History and Lineage

The Order of the Grail is young as such things are reckoned. It has no claim to medieval antiquity and makes none. Its history begins with three people, a house lent for a weekend, and a document signed by candlelight on the twenty-ninth of September, 1987. What follows is the public account of how that beginning became an Order.

Before the Charter

The three founders met in the early 1980s through the older bodies of the Western Mystery Tradition in which each had long worked. Edmund Ashby had spent thirty years in the Rosicrucian work. Helene Marchetti-Vale had been received into the Martinist tradition in her youth and had become one of its most respected teachers. Caspar Lindqvist, a priest and alchemist, moved in the Hermetic circles that overlapped with both. Over several years of correspondence and conversation they came to a shared conviction: that the three streams they served were tributaries of one river, and that what the tradition most lacked in their time was not another teaching but a Rule of life by which teaching could be tested.

Ashby had found such a Rule in the chivalric literature of the Grail, which he had taught for years as a schoolmaster. He proposed that the knightly virtues of courtesy, courage, fidelity and service were not ornaments to the inner work but its necessary outward form, and that an order built upon them might hold together what the older bodies had allowed to separate.

Harrowmere, 1987

In September 1987 the three gathered with nine companions at Harrowmere, a house in the country then belonging to a friend of Ashby's, for what was intended as a weekend of study. By its end they had drafted and signed the Charter of Harrowmere, constituting the Order and its first Commandery, the Commandery of the Rose and Cup, and had adopted the Twelve Articles as its Rule. The house was later bequeathed to the Order and remains its seat.

Growth

The Order grew slowly and by design. The Charter forbade advertisement and the active recruitment of members. Those who came, came by reading, by introduction or by chance. The second Commandery, the Silver Thorn, was chartered at Northwold in 1994 after seven years as an Oratory. The Hidden Spring followed at Port Elowen in 2002, the Lantern at Vellacourt in 2011 and the Seven Pillars at Kingsreach in 2018. The Correspondence Circle was established in 1999 for members living at a distance.

Lineage

The Order's lineage is honest and modest. Each of its three streams was received by one of the Wardens within a historic body of the Tradition and transmitted by that Warden to the Order under the Charter. The Order does not publish the names of those bodies, both from courtesy and because it claims no authority from them; it claims only that what it teaches was received, not invented. It has no concordat with any other organization, is subordinate to none, and recognizes none as superior to itself in the matters of its own Rule.

The Order does not claim descent from any medieval order of knighthood, nor from the legendary Grail knights. Its chivalry is a chivalry of the soul, adopted freely as a discipline, and it has never been otherwise described.