The Mystery School · Grade 2 of six
The Arcana Adept learns the Theurgic Ritual of the Pentagram by building it in levels, then invokes the planetary gods and the signs through their gates. The reading follows the practice, each chapter read in the days before the practice that depends on it.
Grade 2, under Apollo
Apollo is the god of the oracle at Delphi, of music and measure, and of the clear light that disperses confusion, and the later Platonists read him as the intellectual and oracular face of the Sun. He conducts the music of the spheres, the tuned order of the heavens that Pythagoras and Plato described. The second grade teaches the Theurgic Ritual of the Pentagram, and the invocation of Hermes and Apollo opens each set from the third up.
The reading follows the practice. Parts II and III are read in the first weeks with the planetary meditations, Chapters 24 to 33 a chapter or two before the level each teaches, Chapters 34 to 47 god by god as the gate runs reach each one, and Chapters 48 to 55 with the sign runs and the Celestial rehearsals. Parts VII and VIII are read here and performed or lived in the grades after. The School Layman Explanation is read beside the levels, each symbol as the rite takes it up.
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 2: the initiation
The work of the Arcana Adept 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 Air and invokes Apollo, 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 2: 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 2: the reading
Every chapter the Arcana Adept reads, book by book, with its length, its time at 200 words a minute and the size of its open-book test.
65 chapters, 1,183,905 words, about 98.7 hours in the reading hour. 65 chapter tests, 461 questions.
9 chapters, 119,719 words, about 10 hours in the reading hour. 9 chapter tests, 50 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.