The first part of this story showed how a child learns to look behind appearances: behind the mountain, behind the discourse of adults, behind scientific certainties, behind official narratives, and even within his own reasoning. Marcel Ehrmann had transmitted to him the discipline of the weak signal.

Romagnieu had imposed on him the resistance of reality. The laboratory notebooks had taught him that a hypothesis has value only through the test capable of correcting it. The blind spot had eventually become less a weakness to conceal than a territory to seek out.

But one question still remained untouched: what happens when the person who observes the invisible structures of the world agrees to become the object of the inquiry himself?

His entry into initiatory territories was not the sudden emergence of a spiritual vocation in the middle of an existence that had until then been devoid of one. Theology had begun long before adulthood. It already belonged to his childhood.

He successively had a Jesuit tutor, then a Dominican tutor. One does not receive such an education through some spontaneous operation of the Holy Spirit. A Jesuit and a Dominican never teach only a few prayers, religious dates, or the rudiments of a catechism.

They bring with them centuries of thought, exegesis, controversy, philosophy, method, and intellectual discipline. They transmit a way of constructing a line of reasoning, testing its articulations, identifying contradictions, and opposing a proposition not with indignation, but with another architecture of thought.

The word he uses to designate this learning is simple and precise: dialectics.

From his earliest childhood, he was thus placed before a religious discourse that was also an intellectual discourse. He learned that a theological proposition cannot be reduced to an assertion of belief. It has a history, consequences, objections, answers, a logic, and sometimes centuries of debates buried behind a few words that have become familiar.

The succession of the two tutors was not insignificant. The Society of Jesus and the Dominican Order belong to two great traditions of Catholic intelligence. The young boy obviously did not yet receive a learned and exhaustive history of them. But he was exposed to two ways of thinking within the same religion: discernment, examination, and action in the world on one side; study, preaching, intellectual disputation, and the search for coherence on the other.

It would be wrong to attribute retrospectively to these tutors every concept that would appear in his adult work. It would be equally false to minimize their imprint. Even before encountering Freemasonry, the Talmud, or the Zohar, he already knew that a religious tradition could be an architecture of the mind.

This first education continued, on the threshold of adulthood, at the Catholic Faculty of Theology in Lyon.

The Catholic Faculty was neither an anecdotal detour nor a passing curiosity. It constituted his true structured theological education as a young adult. There he deepened his study of Christianity, the history of doctrines, philosophy, exegesis, the great controversies, and the complex relationships among revelation, reason, language, and institution.

There he also made several of his major philosophical discoveries. In particular, he associates this intellectual environment with his encounters with Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio. These men did not teach him theology in the confessional sense of the term. Yet they opened new perspectives on the sign, reality, speed, technology, war, the accident, and the transformation of societies.

Baudrillard questioned the way representations ultimately substitute themselves for what they claim to show. Virilio revealed that every invention carries within it its own accident and that technological acceleration transforms the perception of the world before societies have even learned how to think about it.

These discoveries naturally became part of the kaleidoscopic method taking shape within him. Theology, philosophy, science, law, and technology are not independent continents. They illuminate the same object from different faces.

When he approached Freemasonry, he was therefore not seeking to fill a spiritual void. He was continuing an education begun in childhood and structured at the Catholic Faculty. But he was now seeking something other than academic instruction.

Theology had given him texts, doctrines, histories, and conceptual instruments. He wanted to test what happens when knowledge leaves the domain of commentary alone and becomes a lived experience, situated in a place, a time, a community, a succession of gestures, and a discipline of the self.

In 1985, at twenty-three, he was initiated at the Orient of Lyon, within the Grande Loge Nationale Française. His lodge was called La Voie de la Connaissance. It worked in the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite.

