My Dearest Brother,

I was happy to be present at your elevation to the rank of Master and, even more so, to note that far from considering your initiatory journey as completed, you continued to ask yourself many questions about the meaning of the ceremony you had just experienced and its spiritual and moral implications.

As the bud is the promise of the rose, what was given to you that evening includes in germ the entirety of what Masonry has to transmit to you, but the human mind is so made that it is difficult, if not impossible, to apprehend the entirety of this thesaurus, to understand it and above all to integrate it into oneself from the only ceremony that you have experienced.

The scalar path of the Rite beyond the Mastery will allow you to gradually discover this thesaurus, to deepen it and to penetrate it. Each degree - with its legends and myths, with its ceremonies - will offer you a further step in the discovery of your being and your relationship to others and the cosmos.

The aim of this journey is both simple and ambitious, and is set out in our Great Constitutions: it is for the union, happiness, progress and well-being of the human family in general and of each individual man.

The terms used may seem surprising to you: neither happiness nor well-being can be proclaimed, and misfortune can strike our lives at any moment. To deny this would be folly, but you know the poem of our Brother Kipling: if you can face disasters and triumphs, happiness and misfortune with the same equality of soul, then you will be a man. What the Rite offers you is a path towards this equality of soul: it aims to make you live in harmony with yourself, with others, with the All Other.

But the purpose of the Rite is also - and even primarily - for the human family: we want this harmony to be universal. This is what we call the Holy Empire.

Rest assured, this is not a political project! As you know, Masonry has no business intervening in the life of the city.

The Empire is the one we must have - individually and collectively - over ourselves and it is Holy, because we live and work in the Sacred, under the benevolent gaze of the Divine.

In this way, the Rite proposes to you a humanist and universalist ethic in the strongest sense of these terms. An ethic that we must build through work and with the indispensable humility of those who know that all inspiration comes from Above.

Equipped with this viaticum, the Mason can then go out into the profane world to carry this harmony that he has made his own...

Very fraternally

Ch. Hervé, 33°

Sovereign Grand Commander