Part 8 (1/2)

Third, that every year, upon the day C., they should meet together at the house Sancti Spiritus, or write the cause of his absence.

Fourth, every Brother should look about for a worthy person who, after his decease, might succeed him.

Fifth, the word C.R. should be their seal, mark, and character.

Sixth, the Fraternity should remain secret one hundred years.

Finally Brother C.R. died, but where and when, or in what country he was buried, remained a secret. The date, however, is generally given as 1484. In 1604 the Brethren who then const.i.tuted the inner circle of the Order discovered a door on which was written in large letters

Post 120 Annos Patebo.

On opening the door a vault was disclosed to view, where beneath a bra.s.s tablet the body of Christian Rosenkreutz was found, ”whole and unconsumed,” with all his ”ornaments and attires,” and holding in his hand the parchment ”I” which ”next unto the Bible is our greatest treasure,” whilst beside him lay a number of books, amongst others the _Vocabulario_ of Paracelsus, who, however, the _Fama_ observes, earlier ”was none of our Fraternity.”[248]

The Brethren now knew that after a time there would be ”a general reformation both of divine and human things.” While declaring their belief in the Christian faith, the _Fama_ goes on to explain that:

Our Philosophy is not a new invention, but as Adam after his fall hath received it and as Moses and Solomon used it, ... wherein Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, and others did hit the mark and wherein Enoch, Abraham, Moses, Solomon, did excel, but especially wherewith that wonderful Book the Bible agreeth.

It will be seen that, according to this Manifesto, Rosicrucianism was a combination of the ancient secret tradition handed down from the patriarchs through the philosophers of Greece and of the first Cabala of the Jews.

The ”Grand Legend” of Rosicrucianism rests, however, on no historical evidence; there is, in fact, not the least reason to suppose that any such person as Christian Rosenkreutz ever existed. The Illuminatus von Knigge in the eighteenth century a.s.serted that:

It is now recognized amongst enlightened men that no real Rosicrucians have existed, but that the whole of what is contained in the _Fama_ and the _Universal Reformation of the World_ [another Rosicrucian pamphlet which appeared in the same year] was only a subtle allegory of Valentine Andrea, of which afterwards partly deceivers (such as the Jesuits) and partly visionaries made use in order to realize this dream.[249]

What, then, was the origin of the name Rose-Cross? According to one Rosicrucian tradition, the word ”Rose” does not derive from the flower depicted on the Rosicrucian cross, but from the Latin word _ros_, signifying ”dew,” which was supposed to be the most powerful solvent of gold, whilst _crux_, the cross, was the chemical hieroglyphic for ”light.”[250] It is said that the Rosicrucians interpreted the initials on the cross INRI by the sentence ”Igne Nitrum Roris Invenitur.”[251]

Supposing this derivation to be correct, it would be interesting to know whether any connexion could be traced between the first appearance of the word Rosie Cross in the _Fama Fraternitatis_ at the date of 1614 and the cabalistic treatise of the celebrated Rabbi of Prague, Shabbethai Sheftel Horowitz, ent.i.tled _Shefa Tal_, that is to say, ”The Effusion of Dew,” which appeared in 1612.[252] Although this book has often been reprinted, no copy is to be found in the British Museum, so I am unable to pursue this line of enquiry further. A simpler explanation may be that the Rosy Cross derived from the Red Cross of the Templars.

Mirabeau, who as a Freemason and an Illuminatus was in a position to discover many facts about the secret societies of Germany during his stay in the country, definitely a.s.serts that ”the Rose Croix Masons of the seventeenth century were only the ancient Order of the Templars secretly perpetuated.”[253]

Lecouteulx de Canteleu is more explicit:

In France the Knights (Templar) who left the Order, henceforth hidden, and so to speak unknown, formed the Order of the Flaming Star and of the Rose-Croix, which in the fifteenth century spread itself in Bohemia and Silesia. Every Grand officer of these Orders had all his life to wear the Red Cross and to repeat every day the prayer of St. Bernard.[254]

Eckert states that the ritual, symbols, and names of the Rose-Croix were borrowed from the Templars, and that the Order was divided into seven degrees, according to the seven days of creation, at the same time signifying that their ”princ.i.p.al aim was that of the mysterious, the investigation of Being and of the forces of nature.”[255]

The Rosicrucian Kenneth Mackenzie, in his _Masonic Cyclopaedia_, appears to suggest the same possibility of Templar origin. Under the heading of Rosicrucians he refers enigmatically to an invisible fraternity that has existed from very ancient times, as early as the days of the Crusades, ”bound by solemn obligations of impenetrable secrecy,” and joining together in work for humanity and to ”glorify the good.” At various periods of history this body has emerged into a sort of temporary light; but its true name has never transpired and is only known to the innermost adepts and rulers of the society. ”The Rosicrucians of the sixteenth century finally disappeared and re-entered this invisible fraternity ”--from which they had presumably emerged. Whether any such body really existed or whether the above account is simply an attempt at mystification devised to excite curiosity, the incredulous may question.