This membership is neither a late reconstruction nor an unverifiable allusion. A nominative GLNF document bears his name, that of the lodge La Voie de la Connaissance, the Orient of Lyon, and certifies that his dues and fees were paid through December 31, 1985. This evidence also establishes the boundary of the narrative: he makes his own membership public, but reveals neither the identity of the other brothers, nor the work of the lodge, nor what remains covered by Masonic secrecy.

The choice of this obedience was not accidental. The GLNF was connected to the English deistic tradition, attentive to initiatory continuity and historical recognition. This lineage mattered to a young man already sensitive to sources, transmissions, archives, and forms of legitimacy.

He was not seeking a society of thought detached from all transcendence. He wanted to enter an institution that acknowledged the existence of a higher principle and inscribed its work within a chain longer than an individual life.

His entry was a personal undertaking. It was neither the execution of a paternal instruction, nor the effect of a social recommendation, nor a networking strategy. Marcel Ehrmann belonged to a deeply structured Catholic universe, linked in particular to Opus Dei. The son was not reproducing the father’s path. He was seeking his own.

This is where the expression takes on its meaning: constructing the inner man.

Until then, Thierry had learned to construct, dismantle, and experiment with external objects. He took apart engines, devised electrical assemblies, observed chemical reactions, calculated structures, and recorded his experiments in notebooks. Matter had taught him that it yields neither to titles, eloquence, nor intention.

A barn door that is too heavy remains too heavy. A badly designed mechanism jams. A flawed experiment produces a flawed result. An incorrect hypothesis eventually encounters the reality that contradicts it.

Freemasonry shifted this lesson without abolishing it.

The resistant material was no longer only wood, iron, the engine, stone, or earth. It was also the man himself.

Initiation did not give him a truth to possess. It proposed a worksite. A man could no longer content himself with increasing his knowledge. He had to examine what that knowledge actually changed in his way of speaking, listening, judging, deciding, and acting.

An entire library can enrich a mind without changing its behavior. An individual can know the great moral doctrines while remaining prisoner of his vanity, fears, or automatisms. He can discourse on justice and reproduce injustice the moment his personal interest is threatened. He can celebrate fraternity and withdraw when a brother is genuinely in danger.

Constructing the inner man therefore does not consist in accumulating knowledge about oneself. It means bringing knowledge into conduct.

This passage could not be transmitted by a definition. It required an experience.

There is a frequent temptation, when writing about Freemasonry, to confuse secrecy with depth. The more hidden something is, the more important it is presumed to be. He rejects this equivalence. A rite has value not because it is forbidden to outside eyes, but because of the displacement it produces, the work it imposes, and the time required for its interpretation.

It is possible to say that there was a threshold, a break with ordinary reference points, a particular organization of time, space, silence, and speech. It is possible to recount what this experience produced in his trajectory. But the narrative must stop before what is covered by the word given.

Thierry chose to assert his own membership publicly. Later, in a television program watched by several million people, he would explain that he identified with the English tradition, in which Freemasons may declare their membership and where temples sometimes stand openly on the street.

Yet this personal openness authorizes no disclosure concerning others.

He will not give the identities of the brothers. He will not describe the signs, words, attributes, ritual sequences, or the content of work that does not belong to him personally. Speaking about his own path is a right. Revealing that of others would be a breach of commitment.

Secrecy thus becomes less a strategy of concealment than a discipline of responsibility. It requires the person bearing witness to distinguish what he may say from what he must protect.

This distinction connects with one of the guiding lines of this book: knowledge gives power, but that power has value only if it remains correlated with an ethics of its use.

The lodge also introduced him to a form of transmission different from those he had known.

He would often say:

“I have always had masters.”

The word could be misunderstood. It designates neither submission of intelligence nor abdication of freedom. On the contrary, it affirms that no one forms himself alone. The myth of the self-made man seems false to him.

Marcel Ehrmann had been a master. The Jesuit and Dominican tutors had been as well. Philosophers, scientists, lawyers, artists, and men encountered throughout his existence would become so in turn.

