Catharose de Petri

Catharose de Petri was born 1902 in Rotterdam under the name Henriette Stok Huyser. Of her childhood and youth not much is well-known; she spoke little of herself and was extremely modest. She once said, however, that she had already been conscious in her early years of the task of her life, and so it is not surprising that at the age of 28 years, in the year 1930, she joined Jan van Rijckenborgh and his brother Zwier Willem Leene in  their spiritual work.

As a consequence, Catharose de Petri became the closest and most important woman co-worker with Jan van Rijckenborgh. Together, "over decades", their work resulted in the creation of the School of the Rosycross and its transformation into the transfiguristic spiritual school, which is represented today in 36 countries in the world. They also wrote together a set of books, in which they stated and described the gnostic ideas of many centuries in a way understandable for humans of our time.

And they together carried out an important step in their spiritual development - and also for the development of the School of the Rosycross - when in 1956 they met with Antonin Gadal (1877-1962) in Ussat les Bains, Southern France: This meeting led to a close connection with the spiritual inheritance of the brotherhood of the Cathars, the order whose history Antonin Gadal had made it his life to keep alive.

Her work as an authoress was completely co-ordinated with the theories of the hermetic Gnosis and the philosophy of the Rosicrucians. With her work, Catharose de Petri gives many valuable notes for the daily life practice and the gnostic path for those spiritual human beings open to it. Into the foreground she places the cleansing of the heart again and again as a necessary condition for the gnostic path of spiritual development and refers her readers to the process, which thereby goes hand in hand with what was called by the Cathars the "Endura": the complete renewal of the consciousness of the new soul.