The Fama was powerful stuff - all the more powerful because its dense contents succeeded in triggering off a set of highly charged associations. In order to understand fully the excitement generated by the Fama, it is necessary to look at those associations and their origins.
First of all, the manuscript Fama and subsequently the (almost certainly unintended) printed version, were taken by many readers as a definitive sign for the inauguration of a New Age. The idea of the ‘New Age’ is nothing new. It is not uncommon for human-beings to believe they are living in the ‘last times’, or even the worst times; to look back to a golden age before the rot set in. The corollary of this outlook is to see a better world as imminent, if only one was endowed with the eyes to see the requisite signs. The idea is usually linked to the concept of judgement, of righting wrongs, punishing the guilty and rewarding the faithful with the fulfillment of their best dreams. The idea is also related to the acquisition of new knowledge and new liberties.
As far as we know, the literary roots of this belief lie in Jewish apocalyptic writings. Dire warnings of divine judgement to recompense the evils done among His Children go back at least to the eighth century BC, to the time of the prophets Amos and Hosea. Nevertheless, ‘apocalyptic’ as a specific type of literature did not emerge until after the return of the Jews from the Babylonian Exile in the sixth century BC, when in spite of attempts to rebuild the Temple after the edict of Cyrus, the king of Persia (559-530BC) which authorised this undertaking, the Jews who returned to their homeland continued to languish amid various miseries as a minor component of a Persian satrarpy. The glorious return and elevation of the Jewish people prophesied by men such as the prophet Isaiah failed to materialise, and in spite of attempts to rationalise the situation, faith was put under extreme challenge.
The defeat of the Persians by Alexander the Great in 333 BC did nothing, as far as the Jews were concerned, to remedy the situation, and the challenges to faith grew in intensity. Furthermore, vital elements of the Jewish faith had undergone change. Whereas the pre-Exilic faith stressed the communal dimension of God's covenant with Israel, the development of a pan-oriental Wisdom movement in the sixth century BC (Gautama in India, Zarathushtra in Persia and the ‘pre-Socratics’ such as Heraklitos, in Greece) laid greater stress on the position, vis à vis eternity, of the individual. What of the individual's ‘right’ to a just reward for a life well lived? In the Jewish writings we find this question put directly in the Book of Job. Unfortunately, experience appeared to be indifferent to such a ‘right’, and a longing for divine intervention intensified. Suspicion of the world under the dominance of devouring Time lies at the roots of the development of Gnosis, the aim of which was to uncover the transcendent within the finite.
While the full flowering of Gnosis would have to wait until the apocalyptic hope of the Maccabaean revolts of the second century BC and the Jewish Wars of the first and early second centuries AD had been exhausted, the seeds of Gnosis were already sown within the apocalyptic scheme.
Apocalyptic literature linked the old prophetic format of eventual judgement and salvation to the personal access of the prophet to the very secrets of God's determinations for His People : timetables for deliverance, combined with explanations for the alleged delay in enacting them. The forth-telling of the early prophets had become the foretelling of apocalyptic. Elements of Persian astrology played a part along with the emphasis on signs : an interplay of heavenly deliberations with earthly and political changes, mediated through the correct interpretations of the stars, and the messages of angels, or messengers of God. The seer now had privileged access to the divine books in which human history was prefigured already. This knowledge of the divine intention and secret angelic activity was then inscribed in books such as the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament and the Apocalypse of S. John in the New, as well as the ubiquitous Book of Enoch. Books played a big rôle in apocalyptic theory.
It was almost certainly the failure of hope in an external historical deliverance from the pressing contradictions and waywardness of earthly life that encouraged some of the earliest explicit Gnostics to internalise the apocalyptic process as a description of the destiny of the transmundane spirit. Certain features of apocalyptic nonetheless remained constant :
The key apocalyptic texts, for our purposes, are those bearing the name of the prophet Esdras : I & II Esdras of the Apocrypha, (also known in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as III & IV Ezra). Esdras is described in these books as a priest, living in Babylon during the reign of the Persian King Artaxerxes13. According to I Esdras VIII.9ff, Artaxerxes gave the priest Esdras the right to embellish the Temple in Jerusalem with all manner of gifts to be taken from Syria and Phoenicia for the worship of God, and to support this worship with the proper exercise of the Levitical Law. The whole corpus is a eulogy to the establishment of YHWH's Law in the Temple and among the people, accompanied by visions of the consequences for disobeying the Law and the certain judgement of wrongdoers. These visions were vouchsafed courtesy of a visitation from the angel Uriel. I & II Esdras have been dated between the time of the Maccabaean Revolts of the mid-second century BC to the first century AD.
