The Mystery School · Grade 1 of six
The Aspirant enters through the yoga, the reading of the Central Doctrine and the study of the Tarot, and performs no rite yet. The nativity study begins in the first week and runs through every grade after it.
Grade 1, under Hermes
Hermes is the messenger between the worlds, the god of roads, thresholds and boundaries, and the guide of those who cross from one realm to another. In our teaching he presides over the threshold and over the introduction to the mysteries. The planet Mercury is his visible body, and the Theurgist card of the Greater Arcana pictures him together with Apollo.
The first two weeks go to the Preface, the Introduction, Chapters 1 to 4 and Chapter 8 of Ritual Praxis and Instruction, and the next two to Chapters 5 to 7 with the first chapters of the Central Doctrine beside them. From about the fifth week the reading hour belongs to the Central Doctrine in order, with a few gains written in the journal at the end of each chapter. The Divine Arcana Tarot is read in the practice hour, with the throws.
Every chapter has its own open-book test of 3 to 10 questions, about one question for every 2,500 words. Every answer must be correct, and a wrong answer returns the student to the section to reread before the test is taken again. Each student also receives a workbook of the questions of every chapter, without the answers, to mark while reading, so that the reading and the test move together.
Grade 1: the initiation
The work of the Aspirant opens with an initiation that the Head Master, or an officiant he permits, performs for you once, live, in person or by video. You book its date and hour in your Backoffice, at a time when you can be alone in a quiet room for an hour.
The officiant performs the regular banishing of our School, opens the gate of Earth and invokes Hermes, the patron of the grade. You keep the breaths and the silences with the officiant and speak one sentence, your word of entry into the work of the grade. You need no instrument and perform no part of the rite.
The god is invoked into the temple and never onto or into you, and you are free to step out of the work at any point. The initiation opens the work of a grade you hold, and no title is given for an experience.
Three things.
The grades climb through the elements: Earth, Air, Water, Fire, then Spirit. The sixth grade has no initiation of this kind.
Grade 1: the practice
Each count below is a rule of the School, stated in Ritual Praxis and Instruction, Chapter 1, with the chapter and section where the practice is taught.
Grade 1: the reading
Every chapter the Aspirant reads, book by book, with its length, its time at 200 words a minute and the size of its open-book test.
10 chapters, 102,094 words, about 8.5 hours in the reading hour. 10 chapter tests, 43 questions.
67 chapters, 855,165 words, about 71.3 hours in the reading hour. 67 chapter tests, 344 questions.
57 chapters, 462,316 words, about 38.5 hours in the practice hour. 57 chapter tests, 198 questions.
The Backoffice opens the program one step at a time. In this grade it holds:
The journal
The journal stays with the student. At the end of each of the first five grades its pages are scanned with a phone into one PDF and sent from the Backoffice, and the Head Master returns his notes with the title of the grade. The examination of a journal takes weeks, and no table counts them.
We test what can be tested, careful reading and a practice that has been kept. No student is tested magically, and no title is given for an experience, a vision or a power.
The Mystery School takes students from the Summer Solstice 2027.
