Sit Jessica. Look how this floor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold; There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st But in his motion like an angel sings, Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins. Such harmony is in immortal souls. But whilst this muddy vesture of decay, Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it. (The Merchant of Venice. Act V. scene 1)
An innocent trip from Heilegenkreuz in the Tyrol to Innsbruck in the autumn of 1612 brought an unpleasant surprise to Adam Haslmayr, musician, theosopher, medical celebrity and notary public to the Archduke Maximilian. On the orders of the Jesuit inquisitor Hypolyt Guarinoni, Haslmayr was arrested and sentenced to slavery on the Mediterranean galleys.
Why?
In March, Haslmayr had published his answer to the Fama Fraternitatis – the Fame of the Fraternity – a manuscript which had been privately distributed to persons with an interest in the advancement of science and religion in a corrupt society. Was Haslmayr's ill-fortune a result of his interest in this document? What was so extraordinary about the Fama Fraternitatis?
Seeing the only wise and merciful God in these latter days hath poured out so richly his mercy and goodness to mankind, whereby we do attain more and more to the perfect knowledge of his Son Jesus Christ and Nature, that justly we may boast of the happy time, wherein there is discovered unto us the half part of the world, which heretofore was unknown and hidden, but he hath also made manifest unto us many wonderful, and never heretofore seen, works and creatures of Nature, and moreover hath raised men, imbued with great wisdom, who might partly renew and reduce all arts (in this our age spotted and imperfect) to perfection; so that finally man might thereby understand his own nobleness and worth, and why he is called Microcosmus, and how far his knowledge extendeth into Nature.
This elegant speech serves to usher the reader into the Fama Fraternitatis: a ‘god's-eye’ view of Europe in the first decade of the 17th century. A massive expansion of knowledge has taken place. Galileo has brought the craters of the moon into telescopic focus1. The Americas have been discovered and partly colonised. The globe has been circumnavigated. Copernicus has revolutionised the conception of the universe with his solar system. Giordano Bruno, burnt at the stake only a decade ago has declared the universe to be infinite.
All of this, implies the Fama, is no accident. A certain mentality has been at work; a spiritual endeavour is afoot. It is God, the Fama declares, who has revealed Himself through Nature to the “men of great wisdom”, and through an allegory, the Fama will show what has really been going on, and why it is necessary to deepen and enlarge on what has been achieved.
The second paragraph makes explicit the criticism of the present “spotted and imperfect” age. There is more to come, but certain vices must be overcome: “the pride and covetousness of the learned is so great, it will not suffer them to agree together; but were they united…” This is the main issue to which the Fama addresses itself: unity, co-operation. The learned could, if they would, “collect Librum Naturae, or a perfect method of all arts: but such is their opposition, that they still keep, and are loth to leave the old course…” We are then led swiftly into the main allegory - so obviously an allegory, but one which has for over three centuries (due largely to the nature of the circles in which the Fama has been transmitted) been seen erroneously as a statement of more or less historic fact.
To such an intent of a general reformation, the most godly and highly illuminated father, our brother, C.R. a German, the chief and original of our Fraternity, hath much and long time laboured..
At age five, brother C.R. (Christian Rosenkreuz) is put into a cloister to learn (indifferently2) Latin and Greek. At the first opportunity he escapes the monastery to journey to the Holy Land with Brother P.A.L. P.A.L. dies in Cyprus, whereupon C.R. heads for Damascus to find favour, due to his knowledge of medicine, with some wise men from Damcar in Arabia, where next he goes. Aged sixteen, Brother C.R. arrives in Damcar to be received “not as a stranger, but as one whom they had long expected.” - a marvellous touch, echoing the arrival of the ‘Thief Abu’ in the 1001 Nights who finds himself among “the relics of a Golden Age: golden because gold was nothing”. The wise men teach Christian Arabic. C.R. is thus able to translate the “Book M”.
This is the place where he did learn his physic, and his mathematics, whereof the world hath just cause to rejoice, if there were more love, and less envy.
He next goes to Egypt, observing its plants and creatures, and then moves on to Fez, as instructed by his Arabian teachers.