There must be something quite archetypal about this literature, for we find it being employed with great fervour and astonished reverence throughout the late fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Similar psychological conditions applied : frustration with the world, horror at inhuman wickedness, social confusion, religious breakdown, a longing for better times and the security of knowing what was really going on. Esdras speaks to both the inner and outer dimensions of human experience. Due to this conflict of interests between political or social turmoil and the urge to turn inwards to the purely spiritual, (anxieties addressed in the Rosicrucian Manifestos with their assertion of imminent revelation and illumination of divine secrets hidden in the life of the earth), mysticism (direct and inward approach to God) and apocalyptic became virtually inseparable. The result was a strange (to us) penetration of the timeless into the temporal, analagous to that odd intermediate psychic territory between the soul and the world of nature explored and experienced in alchemy.
There is a fatigue with the ‘wicked world’ and its turning away from the knowledge of itself : analagous to the rejection of Rosenkreuz on his return from the East, further expressed in the idea that new knowledge of the world represents a prelude to the End - what the Fama calls “the last light”:
Verily we must confess that the world in those days was already big with those great commotions, labouring to be delivered of them; and did bring forth painful, worthy men, who broke with all force through darkness and barbarism, and left us who succeeded to follow to follow them : and assuredly they have been the uppermost point in trigono igneo [an astronomical event to be discussed in due course], whose flame now should be more and more bright, and shall undoubtedly give to the world the last light.
The release of the spiritual light (the mercury of Paracelsus) is then at once mystical, alchemical, and apocalyptic. The operation of this liberation, on the Hermetic principle of “As Above, so Below” was expected to be paralleled by events in the material sphere : in the stars and in politics14.
Testimony to the significance of Esdras comes at the same time as the Hermetic revelation hits the intellectual life of Europe in force. None other than the extraordinary Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) was moved to see in Esdras the authority for taking the Jewish Qabalah very seriously as authentic and pristine divine wisdom15. In 1542, David Joris, a radical Flemish reformer who took refuge in Basle, wrote the influential T'Woender Boek and used Esdras as part of his vision of a truth revealed only to a select group of believers, coupled with the notion of an inner word received in the heart. This book was very popular among the followers of the radical reformers Valentin Weigel (1533-1588) and Caspar Schwenckfeld (1489-1556). The idea of a secret spiritual fraternity is implicit in this view.
Schwenckfeld and Weigel were in their turn highly influential on the thought of the gnostic Jacob Böhme of Görlitz in Lausitz. Esdras was also particularly helpful to sixteenth and seventeenth century Calvinists who battled with the Calvinist idea of predestination, since the Books of Esdras stressed the importance of the individual's free will in choosing the path of salvation. But perhaps the strangest instance of the influence of Esdras - apart from the Rosicrucian manifestos - lies in the rôle they played in the ‘angelic conversations’ held between the highly influential English magus John Dee, his ‘scryer’ or seer Edward Kelley, and a number of what Kelley purported to be angels, from whom Kelley claimed to receive direct messages in the 1580s. Not only did these angels seem to have a thorough and respectful acquaintance with the Books of Esdras, but Esdras's own guide, the angel Uriel, appeared to Kelley with instructions recorded in John Dee's quite astonishing spiritual diaries. These strange séances directly affected Dee's career and may have influenced, by the strangest of routes, the course of European history.
