Rosicrucians

“ A curious tale of the Rosicrucians runs to the effect that more than two centuries ago a band of German colonists entered the Ramapo valley and put up houses of stone, like those they had left in the Hartz Mountains, and when the Indians saw how they made knives and other wonderful things out of metal, which they extracted from the rocks by fire, they believed them to be manitous and went away, not wishing to resist their possession of the land. There was treasure here, for High Tor, or Torn Mountain, had been the home of Amasis, youngest of the magi who had followed the star of Bethlehem. ”

“ They encounter with open countenance the false devotees who would force men into spiritual servitude, that they may become the slaves of their will. You call them ‘Illuminati,’ while they have undertaken to illuminate the minds with the beams of knowledge which the Rosicrucians obscure in a mystical fog. ”

“ Today is a day of frankness and so the Rosicrucians boldly proclmm what they have known for centuries. The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization) , a fraternity of liberal-minded men and women, have dared to tear aside the veil that hid these facts about man's inner life. They have seriously investigated those realms upon which religion cast no light—and which the superstitious called magic. Their results have been astounding. They have discovered what caused some men and women to be successes, how personality originates and evolves ”

“ The absurd legends concerning him have led many to deny that such a person as Rosencreutz ever existed. Such writers attribute the origin of the society to the theories of Paracelsus and Dr. Dee, who unconsciously became the real though unrecognized founders of the Rosicrucians. Be this as it may, no sooner were their doctrines generally known than all the alchemists and believers in the marvellous hastened to accept them. ”

“ Moreover, like the celebrated character described in these lines, he had a volume under his arm, which proved to be of vellum with letters of gold, and at the end of it, in two separate circles, were the names of eight brethren who had assisted at their founder’s interment. Next to the Bible, the Rosicrucians valued this book beyond any portion of their inheritance, yet it is not said whether they took away any of these rarities, or left the dead man in quiet possession of his treasures. ”

“ PREFACE. In the following pages an attempt has been made to convey something like an intelligible idea of the peculiar mystic sect known to the readers of history, as the Rosicrucians. The subject is confessedly difficult, owing to the grossly absurd character of the writings left by the disciples of this body, and the secrecy with which they sought to surround their movements and clothe their words. Anything like a consecutive narration is an impossibility, the materials at hand being so fragmentary and disjointed. ”

“ With that the old gentleman condescended to enter into a very interesting, and, as it seemed to me, a very erudite relation, of the tenets of the Rosicrucians, some of whom, he asserted, still existed, and still prosecuted, in august secrecy, their profound researches into natural science and occult philosophy. ”

“ That celebrated sect of mystical philosophers, the Rosicrucians—famous for their profound acquaintance with natural phenomena, and the higher branches of physical, chemical, and medical science—considered that human existence might be protracted far beyond its supposed limits. ”

“ It was, without doubt, the strong and crude element of magic in alchemy that prepared the way for the great change that came over the science at the beginning of the seventeenth century. With the revival of learning that followed the Renaissance, there arose a mysterious sect in Germany known as the Rosicrucians, who were destined to revolutionize the belief in the supernatural. They claimed to derive their name from a certain Christian Rosencreutz who, in a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, had been initiated into the mysteries of the wisdom of the East. ”

“ In the present work every important and available fact has been carefully collected, and the manifestoes and other documents of the Fraternity are republished in revised versions. The Rosicrucians as represented by themselves are, therefore, offered to English readers for the first time in the literature of the subject. The task has been performed by a sympathetic but impartial writer, purged from the bias of any particular theory, and above all uncontaminated by the pretension to superior knowledge, which claimants have never been able to substantiate. ”

“ It is enough that the rosicrucians are created in the imagination, that this imagination is fostered and that people live it out and make it real. It amounts to the same thing for us, whether there were “so-called” or “real” rosicrucians; the substance of their teaching lives and this substance, which is evident in literature, was what I referred to when I said that rosicrucianism is identical with higher alchemy or the hermetic or the royal art. ”

“ The Rosicrucians teach that all great religions have been given to the people among whom they are found, by Divine Intelligences who designed each system of worship to suit the needs of the race or nation to whom it was given. A primitive people cannot respond to a lofty and sublime religion, and vice versa. ”

“ Most of the alchymists of the sixteenth century, although ignorant of the Rosicrucians as a sect, were, in some degree, tinctured with their fanciful tenets: but before we speak more fully of these poetical visionaries, it will be necessary to resume the history of the hermetic folly, and trace the gradual change that stole over the dreams of the adepts. It will be seen that the infatuation increased rather than diminished as the world grew older. ”

“ It is the universal testimony of all who have become true Rosicrucians, that within its symbolic walls there is a deeply mysterious influence for good pervading its atmosphere, under which every man of the Order becomes rapidly but normally individualized and intensified in character, manhood, and influence. ”

“ So far as the numerous works are concerned it is evident that the writers who posed as Rosicrucians were moral and religious reformers, and utilized the technicalities of chemistry (alchemy) , and the sciences generally, as media through which to make known their opinions, there being a flavour of mysticism or occultism promotive of inquiry and suggestive of hidden meanings discernible or discoverable only by adepts. ”

“ He wrote an apology for the Rosicrucians, also a system of physics, called the Mosaic Philosophy, and many other mystical works, to the extent of 6 vols, folio. Jacob Behmen was an enthusiast of the same period, and wrote unintelligibly in mystical terms, Mr Law, who revived some of his notions, calls him a Theosopher. ↑ The Rosicrucians were a sect of hermetical philosophers. They owed their origin to a German, named Christian Rosenkreuz, but frequently went by other names, such as the Illuminati, the Immortales, the Invisible Brothers. Their learning had a great mixture of enthusiasm ”

