In this part, we would like to show how the Gnosis, the Grail, and the impulse of the Brotherhood of the Cathars have been forged in modern times into a real synthesis, into a long awaited unity that irrespective of time and place is continuing to work. Actually a real miracle! ‘Try to reach renewal’, it seems to say. ‘Shift to a purification of your motives; direct yourself toward the Gnosis – that unknown inner force, foreign to the world. Realize, build in this way a soul; develop thus a certain wisdom and self-knowledge, not through others, but out of yourself, out of your heart.’
At the start of the last century, a group of people in the south of France, in the valley of the Ariège, wanted to carry out a similar vision or ideal. One of them was Antonin Gadal, a teacher and speleologist from Ussat-les-Bains. This vision became reality when this historian came in contact with the school of the modern Rosycross, in the persons of Catharose de Petri and Jan van Rijckenborgh.
Antonin Gadal knew the value of the spiritual history as we have described it above. He was looking forward to the moment when the Gnosis of the Cathars would once more find its way into the hearts of humanity. In the early 1950’s, he came into contact with the modern Rosycross, and the joy of Gadal, then 77 years old, knew no bounds.
On the personal level, it was a mutual recognition. Jan van Rijckenborgh and Catharose de Petri saw in him an older brother, who with a well-founded and inner knowledge could confirm their work. And Gadal recognized in his Dutch friends the leaders of a group who not only had kept the memory of the Gnostic idea, but at the same time were to their hearts’ content active with propelling it into life and workability: not only a same mory of the past, but a s an adaptable force in the new times that were at the door.
Source: Gnosis, Rays of Light, past and present by Peter Huijs
Chapter: Antonin Gadal