And it is a great shame unto us, that wise men, so far remote the one from the other, should not only be of one opinion, hating all contentious writings, but also be so willing and ready under the seal of secrecy to impart their secrets to others. Every year the Arabians and Africans do send one to another, enquiring of one another out of their arts, if happily they had found out some better things, or if experience had weakened their reasons. Yearly there came something to light, whereby the mathematics, physic and magic (for in those are they of Fez most skilful) were amended. As there is nowadays in Germany no want of learned men, magicians, Cabalists, physicians, and philosophers, were there but more love and kindness among them, or that the most part of them would not keep their secrets close only to themselves.
At Fez, brother C.R. makes acquaintance with the “Elementary Inhabitants”: the spirits of earth, air, water and fire, who reveal secrets of the inner nature of Nature to C.R3. C.R. finds the magia of Fez somewhat impure (demonic), and their cabala restricted by their faith (Islam), but he nonetheless intends to make use of the knowledge acquired; Rosenkreuz is no bigot. The knowledge is agreeable with the harmony of the whole world: a characteristically Renaissance Neoplatonic and Hermetic concept. Truth is truth and agrees with itself :
might one examine all and several persons upon the earth, he should find that which is good and right, is always agreeing with itself; but all the rest is spotted with a thousand erroneous conceits.
From Fez C.R. departs for Spain, expecting widespread rejoicing at his discoveries, discoveries which will henceforth lead to a firm foundation for all scientific endeavour :
He showed them new growths, new fruits, and beasts, which did concord with old philosophy, and prescribed them new Axiomata, whereby all things might fully be restored. But it was to them a laughing matter; and being a new thing unto them, they feared that their great name should be lessened, if they should now again begin to learn and acknowledge their many errors, to which they were accustomed, and wherewith they had gained them enough.
This great theme of the perversion of knowledge is never lost sight of throughout the Fama. It is the keynote.
C.R., much to his innocent surprise, finds the reaction to his discoveries everywhere the same. No one wants to know. So he dreams of “a Society in Europe”, fully endowed with sufficient wealth to provide solid guidance for the good governance of the continent.
Meanwhile Brother C.R. returns to Germany and looks forward to a reformation. He could have bragged of the transmutation of metals but instead “did esteem more Heaven, and the citizens thereof, Man, than all vain glory and pomp.” His view of Man is transcendental and universalist: Hermetic Man is the Great Miracle who has fallen into darkness. Five years of ruminations, mathematics and construction of fine instruments follow until he decides again to attempt the “wished-for reformation”: the return to first principles and the harmonious unity of the cosmos. He recruits three brothers from his “first cloister” whom he carefully instructs in the necessary arts: Brothers G.V., J.A. and J.O. Thus begins the Fraternity of the Rose Cross.
The Brothers set about compiling a dictionary of the “magical language” (Cabala?), producing the first part of Book M and constructing their house, called “Holy Spirit”. The work is hard and further constrained by the huge numbers of sick people who come to be treated, so more members are recruited - “all bachelors and of vowed virginity” until they number eight. They produce a book “of all that which man can desire, wish, or hope for.” Having ordered things and learned fully the Axiomata of the Fraternity, the brothers spread out into many countries to secretly impart their learning and to correct errors from as many divers sources as possible, and to communicate their discoveries one to another. They have six rules:
C.R. remains with two brothers, hoping for the cleansing of the Church and thinking of her with “longing desire”, while every year they meet “with joy”. They tell of all the inventions of the world and all the new revelations of His world that God has delivered to men's minds.
Everyone may hold it out for certain, that such persons as were sent, and joined together by God, and the heavens, and chosen out of the wisest of men, as have lived in many ages, did live together above all others in highest unity, greatest secrecy, and most kindness one towards another.
The first brother to die is J.O., much learned in Cabala and a resident in England where he was much known and famed for curing a young Earl of Norfolk of leprosy. The Fraternity no longer knows where some of the brothers are buried but each did, we are told, find a fit successor. There follows a reference to a document to come, the Confession wherein readers may learn 37 reasons why the Fraternity has decided to open itself to the worthy.
Also we do promise more gold than both the Indies bring to the King of Spain; for Europe is with child and will bring forth a strong child, who shall stand in need of a great godfather's gift.
Meanwhile, time has passed and the present brothers no longer know when brother C.R. died or where he is buried, or even if they have the entirety of the original wisdom. We are next informed of how the “high illuminated man of God, Fra. C.R.C.” was found.