The writer here observes that it would be indiscreet to say more, but elsewhere he throws out a hint that may have some bearing on the matter, for in his article on the Templars he says that after the suppression of the Order it was revived in a more secret form and subsists to the present day. This would exactly accord with Mirabeau's statement that the Rosicrucians were only the Order of the Templars secretly perpetuated. Moreover, as we shall see later, according to a legend preserved by the Royal Order of Scotland, the degree of the Rosy Cross had been inst.i.tuted by that Order in conjunction with the Templars in 1314, and it would certainly be a remarkable coincidence that a man bearing the name of Rosenkreutz should happen to have inaugurated a society, founded, like the Templars, on Eastern secret doctrines during the course of the same century, without any connexion existing between the two.

I would suggest, then, that Christian Rosenkreutz was a purely mythical personage, and that the whole legend concerning his travels was invented to disguise the real sources whence the Rosicrucians derived their system, which would appear to have been a compound of ancient esoteric doctrines, of Arabian and Syrian magic, and of Jewish Cabalism, partly inherited from the Templars but reinforced by direct contact with Cabalistic Jews in Germany. The Rose-Croix, says Mirabeau, ”were a mystical, Cabalistic, theological, and magical sect,” and Rosicrucianism thus became in the seventeenth century the generic t.i.tle by which everything of the nature of Cabalism, Theosophy, Alchemy, Astrology, and Mysticism was designated. For this reason it has been said that they cannot be regarded as the descendants of the Templars. Mr. Waite, in referring to ”the alleged connexion between the Templars and the Brethren of the Rosy Cross,” observes:

The Templars were not alchemists, they had no scientific pretensions, and their secret, so far as it can be ascertained, was a religious secret of an anti-Christian kind. The Rosicrucians, on the other hand, were pre-eminently a learned society and they were also a Christian sect.[256]

The fact that the Templars do not appear to have practised alchemy is beside the point; it is not pretended that the Rosicrucians followed the Templars in every particular, but that they were the inheritors of a secret tradition pa.s.sed on to them by the earlier Order. Moreover, that they were a learned society, or even a society at all, is not at all certain, for they would appear to have possessed no organization like the Templars or the Freemasons, but to have consisted rather of isolated occultists bound together by some tie of secret knowledge concerning natural phenomena. This secrecy was no doubt necessary at a period when scientific research was liable to be regarded as sorcery, but whether the Rosicrucians really accomplished anything is extremely doubtful.

They are said to have been alchemists; but did they ever succeed in trans.m.u.ting metals? They are described as learned, yet do the pamphlets emanating from the Fraternity betray any proof of superior knowledge?

”The Chymical Marriage of Christian Rosenkreutz,” which appeared in 1616, certainly appears to be the purest nonsense--magical imaginings of the most puerile kind; and Mr. Waite himself observes that the publication of the _Fama_ and the _Confessio Fraternitalis_ will not add new l.u.s.tre to the Rosicrucian reputations:

We are accustomed to regard the adepts of the Rosy Cross as beings of sublime elevation and preternatural physical powers, masters of Nature, monarchs of the intellectual world.... But here in their own acknowledged manifestos they avow themselves a mere theosophical offshoot of the Lutheran heresy, acknowledging the spiritual supremacy of a temporal prince, and calling the Pope anti-Christ.... We find them intemperate in their language, rabid in their religious prejudices, and instead of towering giant-like above the intellectual average of their age, we see them buffeted by the same pa.s.sions and identified with all opinions of the men by whom they were environed. The voice which addresses us behind the mystical mask of the Rose-Croix does not come from an intellectual throne....

So much for the Rosicrucians as a ”learned society.”

What, then, of their claim to be a Christian body? The Rosicrucian student of the Cabala, Julius Sperber, in his _Echo of the Divinely Illuminated Fraternity of the Admirable Order of the R.C._ (1615), has indicated the place a.s.signed to Christ by the Rosicrucians. In De Quincey's words: