A ROSE, as fair as ever saw the North,
Grew in a little garden all alone;
A sweeter flower did Nature ne'er put forth,
Nor fairer garden yet was never known :
The maidens danced about it morn and noon,
And learned bards of it their ditties made;
The nimble fairies by the pale-faced moon,
Water'd the root and kissed her pretty shade.
But well-a-day! - the gardener careless grew;
The maids and fairies both were kept away,
And in a drought the caterpillars threw
Themselves upon the bud and every spray.
God shield the stock! If heaven send no supplies,
The fairest blossom of the garden dies.27
1613 : a year before the publication of the Fama. While two responses to the manuscript version emerge - one from ‘I.B’ in Prague, the other from Joannes Combach in Marburg - the Czech genius and Rose-Cross enthusiast Johann Amos Comensky (Comenius) enters the city of Heidelberg. He is just in time to see the Elector of the Palatine Frederick V returning to that city in a triumphal parade with the King of England, Scotland and Ireland's daughter, the learned and beautiful Princess Elizabeth as his bride.
There were great hopes for the Elector Frederick. He was identified with the symbolic animal of the Palatinate : the lion - and was not the lion the beast who defeated the many-headed eagle in the second, apocalyptic Book of Esdras? That fearsome Habsburg eagle was now flapping its feathers in Bohemia, where the new Emperor Matthias was overseeing a growing reversal of Rudolf II's laws of Toleration : laws which had been established to protect the Bohemian Protestants. The Bohemian Protestants looked to Frederick as their future king. Now he was wed to the daughter of the most powerful Protestant monarch in the world, surely their cause was not only just but politically powerful. Those who had seen and remembered Simon Studion's Naometria (completed in 1604) may have recalled the conclusion to that gigantic work : a six-part choral canon which had called for King James of Britain, Frederick of Württemberg, and the Lily of France (in the person of the tolerant King Henri IV of Navarre, now dead) to rally behind the banner of the Rose. In spite of signs of a growing political crisis in central Europe, great men in England, Scotland and Germany saw the union of Frederick and Elizabeth as one full of extraordinary promise : a great expansion of neo-Elizabethan culture, a new beginning for the whole world : a time of toleration, wisdom, knowledge and art : an age of gold.
During the previous year (1612) the Paracelsian doctor and alchemist Michael Maier of Rostock (1568-1622), formerly physician to the Emperor Rudolf II, had been in England. Soon he was to work for both Moritz von Hessen and for Augustus von Anhalt. He would also become, along with England's very own Paracelsian Hermetist Dr. Robert Fludd, the most determined supporter of the Rosicrucian cause. While in Britain, (where he met James I's physician Sir Wiliam Paddy and very probably the aforementioned Fludd), Maier sent a curious Christmas card to James I. The card, on parchment three feet by two, consisted of a huge rose divided into eight petals : a rose formed of various pious and optimistic Latin phrases whose dominant message offered “Greetings to James, for a long time King of Great Britain. By your true protection may the rose be joyful.”
The Fama's strong bias towards medicine may well have attracted Maier to the Fraternity - had he seen it at this stage. (Maier was in Prague at the time of I.B's early response from that city). We certainly cannot be sure as to what significance the word “rose”28 had for him in this context, any more than that “rose” of Simon Studion behind which enlightened princes were invited to gather round in 1604 (the year of Christian Rosenkreuz's exhumation, according to the Confessio Fraternitatis). Holding back the supposition that the Rose referred to the Fraternity of the Rose-Cross, let us first consider more pertinent avenues, principally in the realm of alchemy, that art so dear to the hearts of Fludd, Maier and Maier's patrons.
The rose had undoubted symbolic, alchemical associations with, for example, the alchemical Pleroma and with Christ; with the womb of the Virgin (wherein the Christ-Lapis=Stone is born) and above all with the lapis philosophorum, the philosopher's Stone itself29. Furthermore, there is the red-and-white rose, the “golden flower” of alchemy and birthplace of the filius philosophorum - the regenerated human-being - which appears in the English alchemical Ripley Scrowle of 158830. The “rose-garden of the philosophers” is one of the favourite images of alchemy, with a many-layered matrix of appropriate meanings. The Rose might have indicated an eloquent and simple password for those seeking the Stone - at whatever level (for the Stone is polyvalent) : including the Stone of political and religious unity.
In the Rosarium philosophorum (1550), well-known to Maier and to most alchemists of the time, the lapis says : “Protect me and I will protect you. Give me my due that I may help you.” This could make sense as a meaningful symbol for political and spiritual co-operation. Meanwhile, close inspection of the unique Christmas card which Maier sent to James I reveals at the Rose's centre a point in a circle. Not only does this bring to mind the heavenly rose at the heart of Dante's Paradiso (=Garden)31 but it also symbolises the fountain at the centre of the Rose-garden : the unifying spiritual heart from which all Good flows : the analogue for the spiritual stone - the lost stone of unity, lost when the Reformation split Europe into religious pieces. (The symbolism of the point in the circle also pertains to the ideal of the Third Degree Master Mason in early 18th century Freemasonry). It would then I think seem reasonable to take the Rose as representing a gathering-point or shorthand for the deepest political and spiritual endeavours of the time. A simple question such as : “Are you for or against the Rose?” would immediately elicit knowledge of the correspondent's political and spiritual proclivity.
