The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal – Arthur Edward Waite
The reader who would reach to motives and inspirations, who would seek to understand the subtle and secret forces that have moved all history, it would be difiicult to name a work of greater interest or value than this. To the rarer reader who has come upon traces of an undying tradition–a Hidden Church or Wisdom–the book will be a very revelation. The Graal legend, even as it is known to the general reader, woven into the Arthurian epic, is one of rarest beauty and most profound meaning. But when its rich symbolism is revealed in full, the signicance of the great quest, in the which pure-miuded and self-sacricing valor is alone successful—the ‘magnitude of meaning is made evident. Perhaps no other man living is so well fitted as Mr. Waite to approach this subject. Under the ruder methods of materialistic critics the delicate beauty and subtle meanings would be lost. Our author combines the grasp of scholarship with the sympathetic attitude and the deep-lying knowledge of hidden things.
The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal
Format: Paperback.
The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal.
ISBN: 9783849673055.
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Waite and the Order of the Golden Dawn (from wikipedia.com)
Waite joined the Outer Order of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in January 1891 after being introduced by E.W. Berridge. In 1893 he withdrew from the Golden Dawn. In 1896 he rejoined the Outer Order of the Golden Dawn. In 1899 he entered the Second order of the Golden Dawn. He became a Freemason in 1901, and entered the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia in 1902. In 1903 Waite founded the Independent and Rectified Order R. R. et A. C. This Order was disbanded in 1914. The Golden Dawn was torn by internal feuding until Waite’s departure in 1914; in July 1915 he formed the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, not to be confused with the Societas Rosicruciana. By that time there existed some half-dozen offshoots from the original Golden Dawn, and as a whole it never recovered.
Aleister Crowley, Waite’s foe, referred to him as the villainous “Arthwate” in his novel Moonchild and referred to him as “Dead Waite” in his magazine Equinox. Lovecraft has a villainous wizard in his short story “The Thing on the Doorstep” called Ephraim Waite; according to Robert M. Price, this character was based on Waite.
(The text of the last section was taken from a Wikipedia entry and is available under the the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.)
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