But he had more to say in his Latin eclogue for Louis XIV, which appeared in print in January 1639.41 Modelled on the messianic Fourth Eclogue of Virgil (which had prophesied the universal rule of Augustus Caesar), Campanella's expanded prophecy leaves no doubt about the future he saw for the French monarchy and the forthcoming reign of Louis XIV. Quite simply, it was divinely ordained to bring about the great universal ‘Hermetic-Christian’ reform that Bruno had dreamt of, and to build the ‘City of the Sun’ which he, Campanella, had promoted .42
So it is time to ask – what did Campanella really have in mind? What type of ‘solar city’ was he thinking of? Was it a real city or merely a symbolic vision of some utopian reform to be ushered in by the French monarchy?
A Hermetic signature
So far we can see that Campanella had succeeded in his Hermetic mission where Bruno before him had failed. True, Bruno had managed to gain some backing from Henry III of France and even had his chance to present his own Hermetic-Egyptian vision of universal reform to the scholars in Paris and Oxford. But what it all finally amounted to had been a heap of ashes in Rome's Campo dei Fiori. Campanella, on the other hand, thanks to his more cunning temperament and greater ability to deal with complex human relationships, now held the support of the French royal couple and their powerful minister, Richelieu. This, though it came very late in his life, gave him the almost unbelievable opportunity to plant the seed of his own vision of reform right in the heart of the French monarchy. Did not Campanella once boast, asks Frances Yates, that he could ‘make a City in such a wonderful way that only by looking at it all the sciences may be learned’?43 Now at last he was in a position to make good on his pledge.
Yates quite rightly sees in Campanella ‘a more successful Bruno’44 and writes that ‘it does look very much as though a torch may have passed from Bruno to Campanella.’45 She also points up another aspect of the mystery, something far more subtle and vague, that no one else seems to have seen before her. In her view Campanella's Civitas Solis was ‘ultimately Egyptian in origin’: It is now clear that to the Roman ideal of universal empire returning in a new golden age, to the Platonic ideal of a state in which philosophers ruled, Campanella added a third ideal, that of the Egyptian state kept intact and eternal by priestly magic. The Sun ruler of the City of the Sun is both priest and king, supreme in both the spiritual and the temporal domains, in short he is Hermes Trismegistus, priest, philosopher and king. Campanella was thus in no sense a liberal revolutionary. His ideal was an all powerful theocracy like that of Egypt, so powerful that it regulated by scientific magic the celestial influences and through them the whole life of the people. Its apparently liberal side is that it encouraged scientific enquiry and invention … but this advanced Solarian science was in the hands of the supreme priesthood and regulated by it – as in ancient Egypt.46
In our view it is not a coincidence that the ‘liberal revolutionary’ aspects of Campanella's utopia – to be based on the principles of truth, justice and brotherly love, and characterised by freedom of speech, equal rights for women, good health care, and universal education for children 47 – had already begun to be realised in Occitania hundreds of years before.48 Nor is it likely to be an accident, as we saw in Chapter One, that they were to appear again, linked to the work of Voltaire, Rousseau and other leading lights of those times, in the philosophical and intellectual undercurrents of the 1789 French Revolution.
The strangest and most striking aspect of Campanella's scheme, however, and the one that Yates particularly draws attention to, is its Egyptianism. The Hermetic magus cleverly grafted it onto the French monarchy in the person of the future Louis XIV, thus ensuring it's acceptability within the existing systems of Europe. But at the same time there is no doubt that what Campanella ultimately had in mind was a revival of the ancient Egyptian ‘golden age’ when a ‘solar’ king and his wise and benevolent ‘scientific-priesthood’ had regulated and governed the land.
Were such thinking to be carried through to its logical conclusion then we would expect Louis XIV to have left a Hermetic signature on the landscape of France. We would expect him, in short, as Campanella had prophesied in the Latin eclogue, to have built, or to have attempted to build, the ‘City of the Sun’.
