The Summer School of the Art met at Lantern House from Sunday, July 19, to Saturday, July 25, 2026. Fifty-eight members attended, from every grade but the seventh and from eleven Chapterhouses, together with twenty-one members of the Hearth Course, for several of whom it was the first week they had ever spent working in company. The weather was hot, the evening rites were moved to the barn, and the old schoolhouse kept reasonably cool.
The theme
The pattern of the week was the usual one: classes in the morning, bench work in the afternoon, and a rite each evening led by one of the Keepers. This year, at the suggestion of the Warden of the Lamp, the morning classes were given a single theme: the Western tradition, what it is, and what the Guild owes to it. The Council's reasoning was that petitioners and new members increasingly arrive with strong opinions on the subject, many of them taken from books whose account of history the historians abandoned long ago, and that the Guild had never set down its own view in one place.
The morning classes
Monday: the long history
The first class traced the methods of the Art from the temples of Egypt and Mesopotamia through the Greek handbooks of the Roman age, the Arabic treatises on the stars, the Latin manuals of conjuration and the learned magic of the Renaissance, to the revival of the nineteenth century. The point that drew most comment was that divination by the flame of a lamp is among the commonest operations in the oldest surviving handbooks. Several Apprentices said that they would never look at their own lamp quite the same way again, and one Journeyman said that he had always suspected as much.
The class ended with a list, drawn up for the occasion, of eight techniques that recur throughout the whole history and are all still taught in the Guild: the prepared place, purification, the name of power, timing by the heavens, the made object, the address to an intelligence, the sign, and the question put to a pattern. The discussion of whether a ninth should be added ran into the lunch hour and was not resolved.
Tuesday: contemplation in the West
The second class answered the objection, now often heard from petitioners, that meditation is an Eastern practice foreign to a Western art. It set out the contemplative disciplines of the Greek philosophers, the theurgists, the Jewish mystics and the Christian monks, and the history of the word itself. In the afternoon two of the Elders, who were staying at Lantern House for the week, sat with the school for an hour at the Lamp. They said very little, as is their custom, and nobody minded.
Wednesday: the body in the rite
The third class was practical. Members worked in pairs on posture, on the signs of the Gates, and on the vibration of names, with a good deal of laughter at first and very little by the end of the morning. A member of Aotea Chapterhouse who has worked seated for twenty years led a session on adapting every part of the Rite of the Four Gates to a chair, and several members who have no need of a chair said afterward that it had improved their standing.
Thursday: a visitor from the universities
On Thursday the school received a guest of the Warden of the Book, a scholar of the history of religions who has written on the study of Western esotericism and on the place of the body in modern ritual practice. She spoke for an hour on how the universities came to study magic, on the many disciplines now engaged in it, and on what historians have found when they tested the claim of an unbroken secret tradition. Questions ran for another hour. The most pointed came from a Keeper who asked whether scholars were not, in the end, telling practitioners that their Art was a muddle of copying errors. Our guest replied that the copying errors were the most interesting thing about it, which several of us thought was exactly what Imogen Castellane would have said.
By the custom of the Guild our guest did not attend any working, and she has asked not to be named here.
Friday: the books
The last class was given by the Warden of the Book in the library itself. She laid out on the long table an example of each kind of book a student is likely to meet, from a facsimile of a late antique wisdom text to a nineteenth-century charm book printed in the German of the Pennsylvania settlers, and talked about how each should be read. She ended, as the Common Book does, by advising members to read less than they practice.
The afternoons and evenings
Afternoon bench work was given to the making of instruments. Eleven wands, six cups, four blades and nine disks were begun, and a gratifying number were finished. The evening rites included a working of the Rite of the Four Gates by the whole school in the barn, which with seventy-nine people took twenty minutes longer than its usual six, and on the Friday a consecration of the instruments made during the week. The closing rite on Saturday morning was kept in silence.
What follows
The Council has asked the Warden of the Lamp to prepare summaries of the morning classes for this website, so that petitioners may read the Guild's view of its own tradition before they write to the Gate. They will appear in the course of the autumn. Members who attended are reminded that their notes of the week belong in the Record, and that the Warden of the Lamp would be glad to see a page of them.
The Summer School of 2027 will meet at Lantern House from Sunday, July 18, to Saturday, July 24. Places are allotted by the Warden of the Lamp in order of application, with preference to members of the Hearth Course.