Chapter 108. The Rosicrucian Manifestos and the “Rosicrucian Enlightenment”

Between 1614 and 1616 three anonymous German publications announced an invisible brotherhood of the Rosy Cross. Its founder had supposedly learned the secrets of nature in Arabia and Morocco, and its members now invited the learned of Europe to join a “general reformation” of the world. No such brotherhood has ever been found. Yet the manifestos set off a furore across Europe, a witch-scare in Paris, a long debate about the origins of the Royal Society and of Freemasonry, and a line of self-styled Rosicrucian orders that lasts to the present. This chapter sets out the documentary facts, Yates’s thesis, the corrections offered by McIntosh, Greer and Churton, and the later claimants to the name.

The three publications

Greer warns at the start that “the most common assumption about the Rosicrucians – that they are a single secret organization, active for the last 400 years if not longer – is also the most inaccurate.” He then gives “the established facts.” In 1614 the printer Wilhelm Wessel of Cassel issued a booklet with three parts. The first was the Universal and General Reformation of the Whole Wide World, “a pirated German translation of one dialogue from News from Parnassus (1612)” by Traiano Boccalini, a satire in which Apollo’s council of sages ends by regulating vegetable prices. The second was the Fama Fraternitatis. The third was a reply by Adam Haselmayer, “for which he was seized by the Jesuits and condemned to a galley” [Greer, The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies, #64911, “Rosicrucians”]. The Fama told of C.R.C., who learned his secrets at Damcar and Fez and died in 1484, and of the rediscovery of his vault in 1604. In 1615 the same press issued the Confessio, bound with Philip à Gabella’s essay drawn from John Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica. In 1616 Lazarus Zetzner of Strasbourg printed The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz [Greer, #64911, “Rosicrucians”].

Greer reads the Fama “by the company it originally kept.” It was “a grand scheme of social reform… printed alongside a raucous satire on grand schemes of social reform.” “If this is true, it counts as the most influential college prank of all time” [Greer, #64911]. McIntosh reads the pairing as a lesson “that an inner reformation within men’s minds and hearts must precede any external reformation.” He dates Haselmayer’s Reply to 1612, “the earliest known printed reference to the Rosicrucian brotherhood,” and has him freed from the galleys in 1617 [McIntosh, The Rosicrucians, #67335, ch. 3 “The Tubingen Circle”].

Andreae, the Tübingen circle and the ludibrium

Who wrote the texts? Greer says the Chemical Wedding “was apparently the first one written.” Its author, Johann Valentin Andreae, wrote it “in 1605 while he was a student at Tübingen University” in a circle “centered on Tobias Hess and Christoph Besold.” Andreae “admitted in his autobiography” that the work was his, “though it was published against his wishes.” The Fama and Confessio came from “one or more members of the Tübingen circle” between 1606 and 1610 [Greer, #64911]. McIntosh reports that recent research by Carlos Gilly “has revealed Hess as a key figure,” since an early Fama manuscript was sent out from Hess’s house. He traces the manifestos’ lion-and-eagle prophecy to Simon Studion’s Naometria (1604), whose chronology ends in 1620 [McIntosh, #67335, ch. 3].

Andreae later disowned the affair. In Turris Babel (1619) he wrote: “Listen ye mortals, in vain do you wait for the coming of the Brotherhood, the Comedy is at an end.” McIntosh suggests, as “speculation,” that Andreae published the Chemical Wedding in 1616 “to show that the fraternity was a myth.” He also records John Warwick Montgomery’s contrary view that Andreae was hostile to Rosicrucianism from the start [McIntosh, #67335, ch. 3]. Yates writes that “Andreae made painful efforts to make clear that Christian Rosencreutz and his Fraternity were a fiction.” She adds that the fiction “suggested a reality, the Christian Unions,” groups that tried to form real societies [Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, #62112, ch. 15; ch. 11 “The R.C. Fraternity and the Christian Unions”]. Churton devotes a chapter to Andreae’s later writings and his Societas Christiana [Churton, The Invisible History of the Rosicrucians, #64729, ch. 11 “Andreae CosmoXenus”].

The Chymical Wedding: the primary text

The library holds the 1690 English translation. It opens on Easter Eve: “On an evening before Easter Day, I sat at a table, and having (as my custom was) in my humble prayer sufficiently conversed with my Creator…” A storm breaks, and “a fair and glorious lady” with a golden trumpet leaves a letter sealed “IN HOC SIGNO VINCES.” The letter reads: “This day, today / Is the Royal Wedding day. / For this thou wast born / And chosen of God for joy… Keep watch / Inspect thyself / And shouldst thou not bathe thoroughly / The Wedding may work thy bane.” Below it are written “Sponsus and Sponsa” [Andreae, The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, #40448, “The First Day”].