Hidden magical springs
Of course it's always possible that the ‘City of the Sun’ was just a metaphor for an ideal type of society, rather than something that was intended to be realised in bricks and mortar. Yet there is much in Campanella's scheme, and in the Hermetic teachings, that that leads us to think otherwise. Most significant is the thoroughly ‘astral’ character of his model which constantly leverages the intimate feedback mechanisms between sky and ground, above and below, that are envisaged in the Hermetic texts.
The broad plan of Campanella's ‘City of the Sun’ as he sets it out in his great work Civitas Solis, looks like a diagram of the Copernican solar system. At its centre, on a raised mound, is a perfectly circular temple of gigantic size (representing the Sun) with its dome supported on soaring pillars. Ringing the temple are the seven concentric divisions of the city (one for each of the orbits of the then known planets) separated by walls penetrated by gates facing the cardinal directions – north, south, east and west. Two axial roadways traverse the city entirely, crossing, as it were, at the centre, one running due north-south and the other due east-west.49
Within the vast ‘Temple of Sun’ lying at the heart of all this geometrical perfection Campanella's text envisages an altar on which is to be found nothing except two huge globes, one showing ‘all the heaven’ and the other ‘all the earth’.50 On the ceiling of the dome are depicted ‘all the greatest stars of heaven, with their names and the powers which they have over things below’; these representations are in correspondence with the globes on the altar. Seven eternal lamps also hang in the temple, called after the seven planets. The outer wall of the temple bears a representation of ‘every star in its order’.51
Images and writings are inscribed on both the outer and inner faces of each of the seven sets of concentric walls and these seem primarily aimed to educate and inspire the citizenry. They include more world maps, cultural geographies of different peoples, representations of seas and rivers, knowledge about the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms, and images of ‘inventors of sciences and laws’ – an eclectic list including Hermes Trismegistus (in his Romanised disguise as Mercury), Jupiter (Zeus-Amun in the Graeco-Egyptian pantheon of Alexandria), the Prophet Muhammad, Jesus Christ and his 12 apostles, and, last but not least, Osiris.52
In summary, observes Frances Yates, the city that Campanella wanted, and prophesied that Louis XIV would in some way build, was to be ‘a complete reflection of the world as governed by the laws of natural magic in dependence on the stars.’53 It was to be carefully arranged ‘so as to be right with the stars’ – the source of ‘all its happiness, health and virtue.’54 Its ruler was to be priest who was to be ‘head in all things, both spiritual and temporal’,55 while its governance was to be in the hands of great men who could understand and use natural magic: ‘inventors, moral teachers, miracle workers, religious leaders, in short, Magi … ’56 They were to be selected according to their ability, in the words of Marcilio Ficino, to ‘draw down the life of heaven’ for the benefit of mankind .57
The intellectual origins of Campanella's grand scheme, Yates shows, are not to be sought (except perhaps superficially) in contemporary or near contemporary works he might have known such as Thomas More's Utopia. ‘To find the ultimate source,’ she argues, ‘one must dig deeper and uncover those hidden magical springs from which the Renaissance was fed.’ She means the Hermetic texts and singles out particularly the Picatrix with its magical city of Adocentyn, reminding us that it featured: … a castle with four gates, on which were images into which Hermes Trismegistus had introduced spirits. Compare this with the four gates and roads of the City of the Sun. On the summit of the castle was a lighthouse which flashed over the city th
e colours of the seven planets. Compare this with the seven planetary lamps always burning in the City of the Sun … In the passage in Picatrix describing the City of Adocentyn Hermes Trismegistus is also said to have built a temple to the Sun …58
In other words, Yates concludes, ‘the deepest, the primary layer of influence behind the City of the Sun is, I suggest, Hermetic; and its first model, to which many later influences have been superadded, is, I believe, the magical city of Adocentyn described in the Picatrix, and the description in the Asclepius of the religion of the Egyptians.’59
In Chapter Eight we quoted at the length the famous Lament from the Asclepius in which we hear of the destruction by inimical forces of the magical, natural religion of the Egyptians, and its apparent disappearance from the earth for a long interval of time. But the reader will recall that the Asclepius also makes the prophecy: that the persecuted religion will one day be restored in ‘a reformation of all good things, and a restitution most holy and most reverent of nature itself.’ Most important of all, this restoration and restitution are to be triggered by the founding of a City aligned with the Sun .60
Could Louis have been influenced by Campanella to carry such thinking through to its logical conclusion and leave a Hermetic signature in the architecture of France? If so the old magus must somehow have found a way to reach out to him from beyond the grave – for he died in Paris on 21 May 1639, eight and a half months after the young ‘Sun King’ was born.
