Soon afterwards these four founders were joined by four others – ‘Brother B.’, ‘Brother G.’, ‘Brother P. D.’, and ‘Brother J. A.’ – ‘so in all they were eight in number, all bachelors and of vowed virginity.’11 The group then ‘collected a book or volume of all which man can desire, wish or hope for’ – a system of guidance which ‘shall unmovably remain unto the world's end’ with the power to open the eyes of the masses of all lands and to make them less passive before ‘the Pope, Mohamed, scribes, artists and sophisters.’12
Thus prepared ‘and able perfectly to discourse of secret and manifest philosophy’, the eight ‘separated themselves into several countries’ – there to draw aside from amongst the learned those who were worthy to receive their doctrines. Like Cathar perfecti who were renowned for their medical skills, these Rosy Cross brothers were to work as doctors curing the sick, and were to do so free of charge. The better to disguise themselves and blend in, they were not obliged to wear any particular habit ‘but therein to follow the custom of the country’. Like Cathar perfecti they were celibate and, again like perfecti, each was to seek out and work with an apprentice, ‘a worthy person who, after his decease, might succeed him.’13
In this way generations passed until ‘none of us had in any manner known anything of Brother R. C. and of his first fellow bretheren,’ than could be gathered from the books of the order. There began to be doubts as to whether the true teachings of the original eight had been properly passed down. At this time, however, and by chance, one of the brothers stumbled upon the long-lost tomb of Christian Rosenkreutz himself. It turned out to be a kind of Hermetic ‘Hall of Records’ containing all the wisdom necessary to restore the order: We opened the door, and there appeared to our sight a vault of seven sides and corners, every side five foot broad, and the height of eight foot.14
A permanent light, like ‘another sun’ glowed ‘in the upper part in the centre of the ceiling.’ Instead of a tombstone the vault contained a round altar covered with a brass plate on which was engraved the following mysterious epitaph: This compendium of the universe I made in my lifetime to be my tomb.15
Beneath the brass plate was the dead body of Christian Rosenkreutz, ‘a fair and wise body, whole and unconsumed.’ In his hand he held a parchment book, on the final page of which was this eulogy: A grain buried in the breast of Jesus, C. Ros. C. sprung from the noble and renowned German family of R. C.; a man admitted into the mysteries and secrets of heaven and earth through the divine revelations, subtle cogitations and unwearied toil of his life. In his journeys through Arabia and Africa he collected a treasure [of knowledge, not gold and worldly riches] surpassing that of Kings and Emperors, but finding it not suitable for his times he kept it guarded for posterity to uncover … He constructed a microcosm corresponding in all motions to the macrocosm and finally drew up a compendium of things past, present and to come. Then, having now passed the century of years, though oppressed by no disease … but summoned by the Spirit of God … he rendered up his illumined soul …16
The authors of the Fama claim that they ‘have the knowledge of Jesus Christ’ and that their philosophy ‘is not a new invention’: Also our building (although one hundred thousand people have very near seen and beheld the same) shall forever remain untouched, undestroyed, and hidden from the wicked world.17
Finally, and in ringing tones, there comes this statement and prophecy of tremendous changes and the birth of a new order, which the Rosicrucians, with the treasures of knowledge at their disposal, stand ready to usher in: Europe is with child and will bring forth a strong child, who shall stand in need of a great godfather's gift.18
The Confessio
Published in 1615 the Confessio presents itself as a sequel to the Fama and begins with a condemnation of ‘the East and the West [meaning the pope and Muhammad] blasphemers against our Lord Jesus Christ.’ It then promises that ‘all learned who will make themselves known to us, and come into our brotherhood, shall find more wonderful secrets thereby than heretofore they did attain unto, and did know, or are able to believe or utter.’19
Using strange metaphorical language the Confessio next proposes what sounds like total revolution in Europe, wiping the slate clean, because ‘posterity will be able only thereby to lay a new foundation and bring truth to light again.’ This is argued to be preferable to endless renovations and repairs to ‘the old ruinous building.’20 The hoped for end result will be that: … the World shall awake out of her heavy and drowsy sleep, and with an open heart, bare-headed, and bare-foot, shall merrily and joyfully meet the new arising Sun …21
