The Chivalric Ideal

The Order of the Grail is distinguished among the bodies of the Western Mystery Tradition by the place it gives to chivalry. Where most esoteric orders arrange their members in grades of knowledge, the Order arranges them in grades of service: Page, Squire, Knight or Dame. Where most impose a rule of secrecy, the Order imposes also a Rule of conduct, the Twelve Articles, which govern the member's dealings with every person met. This is not ornament. The founders held that the inner work is proved in outward conduct or not at all, and that chivalry, rightly understood, is the form that proof takes.

What chivalry is

The Order understands chivalry as the discipline by which strength is placed at the service of weakness. The knight of legend was a man of arms who bound himself by oath to use those arms for the protection of those who had none: the widow, the orphan, the pilgrim, the stranger. The Order asks its members to make the same oath with respect to whatever strength they possess, whether of body, of mind, of means or of position. The Twelve Articles spell out what this means in practice: courtesy to all, courage in the face of wrong, fidelity to the given word, generosity to the needy, truthfulness, humility and the rest.

The Order's chivalry is explicitly a chivalry of the soul, open to women and men alike and having nothing to do with arms. The sword that is given at the Vigil of Arms is a symbol of discrimination, the power of the mind to divide true from false; the spurs are a symbol of the will, which drives the self forward when it would rest. Neither is ever drawn in anger.

Why chivalry belongs to the Mysteries

The Grail legend, in which the Order's chivalry is rooted, is a story about the relationship between inner attainment and outward conduct. The knights who seek the Grail are undone not by want of courage but by want of compassion: the one who fails to ask the wounded king what ails him, the one who cannot see the Grail because he has not forgiven, the one whose purity is a pride. The Grail is found only by the knight whose chivalry has become charity. The Order reads this legend as a precise account of the esoteric path. Knowledge without compassion is blindness. Power without service is the wound that will not heal. The Cup is given to the one who has learned to ask the question.

The Twelve Articles

The Rule of the Order is set out in the Twelve Articles of Chivalry, composed by Edmund Ashby in 1987 and adopted by the Charter. Each Postulant receives them at the beginning of the postulancy and is examined upon them before reception as a Page. Each member renews them annually at the Convocation. They may be read in full in the Library. In brief, they require of the member: to seek the Light; to serve the stranger; to guard what is entrusted; to speak the truth; to keep the given word; to protect the weak; to show courtesy to all; to bear injury without revenge; to give freely; to hold no one in contempt; to keep the body, the speech and the mind in discipline; and to remember death.

The Vigil of Arms

The central ceremony of the Order is the Vigil of Arms, kept by the Squire on the night before reception as a Knight or Dame. The Squire keeps watch alone through the night in the Oratory of the Commandery, with the sword and the Articles before him or her, in prayer and in the examination of conscience. At dawn the Squire is received. The Order regards the Vigil as the point at which the chivalric and the mystical become one: the knight's watch and the mystic's dark night, the arming of the body and the stripping of the soul. Many members speak of the Vigil as the one night of their lives on which they were wholly awake.

Courtesy

Of all the chivalric virtues the Order places first the least regarded: courtesy. The founders held that the state of a soul is revealed in small dealings more surely than in great ones, and that a member who is unfailingly courteous to the waiter, the clerk and the beggar has accomplished more of the Great Work than one who has memorised every correspondence in the Tradition. Courtesy, in the Order's understanding, is the recognition of the Divine spark in another; its practice is therefore not etiquette but theurgy.