In matters of influence, however, as we shall see (and as the Hermetic texts themselves advise), it is best to presume that ‘nothing is imposible.’61
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE INVISIBLE BROTH ERHOOD
[Cardinal] Richelieu did not receive the Rosicrucians, but when eleven years later Campanella came to Paris he had the powerful cardinal's support – an indication of Campanella's success in switching his ideas … into channels acceptable to the powers that be.
Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition
The Rosicrucians, do they exist? Are you one?…
Frances Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment
In 1623, during the reign of Louis XIII and 11 years before Tommasso Campanella arrived at the French court, a subversive organisation made its presence known in Paris. Stealthily, by night, eye-catching placards were put up on the walls of public buildings and in all the main streets of the city, bearing the following announcement: We, being deputies of the principal College of the Brothers of the Rose Cross, are making a visible and invisible stay in this city through the Grace of the Most High, towards whom turn the hearts of the Just. We show and teach without books or marks how to speak all languages of the countries where we wish to be, and to draw men from error and death.1
Another poster contained a variant of the message with more specifically religious overtones: We deputies of the College of the Rose Cross, give notice to all those who wish to enter our Society and Congregation, that we will teach them the most perfect knowledge of the Most High, in the name of whom we are today holding an assembly, and we will make them from visible, invisible, and from invisible, visible …2
As it had certainly been intended to do, the poster campaign caused quite a stir in Paris. Contemporary reports speak of a ‘hurricane’ of rumour at the news that the mysterious Rose Cross fraternity – already believed to be active in Germany – had now come to France.3 Pamphlets and further rumours (although of a rather concrete and specific nature) had it that the core of the brotherhood was formed by 36 ‘Invisible Ones’ – implying that they were veiled, incognito, disguised – who were dispersed throughout the world in six groups of six.4 They held their assemblies at the time of the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. And although the language of the pamphlets and posters seemed religious and obviously Christian it was said that adepts of the fraternity ‘swore to abjure Christianity and all the rights and sacraments of the Church.’5
To understand the sort of moral panic, accompanied in many cases by a thrill of illicit excitement, which was generated by hints and rumours like these we need to keep in mind the general condition of Europe in 1623. For more than a century, bloody religious conflicts between Catholics and Protestants had been tearing the peoples of the Continent apart creating a climate of overwhelming fear and suspicion, and now the great struggle in central Europe that was to become the Thirty Years War had just begun, further inflaming the deep hatreds and passions of the time. So it was natural that everyone, particularly the court and the government of France, would feel disturbed and even a little threatened by these announcements that a clandestine brotherhood had set up shop in Paris and intended to save the people from ‘error and death’.
Who was behind all this provocative propaganda? Who was responsible? Who were the ‘invisible’ people calling themselves brothers of the Rose Cross?
Although a mass of material supposedly stemming from these original ‘Rosicrucians’ has come to light, scholars still debate such questions today and have proposed no definitive answers. All that is clear – whoever they were – is that the self-styled ‘invisible’ brothers must have been cut from very much the same cloth as men like Bruno and Campanella. Though their methods were more guarded than those of the great Hermetic magi, they saw themselves in the same way as being endowed with special magical powers, or knowledge, or ‘science’ that could be used to bring about a religious and intellectual reform of the world.