“ Rosicrucians, a fraternity who, in the beginning of the 15th century, affected an intimate acquaintance with the secrets of nature, and pretended by the study of alchemy and other occult sciences to be possessed of sundry wonder-working powers. ”

“ The history of the Rosicrucians,—or rather the inquiry as to whether actually existed at any time such a college or brotherhood, and, if so, to what degree of antiquity can it lay claim,—forms another and, perhaps, somewhat more profitable subject of attention. This question, however, having been fully discussed elsewhere, I will conclude by a catalogue raisonné of such books and essays (the most important of which are readily obtainable) as will enable your correspondent to acquire for himself the information he seeks. ”

“ I. The Rosicrucians are a body of good men, and true, working under a Grand Lodge Charter, deriving its power and authority from the Imperial Dome of the Third Supreme Temple of the Order, and the last (claiming justly to be the oldest association of men on earth, dating from the sinking of the New Atlantis Isle, nearly ten thousand years anterior to the days of Plato) , and as a Grand Lodge, having jurisdiction over the entire continent of North America, and the Islands of the Sea. ”

“ They go about with us, they sit with us at table, they grasp our hands as friends, they flatter us as our admirers, they smile on us in the persons of the women we [Pg 230] love, they leave no means untried to fetter our hearts and understanding. The Rosicrucians, what are they, one and all, but disguised Jesuits! ”

“ It was entitled The Book of the most Hidden Secrets of Nature, and was divided into three parts; the first treating of “perpetual motion;” the second of the “transmutation of metals;” and the third of the “universal medicine.” He also published some German works upon the Rosicrucian philosophy, at Frankfort, in 1617.
Poetry and romance are deeply indebted to the Rosicrucians for many a graceful creation. The literature of England, France, and Germany contains hundreds of sweet fictions, whose machinery has been borrowed from their day-dreams. ”

“ I beg leave to warn my readers that all persons who proclaim themselves to be Rosicrucians are simply members of pseudo-fraternities, and that there is that difference between their assertion and the fact of the case in which the essence of a lie consists! ”

“ The latter have revived all the exploded doctrines of the Rosicrucians; and in an age which is called enlightened, have disinterred from the rubbish of antiquity, the wildest superstitions of their predecessors, and built upon them theories more wild and startling than anything before attempted or witnessed among mankind. Paracelsus and Bohmen, Borri and Meyer, with their strange heterogeneous mixture of alchymy and religion, but paved the way for the stranger, and even more extravagant mixture of magnetism and religion, as now practised in Germany. ”

“ The Rosicrucians are a people I must bring you acquainted with. The best account I know of them is in a French book, called Le Comte de Gabalis, which both in its title and size is so like a novel, that many of the fair sex have read it for one by mistake. According to these gentlemen the four elements are inhabited by spirits, which they call sylphs, gnomes, nymphs, and salamanders. The gnomes or demons of earth delight in mischief; but the sylphs, whose habitation is in the air, are the best conditioned creatures imaginable. ”

“ The Rosicrucians are Hierophants of the lesser Mysteries, and beyond them there are still schools wherein Greater Mysteries are taught. Those who have advanced through the lesser Mysteries and have become pupils of the Greater Mysteries are called Adepts, but even they have not reached the exalted standpoint of the twelve Brothers of the Rosicrucian Order or the Hierophants of any other lesser Mystery School any more than the freshman at college has attained to the knowledge and position of a teacher in the High school from which he has just graduated. ”

“ This building in fact, represented the purpose or object of the Rosicrucians. And what was that? It was the secret wisdom, or, in their language, magic—viz., 1. Philosophy of nature, or occult knowledge of the works of God; 2. Theology, or the occult knowledge of God himself; 3. Religion, or God’s occult intercourse with the spirit of man, which they imagined to have been transmitted from Adam through the Cabbalists to themselves. But they distinguished between a carnal and a spiritual knowledge of this magic. ”

“ Every member to appoint some person with the proper qualifications to succeed him at his own decease. The word Rosy-Cross to be their seal, watchword, and characteristic mark. The association to be kept unrevealed for a hundred years. Christian Rosycross died at the age of a hundred years. His death was known to the Society, but not his grave; for it was a maxim of the first Rosicrucians to conceal their burial places even from each other. New masters were continually elected into the House of the Holy Ghost, and the Society had now lasted 120 years. ”

“ The encyclopædist remarks that at first the title commanded some respect, as it seemed to be borrowed from the arms of Luther, which were a cross placed upon a rose.
The leading doctrines of the Rosicrucians were borrowed from the Eastern philosophers [4] ; the Christian Platonists, schoolmen, and mystics: mixed up with others derived from writers on natural history, magic, astrology, and especially alchemy. All these blended together, and served up in a professional jargon of studied obscurity, formed the doctrinal system of these strange philosophers. ”

“ In nearly the same words as the Rosicrucians applied to their founders, he has been called the discoverer of the secret which brings man into more intimate connexion with his Creator, the deliverer of the soul from the debasing trammels of the flesh, the man who enables us to set time at defiance, and conquer the obstructions of space. A careful sifting of his pretensions, and examination of the evidence brought forward to sustain them, will soon shew which opinion is the more correct. ”

“ Although we find in the works of some of the Apologists for the Rosicrucians extraordinary statements as to the length of life it was within their power to attain unto (John Higden professes to shew how a man may live two hundred years) and although some of the fraternity actually did live a great number of years, we find them at last dying one by one notwithstanding their professed power to guard against or to relieve sickness. ”