Epistle to the Pages

My dear Pages, you have been received into the Order of the Grail, and I am asked to write you a word of welcome. I shall try to write the letter I wish someone had written to me forty years ago, when I first knocked at a door of this kind and was let in, and did not know what I had done.

You have not joined a club. You have not been given a secret. You have not become anything you were not yesterday. What has happened is simpler and more serious than any of these. You have made a promise, in the presence of people who have made the same promise, and you have asked them to hold you to it. That is all an Order is: a company of people holding one another to a promise. Everything else, the ceremonies, the badges, the degrees, the old books, is scaffolding. Do not mistake the scaffolding for the building.

The promise is the Twelve Articles. You have read them and been examined upon them, and I expect you found them disappointingly ordinary. Seek the Light, serve the stranger, speak the truth, be courteous, forgive. Where, you may ask, is the hidden wisdom? I will tell you where it is. It is in the keeping of them. Any fool can understand the Articles in an afternoon. No one I have ever met has kept them for a week without failing. The hidden wisdom of the Order is what you learn about yourself in the failing, and what you learn about the Light in the getting up again.

You will be given much to study in this degree. Study it. The Hermetic philosophers were not fools and their maps of the soul are good maps. But remember that a map is not the country, and that the Page who can recite the seven principles and cannot be civil to a shop assistant has learned nothing. I would rather you forgot every correspondence in the Tradition and remembered to visit one lonely person a week.

You will be given a daily practice. Keep it. Twenty minutes a day, every day, is worth more than two hours on Sunday. The practice is not difficult; it is only tedious, and tedium is the first dragon on the road. Most who leave the Order leave in the first year, not because the way is hard but because it is dull. The Light does not come as fireworks. It comes as a slow change in the quality of ordinary days, so slow that you will not notice it until one morning you realise that you have been different for some time.

You will be tempted to think of yourself as an initiate. Do not. You are a Page. A Page is a child in a great house, who carries the cups and holds the doors and watches how the grown people behave, and learns. There is no shame in it. Every Knight in this Order was a Page and every one of them remembers it. The shame would be in pretending to be more than you are, and the Order will know, and so, in your heart, will you.

You will be tempted also to think of the Order as something special, and of yourself as special for belonging to it. This is the subtlest of the dragons and the one that has devoured more seekers than all the rest together. The Order is not special. It is a few hundred ordinary people trying to keep a promise. If it ever becomes special in its own eyes, it will have failed, and I hope you will have the courage to say so. The Grail was not found by the proud knight. It was found by the simple one who asked the wounded man what ailed him.

Finally, you will be lonely. This is a path that cannot be walked for you, and there will be nights when it seems you walk it alone. You do not. You walk it in the company of everyone who has ever kept the Articles, in this Order and outside it, knowingly and unknowingly, in every age. When you cannot feel their company, trust it. When you cannot trust it, keep the practice anyway. And when you cannot keep the practice, write to your sponsor, who has been where you are, and will tell you so.

Welcome, then. Carry the cups. Hold the doors. Watch, and learn, and be kind. I am glad you have come.

E. T. A.
Harrowmere, the Feast of Lights, 1989