For John Dee, as for many others in the sixteenth century, magia, the art of the magi, was a vehicle for spiritual salvation. The split in the Catholic Church with its ensuing violence and hostile invective had left many genuine believers with a feeling of being cut off from the spiritual resources of the old universally practised eucharist. Magic, in its aspect of divine and mystical illumination (made respectable in Neoplatonic writings), was held to be a valid route for divine influences to enter into the life of man to heal his heart. Therefore magia was deeply associated with Reformation movements and, necessarily, with apocalyptic prognostications. Men such as Henry Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535) and the phenomenal Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) believed that a deeper and more powerful reforming movement could be enacted by revitalizing the magical basis of religion. This view provides a basis for understanding John Dee's fervent desire to make contact with the angels of the supercelestial sphere. These angels seem to have had more than a passing acquaintance with the Books of Esdras and their (ie : Edward Kelley's) interpretation of the books stressed that they applied directly to the late 16th century, and that they promised a magical reunion of the Christian Church as well as a necessary overturning and reforming of the contemporary order. Compare for example the following communication of the angel ‘Madimi’ with Dee16 to II Esdras and the Fama Fraternitatis:
Madimi: And lo, the issue which he giveth thee is wisdom. But lo, the mother of it is not yet delivered. For, if woman know her times and seasons of deliverance : Much more doth he [God], who is the Mother of all things. But thou mayest rejoice that there is a time of deliverance, and that the gift is compared to a woman with childe.
II Esdras IV.40: Go thy way to a woman with child, and ask of her when she hath fulfilled her nine months, if her womb may keep the birth any longer within her.
Fama Fraternitatis: ..for Europe is with child and will bring forth a strong child, who shall stand in need of a great godfather's gift.
Uriel to Dee : These are the days wherein the prophet said, No faith should be found on the earth. This faith must be restored again, and men must glorify God in his works. I am the light of God.
URIEL : When you have the book of God before you, then I will open these secrets unto you.
In order to re-establish “the faith”, Uriel instructs Dee and Kelley to read II Esdras IX.7 and VI.28. The texts from Esdras read as follows :
And everyone that shall be saved, and shall be able to escape by his works, and by faith, whereby ye have believed, Shall be preserved from the said perils, and shall see my salvation in my land, and within my borders : for I have sanctified them for me from the beginning.
As for faith, it shall flourish, corruption shall be overcome, and the truth, which hath been so long without fruit, shall be declared.
This is, according to Uriel : That my kingdom may be One. Another angel, Jubanladace by name, re-iterates the same message with tiresome repetitiveness :
For I will establish One Faith.. Moreover I shall open the hearts of all men, that he may have free passage through them.
And there must be One veritie. And Hierusalem shall descend with an horn of glory to the end.
Other angelic prophecies reveal that the Antichrist's arrival was scheduled for 1587; that “the Turk” (the Ottoman Empire) would be destroyed by a ruler in central Europe and, generally, that those who fail to respond to the prophetic call shall be destroyed. Amid all this heaviness, there are lighter moments. The New Age which the angels usher in promises a spiritual joy, then currently being enacted by the radical reformers, such as some Anabaptist sects, persecuted by Catholics, Lutherans and Calvinists alike. The angels put themselves in spiritual communion with the bright and often crazy spirit of the new churches. In Dee's shewstone (which can be seen in the British Museum) Kelley sees and hears a luminous figure declare :
There is a God, let us be merry. E.K. [Kelley] He danceth still. There is a heaven. Let us be merry. E.K. Now he taketh off his clothes again.
Kelley frequently has his angels recommend ‘free love’ as a fruit of the spirit. It is hard to imagine that such stuff should form the basis of a practical political programme, but that would be severely to underestimate the conviction of authenticity in which Dee held these communications. These revelations would take Dee and Kelley off to central Europe on a mission to save the world.
Frances Yates in her book The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1972) held the view that Dee's activities were instrumental in bringing about the Rosicrucian movement, and that the movement had an essentially English basis. This can no longer be held to be the case. Germany and Bohemia had sufficient magi (if not so universally brilliant as Dee) of their own to initiate their own movement. However there is little doubt that Dee and Kelley's time spent abroad in the 1580s and 1590s - combined with the political configurations of the period (wherein England was seen as a bastion against the Habsburgs) - was a significant influence on the alchemico-magico-apocalyptic reforming philosophy, and Dee certainly contributed to and reinforced the growing expectation of great events soon to be fulfilled in which gnostic influences would play such a significant (if unspoken) rôle. More important than Dee's angelic seances whose prophecies were already widespread in Europe, was the contribution of his book Monas Hieroglyphica (1564) which laid out a complex theory of cosmic unity whose aim was to integrate all knowledge in a cosmic spiritual/mathematical system : an aim implicit in the Rosicrucian endeavour. Dee's Monas symbol became a staple symbol in the works of Rosicrucian apologists and even appeared in the 1616 edition of Johann Valentin Andreae's alchemical story, The Chymische Hochzeit.
