Initiatory orders are pyramid schemes with candles

Here is the business model with the incense blown out.

You pay to join. You swear an oath, which feels enormous and costs nothing to administer. You get a grade, and the grade comes with homework, and the homework comes with a clock, and the clock says you cannot touch the good material until you have sat in the waiting room long enough. Another fee. Another oath. Another grade. The door to the next room is held shut by somebody who got through it the same way, and who has every reason to make you wait exactly as long as he did.

Every rung is a place to stand while you wait for permission. That is what's for sale. The magick, when it shows up, is the free sample at the end of the aisle.

I'll say the part the candle people hate. A ladder needs a bottom. Somebody has to be the beginner, somebody has to be paying to be the beginner, and the whole thing leans on that person believing the next rung is where it gets real. I've watched plenty of people stand on that rung for years. The ones who got anywhere quit waiting one night and did the working.

What the ladder pays out for

Ignore the costumes and follow the incentives. A grade system rewards showing up, sitting still, and passing an exam on a book you could have read in an afternoon. Mostly it rewards being noticed by the people above you. None of that moves a room, a mood, a bank balance or a life, and moving things is the only result worth a damn.

A working does not care what grade you hold. The sigil never asks for your paperwork. The god you invented out of a vending machine has no opinion on whether you were passed, raised, admitted or whatever the verb is this week. If it moves something, it moved. If it doesn't, the certificate on your wall won't jump-start it.

So here's the only question I'd ask any order: what does the grade do that the working wouldn't have done anyway? If the answer is "it tells you which working to do next," congratulations, you paid dues for a reading list. Reading lists are free. Libraries exist. I've checked.

And notice who gets to decide you're ready for the next rung. The people above you. The same people whose rank only means something as long as there are plenty of people below them. Ask yourself how fast anybody in that seat is going to hurry.

The oath racket

Oaths are the cheapest part of the machine to install and the most expensive part to remove. You swear, out loud, in a ceremony built to feel like it matters, and now you own a sunk cost with a ribbon on it. Leaving feels like breaking your word. That feeling is the whole point of the oath.

My rule: if you're promising something you haven't met, about secrets you haven't heard, under penalties nobody will spell out ahead of time, you just handed over a DEPOSIT and called it a vow. Walk out and take your deposit back.

Secrecy does one more job, and it's the one nobody puts in the brochure. A result you can't talk about is a result nobody can check. If an order's methods worked better than a teenager with a marker and a bad week, you'd think they'd want to show somebody.

The wait is the product

"You are not ready." Say that to a person often enough and they'll pay good money to find out when they will be. The sentence never has to be true to keep working. It only has to be unanswerable, and it is, because the person saying it is also the person holding the key.

I've heard the argument that the slow climb builds discipline. Sure it does. So does a gym, and a gym never once made me swear to keep the bench press secret. Discipline is a skill. You can grow it on your own clock, with a stopwatch and a bad attitude, and nobody has to stand at the door jingling anything while you do it.

Some people like the structure, the fellowship, the dress-up, the bell over the door. Good for them, honestly. Wanting a clubhouse is no crime, and some clubhouses are good ones. A clubhouse that bills itself as a requirement is a toll booth, though, and you deserve to know which one you're pulling up to before you roll down the window.

What you actually need

A working you can do tonight. Some way to tell whether anything moved. A few people who'll tell you to your face when you're fooling yourself. That's the whole kit, and nothing in it comes with a membership number.

If you join something anyway, go in with rules of your own. Never hand over money you need for rent. Never accept a rule that cuts you off from your friends, your family or your doctor. Never let anybody tell you a bad night, a bad week or a bad stretch of your head is a spiritual test you have to sit through alone; that's the moment to call a person, and a professional if it's heavy. If a group gets weird about you leaving, that answers every question you had about the group. Leave, and tell someone.

The joke is already running

The Pit hangs a mock ladder next to every handle, and I want it framed. You start at 4°, Neophyte of the Outer Doormat, which "confers a chair by the door, a pencil, and repeated assurance that this is all very serious." One step up is Initiate of the Second Kettle, which "confers kettle duty and a password that changes the moment you learn it." Read that twice. That's the oath racket and the wait in one line, and it's printed on a badge.

Climb far enough and you hit 0°=5°, The Sum That Will Not Balance. Past that the ladder drops into a basement, then a sub-basement, then somehow lands on Demi-Adept, Half Inclusive. Near the top sits Perpetual Archon of the Endless Rung: "a ladder that keeps going and the sacred duty to keep climbing it while seated."

Climbing it while seated. Every order I've ever heard pitched, right there on a name tag.

Last on the list is NaN°, Degree Pending. "The paperwork was filed, then filed itself back." And once a day the Dice bump somebody up and knock somebody else straight back down to the doormat, which is more honest about how rank gets handed out than any lodge has ever had the guts to be.

Think I'm full of shit? Come tell me in The Pit, and make your case loud enough to earn the kettle.