The death of Brother A in Gallia Narbonensis (Languedoc) makes way for his successor N.N., an architect, who in the course of renovations to his ‘building’ uncovers a memorial tablet inscribed with the names of the original brethren. In the tablet is a nail which when pulled out dislodges some of the masonry behind it, revealing a hidden door on which is written POST ANNOS 120 PATEBO, prophesying the precise time of the discovery of Father Christian Rosenkreuz. (“I shall be revealed after 120 years”4)
From information given in the succeeding Confession, we can put a date to this ‘event’ as being 1604. (C.R. having been born, according to the Confessio Fraternitatis, in 1378 - the Year of the Great Schism of the Church - and having died in 1484). The allegory continues:
For like as our door was after so many years wonderfully discovered, also there shall be opened a door to Europe (when the wall is removed) which already doth begin to appear, and with great desire is expected of many.
The next morning, a small band of brothers open the door. Their efforts reveal an extraordinary vault of seven sides: five feet broad and eight feet high. The vault is illuminated by an inner sun “situated in the upper part of the centre of the ceiling”. In the middle is a round altar covered with a brass plate declaring, “This compendium of the universe I made in my lifetime to be my tomb.” In a circle is written : Jesus mihi omnia : Jesus, all things to me. In the middle of the plate, four figures in circles are inscribed with the words:
The whole design is a quite stunning array of geometrical symmetry of mystical import whose exact nature will be revealed only to those found worthy of joining the society. The floor, for example, is divided into triangles which describe the powers of the “inferior governors” (the stars). Against each wall is a chest containing books, the first of which to be mentioned is the Vocabular of Paracelsus5. Another chest contains looking-glasses, bells, burning lamps and sufficient things by which the principles of the Order might be reconstructed, should the Order's labour come to nothing.
Removing the altar, the brothers find the body of Christian Rosenkreuz “whole and unconsumed”, grasping to his chest the Book I, and a Bible: “our greatest treasure.” They read in Latin a concise eulogium of R.C.'s life :
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 journey through Arabia and Africa he collected a treasure surpassing that of Kings and Emperors; but finding it not suitable for his times, he kept it guarded for posterity to uncover, and appointed loyal and faithful heirs of his arts and also of his name. He constructed a microcosm corresponding in all motions to the macrocosm and finally drew up this compendium of things past, present and to come.
After a list of the first and second “circles” of brethren, come the words, We are born of God, we die in Jesus, we live again through the Holy Spirit.
And so we do expect the answer and judgement of the learned, or unlearned. Howbeit, we know after a time there will now be a general reformation, both of divine and human things, according to our desire, and the expectation of others. For it is fitting, that before the rising of the sun, there should appear and break forth Aurora, or some clearness, or divine light in the sky.
This must be a reference to the appearance of new stars in the constellations of Serpentarius and Cygnus in the year 1604, written about by the astronomer Kepler in the year in which the exhumation of C.R. is said to have taken place: a definitive sign that the New Age had at last come.
The Fama is concluded by a series of exhortations concerning the unity and agreement of genuine knowledge, as well as warnings against “the ungodly and accursed gold-making” (materialist alchemy) which has become so popular, and which the author or authors regard as a perversion of the real thing. The making of gold, the ‘purest’ metal, incorruptible and analagous to the divine is, according to the Fama, merely a parergon: a by-product of the main work that is spiritual transformation. Readers are warned against false books of alchemy which promise what they cannot deliver and lead men6 to dismal fates.
At last comes the final invitation for outsiders to join the Fraternity. It is clearly stated that the Brothers will inwardly and spiritually know which enquirers are genuine or not, however they might try to make contact with the Order. The false cannot hurt the Order: “our building (although one hundred thousand people had very near seen and beheld the same) shall for ever remain untouched, undestroyed, and hidden to the wicked world.” The Fraternity lives under the protection of Jehova's wings : SUB UMBRA TUARUM JEHOVA. This is a spiritual Order. Those who share its aims and spirit are, in a sense already part of it, but the spiritual body must begin to manifest its works and illuminations in the material world.