The Rosicrucian Manifestos
If a secret society is successful – which means, by definition, that it is difficult to detect in its own epoch – then we may suppose that its traces are unlikely to be easily found by the historians of a later epoch. If we take the Rosicrucians at face value as a secret society, therefore, it follows that we really can't say for sure how long they may have existed undetected before they declared themselves. All we know is that the first direct and definite references to them were made in Germany during the 20 years before the 1623 poster campaign in Paris. From this early activity comes almost everything we know, or think we know, about the ‘Invisible College’ of the Rose Cross.
The name ‘Rosicrucian’ is derived from ‘Christian Rosenkreutz’, i.e. Christian Rose Cross or Rosy Cross, the hero of two small books, deep and most unusual in their contents, that were first published at Cassel in Germany in the years 1614 and 1615. The full title of the first is Fama Fraternitatis, or a Discovery of the Fraternity of the Most Noble Order of the Rosy Cross. Scholars generally refer to it as the Fama. The second, published in 1615 and usually known as the Confessio, is titled in full: Confessio Fraternitatis, or the Confession of the Laudible Fraternity of the Most Honourable Order of the Rosy Cross, Written to all the Learned of Europe. These two texts amount in English translation to a total of less than 25 pages and are known collectively as the ‘Rosicrucian Manifestos’.6
The Fama
The Fama purports to be the work of a group of Rosicrucian adepts and tells the story of ‘the most godly and highly illumined Father, our Brother, C. R. [Christian Rosenkreutz], a German, the chief and original of our Fraternity,’ whose aim was to bring about a ‘general reformation.’ It seems that as a youth this C. R. had set out on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land but had stopped on the way amongst the ‘wise men of Damascus’. Receiving him ‘not as a stranger but as one whom they had long expected’ they showed him secret things, ‘whereat he could not but mightily wonder’, and taught him knowledge of physics and mathematics. C. R. was so magnetised by his studies that he lost all interest in reaching Jerusalem – his original objective – and spent three years with the Damascene sages, undergoing what sounds very much like a Hermetic initiation .7
Finally, with their blessing, he began to make his way westwards again. First he journeyed into Egypt. Then he ‘sailed across the whole Mediterranean Sea for to come unto Fez’ (Morocco). There the ‘Elementary Inhabitants’, members of an occult society of ‘magicians, Cabalists, physicians, and philosophers … revealed unto
him many of their secrets.’ However the knowledge that he had learned in Damascus seems to have been superior to theirs since he judged that ‘their Magia was not altogether pure … their Cabala was defiled with their religion.’8
After two years in Fez, Brother C. R. moved on, this time to Spain and thence into the rest of Europe. He wished to share the great wisdom he had learned in the East and to teach the wise men of the West ‘the errors of our [i.e. Western] arts, and how they might be corrected … also how the faults of the Church and the whole Philosophia Moralis was to be amended.’ However he was ridiculed and attacked by the scholars to whom he unfolded his ideas because they ‘feared that their great name should be lessened.’9 We are reminded, inevitably, of the mission of Giordano Bruno to bring about the Hermetic reform of the world.
At last Christian Rosenkreutz returned to Germany. He built a home, meditated at length about his journey and his philosophy, ‘and reduced them together in a true memorial’. He also intensified his studies of mathematics and made ‘many fine instruments’. After five years ‘came again into his mind the wished for reformation … and unwearying, he undertook, with some few who joined with him, to attempt the same.’ We hear at this point of three other bretheren – ‘Brother G. V.’, ‘Brother J. A.’, and ‘Brother J. O.’ – who C. R. binds ‘unto himself to be faithful, diligent and secret’: After this manner began the Fraternity of the Rose Cross; first by four persons only, and by them was made the magical language and writing, with a large dictionary, which we yet daily use to God's praise and glory, and do find great wisdom therein … 10