Would you have been received into the Martinist first degree?

The first degree is called “Associate”. The ritual of 1896 says who may petition, who investigates, and what happens behind the door. Seven questions, each set beside what the text says.

The Martinist Order was founded in Paris by Papus around 1890. In 1896 its delegate for the United States, Edouard Blitz, published the full ritual with Papus’s approval. That is the text we follow, from the petition to the conferring of the first degree. Nothing is sent anywhere.

1. Are you entirely free to commit yourself?

Not eligible: “All persons not absolutely free” — members of religious orders, servants, employees, soldiers — “except in case they want to assume that moral liberty at their own risk”. Minors are not admitted.

Yes Perhaps No

2. Would two members sign your petition?

Petitions are sent by mail to the head of the lodge, “and are signed by the Candidate and two Members”.

Yes Perhaps No

3. Would you accept three strangers investigating your character?

A committee of three pledges not to divulge the names of the petitioners “the character of whom it becomes our duty to investigate”. It reports a month later, then the lodge ballots.

Yes Perhaps No

4. Would you knock three times at a door that does not answer, blindfolded?

“The Candidate is divested of his outer apparel, right arm bare, and blindfolded.” He knocks: “No answer from within.” He knocks louder: nothing. Before the third knock, “the door swings wide open”.

Yes Perhaps No

5. Do you come from desire to know, and not from curiosity?

He must declare on his honour that, “uninfluenced by an unhealthy curiosity”, he is “prompted solely by a strong desire of knowledge”. “The portals of our Sanctuary are wide open for the Man of Desire.”

Yes Perhaps No

6. Would you accept a sacrifice upon your senses?

The sign of the first degree “alludes to the sacrifice the Associate must make upon his sensual nature”.

Yes Perhaps No

7. Would you accept being told that wanting to know is not enough?

The welcome ends by telling him that “the wish to know contains not always the faculty to acquire,” and that if “many are called, few are chosen.”

Yes Perhaps No

Edouard Blitz, Ritual and Monitor of the Martinist Order, 1896.

Where this comes from

The ceremony, step by step

The ritual of 1896 describes the reception itself. The candidate, blindfolded and with his right arm bare, knocks at the door; it opens before the third knock. He is led six times around the centre of the lodge. At a first station his arm is plunged “into a box filled with sand” while the opening of Genesis is read; then into a basin of water; then he “is fanned”, as the text says that man receives “the breath of life”. He is then “covered with an open sack”, which the ritual calls “an impenetrable armor”.

Then the trial: the brethren “rush from their places in confusion, imitating all kinds of noises”, and thunder is rendered “by letting stones roll down an inclined plane”. The blindfold is raised for a moment and he sees around him, “amidst red and green flames”, figures that “seem ready to take the life of the Candidate”. The sack is taken from him: the armour is lost, that is the fall. He is led out, then returns to sit before the East for the instruction, suited to what the inquiry said of him; at last he receives the sword, the sign and the word of the first degree.

Get the full ceremony — US$19

The first degree of 1896 from end to end: the opening of the lodge and its invocation, the signed obligation, the reception with all its stage directions, the discourse of the fall, the Mask, the conferring of the sword and the charge. A reading dossier in PDF, emailed within 24 hours; you pay after you have received it. It confers no degree.

The text

Edouard Blitz, Ritual and Monitor of the Martinist Order, 1896, first edition, with the recommendation signed “Dr. Papus, President of the Supreme Council”. Read on archive.org. The book gives three degrees: Associate, Initiate, then Unknown Superior. After the reception, the first degree is conferred with a sword; the ritual calls it equivalent to the fourth degree of the older rite attributed to Saint-Martin.

A former head of an order tells that in France, in the 1970s, one Martinist branch received only members of another order who had already reached a certain degree. The text of 1896 asks nothing of the kind: that is a later rule, which we have read nowhere.

This test sets your answers beside a ritual printed in 1896. It confers no degree and belongs to no Martinist order; those that exist today have their own rules.