The text continues with an attack on the Church: Like as the mathematician and astronomer can long before see and know the eclipses which are to come, so we may verily foreknow and foresee the darkness of obscurations of the Church … 22
We are told that ‘the Romish seducers have vomited forth their blasphemies against Christ, and as yet do not abstain from their lies in this clear shining light.’23 There are also repeated appeals for proper understanding of the scriptures .24 Finally: We acknowledge ourselves truly and sincerely to profess Christ, condemn the Pope, addict ourselves to the true Philosophy, lead a Christian life, and daily call, entreat, and invite many more into our Fraternity, unto whom the same Light of God likewise appeareth.25
The Confessio for the first time provides the reader with the chronology within which the whole story is set: Christian Rosenkreutz is born in 1378 and lives for 106 years, dying in 1484. His tomb is rediscovered 120 years later – in other words in 1604, exactly 10 years before the publication of the Fama .26
Mystery of the Chemical Wedding
A third publication appeared in 1616 that added to the mystery of the Rosicrucian Manifestos. Its title is The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and, like the Manifestos, it describes a secretive order which uses a red cross and red roses as its symbols.27 Now, though, the focus has shifted to what might be called ‘inner transformation’ – as opposed to the social and religious transformation heralded in the Manifestos.28
The authors of the Fama and the Confessio have never been firmly identified. For some time, however, it has been the concensus of scholars – Frances Yates believed it to be a certainty – that the Chemical Wedding was the work of Johann Valentin Andreae, a young Lutheran pastor from Tübingen in Germany.29 Recent research has begun to cast some doubt on this identification, primarily because the Chemical Wedding as it appeared in 1616 is distinctively different from all other surviving writings of Andreae. As the Hermetic scholar Adam McLean puts it: From what we know of Andreae as an orthodox and eminent Lutheran pastor and academic, it seems unlikely that he could have devised such a profoundly esoteric document, which in fact has as its basis many ideas heretical even in Protestant terms.30
The confusion enters in because Andreae lists a work called The Chemical Wedding amongst a number of short plays – ‘first juvenile efforts as an author’31 – that he wrote while studying at the University of Tübingen in 1602 and 1603. This early play has not survived. But Andreae moved in esoteric and Hermetic circles, as we shall see, and was very much involved with the nascent Rosicrucian movement of Germany,32 so it was natural for scholars to identify his Chemical Wedding of 1602/3 with the anonymous Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, published in 1616. The latter contains references to the Rosicrucian Manifestos (1614/15) and to other contemporary matters and so cannot be identical to the lost 1602/3 text, but the general view is that Andreae must have updated it prior to publication.33
Born in 1586 Andreae would have been 17 in 1603, too young and inexperienced of the world, in our view, to have written a work as deep, dark and rich in complex symbols as The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz. By 1616, when it was published, he would have been 30 – a different matter altogether. Even so, if he was the author, he must not so much have ‘updated’ as completely rewritten the juvenile version of the play before bringing it out in print – for there is nothing at a
ll of a 17-year-old boy to be seen in the finished work. And even accepting that he did completely rewrite it in his maturity, we still confront the problem of its ‘heretical’ undertones and its alleged incompatibility with the rest of Andreae's writings. The issue will probably never be resolved to everyone's satisfaction unless the lost manuscript of 1602/3 turns up. Meanwhile we find Adam McLean persuasive when he speculates that: Andreae did in fact write a version of the Chemical Wedding, perhaps a simple play or masque … Some years later … one of the ‘Rosicrucian’ fraternity … with whom Andreae had some connections, might have decided to rework Andreae's early, unpublished play into the complex esoteric allegory we know today.34
A strange story
