The Founding of the Order
Principles, purpose and inheritance
The Apotheotic Order, also known as the Order of Apotheon, was founded upon the conviction that humanity possesses a sacred faculty: the power to bring forth that which has never been, and to give meaning to all that is.
Drawing upon the philosophical inheritance of antiquity, and particularly upon the teachings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, the Order regards creation as an undertaking through which humanity may approach the divine; its name is taken from that aim, as explained in On Apotheosis. The Order was established as a fellowship dedicated to the cultivation of this faculty, and to the preservation of the works, stories and traditions through which humanity gives meaning to existence.
What the Order inherits is older than any institution and less easily owned: a long conversation about the mind, the divine and the act of making, carried from the temples of Egypt through the schools of Alexandria to the studies of Renaissance Florence. The archive records that conversation under three inheritances.
The fellowship requires no single account of the divine. A member may understand the creative faculty as a gift of the Creator in whose image humanity was made; another may revere the same faculty while holding its ultimate origin to be unknown. The Order asks the same of both: that they cultivate what is made well, preserve what carries meaning, and protect the conscious lives through which meaning is experienced. These duties are summarised in its motto, To create, to preserve, to uphold.
Its chosen sign is the Ankh, the Egyptian sign of divine life, which the Order reads as life endowed with the power to create. Its patron is Hermes Trismegistus, whose teachings place the act of making at the heart of humanity’s kinship with the divine.