So this was that Fama which made such a fateful impression upon Adam Haslmayr. What particularly struck him was its consistency with the ideas of his idol Paracelsus (1493-1541), the “German Trismegistus”, greatest and most controversial medical doctor of the age. Although, according to the Fama, Paracelsus was “none of our fraternity,” he did look over the Book M (which most likely stands for mundus since Paracelsus is famous for taking his ideas directly from the natural world), and while the Fama's author was well aware of Paracelsus' subversive reputation as a vulgar critic of his opponents, the author takes a sympathetic view: “in his writing he rather mocked these busybodies, and doth not show them altogether what he was.”
Paracelsus had introduced chemistry to medicine, believed in the virtue of experiment, had more faith in the ‘book of nature’ than received paper authority, got his hands dirty and tirelessly fulminated against those who could spout but could not cure. Such is well known. What is far less known is that Paracelsus, inspired by the Hermetic tradition, wrote reams on the subject of religion. Kept secret in his lifetime these writings would become time-bombs after his death.
Paracelsus held to a gnostic cosmogony: Man was a microcosm of the universe, but the spirit that giveth life was generally trapped in gross matter. The result: spiritual and bodily sickness. This prognosis applied as much to the churches as to the body. Paracelsus had no time for the “mauerkirche”, the external church of stone, but believed in the church of spirit, the inner Word. As his follower Haslmayr put it, God does not need bishops or professors to tell him where to go, what to do, or to whom He should speak. Paracelsus regarded Catholic and Protestant disputants alike as liars. Paracelsus’ own middle name, Theophrastus, means God-speaker or God-expounder, and he lived up to it. Followers such as Haslmayr took it as the name for a ‘new’ religion, the Theophrastia Sancta or religion of the two lights: the light of grace and the light of nature.
Follow the ‘divine signatures’ in Nature and a harmony invisible to the disharmonious mind would appear. The priest was doctor; the doctor scientist; the scientist priest. Paracelsus prophesied the coming Golden Age of Grace. The magi were returning.
What Haslmayr read in the Fama chimed in with the Paracelsian bell, and in his printed Antwort of March 1612 he thanked the Brethren of the Rose Cross for their divine gift and Theophrastiam. Haslmayr's open letter to the Brotherhood also refers to a number of apocalyptic prophecies.
In 1605 a French prophecy, falsely attributed to Paracelsus7, appeared in Germany. A double catastrophe of political and religious import was predicted. The prophecy spoke of a hidden treasure that a group of initiates would discover and use for the benefit of humanity. A group of faithful elect would appear: men who had resisted the lies of the world, led by a messenger and mystagogue who would destroy the Antichrist and give good things to all.
Three treasures were mentioned in the prophecy, one of which was hidden in Germany. The German treasure would provide enough funds to feed a dozen kingdoms. Furthermore, rare books would reveal the Great Art of alchemical transmutation to make a drinkable gold according to the virtue of the philosopher's stone and the procedures of Paracelsus. When the treasure was found, a yellow lion would oppose the eagle, resulting in war and revolution.
Haslmayr begs for help for the renovation of the world, for “a new heaven and a new earth”. The treasures within the vault of Christian Rosenkreuz are linked by Haslmayr to the three treasures of the “Lion of septentrion”, waiting until the arrival of “Elias the Artist” (Elijah the prophet, whose coming was predicted by magus Tommaso Campanella for 1604) to be opened; when everything hidden would come to light and, according to Paracelsus' De Tinctura physicorum, the Golden Age of Grace would commence.
For the Adam Haslmayr of 1612, the end of time was approaching. The Judges would appear in 1613 and the Great Judgement would take place in 1614. Spurred on by his enthusiasm and sense of imminent expectation, Haslmayr compared the Brotherhood of the Rose-Cross to the Jesuits and asserted that it was the Fraternity of Christian Rosenkreuz that was the true Society of Jesus. He wrote to his employer, the Archduke Maximilian (for whom Haslmayr was a notary) for permission to go to Montpellier to search for the Rosicrucian Brotherhood. The choice of Montpellier was presumably the result of seeing the reference in the Fama to Brother N.N (“the architect”) from Gallia Narbonensis.
Unfortunately for Adam Haslmayr, Haslmayr's intentions came to the attention of Inquisitor Hippolyt Guarinoni. Guarinoni was a Jesuit and fervently anti-Paracelsian8. Haslmayr was tricked into an arrest at Innsbruck, force-marched to Genoa and made a galley slave between that port and Messina9.