As to the content of the Chemical Wedding, there is simply not space here for us to do it justice. In English translation the printed text runs to about 90 pages, divided into seven chapters each representing a day's journey in a sort of pilgrim's progress. The narrator is Christian Rosenkreutz himself who, the reader will recall, was said in the Manifestos to have lived to the age of 106. In the Chemical Wedding his age must be 81 – for we know that he was born in 1378 and the story is set in the year 1459. 35
The ‘First Day’ finds C. R. at his table, quietly meditating ‘on the many great mysteries which the Father of Light, in his majesty, had allowed me to glimpse.’36 We note in passing that the phrase ‘Father of Light’ never appears in the Christian Bible, either in the Old Testament or in the New Testament.37 In the early centuries of the Christian era, however, it was in common usage amongst Manicheans and Gnostics as a reference to the God of Goodness, and there was a sect of Gnostic Christians whose members called themselves the ‘Sons of Light’.38
Whilst in the depths of his meditation, C. R. is visited by the angelic, glowing, winged figure of ‘a wonderfully beautiful female … dressed all in blue, spangled like the heavens with golden stars.’ She produces a ‘small note’, puts it on the table with a curtsey and immediately flies off into the upper atmosphere blowing loudly on a trumpet.39 When C. R. opens the note he finds it contains an invitation to ‘the wedding of the king’ and a cryptic warning that he must study himself closely before deciding to accept: If you're not clean enough, The wedding can work ill. Perjure here at your peril.40
What kind of wedding is it – one is inclined to ask – that can be perilous to guests who are impure or do not tell the truth? This is an early hint, one amongst many in the narrative, that we are not in any way dealing with an account of real events here, or even with pure fiction, but strictly and exclusively with what Adam McLean calls an ‘esoteric allegory’. It may be said safely that the allegory of the wedding is meant to bring to mind something more of the nature of a quest or personal challenge than a ‘marriage’. Very much in the same tradition as the quest for the Holy Grail, the ordeals and moral dilemmas that the guests confront over the coming ‘Days’, and in which they must cooperate to complete a complex alchemical operation, seem themselves to be part of a subtle process of purification and transformation.
Like the Grail Quest, the Chemical Wedding is often claimed as a document of esoteric Christianity. But as Adam McLean asks and observes: Where is the Christian message? What is described seems more like an ancient ‘mystery initiation’ than a Christian religious experience.41
Still on the First Day of his quest, the octogenarian Christian Rosenkreutz does as the wedding invitation has warned him to do. He observes himself, both inwardly and outwardly, with absolute honesty and finds himself wanting: The more I pondered, I could see that there was nothing in my head but a great want of sense and blindness in esoteric matters … I also found that my physical life, outward conduct, and brotherly love towards my neighbour were far from being purged and pure enough. I was aware of fleshly desires, which aim only for reputation and worldly show, not for the well-being of others; I was always thinking how I could use my skills for my own immediate benefit, for building many splendid things, for making an everlasting name in the world, and other such materialistic thoughts …42
It is interesting that the two matters for which C. R. reproaches himself are (1) his esoteric blindness and lack of inner gnosis and (2) his worldly and materialistic behaviour. Regardless he decides that he will attend the wedding. Dressed in a white linen coat with a blood-red belt bound crosswise across his shoulders, and wearing four red roses in his hat, he proceeds on his journey. Thus ends the First Day.
On the ‘Second Day’ Rosenkreutz enters a great forest and comes eventually to a clearing. There he is offered ‘the choice of four paths, by all of which you may reach the royal castle, if you do not fall by the wayside.’ One is short but dangerous, another long and winding – and so on. Eventually C. R. finds his way to the castle, where other guests are already gathered. A beautiful virgin appears and makes a portentous announcement reminding the guests that they are not supposed to be here unless properly prepared: Tomorrow every one of you
Upon the balance will be weighed …
He who dares beyond his powers
Would have done better not to come.
We wish you all the best.43
We will not take the reader step by step through the remaining ‘Five Days’ of the Chemical Wedding, which indeed feature (on the ‘Third Day’) a symbolic ‘weighing of the guests’ in which some are ‘successful’ and some are not. Varying degrees of punishment await those who prove ‘too light in the balance’ and the worst offenders (‘who could not even outweigh a single weight’) are slaughtered.44 Many elements of this curious scene are strongly reminiscent of the stage in the afterlife journey known as the ‘weighing of the soul’ as it is described in the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead – a text of the second millennium BC that no one in the 17th century is supposed to have been able to read. And other elements of the landscape of the Chemical Wedding also have ancient Egyptian resonances, to pick at random – a phoenix, the god Hermes, a royal staircase with 365 spiral steps, the ‘House of the Sun’, scenes of death, a rebirth ritual (‘We had to drudge away on this island until we had done everything necessary for reviving the beheaded bodies’45), a pyramid, a pentagon, various pieces of equipment needed in the quest including a ladder, a rope and wings, an egg produced by alchemical processes, a bird that grows at miraculous speed, resurrection of the king and queen, and elevation of certain of the guests to the status of ‘Knights of the Golden Stone’.
Towards the end of the ‘Seventh Day’ Christian Rosenkreutz writes his name in a great book above the following enigmatic motto: The height of knowledge is to know nothing.46
Bruno, Campanella and the Rosicrucians
It seems to us to be beyond serious doubt that a great allegory of death, rebirth and spiritual transformation lies at the heart of the Chemical Wedding and that Adam McLean is right to compare the entire process to an ancient mystery initiation. At the successful completion of the Seventh Day we are perhaps to understand that the initiate, now an adept – literally a ‘perfect’ – has attained that gnosis by means of which ‘the soul can escape its bondage to material existence.’47 If so, no matter how different the mode of expression, the primary concerns of the Chemical Wedding can be seen to be essentially the same as those of the Alexandrian Hermetists, the Gnostics, the Manicheans, the Paulicians, the Bogomils, the Cathars – and all those on the great chain of heresy that we have traced in the preceding chapters. Since the Chemical Wedding can, in a sense, be regarded as the ‘statement of faith’ of the elusive Rosicrucian order, the clear implication is that their general reformation of the world was to be of a distinctly Hermetic nature.48
Reinforcing this is the fact that even a cursory examination of the Fama, the Con fessio and the Chemical Wedding makes it quickly evident – whatever their identity – that our shadowy ‘Rosicrucians’ were using a strong mixture of Hermetic magic, Gnosis, Cabala and alchemy in a Christian framework. In short, these pamphlets that caused such a stir at the time were seeking not only to bring about a ‘Rosic
rucian’ reformation of the world but also to do so with all the intellectual weaponry of the Hermetic magi such as Pico della Mirandola, Bruno and Campanella. Even more curiously, through their connection with Johann Valentin Andreae, the ‘brothers’ were also involved in the conception of a utopian city-society they called Christianopolis – a sort of microcosm of the world governed by Hermetic statesmen-priests49 – that very much resembled Campanella's Civitas Solis. With such similar terminology, imagery and objectives, it is justified to ask whether this ‘Rosicrucian’ movement might not somehow have been rooted in Bruno's long sojourns in Germany between 1586 and 1591 (see Chapter Eleven) as well as the smuggling of advance copies of Campanella's Civitas Solis into that country – events that occurred in the years immediately before the Rosicrucian Manifestos first appeared.
During Bruno's Inquisition in Venice in 1592 (before his case was referred to Rome, see Chapter Eleven), his Venetian ‘pupil’ and betrayer, the faithless Mocenigo, reported that the Nolan had plans to found a new philosophical sect in Germany. Other witnesses said that the sect existed, that Bruno had named it the Giordanisti and that it much appealed to the Lutheran heretics in Germany. Such testimonies led Frances Yates to wonder whether these rumoured ‘Giordanisti’ could have had any connection with the unsolved mystery of the origins of the Rosicrucians who, she reminds us ‘are first heard of in Germany in the early 17th century, in Lutheran circles.’50 If such a connection exists at all, however, as Yates discovered, it is as yet far too murky and faint for us to be sure of. Nonetheless, sufficient hints and clues exist for her to suggest that ‘Rosicrucian aspirations after a universal reform in a Hermetic context may well owe something to Bruno as well as to Campanella.’51 And although no direct connection has so far been confirmed between Bruno and the Rosicrucian movement in Germany, there is at least strong circumstantial evidence of a connection between Campanella and the Rosicrucians.