At admission every Apprentice receives five Charges. They are the whole of the moral law of the Guild. They are short because they are meant to be kept.
The Five Charges
- Keep the Record truthfully. Write what happened, not what you hoped. Do not improve an entry afterward. A false Record deceives first the one who keeps it.
- Work nothing upon another without consent. No rite, talisman or reading shall have as its object a person who has not knowingly agreed to it, whether the intent is to harm, to bind, to attract or to help.
- Claim nothing you cannot show. Promise no results, to yourself or to anyone else. Do not present the Art as a cure, a guarantee or a proof.
- Sell nothing sacred. Take no payment for any working, reading, teaching or admission in the name of the Guild.
- Keep the silence of the Hall. What you learn of another member within the Hall, whether a name, a word or a Record, is theirs. Speak of your own work as you please, and of theirs not at all.
Commentary
On consent
The second Charge is the one most often questioned. Surely a member may work for the recovery of a sick friend? Certainly, by asking the friend first. The Charge does not forbid working for others. It forbids working on them. The experience of the Guild is that the wish to work on someone "for their own good," without telling them, is a reliable sign that something other than their good is being served. Workings meant to make a particular person love, desire, obey or return to the practitioner are forbidden outright, whatever the motive.
On harm
The Charges contain no separate rule against cursing, because the second Charge already covers the case: no one consents to be harmed. The Guild teaches protection, banishing, and the binding of one's own bad habits. It does not teach attack, and its Records give no encouragement to those who are curious. Whatever is called into the circle is met first by the one who called it.
On claims
The third Charge is the reason this website promises nothing. A member may say, "In my Record, workings of this kind have been followed by the result on eleven occasions out of nineteen." A member may not say, "This works." The difference is the difference between a practitioner and a salesman, and the Guild would like there to be more of the former.
On money
Members earn their living as they please, and some do so as readers, writers or teachers of these subjects. They may not do it under the name of the Guild or on the strength of its grades. The Guild itself charges nothing for instruction, for examination or for admission, and its officers are not paid.
On silence
The fifth Charge protects persons, not doctrines. A member is free to say that he or she belongs to the Guild, to describe its methods as this website does, and to publish his or her own Record. A member is not free to identify another member, or to repeat what another member said or did in the Hall. The one matter of ritual that is reserved is the wording of the rites of admission.
On health
This is not a Charge but a standing instruction of the Council, and it is enforced as though it were one. No member shall advise any person to delay, refuse or abandon medical or psychological treatment, and no working shall be offered in place of it. A rite may accompany a course of treatment. It may never replace one.
On the law and on conscience
Members obey the law of the place where they live. No undertaking given to the Guild binds anyone to conceal a crime, to act against conscience, or to remain a member for a day longer than he or she wishes.
When a Charge is broken
Anyone who believes that a Charge has been broken, whether by a member, by an officer or by themselves, may write in confidence to the Warden of the Scales at scales@sorcererguild.com. The Warden hears both parties and reports the outcome to the one who wrote. Outcomes run from a conversation, through suspension from the Hall, to the removal of a name from the roll. In fifty-five years a name has been removed eleven times, in every case for a breach of the second or the fourth Charge.
Sayings on the ethic
The test of a working is not whether it succeeded, but whether you could describe it to the person it concerned.
Imogen Castellane, Thirty Letters from Lantern Court
Power is a poor word for it. Call it responsibility and see whether you still want it.
The Common Book, Paper 31
I have never known a curse do as much harm to its object as the wish to cast it did to its author.
Ambrose Tolland, The Binder's Notebook