Yates summarises the seven days. On the first day comes the invitation. The hero, wearing four red roses in his hat, calls himself “a brother of the Red Rosy Cross.” Then come the weighing of the guests, a play before the king and queen, the deaths and alchemical restoration of the royal pair, and finally the knighting of the guests into the Order of the Golden Stone. Yates calls it “an allegory of alchemical processes interpreted symbolically as an experience of the mystic marriage of the soul” [Yates, #62112, ch. 5 “The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz”].

Yates’s thesis: the Palatinate and the Bohemian catastrophe

The core of Yates’s book is historical and political. In her preface she writes that “what has slipped out of history” is that “a ‘Rosicrucian’ phase of culture was attached to” the marriage of Elizabeth Stuart and Frederick V, Elector Palatine, in 1613. In her account the manifestos were connected with it, Dee’s earlier movements in Bohemia lay behind them, and the brief reign at Heidelberg “was a Hermetic golden age, nourished on the alchemical movement led by Michael Maier, on Dee’s Monas hieroglyphica.” When James I disowned the movement, it foundered [Yates, #62112, Preface; ch. 1 “A Royal Wedding”; ch. 2 “The Bohemian Tragedy”; ch. 3 “John Dee and the Rise of ‘Christian Rosencreutz'”].

She offers several lines of evidence. The Chemical Wedding carries “a roughly drawn version of John Dee’s ‘monas hieroglyphica'” in the margin and on its title page. Its castle of lions recalls Heidelberg, home of the Palatine Lion, and the red cross and roses may echo Frederick’s Order of the Garter. Yates holds that both an exoteric chivalric meaning and an esoteric alchemical one (Ros Crux, dew-cross) “might stand together” [Yates, #62112, ch. 5]. De Bry’s press at Oppenheim, in the Palatinate, published Fludd and Maier in 1617 [Yates, #62112, ch. 6 “The Palatine Publisher”]. Frederick took the Bohemian crown in 1619 and lost it at the White Mountain in 1620. [Yates, #62112, ch. 2].

Greer accepts the outline as Yates’s argument. Frederick’s supporters “were involved in propagating Rosicrucian documents, particularly the Confessio,” and the promised reformation “was propaganda for Frederick’s party.” He adds that “if this was the political reality… the scheme failed disastrously” [Greer, #64911]. McIntosh is more guarded: “Her claims about Dee’s role appear exaggerated, however, in the light of recent scholarship” [McIntosh, #67335, ch. 3].

Furore, scare and the “invisible college”

The manifestos drew a flood of replies; Yates covers the German furore in her chapter 7 [Yates, #62112, ch. 7 “The Rosicrucian Furore in Germany”]. In France the reaction turned to fear. “In the year 1623 placards are said to have appeared in Paris announcing the presence in the town of the Brethren of the Rose Cross”: “We, being deputies of the principle College of the Brothers of the Rose Cross, are making a visible and invisible stay in this city.” A 1623 pamphlet, Horrible Pacts made between the Devil and the Pretended Invisible Ones, turned them into devil-worshippers. The Jesuit François Garasse said they “all deserve to be broken on the wheel or hanged.” Yates calls this “an attempt… to start a witch-craze” [Yates, #62112, ch. 8 “The Rosicrucian Scare in France”].

Yates then follows the “invisible college” through Bacon’s New Atlantis, Comenius and Hartlib to the Royal Society of 1660 [Yates, #62112, ch. 9; ch. 12; ch. 13 “From the Invisible College to the Royal Society”]. She shows that Elias Ashmole copied out the manifestos in his own hand with a letter asking to join, and she traces the “Dee tradition” to Newton’s alchemy [Yates, #62112, ch. 14 “Elias Ashmole and the Dee Tradition”].

Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry

In her chapter 15 Yates states her negative finding plainly: “I have found no evidence of a real secret society calling itself ‘Rosicrucian’… There is immense evidence of a passionate search for Rosicrucians but no evidence that they were ever found.” She then sets out the evidence that does exist. Robert Moray was admitted to the Edinburgh lodge on 20 May 1641, and Ashmole was made a Mason at Warrington on 16 October 1646. Both were founder members of the Royal Society. A 1638 Perth poem links the two: “For we be brethren of the Rosie Crosse: / We have the Mason word and second sight.” A 1676 squib announces that “the Ancient Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross; the Hermetick Adepti and the company of Accepted Masons intend all to dine together.” She judges that De Quincey’s view, that “Freemasonry is neither more nor less than Rosicrucianism as modified by those who transplanted it to England,” “cannot be entirely right” [Yates, #62112, ch. 15 “Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry”].

Greer gives the Masonic route more concretely. The Scottish degrees that appeared in France in the 1740s and 1750s, which he attributes to Jacobite authors, carried Rosicrucian elements into “the 18° of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite” [Greer, #64911]. Pike’s Eighteenth Degree, Knight Rose Croix, treats its ceremonies as open to each brother’s own reading. Some see in the Master’s legend “the condemnation and sufferings of Christ; others those of the unfortunate Grand Master of the Templars.” He identifies the Word of the degree with “the Ormuzd of Zoroaster, the Ainsoph of the Kabalah” [Pike, Morals and Dogma, #378717, Degree XVIII “Knight Rose Croix”]. In his Kadosh degree he gives the symbol’s meaning: “To unite the Rose to the Cross, was the problem proposed by the High Initiation” [Pike, #378717, Degree XXX].

Later claimants to the name

Greer calls the Order of the Golden and Rosy Cross (Gold- und Rosenkreuz) of the 1750s, founded by Hermann Fichtuld, “the first solidly documented Rosicrucian order.” It admitted only Master Masons, counted Frederick William II of Prussia as a member, and claimed descent from an Egyptian magus, Ormus, in 96 CE [Greer, #64911]. Later came the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (1866), the Paris Kabbalistic Order of the Rose+Cross (1888) and Heindel’s Rosicrucian Fellowship (1907). AMORC was founded by H. Spencer Lewis in 1925. Greer says Lewis “backdated his own initiation… and his order to ancient Egypt,” and that his feud with R. Swinburne Clymer’s Fraternitas Rosae Crucis involved charges of sex magic that “probably had merit in both cases” [Greer, #64911]. Churton covers Steiner, Heindel, Lewis and the Lectorium Rosicrucianum in a chapter he titles “The Age of Insanity” [Churton, #64729, ch. 17]. Christian Rebisse’s Rosicrucian History and Mysteries was published by AMORC’s Supreme Grand Lodge. It is the order’s own history, running from “Egypt and the Primordial Tradition” to Lewis’s initiation at Toulouse and “The Fourth Rosicrucian Manifesto” [Rebisse, Rosicrucian History and Mysteries, #66262].

Steven Sora goes further. He claims that “a very small handful of individuals… alchemists, geomancers, and philosophers” calling themselves “the Invisibles,” from “a college in sixteenth-century England,” shaped the founding of the United States. His chapters run from Bacon’s New Atlantis to Pennsylvania’s Pietists and the Revolution [Sora, Rosicrucian America, #64376, Introduction]. Rudolf Steiner gave his 1907 lectures on “Anthroposophy and Rosicrucianism” at Kassel, the town of the Fama‘s first printing, and they set out the anthroposophical reading taken up in a later chapter [Steiner, Cunoașterea lui Hristos (GA 100), #48586].

Key points

• Greer’s “established facts”: the 1614 Cassel booklet from Wessel bound the Fama with a pirated Boccalini satire and Haselmayer’s reply. The Confessio (1615) and Chemical Wedding (Strasbourg, 1616) followed.
• Andreae claimed the Chemical Wedding as a youthful work of about 1605 and later called the brotherhood a “Comedy.” McIntosh and Gilly give Tobias Hess a central role.
• Yates ties the manifestos to Frederick V and Elizabeth Stuart, Dee’s Monas, the De Bry press at Oppenheim and the defeat of 1620. Greer accepts this as her argument; McIntosh finds the Dee claims exaggerated.
• The 1623 Paris placards set off an attempted witch-scare against the “Invisibles.”
• Yates found “no evidence” of a real Rosicrucian society. She documents overlaps with early Masonry: Moray (1641), Ashmole (1646), the 1638 poem and the 1676 squib.
• The Rose Croix entered Freemasonry as the 18th degree. Pike reads it as a universal symbol of the redeeming Word.
• Later orders from the Gold- und Rosenkreuz to AMORC built their own lineages. Rebisse writes AMORC’s self-history; the American thesis is Sora’s.