Fifteen years ago tonight, on 2 October 2010, seven people sat in a small room, adopted a short text called The Shed Skin, and resolved that the order they were founding would charge no one for anything, would keep no secret teaching, and would give no one authority over the practice of another.
None of those seven is a Keeper today. The resolutions have not changed. On this anniversary we want to set down, as honestly as we can, what fifteen years of keeping them has taught us.
Openness Did Not Cheapen the Work
The most common objection to the Order's founding was that teaching given away would be valued at what it cost. People would skim it, misunderstand it, and move on. We were told, more than once, that a teaching has to be earned to be respected.
Fifteen years later, we can say that this did not happen, or at least that it did not happen any more than it happens with teaching that is paid for. Most readers skim. Some readers study. A few practice. That proportion seems to be the same whether a teaching is free or expensive, open or locked. What openness changed was not the number of serious practitioners, but who they could be. People who could never have paid for a grade, traveled to a lodge, or sworn an oath they did not believe in have found their way to the work. That alone would have justified the decision.
Secrecy Was Not Protecting Anything
When the archive was opened in 2014, some of us expected consequences. We thought something would be lost, misused, or cheapened. Nothing was. The ideas that were valuable went on being valuable. The ideas that were poor were seen to be poor, and were improved or abandoned. Against the Locked Grimoire made the argument before the fact. The years since have made it again, more quietly.
The Hardest Resolution Was the Third
Charging nothing has been easy. Keeping nothing secret has been easy. The resolution that has required constant attention is the third: that no one should hold authority over the practice of another.
The pull toward authority never stops. Readers publish texts of their own and present them as continuations of ours. Practitioners form groups and describe them as branches of the Order. Others publish open questions addressed to the Order and wait for an answer that would carry weight. Every one of these is understandable, and every one of them, answered, would be the first step toward a hierarchy. We have answered none of them, endorsed none of them, and pointed, in our texts and in this Journal, back to the reader's own record. Silence is harder to keep than it sounds.
What We Did Not Expect
We did not expect how much the texts would travel. They have been translated, printed, adapted, set to music, and quoted in places we will never see. Most of this we know about only by accident, and some of it we would not have chosen. That is exactly what the public domain means, and we would not change it.
We did not expect how much we would revise. The Order has rewritten parts of its own texts, most substantially in the 2022 revision of The Seven Coils, and it has said plainly what changed and why. A second edition of First Workings is now in preparation. A tradition that cannot admit error is a tradition that has stopped learning. We hope to keep making our mistakes in public for another fifteen years.
The ring is still open.