ABOUT
The Order of the Lion's Bell is an independent philosophical, research, and chivalric fellowship devoted to the pursuit and preservation of knowledge. We investigate unusual phenomena, consciousness, history, philosophy, psychical research, UAP, folklore, and other questions which remain uncertain, neglected, or difficult to place within a single field. Members of the Order are known as Heralds of the Lion.
THE WORK OF THE ORDER
Heralds collect books, documents, testimony, correspondence, observations, archival material, and reports; open Case Files where questions deserve investigation; compare claims with the evidence offered for them; preserve unusual human experiences; and publish useful findings through Bell Reports and The Bell. This work is maintained through the Heralds Research System, which joins our Research Library, Experience Archive, cases, claims, evidence, correspondence, and continuing investigations into a common record.
WHY AN ORDER?
We call ourselves an Order because investigation is not our only concern. The Lion's Bell is also a fellowship shaped by a Rule, common study, offices, gatherings, stages of formation, correspondence, and service to one another. From the chivalric tradition we take the ideas of courage, discipline, loyalty, restraint, responsibility, and the obligation to place one's abilities in the service of something beyond oneself. A title in the Order is therefore not an ornament. It carries work, responsibility, and duty with it.
A Herald is both investigator and messenger. We go looking for the questions others overlook, neglect, or consider too strange to ask. Knowledge belongs to no caste or profession alone. Scholar and amateur, witness and archivist, scientist and historian may each possess one part of a larger problem. The Bell sounds for all.
TRADITION
The Order draws from older traditions concerned with knowledge, initiation, philosophy, and preservation. They form a body of symbols, stories, texts, and examples through which the Order understands its own work.
Sais and the Keepers of Records
In Plato's Timaeus and Critias, Solon travels to Egypt and speaks with priests at Sais who tell him that the Greeks have repeatedly lost the memory of their own past while Egyptian records preserved accounts reaching much further back.
The Pythagorean Influence
Pythagoras remains one of the great philosophical influences of the Order. The Pythagorean tradition joined the investigation of nature and number with philosophy, fellowship, discipline, and the formation of the individual.
Hermes and the Herald
Hermes is the messenger, traveller, interpreter, and mediator. The later figure of Hermes Trismegistus and the Hermetic writings became important influences upon philosophy, cosmology, alchemy, and Western esoteric thought. These traditions remain part of the philosophical inheritance studied by the Order.
The name Herald carries the same idea into our own work. A Herald brings reports in and carries knowledge outward.
Hermes also possesses another character important to the investigator: the Trickster. Writers on folklore, psychology, religion, and anomalous phenomena have repeatedly encountered the same association with ambiguity, inversion, coincidence, deception, contradiction, and the crossing of boundaries.
THE LION, THE BELL & THE SUN
The Lion is the emblem of courage, guardianship, and responsibility. It has appeared under many forms throughout religion, philosophy, heraldry, alchemy, and esoteric tradition, from Sekhmet and Chnoubis to the Green and Red Lions.
The Sun and the Bell express two forms of revelation: light and sound. The Sun illuminates what was hidden from sight. The Bell announces what must be heard. Together they represent discovery and proclamation: to find knowledge and then to herald it.
The Bell is also a call to gather and a measure of passing time. Its sound reaches outward without distinction. King and beggar, initiate and stranger, scholar and amateur hear the same bell and live beneath the same sun. In this sense the motto the Bell sounds for all is also a reminder of equality and mortality. Our time is brief. Whatever can be learned, preserved, and passed onward must be done while the flame still burns.
Campana sonat omnibus.
The Bell sounds for all.
ὁ ἔχων ὦτα ἀκούειν ἀκουέτω
"He who has ears to hear, let him hear."