In 1614 two books appeared that pulled the Hermetic tradition in opposite directions. In London, Isaac Casaubon showed that the treatises of Hermes were not ancient at all. In Kassel, a small anonymous pamphlet announced that a secret brotherhood of Hermetic sages had existed in Germany for two centuries and was now ready to reveal itself. The first book began the end of a legend. The second began a new one, and its effects are still felt.
In brief
- Three anonymous works, published between 1614 and 1616, told of a hidden fraternity founded by one Christian Rosenkreutz.
- They called for a general reformation of learning, joining Hermetic philosophy, alchemy and Kabbalah to Protestant piety.
- Hundreds of readers replied, asking to join. No one was ever admitted, and there is no evidence that the brotherhood existed.
- The manifestos were most likely written in a circle of young Lutheran scholars at Tubingen.
The three books
- Fama Fraternitatis (1614)
- The Report of the Fraternity. Printed in German at Kassel, after circulating in manuscript for some years. It tells the story of the founder, the rules of the order and the discovery of his tomb, and invites the learned of Europe to make themselves known.
- Confessio Fraternitatis (1615)
- The Confession of the Fraternity. Published in Latin the following year, also at Kassel. It defends the brotherhood against its critics, sharpens its religious and political tone, and repeats the invitation.
- The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz (1616)
- Published in German at Strasbourg. Not a manifesto but an allegorical romance in seven days, in which the aged Rosenkreutz attends a royal wedding that turns out to be an alchemical operation. It is the most readable of the three and the most Hermetic.
The legend of the founder
According to the Fama, Christian Rosenkreutz was born to a poor but noble German family and educated in a monastery. The Confessio adds the year of his birth, 1378. As a young man he set out for the Holy Land. His companion died on the way, and he turned aside to Damascus and then to a place in Arabia called Damcar, where wise men received him as though they had been expecting him. There he learned Arabic, mathematics and physics, and translated into Latin a book called M, which held the secrets of nature. He went on to Egypt and to Fez in Morocco, where he studied magic and Kabbalah, and then to Spain, where the learned laughed at him.
Returning to Germany, he gathered first three companions and later four more, so that with him they numbered eight, and with them founded the fraternity in a house he called the House of the Holy Spirit. They agreed on six rules.
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The first rule
To heal, and without payment
None of them should profess anything other than to cure the sick, and that freely.
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The second rule
To pass unnoticed
None should wear a distinctive habit, but each should follow the custom of the country where he lived.
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The third and fourth rules
To meet, and to continue
Every year they should meet at the House of the Holy Spirit or send word of their absence, and each should look for a worthy person to succeed him.
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The fifth and sixth rules
To keep the seal and the silence
The letters R.C. should be their seal and mark, and the fraternity should remain secret for a hundred years.
Rosenkreutz died in 1484 at the age of a hundred and six, and his burial place was forgotten. In 1604, the Fama says, a brother of the third generation, repairing the house, found a hidden door bearing the words Post CXX annos patebo, after a hundred and twenty years I shall open. Behind it was a vault of seven sides, lit by an inner sun in the roof and covered with figures and inscriptions. In the middle stood a round altar, and beneath it lay the body of the founder, perfectly preserved, holding a book called T.
What the manifestos asked for
The legend was the frame for a program. The manifestos announce that the time has come for a general reformation of knowledge, in which theology, medicine, mathematics and natural philosophy would be brought into harmony with one another and with the Bible. Nature is described as a book open to all who can read it, and the brotherhood claims to possess an art of reading it that makes every other learning partial. The vault itself, with its seven sides and its inner sun, invites reading as a small world built on the plan of the great, and later readers took it so.
The ingredients are recognizably those of the Renaissance synthesis: the medicine of Paracelsus, Hermetic philosophy, Christian Kabbalah, number and harmony. The tone is Protestant, and in the Confessio it becomes openly hostile to the papacy. Alchemy is honored and its abuse condemned. The Fama is scornful of what it calls ungodly and accursed gold making, and insists that the transmutation of metals is the least of the brotherhood's concerns.
The response
Europe took the invitation seriously. Within ten years several hundred books and pamphlets had been published for or against the brotherhood, many of them open letters asking to be admitted. Some were addressed to the brothers by name, in the hope that the fraternity would recognize a kindred spirit and send for the writer. None received an answer. In 1623 posters appeared on the walls of Paris announcing that the brothers of the Rose Cross were present in the city, visibly and invisibly, and the result was something close to panic. The young Rene Descartes, according to his early biographer, looked for them during his travels in Germany and could not find them.
Some serious figures defended the brotherhood. The alchemist and physician Michael Maier, whose emblem book Atalanta Fugiens appeared in 1617, and the English physician Robert Fludd both wrote in its support, while admitting that they had never been received into it.
Who wrote them
The manifestos were most likely written in a circle of young Lutheran scholars at Tubingen in the first decade of the century. The central figure was Johann Valentin Andreae, a theologian who in later life called the Chemical Wedding a youthful jest, and who wrote several works mocking the excitement the manifestos had caused. His family arms showed a cross with four roses. The rose and the cross also appeared together in the seal of Martin Luther, and readers of the time would have caught the allusion.
What the authors intended is still debated. The likeliest answer is that they meant a serious hope in a playful form: a picture of what a reformed and learned Christian community might be, offered as a challenge to their contemporaries. They seem to have been surprised and then dismayed by how literally they were taken.
The rose and the cross
Whatever its origin, the symbol took on a life of its own. The cross was read as the body, the world of matter and suffering, and the rose as the soul unfolding upon it. Together they made an image of the Great Work: not escape from the body but the flowering of consciousness within it. Alchemists read the rose as the reddening of the final stage and the cross as the four elements. Later Hermetic writers placed the rose at the center of the cross and drew upon its petals the letters and signs of the whole system of correspondences.
What came of it
The brotherhood never appeared, but the idea of it proved permanent. From the eighteenth century onward, one society after another claimed descent from the fraternity of 1614, and graded orders adopted its legend as their foundation myth. The most influential of the nineteenth century magical orders built its inner ceremony around the opening of Rosenkreutz's vault. The story is told on our page on the occult revival.
Two lessons follow, and both remain useful. The first is that a fiction can carry a real ideal. The vision of learned people who heal without payment, live unnoticed among their neighbors, and seek the harmony of all knowledge for the common good has outlasted the question of whether its authors meant it literally. The second is a caution. No claim of secret lineage, however old or beautifully told, can be checked, and none is needed. The fraternity's own first rule supplies the only test worth applying to any group that claims to inherit it: what does it do, and does it ask for payment? Our guidance on groups and teachers says the same in plainer words.