Haslmayr was not alone in his enthusiasm for Paracelsus. During the 1980s, Spanish scholar Dr Carlos Gilly discovered correspondence between Prince Augustus of Anhalt and the Augsburg city physician Carl Widemann. For many years Widemann had been collecting the red-hot theological writings of Paracelsus as well as those of the sympathetic radical reformers Caspar Schwenckfeld (1489-1561), Sebastian Franck (1499-1542) and Valentin Weigel (1533-1588). These works of alchemico-spiritual Christosophy scandalised the closed worlds of all the proponents of authoritarian religion in the 16th century.
Widemann had also been secretary to English alchemist Edward Kelley in Prague 1587-88, during the tail end of the latter's engagement as seer to British Magus John Dee. This experience was doubtless of interest to Augustus von Anhalt, a man in search of the philosopher's stone10.
In 1611 Widemann became acquainted with Haslmayr, sharing Haslmayr's understanding of the Theophrastia Sancta as “a sort of perpetual religion, which since the days of the apostles had been practised in concealment until the time when the German Trismegistus, Philippus Theophrastus [Paracelsus] began publicly to expound its meaning.” (Gilly). He had no hesitation in recommending Haslmayr's alchemical and compositional prowess to Augustus.
In December 1611 the officially Calvinist Prince Augustus von Anhalt, based at Schloss Plötzkau near Magdeburg, received a new year's present from Haslmayr – copies of both the Fama and his response to it. Prince Augustus “read it [the Fama] and re-read it again” (letter of Augustus-Widemann, January 1612). Deeply hooked, he asked Widemann how he might obtain the Fama's promised follow-up, the Confessio.
Widemann was aware that the manuscript of the Fama had been disseminated from the house of one Tobias Hess in Tübingen, Württemburg. Enquiries, however, yielded nothing.
In the summer of that year, Augustus gave Haslmayr the task of assembling ‘Theophrastian’ texts for his secret printing press at Plötzkau, a plan which came to a halt after Haslmayr wrote to the Archduke Maximilian of the Tyrol in August 1612, asking for permission to go to Montpellier to search for the Fratres R.C. Thanks to the inquisitor Guarinoni, Halsmayr's stony path would take him not to Languedoc, but to the galleys of the Habsburgs, wherein he would languish for five terrible years.
Meanwhile, Haslmayr's manuscripts - including a copy of the Fama - had been entrusted to the Paracelsian alchemist Benedictus Figulus. Figulus was soon made subject to an arrest-warrant in Freiburg and left that city to travel 150 miles north to friends in the city of Marburg in Hesse-Cassel.
Hesse-Cassel was governed by the Landgrave Moritz von Hessen, alchemically minded Calvinist and friend of Augustus von Anhalt (they would later establish their own Societas Hermetica). In Marburg lived Raphael Eglin and Johann Hartmann, two alchemists patronised by Moritz von Hessen. Arriving in Marburg, Figulus deposited Haslmayr's manuscripts11 at the home of Raphael Eglin. Eglin's manuscripts, including those formerly belonging to Adam Haslmayr are now in Cassel, formerly the home of Moritz von Hessen. Cassel was also the base of the printer Wilhelm Wessel.
In 1614 Eglin wrote a letter of complaint to his patron Moritz von Hessen. He complained that he had sent his work to Wessel two months before Wessel had received the Fama, but still his work had not been printed. Who could have given the Fama to the printer? Was it Eglin? Augustus? Moritz von Hessen? Could it have been Figulus? We do not know as yet. Somebody it seems wanted to bring the Fraternity of the Rose-Cross out into the open.
Wilhelm Wessel of Cassel printed the Fama Fraternitatis in 1614, along with a piece called The general Reformation of the whole wide world: an extract from Trajano Boccalini's satirical News from Parnassus, hot from the liberal (and politically threatened) Republic of Venice. As a result, the Fama was immediately linked to an itinerary of worldwide Reformation. The Wessel edition also included Adam Haslmayr's Antwort, with an account of Haslmayr's unfortunate incarceration at the hands of the Jesuits - a highly political inclusion. The Reformation of the whole wide world…
The timing was extraordinary. Publication of the Fama provided the proverbial spark in the powder-keg. What had begun as an imaginative experiment in communication was very soon to become one of the most virulent intellectual hurricanes ever to hit Europe. The “greatest publicity-stunt of all time”12 had begun.