And both those factions are ones which the Free Council hate. And the Free Council book was terrible. The Silver Ladder book was also good, and the Free Council hate them too.
Hmmmmmmmm. I think we've just confirmed that the Free Council are so terrible that they just hate good things.
I haven't read the book myself, but my personal idea of how the Free Council should work is that they're only barely a cohesive faction. I mean, there's a few guys who happily try to work with anyone else who identifies as a Free Council member, whether because of ideology, temperament, or just a creeping fear that the whole network will fall apart unless
somebody keeps trying to hold it all together.
Most of them? They're just 'the weird guys' of their local areas: that one stuck-up Mastigos who's totally going to prove that Mind and Spirit are the same Arcana one of these days, a tiny cabal planning to build a private kingdom of fungus-people and volcano-powered wonderment underneath Yellowstone National Park*, a Thyrsus who runs a Proximi-heavy New Age commune out in Idaho and keeps trying to get Luna-sempai to notice them.
Going back to that 'creeping fear' bit, the main thing binding all these disparate groups into a (theoretically) greater whole is basically just self-preservation. When you're a Mage, being alone can go really bad really fast; there's a lot of nasty shit waiting out there to swallow up thaumaturges who live on their own, including their own hubris, and you can get more done in the face of the other Orders when you can claim to be a representative of the Free Council instead of just some random asshole who lives out of a derelict meat packing plant off the southbound freeway.
You don't pick the Free Council to represent being part of a venerable tradition, you pick the Free Council to represent your character being:
A) Somebody who can't quite see themselves fitting in with any of the other Order chapters in their area and thus latched onto the Council for protection and a way to get in contact with/cut deals with other Mages more easily.
B) A (probably misguided) iconoclast who's fed up with those other Orders and their hidebound foolishness, and will hopefully evolve their position into something more complex than "fuck you
dad old people" someday, or at least find something else to base their lives around.
C) One of the scions of the "original" Free Council, that band of free thinkers and philosophers who told the Seers of the Throne to get fucked. They're the smallest faction left in the Order: the last heirs to a dying house, inheritors of philosophies and beliefs that have largely been ground down and disproven by the cold march of time, and they've either become willfully blind to that semi-obsolescence or founded/joined one of a handful of new movements evolving from the ashes of the Free Council's glory days - all while bearing the brunt of the Seers' occasional reprisals for their forebears' actions.
* If they don't get eaten by the Abyss first, of course - seriously, they're like idiot children who keep trying to microwave tin foil. No, Charlie, you can't "just wing it" if the rangers find one of your escaped 'Mold Men' - you have to actually think & plan before you start doing this kind of thing annnnd you've just walked off to go make your stupid mold monsters. Fuck's sake...
