The Teachings of the Order

The Order of the Grail teaches no new doctrine. It teaches what has been handed down within the Western Mystery Tradition for centuries, arranged in a graded course of study and practice and bound together by a Rule of conduct. The founders held that the three great streams of that Tradition, the Rosicrucian, the Martinist and the Hermetic, were never truly separate, and that each is incomplete without the others. The Order's curriculum is an attempt to teach them as one.

The shape of the teaching

The teaching of the Order is organised around a single image: the Cup. The Cup is the human heart, which must be emptied before it can be filled, cleansed before it can hold anything worth holding, and offered before it can be of use. The Hermetic stream teaches the seeker to know the Cup: its nature, its composition, its place in the order of things. The Rosicrucian stream teaches the seeker to cleanse and to heal the Cup, and through it to heal others. The Martinist stream teaches the seeker to offer the Cup, and in offering it to find it filled. The chivalric Rule governs the hand that carries the Cup through the world.

Each degree of the Outer Court is assigned principally to one stream, though all three are present in every degree. The Page studies the Hermetic foundations. The Squire takes up the Rosicrucian work. The Knight or Dame enters the Martinist Way of the Heart. The Inner Court pursues the synthesis in contemplative and theurgic practice.

Method

The Order teaches by four means. The first is study: each degree has a course of reading, with written reflections submitted to the Preceptor of the Commandery. The second is practice: each degree has a rule of daily exercises, in meditation, in contemplative prayer and in the examination of conscience, which the member undertakes to keep. The third is ritual: the degrees are conferred in ceremonies that enact in symbol what the member has studied in text, and the Commanderies meet in Chapter at regular intervals to renew the work. The fourth is service: each member undertakes, under the Articles, some concrete work for the good of others, and reports upon it to the Commandery.

No one of these means suffices alone. Study without practice is pedantry. Practice without study is superstition. Ritual without either is theatre. And all three without service are, in the words of the Charter, "a lamp lit in a locked room."