Every ceremony in this curriculum arrives finished. A formula, a psalm, an hour, a set of names, a sequence of circuits around a room. Somebody put those pieces in that order — and the volume never says who, or how you would do it yourself.
The tenth trade is the answer. Templars are the ones who know the secret of creating Rituals, Rites and Magical Practices.1 Not performing them. Making them.
And the setting is fixed. Where the Praetor goes out to the trouble, the Templar fights evil through magical rituals and magical operations performed inside the Sacred Temple. Same enemy, same side, and the whole of the work happens in one room.
The composition method is given as a list of ingredients, and it is the most useful sentence in the trade descriptions because it names what a rite is made of. Through their long studies they uncover the ancient mystery of how to put together invocations, prayers, magical formulas, scriptures and psalms along with the powerful names of the creatures of light and the divine powers of heaven.
Six components. An invocation, which calls. A prayer, which asks. A magical formula, which does. A scripture, which is inherited text. A psalm, which is a specific inherited text with a number on it. And names.
Read the spellbook against that list and every entry in it is one of these assemblies partly disassembled — a formula, a psalm, a celestial, an effect. What the Templar holds is the rule for how those parts fit together, and that rule is nowhere in the volume. Which puts this trade in the same position as the Kabbalist. One holds the secret study of how incantations come to be; the other holds the secret of how rites are composed. Both are named, both are called secret, and the working material is the output of both.
The output of a well-made combination has a name, and the name is a shape. Templars know how to combine the powerful names of divinities, archangels, celestial princes, elementals and other luminous beings in order to create powerful cascades of magical might.
A cascade falls. It goes over an edge at the top and arrives with force at the bottom, and every stage feeds the next. That is a picture of what stacking names is supposed to do — not adding four powers together, but starting something at the top that gathers on the way down.
The word is used elsewhere in this curriculum for one of the four forms of a particular class of working, where cascades are specified as the personal-dimension form. Here it is what a combination of names produces, which suggests the term names a mechanism rather than a category. The order of the beings named tells you the same thing: divinities, then archangels, then celestial princes, then elementals. Top to bottom. Which is the direction a cascade runs.
What the finished arrangements produce is described concretely, and there are four distinct operations rather than one. Through these magical arrangements they create powerful walls that protect against evil, keep evil at bay, vanquish evil from the environment, and remove evil from a place, object or person.
Protect. Keep at bay. Vanquish from an environment. Remove from a place, an object, or a person.
The first two are standing conditions and the second two are events. And the last is the only one in the trade description that touches an individual — removing something from a person, which is the operation most religious traditions would call exorcism and which this material declines to name. The word walls is not decoration. It is architecture, made out of a rite, and it fits a trade whose whole practice takes place inside a building.
The second half of the trade is positive rather than defensive. Templars know how to sanctify places, bless artifacts, and empower them with the forces of goodness and the energies of the heavens. Places and objects, made into something they were not.
And they are masters of prayers, used to place the energies of Heaven in a residence, call upon the celestial forces of the Almighty, and manifest the presence of celestials in a given location. Which is the same operation aimed three ways: at a house, at the powers themselves, and at getting a being to be somewhere. The alternative name given is Clerics, and the footnote is careful about why. They are so called because of their spiritual devotion to Magic, not as a simple religion but a quite powerful and compelling mystic experience.
Devotion to magic. Not to a god, and explicitly not as religion — the word is being borrowed for the posture rather than for the institution.
One line assigns this trade a social function nothing else in the volume has, and it is the most human thing in the ten descriptions. These are the ones who direct the spiritual offices of birth and death for those in the Magical World, and who serve as counselors and guides in the difficult times of Wizards.
Births and funerals. Somebody officiates, and it is this trade. Which means the wizarding world described here has a life cycle with ceremonies attached at both ends, and a person whose job is to run them. Nothing else in the volume mentions either rite. No formula anywhere is for a newborn's naming or for a death, and the closest the spellbook comes is a blessing for children up to two years old.
⚠ The offices are named and never described. What is said at a magical birth or a magical death is nowhere in the ranges read in this build.
What the entry does supply instead is a description of the person, and this is the only trade in the ten that gets one. It is stated as fact rather than as an ideal.
