Do not dwell in the past,
do not dream of the future,
concentrate the mind on the present moment. - Buddha
IT IS MORE THAN SOME PEOPLE UNDERSTAND AND DIFFERENT THAN SOME BELIEVE - HSL
"The press has the idea that we're a strange, weird cult," said Lewis, the president and imperator of the group, in an interview several years ago. "We're not. We're a study group that takes the position that human consciousness is a stream, a flow. We believe that man generally functions on only one level, but that he can function on levels higher than the objective and the subjective. - RML
The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties - this knowledge, this feeling ... that is the core of the true religious sentiment. - Albert Einstein
In the Footsteps of Harvey Spencer Lewis by Paul DuPont, F.R.C.
In the 1980s, when I was doing research regarding the Rosicrucian Order’s history, and more specifically regarding Harvey Spencer Lewis coming to Toulouse, former Imperator Ralph M. Lewis allowed me to go to the chateau near the old town of Vieille Toulouse (Old Tolosa, some miles from Toulouse) where H. Spencer Lewis was initiated into the Rosicrucian Order.
We knew the name of the place where this chateau is situated, for Frater Lewis had described it precisely. I was of course somewhat impatient to go there, but I knew neither when nor how I could visit. An occasion presented itself to me soon, for I was asked to go not far from there for professional reasons.
It was a beautiful summer evening. The sun, still high in the sky, gave the hillsides a pink color well known in our region. I arrived near the little village, in sight of the hill where the chateau was located. From afar I could see a glimpse of the long outer wall of which Frater Lewis spoke. This wall was made of baked clay and of stones from the Garonne river. It surrounded the chateau and his property.
I walked along the wall to one of the entrances of the chateau, but it was closed by a great wooden door, which was high enough that I could not see inside. I could just barely see the façade of the chateau because of two square towers blocked my view, so I went back to the village to see if I could find another entrance.
I walked past another large door, formerly used as the main entrance. Walking outside the long outer wall running alongside the village itself, I eventually found a little door and decided to try to open it. Who knows? Maybe it was open.
Indeed it was easy to open. I stepped inside and found myself in the large park near the chateau, behind the old barns, and I was soon inside he main grounds. I thought to myself, since no one lived there, the worst I risked was to be taken back to the door. The shutters and the doors, everything was closed. With no one around I wavered between two thoughts: go back as I had come or go farther. Was I not after all completing a mission for the Grand Master and the Imperator!?
While I was there I thought while I was at it, I should take some photographs. (I learned later that Frater Ralph Lewis had hoped that I would take photographs of the interior of the building.) Therefore I proceeded further, taking some photographs here and there, in the park, and then after crossing a large carriage entrance, in the courtyard within.
And so, eventually, one step after another, I found myself in the courtyard, facing the façade of the chateau. The owners had built a swimming pool in the middle of the courtyard where the fountain had been located in H. Spencer Lewis’s drawing. I found such a thing somewhat preposterous, knowing what the chateau had sheltered. I tried to imagine that large courtyard in the state which it was in then, in the days of its mystical purpose.
I stopped taking photos and was about to leave when a fortuitous event occured. A I was retracing my steps, I saw an elderly woman hurriedly coming toward me. I prepared myself for the worst and tried to think of an explanation for my intrusion. After the usual salutations she simply asked me, “You have come for a visit?” The owners had entrusted the key and the safekeeping of the building to her because they expected visiting to purchase the estate.
Indeed, she had a huge key in her hand. The chateau was for sale. She explained to me that the owners, being in another country, had entrusted her to show visitors the property.
It was now a litttle late and perhaps the hour had arrived for her to prepare her meal. In any case, she let me visit the chateau alone. She opned the door for me, left it open halfway, and left me in the entrance hall.
Those who knew the history of the place will understand the emotions which overwhelmed me in that moment. There I stood in front of the large staircase leading the place where H. Spencer Lewis was interviewed by his initiator before the initiation itself. I was in the meeting room of the Grand Lodge of France.
Before going upstairs I pushed open the door of a room on the ground floor. It opened onto a huge room with may chairs scattered here and there in small groups. It was a vast living room for the meetings, which they held over the past centuries. The people met there and talked and exchanged their ideas about philosophical subjects.
As they were arranged, these chairs seemed to still be inhabited by their former owners. For a moment I even felt as if they were still present and I nearly excused myself for having disturbed them. I did not stay there long for I knew I knew the old Grand Lodge was one the second floor. I no longer had a lot of time. Passing by the chairs, I saw one of the ancient sculpted chairs which H. Spencer Lewis wrote, and I took a photograph of it.
