About the Order

The Founders

The three Wardens of the Cup who signed the Charter of Harrowmere.

The Order was founded by three persons who have since been known within it as the Wardens of the Cup. Each had spent decades within one or more of the historic bodies of the Western Mystery Tradition before they met, and each brought one of the three streams that the Order would unite. None sought a title, and none founded a dynasty. The offices they held passed by election at their retirement or death, as the Charter required.

Edmund Thorne Ashby

1931 - 2009. First Grand Master, 1987 - 2004

Edmund Ashby was a scholar of Renaissance Hermetic literature and for most of his working life a schoolmaster. He entered the Rosicrucian work as a young man and advanced within it for more than thirty years, serving as an officer of his lodge and as a teacher of its probationers. He came to believe that the Rosicrucian impulse of healing and reformation needed a Rule of conduct that could be kept outside the lodge room, and he found that Rule in the chivalric literature of the Grail, which he had taught for years as a matter of letters before he came to understand it as a matter of the soul.

Ashby composed the greater part of the Charter of Harrowmere and the whole of the Twelve Articles. His Discourse on the Cup, delivered at the fifth Convocation in 1992, remains the central statement of the Order's understanding of the Grail. He served as Grand Master for seventeen years and retired in 2004 to the office of Warden Emeritus. He died at Harrowmere in the spring of 2009 and is remembered each year at the Vigil of Midsummer.

Helene Marchetti-Vale

1940 - 2021. First Grand Prior, 1987 - 2016

Helene Marchetti-Vale was a translator and a lifelong student of the Martinist tradition, into which she had been received in her twenties. She was the custodian of the Order's Martinist stream and of its contemplative practice. It was she who insisted, against some early opposition, that the Third Degree be built not upon ceremony alone but upon the Way of the Heart: the silent inner prayer and the discipline of the conscience by which the Martinist seeks reintegration.

As Grand Prior she had charge of the spiritual life of the Order for nearly thirty years. She wrote the Order's rule of daily practice, its guidance on the keeping of the Vigil, and the greater part of the instruction of the Third Degree. She trained every Prior who has since held office. She was known for her severity in matters of practice and her gentleness in matters of persons, and she was fond of saying that the two were the same thing seen from different sides. She died in 2021 and is buried in the garden at Harrowmere.

Caspar Lindqvist

Born 1944. First Warden of Studies, 1987 - 2012. Warden Emeritus

Caspar Lindqvist is a priest of an independent sacramental tradition and a practising student of laboratory and spiritual alchemy. He brought to the Order its Hermetic stream: the philosophy of correspondence, the study of the classical Hermetic texts, and the alchemical understanding of transformation that underlies the whole of the curriculum. He designed the original course of study of the First Degree and has revised it, with the Wardens of Studies who succeeded him, in every generation since.

Lindqvist is the last surviving signatory of the Charter. He retired from the office of Warden of Studies in 2012 but continues to lecture at the Annual Convocation, to examine candidates for the Inner Court, and to tend the alchemical garden at Harrowmere that he planted in the first year of the Order. He is the author of the Order's glossary and of its commentary on the Emerald Tablet, which is studied by every Page.

The Succession

The Charter provided that the offices held by the Wardens should pass by election of the Grand Council, and so they have. The Order has had three Grand Masters: Edmund Ashby (1987 - 2004), Sir Julian Westerby (2004 - 2017), and Dame Rosalind Achterberg (2017 to the present). The present officers are listed on the page on Governance.

The Order venerates its founders but does not worship them. They were, as Ashby liked to say, "three people with a stubborn idea and a borrowed house." What they built belongs to those who keep it.