“YOU ARE BECOME PROPHETS, AND ARE SANCTIFIED FOR THE COMING OF THE LORD”.
With these words, the angel Uriel launched John Dee and Edward Kelley on what must be one of the strangest adventures of all time. The adventure got off the ground through a strange co-incidence. In June 1583 the Polish Prince Albert Laski was taken by the poet-adventurer Sir Philip Sydney to witness an academic debate held at Oxford University. The principal speaker was none other than ‘the Nolan’, Giordano Bruno (of Nola), gnostic Dominican with a mission to return the world to the (in his eyes) pure Egyptian “religion of the world” : the worship of the divine immanent principle, the basic magic power to be found in an heliocentric system as part of an infinite universe. The debate went badly for Bruno who was laughed at, ridiculed and unjustly accused of plagiarism from the de vita triplici of Marsilio Ficino by the “grammarians and pedants” of Oxford (as he called them).
Sydney suggested Laski might like to meet England's greatest intellectual luminary, John Dee, at the latter's house in Mortlake. Dee obliged Laski with some angelic conversations. Kelley's angels siezed the opportunity to suggest that Laski was the European prince who could fulfill the role of harbinger of a new age. He would defeat the Turk and bring the “One veritie” to the whole wide world. Laski seems to have found the prospect agreable, and so Dee and Kelley packed their bags and returned to the continent with the Polish prince. Laski was probably most moved by Kelley's contention that the angels held the key to alchemical transmutation : gold.
Laski proved not to be quite what the angels really had in mind, and their attention turned towards the Emperor Rudolf II in Prague, whence Dee and Kelley's expansive train moved. On 3 September 1584, Dee finally got his audience with the Emperor. In the full panoply (and doubtless folly) of his new prophetic rôle, Dee announced to Rudolf that “The Angel of the Lord hath appeared to me, and rebuketh you for your sins. If you will hear me, and believe in me, you shall Triumph : if you will not hear me….” Rudolf heard Dee, but found it practically impossible to step into the rôle Dee's angels had in mind for him, which was in effect to take practical spiritual and political advice direct from John Dee. Rudolf was interested however in Kelley's vaunted alchemical skills - and so was Queen Elizabeth of England who tried to get Dee - and especially Kelley - back to England to serve their country. But Dee now saw himself as a trans-national figure in the care of God alone. He even celebrated Mass in a Catholic church to demonstrate his eirenicist intentions. He consulted with the Catholic Hannibal Rosseli in Cracow on how to employ the Corpus Hermeticum (on which Rosseli was writing a massive commentary) to unite the Christian churches behind the banner of the (Neoplatonic) One. Dee was in an incandescent state for some years. It seemed to him that his message was indicated in the stars, and by the knowledge of the time, he had reason to do so, as we shall see shortly.
In 1586, the year in which Johann Valentin Andreae was born, Dee met Francesco Pucci in Cracow. Pucci was an enthusiast for a mystical and universalist faith which he believed the Catholic Church would or should enact. He also shared Dee's views on the coming Apocalypse and final judgement. These consultations with Catholic savants greatly disturbed the Papal Nuncio in Prague. The Nuncio had Dee and Kelley thoroughly investigated, concluding on orders from the Vatican that the pair should be arrested and put to the stake. Rudolf, compromising as usual, ordered Dee and Kelley out of Prague, whence they became guests of Count Rozmberk on his estates at Trebon in Bohemia. Rozmberk lavished his wealth upon them and encouraged Dee in his mission. We also know that Dee visited Landgrave Wilhelm IV of Hesse-Cassel, where he whipped up the requisite enthusiasm and presented his host with manuscripts on the subject of the secrets of God relating to the Apocalypse. Dee doubtless encouraged other chiliasts, alchemists and dreamers during his journeys about central Europe. All of this took place only twenty-six years before Adam Haslmayr was arrested by the Inquisitor Guarinoni in Innsbruck - well within the living memory of Carl Widemann and Andreae's older friend and guide Tobias Hess. (Hess was sixteen when Dee met the Emperor Rudolf II in Prague in 1584).