I then proceeded to climb one step after another with deep veneration. I learned later from one of the owners, whom I would subsequently come to know in a friendly manner, that one of the wings of the chateau had been condemned since the beginning of the twentieth century. The owners, in order to save on heating, did not use it any longer and it had therefore stayed in its original condition. I will point out here that these rooms were in an advanced state of decay, especially the floors. This was precisely where H. Spencer Lewis had spent his initiation night!
It was a great privilege for me to be in this area, and I deeply valued this experience, however I had no flash with me and everything was in semi-darkness, therefore I do not have a photograph of this area. So I will endeavor to describe the place of the initiation itself from memory.
There was a large and high wooden door, which opened easily. Once inside the door, there was a small hall opening in front onto a room with an alcove, and on the right there was a larger room that reminded me of the reception room of our lodges. In the smaller room in front of me there was an old sofa and a huge stack of papers on a table.
I then made my way toward what I considered to be the reception room. The parquet floot was disintegrating so I cautiously put my pit my feet on the wooden boards that creaked under my weight. The room was at least ten meters (30 feet) long, stretching from one façade of the chateau to the other. There was an old fireplace, which the present owners had restored in the style of Louis XVI. Although the room was large, I crossed it quickly because I wanted to see what was next.
At the end of the room, to the left there was a twenty-meter-long (60 feet) corridor, which ran along the windows of the rear of the building. These windows had been bricked up from within, yet some cracks allowed just enough light to see that this corridor had three small doors, giving access to three small contiguous rooms and at the far end, to a square room and another small room situated on the right, in a tower of the chateau.
There was absolutely no decoration except a little picture nailed down on the edge of the door to the first room. From memory, it seemed to me that it was Gabriel, the Archangel, striking down the Dragon.
Was this the threshold chamber? I could not go into that room for it was too dark, so instead I went into the other room. It had no decoration and measured only a few meters. I went through it, not without some apprehension for it was dark, and then I pushed open the next door, which opened into a beautiful room. The walls were covered with ancient tapestries with small floral patterns in green and brown.
All this seemed to be very old. The patterned material probably dated from the 18th century, however I could not see it easily in the Darkness. Rather I tried to feel the mood of the place, and my thought was that it was quite small for a place of such importance. Here I was in the Grand Temple!
Certainly this place had not been used for a long time. H. Spencer Lewis had written that Count Bellcastle-Ligne, his initiator, told him in 1909 that the Lodge had not been active since the middle of the 1800s.
I looked for the door in the far end through which the master of this house could come and go. Indeed the rooms were linked to one another through doors in a row, which made it possible, as Frater Lewis had described, for the master of the house to leave a room and then find him again, as if by a miracle, in another place in the same room. For example, there is door that leads onto the little balcony near the grand staircase, which by a hidden passage, gives access to the room where I was.
I meditated for a while in this area before moving to the windows in the back of the building. Near one of them, through a half-open door, one could see another room situated in of the four towers of the chateau. The size of that room was that of a large sanctum, where three or four people could be accommodated without disturbing one another. I cannot describe this room from memory; again, all this was very dark.
The whole of this area that I just described is about one hundred square meters (300 sqaure fees) and as I saw it, was made up of a square roon, of three antechambers, of a small corridor for access, of a room to receive people, and of a room with an alvoce, a divan and some chairs. This is all that remained.
Of course I wish I had been able to take photographs of this area for since then the owners have remodelled it, from floor to ceiling, lowering the floor because they needed to redo the main beams.
During the months and years that followed, I visited again on several occasions, meeting the former and the new owners, as well as some neighbors. One of the eminent members of the Societé Archéologique du midi de la France lived near the chateau. He had been, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the authorized representative of one of the former owners.
We have photograph of this man, in uniform. He may have been the man in partial military dress who greeted H. Spencer Lewis in 1909 and asked him for his letter of introduction before he came before the Archivist of the Order. Within the famous Sociéte Archéologique du Midi de la France, there were personalities of whom it has been said were Rosicrucians, noticeably the Viscount de Lapasse, about whom we have some old documents, but chiefly and more directly concerning H. Spencer Lewis’s journal, “A Pilgrim’s Journey to the East”, was Clovis Lassalle.
Once he presented his letter of introduction, H. Spencer Lewis was greeted again, with some ceremony, by an elderly woman who led him to the one who would some hours later initiate him into the Order of the Rose Cross.
I had found the Light - and it had illumined me as I faced the Rosae Crucis - HSL
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