But Masonic mastery introduced another relationship. Knowledge no longer came only from a father, a professor, or an author read in a book. It circulated within a human chain. Each person received before transmitting. Each had to learn to occupy a place that did not depend only on civil age, social success, or the speed of intelligence.

This temporality could be difficult for a man accustomed to moving quickly through complex systems. Initiatory progression requires receiving before recomposing. It forbids, at least temporarily, immediately transforming every teaching into a personal architecture.

This constraint was useful to him.

It taught him that a symbol is not exhausted by the first interpretation given to it. Its meaning appears in layers. What one believes one understands immediately shifts after a year, an experience, a contradiction, or a loss. Time is no longer merely the duration necessary for learning. It becomes an operator of transformation.

This principle corresponded deeply to his way of perceiving the world. He does not spontaneously see information as a sequence of isolated objects. He perceives it in volumes, architectures, and relationships. He looks for visible and invisible links, exposed faces, and surfaces that the observer’s position prevents him from seeing.

Freemasonry offered him a universe in which architecture was simultaneously material, symbolic, and human. Masonic architecture referred not only to an external building. It also became the figure of an order to be established within oneself, without ever claiming that it would be definitively complete.

Yet this experience was not an unreserved adherence to the institution.

Receiving a tradition does not mean dissolving into it.

Freemasonry brought together several elements capable of attracting him deeply: architecture, symbol, transmission, fraternity, long temporality, work, plurality of readings, and self-construction. But it remained a human institution, with its rules, hierarchies, habits, power relations, and contradictions.

Every institution protects something that it also risks freezing.

Form makes transmission possible, but it can end by mistaking itself for the truth it was meant to serve. Hierarchy makes it possible to organize work, but it can become an instrument of domination. Rite opens a space for transformation, but it can be reduced to empty repetition when the gesture is no longer connected to its purpose.

This tension between form and freedom did not lead him to deny the institution. It taught him to seek what remains alive beneath the envelope of practices.

A scene that occurred in Lyon on the day Marcel Ehrmann died gave this question particular gravity.

The father died in 1985. The son was only twenty-three. Marcel Ehrmann was born in 1901. Between them lay more than an age difference: almost a difference of civilization. The father had transmitted entire worlds — science, law, strategy, Catholicism, the discipline of evidence — but the transmission remained unfinished. It always would.

At the funeral, Masonic tradition brought into the scene a gesture whose power he has preserved: the reversed apron.

There is no need to describe its use or provide ritual commentary. It is enough to measure its function in this history. Theology had long thought about death, survival, memory, and passage. Freemasonry suddenly made them present in an object, a gesture, and a community of men gathered around someone who had died.

That same evening, the work of the lodge was to continue.

The father’s death did not suspend the work. It changed its density.

A confrontation arose around the freedom and sovereignty of the lodge. For him, the words free and sovereign could not be decorative elements in institutional discourse. They had to produce real consequences.

A lodge that calls itself free and sovereign must be able to exercise its judgment, assume its decisions, and make fraternity live beyond simple formal obedience. The conflict with the Worshipful Master was therefore not merely a quarrel over authority. It brought to light a question that would structure everything that followed in his initiatory path: how can one receive the strength of a tradition without surrendering to it one’s freedom of thought?

The discussion was then brutally interrupted by reality.

A visiting brother suffered an extremely serious medical emergency. Concepts, degrees, practices, and disagreements immediately ceased to occupy the foreground. A man was in danger.

Thierry intervened, gave him aid, and participated in his care before he was transferred to the hospital.

The scene constituted a test of truth.

Fraternity was no longer a proclaimed idea. It became an act. Sovereignty was no longer a principle under discussion. It became the ability to respond when a life depended on another man’s lucidity and speed.

This gesture, performed without calculation, was not supposed to open any door. It was not the staging of a virtue, but a response to an emergency.

Much later, a Paris lodge composed of Masters and Past Masters asked him to come work with them. He initially refused. He believed he did not possess the degrees, customs, or practices that would allow him decently to enter such a space.