Apart from the ministry of angels, what else made Dee so sure that his mission had such extraordinary and apocalyptic significance?
1584 saw a major astronomical event : a conjunction of three planets in Aires - a fiery trigon or trigonus igneus. This was generally held among students of the stars to signify the inauguration of a “Great Year”, a new epoch or Aion: a vast cosmic time-unit bringing with it a new set of dispensations - a New Age. Dee received his astrological theory of history chiefly from De magis coniunctionibus by Abu Ma'shar (787-836AD), which had been translated into Latin in about 1120. Abu Ma‘shar’s ideas reflect the teachings of the Harranian pagans or ‘Sabians’ who took Hermes Trismegistos for their prophet. Their astrology developed within the context of Aristotle's works on the natural world : the Physica; De caelo; De generatione et corruptione and De meterologia. Following Abu Ma'shar, it became common to divide the twelve signs of the zodiac into four trigons, corresponding to the four elements. When the superior planets formed a new trigon (as happened in 1584) it was taken to be a sign for such earthly events as the genesis of new empires or new religious movements.
On cue, Dee set about fulfilling the necessary conditions for a New Age, an endeavour further supported by the influential Astronomisches Schreben by David Herlizius and, most particularly, by Leowitz's De coniunctionibus magnis which Dee had acquired twenty years earlier and had heavily annotated. Leowitz's work had predicted great changes to take place in Bohemia and the Habsburg domains in 1584. Dee believed that the signs for a new movement to establish religious unity - he was heard to say in Prague that he did not care for religions - within the context of new scientific understanding of the cosmos were now more than sufficient to encourage him and anyone with whom he came into contact to rise to the task of ushering in the new aeon. He was certainly not alone in this view.
One year after Dee's audience with the Emperor Rudolf, Theodor Gluichstein of Bremen published the Mystica et prophetica libri Geneseos interpretatio by the Italian heretic Giacomo Brocardo. Brocardo had escaped the fangs of the Venetian Inquisition in 1568 and had taken his vision of the end of the old order through Basle, Heidelberg, England, Holland, Bremen and, in the early 1590s, to Tobias Hess's home-town of Nürnberg. Brocardo's work was to make a great impact on two men whose lives and work are pertinent to our story. They are the Tübingen doctor Tobias Hess (1568-1614) and Simon Studion, author of the apocalyptic work Naometria (=the measurement of the Temple), who was born in Urach in Württemberg in 1543.
Brocardo's mystical and prophetic interpretations of the book of Genesis generally follow similar lines to those explored by Dee and Kelley. The difference is that in the works of Brocardo and Studion, number-mysticism and complex mathematics are brought to bear on the precise dating of apocalyptic history, in conjunction with other prophecies such as those of I & II Esdras. To a large extent Brocardo, like Studion, employs the framework devised by the Calabrian abbot Joachim of Fiore (c.1135-1202). While Joachim's division of history into the three eras of Father (Law), Son (Gospel), all to culminate in the final age of the Holy Spirit (revelation of God's secrets and an era of spiritual liberty), had made a major contribution to apocalyptic expectation in the thirteenth century, his basic ideas were to do much the same for the sixteenth century and beyond. Brocardo saw the date of Luther's birth (1483) as the starting point for the last age. This age would last 120 years (cf. the time to elapse given in the Fama with respect to the discovery of the tomb of Christian Rosenkreuz).