These wizards enjoy prayer, solitude, and meditation. They undertake the purest acts and are known for their kindness and blessed hearts. Enjoy is the verb used. Not practise — enjoy, which makes solitude a preference rather than a discipline.
Set that beside the Praetor, the trade this one is explicitly compared with. Both fight the same thing with overlapping formulas — invocations, protection incantations, revocation formulas to abjure the most horrible forces of evil. The Praetor is described as relentless and armoured and trained in combat styles. The Templar is described as kind.
Same enemy, two temperaments, and the material treats the difference as a matter of where you do the work rather than of what you are willing to do.
The trade ends on a physical claim, and it is the strangest ending in the ten. Templars become so in tune with the celestial energies of Heaven that they develop a relationship with the saintly Solar Angels, who offer guidance and in many cases assist in the operations these wizards engage. And then the final line: they become so luminous and filled with light eternal that their bodies begin to radiate luminosity at a certain age, making these wizards known as the Hallowed Elders.
At a certain age. Which is not named. It is the same shape as the Healer's endpoint — a capacity that arrives from long practice with no technique attached, no threshold, and no way of working toward it deliberately. Two of the ten trades finish this way, and both finish with something visible to other people rather than with a power the practitioner uses.
Learn the six components and then learn to fit them. Invocations, prayers, magical formulas, scriptures, psalms, and names. Composition is the trade's defining skill and the rule for it is not printed anywhere, so the study is reverse-engineering the rites you already have.
Stack names in descending order. Divinities, archangels, celestial princes, elementals — the cascade runs downward and the order given is the order that produces it. Work inside. The Temple is the stated setting for everything this trade does, which is the sharpest practical difference from the Praetor.
Build the four operations separately. Walls that hold, a standing condition that keeps evil at bay, a clearing of an environment, and a removal from a place, an object, or a person. They are different jobs and the entry lists them as four.
Then the positive half: sanctify places, bless artifacts, and use prayer to put the energies of Heaven into a residence. And take the offices when they come. Births and deaths in the magical community are directed by this trade, along with counsel in difficult times. That is the part of the work that has nothing to do with evil at all.
The composition method, the four operations, the Cleric footnote, the offices and the Hallowed Elders are all in the Templar entry of the ten Wizardly Trades. This is the Eldest Tradition warrant on the source stub. 🚩 SINGLE SOURCE.
⚠ The trade name is borrowed from the Knights Templar, a real medieval military order dissolved in 1312, and nothing here claims a connection. The Cleric footnote likewise borrows a term with a specific institutional meaning and redefines it as devotion to magic. ⚠ The secret of composing rites is named as this trade's defining knowledge and no part of it is given. ⚠ The offices of birth and death are assigned and not described. ⚠ The age at which a body begins to radiate is not stated.
⚠ The volume closes the trade section with its own hedge: the descriptions lack hundreds of descriptions and many more factual details, and a wizard gradually becomes into one of the Wizardly Trade by study, expertise and experience rather than by choosing one. Reported as printed. Unresolved: two trades hold the theory of how the working material is made — the Kabbalist for incantations, the Templar for rites — and both are described as secret in a volume that prints the results of both.
Follow the composition half and this is the most technical trade in the ten. Six kinds of component fitted together by a rule, names stacked in descending order to produce a cascade, four distinct operations against evil, and objects and places altered on purpose. Follow the character half and none of it is technical. The Templar enjoys prayer and solitude, undertakes the purest acts, is known for kindness, and eventually begins to glow. Nothing in that half is a method, and the trade's endpoint arrives at an age rather than at a competence.
Both halves are in one entry and the join is the Solar Angels, who are described as offering guidance and assisting in operations — which makes the character half the qualification for the technical one, without ever saying so.
Zero handshakes on this page. The material is one system's account of who composes its rites and what a composed rite does, and the connections worth having — the grammar of assembly, and the four orders of working — sit inside this build already, where the same components are shown taken apart rather than described as a secret.
Sharpest implication. One trade holds the secret of creating Rituals, Rites and Magical Practices — the rule for fitting invocations, prayers, formulas, scriptures, psalms and names into something that works. Every ceremony in this curriculum is an output of that rule, and the rule itself appears nowhere in the volume.
Generative questions.