The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal: Book IX: VI. The Graal Formula in the Light of Other Gleanings from the Catholic Sacramentary

VI

THE GRAAL FORMULA IN THE LIGHT OF OTHER GLEANINGS FROM THE CATHOLIC SACRAMENTARY

The Secret Orders illustrate the realised life of sanctity on the plane of symbolism, but if it were tolerable to suppose that the literature of alchemy was put forward by an instituted confraternity, then that would be the one association which per doctrinam sanctam had gone apparently beyond symbolism and reached the catholic heart of all experience. On the question of fact, I believe that the Hermetic adepts had a via secretissima which was communicated from one to another under self-enforcing covenants--because it was Sacramentum Regis--and that at least the best among them were not incorporated formally. The adepts of the physical work had successive fellowships--and so also had the seekers thereafter--which we can trace at different periods; but these do not concern us. The others exchanged the watchwords of the Night and the vision of Aurora breaking in the soul; they left their memorials in books as guides one to another, saying what they best could about that which was never expressed openly and caring little, except under God's will, whether there were any listeners, since it could not fail that the light should remain somehow in the world. Outside the wisdom of the very Church itself, they are the greatest witnesses in the age of Christ to the truth of its greatest experiment.