Hess obtained his copy of Brocardo's work in 1601 and was by this time in communication with Simon Studion, who lived in Stuttgart as a favoured scholar of Duke Frederick of Württemberg and who, incidentally, shared the same tutor at Tübingen as did Johann Valentin Andreae : Martin Crusius. Simon Studion completed his first draft of Naometria in 1592, a year after Hess became a doctor of civil and canon law at Tübingen. It will soon become apparent as to how the involvement of Tobias Hess was crucial to the genesis of the Fama Fraternitatis, its successor the Confessio Fraternitatis and the Rosicrucian movement in general. For Hess in 1601, the destiny of the world was definitely ‘hotting up’. According to the Naometria he was living at precisely the time when the “first seal” of the Apocalypse would be broken (in heaven): a time of bloodshed. Two years previously (1599), Tommaso Campanella had been incarcerated in a Naples dungeon. In 1598 he also had seen signs. His interpretation of the signs convinced him that a universal Hermetic-Christian Republic was imminent, and that he should help things along by participating in a rebellion against the Spanish Habsburgs. Like Dee, Kelley and Tobias Hess, Campanella had drawn inspiration from II Esdras, in particular chapters XI and XII which speak of a murderous many-headed eagle, a figure uncannily like the double-headed eagle of the Habsburg insignia. II Esdras promised revenge and justice :
And therefore appear no more, thou eagle, nor thy horrible wings, nor thy wicked feathers, nor thy malicious heads, nor thy hurtful claws, nor all thy vain body : That all earth may be refreshed, and may return, being delivered from thy violence, and that she may hope for the justice and mercy of him that made her. (II Esdras XI. 45-46).
The point is taken up in the Confessio Fraternitatis:
But we must also let you understand that there are yet some Eagle's Feathers in our way, the which do hinder our purpose.
II Esdras XI.37 ff. pits a “roaring lion” against the eagle. The lion speaks with a man's voice, and on hearing the speech of the lion, the horrible eagle is annihilated:
For thou hast afflicted the meek, thou hast hurt the peaceable, thou hast loved liars, and destroyed the dwellings of them that brought forth fruit, and hast cast down the walls of such as did thee no harm.
Likewise in the Confessio, false hypocrites and those who seek other things than wisdom from the Fraternity “shall certainly be partakers of all the punishment spoken of in our Fama; so their wicked counsels shall light upon themselves, and our treasures shall remain untouched and unstirred, until the Lion doth come, who will ask them for his use, and employ them for the confirmation and establishment of his kingdom.”
From the point of view of the authors of the Rosicrucian Manfestos, the Reformation could not be completed so long as the Pope and his political allies remained - and it was the completion of the Reformation in all its fullness that the authors of the manifestos sought. Nevertheless there are different areas of stress within the manifestos themselves - all part of their mystery and fascination - and it is more than likely that these areas of emphasis stem from the difference between the two minds which dominate the manifestos, namely Tobias Hess and the more subtle and ambivalent Johann Valentin Andreae.
John Dee was certainly not the only man alive in his time who had glimpsed the great import of the fiery trigon of 1584. Dr Carlos Gilly (the foremost authority on the Rosicrucians in the world) has made many discoveries in the last decade pertaining to their origins. Among them was the discovery of a cache of writings by Tobias Hess, commenting on Studion's Naometria, as well as a copy in Hess's hand of correspondence between Studion and Duke Frederick of Württemberg. Hess also copied Studion's judicium on the writings of Brocardo, in which Studion speaks of a series of seven fiery triangles, beginning with Adam and proceeding regularly through the times of Enoch, Noah, Moses, Babylon, Christ and Caesar Augustus, Charlemagne - all to culminate in 1584, the Great Year. Gilly has also examined correspondence between Hess and Studion in the Würtembergische Landesbibliothek wherein Studion defends his work by saying to Hess that should his (unbelievably complex) computations be denied, then the enquirer should recognise that they have been checked by the great mathematician Michael Mästlin, tutor in mathematics to both the astronomer Kepler and to Johann Valentin Andreae.
