The Mystery School · Grade 3 of six
The work of the third grade is the Decan Year, the 36 windows of the Sun’s year, each a span of ten days in which the Sun stands in one decan. The year opens at the first equinox or solstice after the title is given, or at a later one the Ritual Theurgos chooses.
Grade 3, under Hecate
Hecate is the goddess of the threshold and of the Anima Mundi, the world-soul, and the lunar work across the Decan Year is hers. In the Chaldean theology the mediating powers proceed from her, and so the daemons of generation, the thirty-six ministers of the gods who stand over the ten-day stations of the Sun’s year, are cleared under her.
The reading of Ritual Praxis and Instruction is finished before the year begins, and Chapter 55, read in the second grade, gives the working text of the third in its practice sections, §55.9 to §55.13. WaveForm Astrology is read during the year, a block at a time in the weeks between windows, with notes at the end of each chapter, and its chapter tests are taken after the last window.
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 3: the initiation
The work of the Ritual Theurgos 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 Water and invokes Hecate, 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 3: 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 3: the reading
Every chapter the Ritual Theurgos reads, book by book, with its length, its time at 200 words a minute and the size of its open-book test.
38 chapters, 459,897 words, about 38.3 hours in the reading hour. 38 chapter tests, 192 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.