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The Order of the Mouseion must be considered one of the earliest lodges of magick, although its continued existence has been a well kept secret since the destruction of the Great Library in 47 BC. The sigil of the order is the open book, and it has chapter houses in Alexandria, London and Washington (in libraries naturally.)
The Order was created by Demetrius of Athens with the foundation of the Great Library at Alexandria, and all the sorcerers who worked at the Library until its destruction were members. There is no written record to verify the fact, but when Caesar wished to make an example of Alexandria to punish its people for the assassination of Pompey, he belived that the order based at the Mouseion would thwart his attack so he persuaded a dragon to join him in his attack with promises of the collection in the Library. All evidence of the battle between the dragon and the Mouseion was destroyed when the Library was burned to the ground in the aftermath of the attack.
What neither Caesar nor the dragon knew about was the hidden entrance to the subterranean complex where the most precious lorebooks were kept, and the order literally went underground. Although most orders maintain their secrecy, the continued existence of the Order of the Mouseion is known only to its members. The Mouseion draws its membership from existing orders, chosing individuals who most adhere to its goals and vetting them carefully before taking a vote on whether they should be approached. A single "nay" vote is sufficient to block membership: only if all the existing masters are in agreement is the prospective candidate approached, and must take a vow of total secrecy before anything is revealed to them about the order.
Candidates for the order are typically scholars, often concerned more with theoretical sorcery than its practise or what they can gain from it. Members are more interested in knowledge for knowledge sake, although they still study new practical uses for existing lore as well as investigating any reports of new lore.
) not only allows people who do not speak the same language to understand each other, but also allows text in an unknown language to be read.
Copying scrolls by hand is prone to errors, and this can be a problem when working with magickal lore, so the order developed the spell of Duplicate (12) which allowed the caster to create an exact facsimile of the original document no matter what its form. It didn't ease the effort involved in copying, or speed up the time taken to do so, but it did ensure that every nuance of the original was recreated in the copy whether it was a written document, beads and wampum, or an oral tradition being consigned to parchment.
Search the Archives (8) was originally created so that archivists at the library could find the volumes they were looking for on the stacks. It can, however, be used to locate any object or person known to the caster, even if they have only ever seen it before from a distance.
Sometimes the content of a scroll was considered so dangerous that the librarians could not permit it to be read by anybody, yet they could not bring themselves to destroy any document. Thus the spell of Obfuscate (10) would scramble the text of a document beyond even the power of Glossalalia to interpret. The result could only be unscrambled by the ClearText (10) spell.
Sorcerous lore is often protected by wards that can prove harmful or even fatal to the scribe copy them. Insinuate allows the caster to read the content of a document without triggering the wards set to protect it: lesser wards would not reveal that the protection had been breached, greater wards would not trigger their counterspell. A simplified version of this spell, Release is commonly used by sorcerer archaeologists to counter the spells of protection set on tombs, but Release simply allows the thaumic energies of the ward to dissipate safely, and the original caster of lesser wards bypassed in this way will know that his defences have been breached. The Thaumic cost for Release is the original total cost to set the wards times two. The cost for Insinuate is the original total for the wards multiplied by six. Because the caster cannot know the nature of the wards set on an object or place, he will not know that his counterspell has succeeded until he senses the change in magickal energies. Because the caster of either of these spells does not know the Thaumic nature of the wards, these spells both require unaligned energy of all four aspects in their casting, and there are no harmonic effects. However, drawing a joker from the sorcery deck will still trigger wild effects.