They insisted. Eventually, he went.

The powerful Worshipful Master of this free and sovereign lodge, composed of major figures in Freemasonry then rebelling against certain rigidities of the obediences, was precisely the man he had helped in Lyon.

The scene produced in him the effect of a second initiation.

The connection between the two moments should not be interpreted as a social reward. It reveals a deeper circulation. The man encountered in vulnerability reappeared in a position of authority. The act performed when titles no longer mattered became, at a distance, the point of entry into a new phase of transmission.

Through this man’s power and position, he was able to advance toward a decisive elevation to the Middle Chamber.

Here again, it is not a matter of inventorying degrees or illuminating what must remain covered. The function of this progression lies elsewhere. It marks the passage from an initiation received to a path that must now be walked personally.

Tradition could no longer be merely a set of transmitted forms. It had to become an instrument of autonomy.

He was beginning to understand what the expression he would often use later could mean: to be a free Mason in a free lodge.

Freedom did not consist in rejecting every rule. It consisted in never confusing the instrument with the purpose. The lodge could provide a form for the work. It could not become the owner of the conscience of the person doing the work.

This evolution also allowed him to understand better the two movements he would designate by the expressions dry path and wet path.

The dry path is sudden illumination. It is intuition that grasps a structure before having gone through all its demonstrations. It proceeds by flash, condensation, shortcut, sometimes by that leap others understand only afterward.

The wet path is duration. It accumulates, verifies, begins again, classifies, documents. It slowly transforms matter through patience, as water works rock or as years of deposits produce a stalactite.

He already knew these two regimes without yet having fully named them. His mind could grasp a conceptual architecture in a few seconds. But his laboratory notebooks had taught him that intuition must meet protocol. He could sense the organization of a system very early, then work for years to make it operational.

Initiation did not ask him to choose between illumination and duration. It taught him to hold them together.

A dry path that refuses verification can produce illusion. A wet path deprived of vision can be reduced to accumulation. The first sometimes sees before others; the second builds what the first had only glimpsed.

Constructing the inner man requires this double discipline: preserving the force of intuition without declaring oneself exempt from work.

The abandonment of metals appeared to him in the same light.

It was not hostility toward matter or wealth. He never thought money impure by nature, nor deprivation a guarantee of virtue. Metals designate rather what, in the external world, artificially assigns value to a person: wealth, rank, titles, reputation, power, and display.

To abandon them means temporarily suspending these hierarchies so that the individual is brought back to his work, his word, and his conduct.

This lesson already contained a contradiction he would have to inhabit throughout his life. He would build companies, infrastructures, and archives of considerable scale. He would possess rare objects, collections, and powerful tools. But he would continually seek not to become the property of what he possessed.

Metal is not only what one holds. It is what ultimately determines the idea one has of oneself.

The Inner Temple has meaning only if it changes the way a person inhabits the outer world.

His participation in several structures did not make him a collector of rites. He was not seeking to add affiliations as one accumulates distinctions. Each teaching was a layer. Each provided an instrument, but none could claim to contain the whole of reality by itself.

Freemasonry had taught him that a symbol possesses several levels of interpretation.

The Catholic Faculty had given him the history of texts, doctrines, and their controversies.

The tutors of childhood had placed dialectics at the heart of his relationship to religion.

The inquiry therefore could not stop.

Authentic initiation had not closed the world behind a door reserved for a chosen few. On the contrary, it had multiplied the thresholds. It had shown him that knowledge has value only when it changes the person receiving it, but also that no institution can exhaust the totality of human experience.

He emerged from this first initiatory sequence better instructed, but also more aware of what escaped him.

He had learned to become the substance of his own work.

What remained was for him to discover how far a civilization could push the art of commentary, contradiction, and interpretation.

For that, he had to enter another space of speech: that of the yeshivot, the Talmud, and the Zohar.