According to the diary of Martin Crusius (one of Andreae's tutors), Hess spent the years 1597-1605 delving deeply into the work of Studion and indeed anything he could find of value regarding futuristic apocalyptic prophecy. Hess agreed with Studion in 1597 that the Papacy must fall in seven years, according to computation. The key year was 1604. There must have been something wrong, if not with the mathematics, then with Studion's source of inspiration, for a year after the Papacy was supposed to have fallen (1604), Hess was getting into trouble with the theological authorities in Tübingen for discussing the theory of fiery triangles, while the Pope was still attending to his business in Rome. Nevertheless, something extraordinary had occurred in 1604. Apart from Studion's completing Naometria in 1800 unpublishable pages, the heavens offered yet another sign for the times. A trigonus igneus appeared in March 1604 in the constellations of Serpentarius and Cygnus, at which point I shall defer to the astrological wisdom of Dr Christopher McIntosh17:
At the time when the new stars appeared Jupiter and Saturn were in conjunction in the ninth house. As Jupiter was considered a good planet and Saturn a bad one, there was some speculation as to which was dominant. The general concensus of opinion, however, was that as the ninth house is Jupiter's house, and Jupiter rules Pisces, the sign which was in the ascendent at the time of the observation, Jupiter was therefore the dominant planet. Both planets were also favourably placed in relation to the other planets. When Saturn is well placed it brings forth thoughtful, serious men. The combination therefore, promised the advent of a prophet or prophets who would be wise, just and righteous. It was believed, moreover, that these astrological positions corresponded to the positions at the Creation. According to tradition the Sun first appeared on the fourth day of Creation when Aires was in the ascendent. From this it followed that Saggitarius must have been in the ninth house. Thus, the signs at the appearance of the new stars in 1604 were the same as those for the beginning of the world, proving that 1604 would also see a great new beginning.
For Tobias Hess this event assumed an extraordinary importance - and it must be to him that we must look for an explanation of how it came to be that the tomb of Christian Rosenkreuz, the “compendium of the universe” came to be revealed to the Rose-Cross Brothers in 1604, 120 years after he had been buried and almost exactly 120 years after the birth of Martin Luther, in which time according to Johann Valentin Andreae, the full Truth had been buried beneath sectarianism, academic pedantry, persecution of God's servants and widespread anti-Christian bickering and violence : those very evils which true Christians who most desired a reform of the Church had been expressly against. As Andreae's friend Christoph Besold observed : “Whereas before Luther we were ruled by the Pharisees, now we are ruled by the Scribes.” The Rosicrucian Manifestos clearly suggest that the ‘old guard’ cannot be trusted and that a new attitude, a new openness, an altogether new heart is required : a refreshing spirit of Fraternity and understanding is waiting for the right men to fill its ranks to bring light to the world.
The Confessio Fraternitatis, written very probably in early 1610, looks back six years to the wondrous planetary event of 1604, an event which had moved the astronomer Kepler to prophetic poetry18 :
It was in March when the red orbs appeared
A birth of unparalleled redness
When the matchless ruby stars were brought forth
The wife a matchless golden girl…
Kepler was not sure what the event really meant, but he seems to have expected political catastrophes or a new religious sect. The Confessio takes the event as its own.
As we now willingly confess, that many principal men by their writings will be a great furtherance to this Reformation which is to come…yea, the Lord God hath already sent before certain messengers, which should testify his will, to wit, some new stars, which do appear and are seen in the firmament in Serpentario and Cygno, which signify and give themselves known to everyone, that they are powerful Signacula of great weighty matters. …that great book of nature stands open to all men, yet there are but few that can read and understand the same.
That last line perfectly expresses the ambivalence of the manifestos, a quality of playfulness which can only have come from Andreae, the serious joker. Investigation of the Book of Nature is a Paracelsian term which can mean simply sensible scientific experiment and experience - an openness to what nature has to offer as an image of God - or something more mysterious, the interpretation of signs in an astrological or mystical sense. It will become clear that Andreae was definitely in favour of the former but ambivalent or hostile to the latter, while Hess could look both ways at once.
Studion completed his manuscript Naometria in the same year as the fiery trigon, and it was perhaps this event as well as Hess's public discussion of the import of the trigon that led to Tobias Hess's being accused of questionable interests by some of the theologians of Tübingen University. Studion himself had bitter enemies at Duke Frederick's court in Stuttgart and they persuaded the Duke to distance himself from Studion. On 2 July 1605, Hess, absolutely unrepentant, wrote an Apologia to Duke Frederick. While the academics of Tübingen found Studion embarrassing or even politically dangerous and inflammatory, Hess stood for decency and truth where it could be found, whether it appeared palatable or not. In his Apologia Hess maintained that all prophecies will be fulfilled in time, that the enemies of God will be destroyed and that the trigon of 1604 was one of the signs of the last times. He quoted Matthew V.18, “until heaven and earth fall apart, nothing will be taken from the law” and, most forcefully, Habbakuk II.3 :
For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak, and not lie : though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry.