Builders of the Adytum

Builders of the Adytum is one of the clearest examples of the modern esoteric order run as a graded correspondence course, and its distinctive feature is the instrument it teaches through.

The Tarot as curriculum

Founded in the United States in the early 1920s by Paul Foster Case, a former member of a Golden Dawn successor body, the school presents the Tarot and the Kabbalah as the twin keys of the Western mystery tradition, and it teaches them through graded lessons that members study at home. A characteristic exercise has the student colour a deck of Tarot keys by hand according to the instruction of the lessons, so that the images are learned by making them. The school describes itself as a religious and educational body rather than a religion in the ordinary sense.

After the founder

Case led the order from Los Angeles, and after his death in 1954 it continued under Ann Davies and then under later leadership, spreading through affiliated groups in several countries. Its structure places the weight of the teaching on the printed lessons and the organisation behind them rather than on a resident temple or a face-to-face initiatory chain, which is the feature it shares with the other correspondence-based orders of the twentieth century and which distinguishes it from the lodge tradition it descends from.

Builders of the Adytum teaches through the tarot, and its most distinctive practice is that students are sent the twenty-two major keys in black and white and colour them by hand to instruction. The point is not decoration. The colour scales come from the Golden Dawn correspondences, and painting a card slowly, in the assigned colours, is designed to fix the associations in a way that reading about them does not. It is a memory technique disguised as an art project.

Paul Foster Case had been a member of a Golden Dawn successor body before founding his own school in the 1920s, and the syllabus shows it: Hebrew letters, the Tree of Life, the tarot as an ordered system, and sound and colour correspondences. What he changed was the delivery. The lessons go out by post, in a set order, at a low cost, and the order has run that way continuously for a century.

Case died in 1954 and Ann Davies led the organisation for the next two decades, which is worth noting in a field where succession usually produces a schism. It did not here. The order continues, headquartered in Los Angeles, with the same correspondence structure and much of the same material, and it remains one of the few Western esoteric bodies whose curriculum has stayed recognisably intact for a hundred years.