Sure enough, history suggests something of this nature was indeed being assiduously sought by powerful and not-so-powerful people in Germany and Great Britain32. Ludwig and Christian of Anhalt (the politically active elder brothers of Augustus) were already planning a new union of Protestant Princes to centre around Frederick and his English wife Elizabeth, whose parentage seemed to suggest British support for their schemes. Comenius, who had come from Bohemia (where Protestants put hope in Frederick's legitimate candidacy for the Bohemian crown) to Heidelberg for his studies, must have gazed in wonder at the great celebrations in Heidelberg, as the bells rang out across the Neckar to welcome the English Rose, Elizabeth33.
Meanwhile, word was getting about (in highly select circles) of a secret Fraternity of the Rose-Cross. The Rose and the Cross - could Johann Valentin Andreae ever have dreamed that his family coat-of-arms - the S. Andrew's cross with four roses : might suddenly gain such powerful meaning to those steeped in symbolism, in a world where politics was frequently expressed in symbolic references? We know that Augustus von Anhalt had seen a copy of the Fama and wanted to know more. Did he speak about it with his brother Ludwig (based a few miles away at Köthen), friend of Frederick of the Palatinate, a man with whom he shared ‘literary interests’?
The publication of the Fama Fraternitatis represents not only the “greatest publicity-stunt of all time”, sparking off a movement which persists to this day, but it also provided Europe with its first multinational conspiracy story. Indeed, every occult conspiracy story since owes its basic shape to the excitement generated by the prospect of a secret, underground body of initiates pledged to change the world by invisible means, privy to all knowledge, advanced science and vast wealth. Whether or not readers thought such a prospect dangerous or as something wonderful to be welcomed with open arms depended very much on whether that person was in fundamental sympathy with the aims of the Brotherhood. Since the Confessio Fraternitatis (published as a follow-up in 1615) made it clear that the Brotherhood stood against the Papacy, response to the Brotherhood was likely to be split according to religious affiliation. Furthermore, it did not take long before the plea for universally shared knowledge and the announcement of enlightenment began to appear as an attempt to subvert the established order of government, education and religion. It was - but not in the way its enemies thought.
From 1614 until the mid-1620s when the Thirty Years War began to take the steam out of the furore, Europe was split between those in favour of the Rosicrucian movement, and who wished to join its ranks, and those who were against it. Wiser commentators stayed on the fence, a few aware of the method behind the apparent madness of the Rosicrucian self-publicity : to stir up debate on fundamental issues regarding the nature and orientation of religion and science. One thing was for sure, whoever had published the Fama had taken any control the Tübingen circle might have had over its dissemination right out of their hands. As a published work the Fama began to look very different indeed from a select manuscript submitted for private consideration and intimate response. This no longer looked like an enquiry into the minds of men of learning; this was a broad, politico-religious manifesto. The authors may well have been shaken by the reaction - although in the first instance one does suspect a mite of ribald laughter at the sight of people looking for an invisible fraternity while remaining completely blind to that fraternity which could be realised all about them. The Philosopher's Stone was, according to the alchemists, everywhere to be found but nowhere seen. Andreae and others pondered upon the words of John's Gospel (I.10-11) : He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own received him not. The world, Besold said, is a sect.
Initial response to the Fama came in the form of a bewildering number of books and pamphlets which flew back and forth across northern and central Europe. Many wished to join; some defended the movement, some even said they were members of the Brotherhood -or knew somebody who was. Others virulently opposed the Brotherhood, accusing it of heresy and worse crimes. Some writers wrote defending the Brotherhood one day while repudiating it the next. The Brotherhood was sought everywhere, but found nowhere. Surely, some surmised, the Brotherhood must be invisible! The Fama had fallen like a catalyst into the religious and intellectual bosom of Europe, winnowing out a vast array of pros and contras.
In Tübingen: Wilhelm Schickhard, Wilhelm Bidenbach, Thomas Lanz, Abraham Hölzl, Samuel Hafenreffer - all pro. Caspar Bücher, Theodor Thummius34, Lucas Osiander35 -against. In Darmstadt: Theophilus Schweighardt (real name, Daniel Mögling36) and Heinrich Nollius37 - both for the Brotherhood. In Frankfurt : Johann Bringer and Lucas Jennis - both printers and both pro. In Marburg: Rudolph Goclenius, Georg Zimmerman, Raphael Eglin38, Johann Hartmann, Joannes Combach and Philipp Homagius39 - all in favour. In Ulm: opposition from Zimbertus Wehe, Johann Hebenstreit and Conrad Dieterich. In favour: Johann Faulhaber, a brilliant mathematician40. In Augsburg, carrying a torch for the Brotherhood were Carl Widemann, David Ehinger and from 1617 Adam Haslmayr, lately returned from sea.
In Coburg lived one of the most active and virulently anti-Rosicrucian writers: Andreas Libavius41. Libavius was a famous ‘chymist’ who, while approving Paracelsus' introduction of chemistry into medicine, absolutely despised the magical interest in Paracelsus and stood as a staunch defender of traditional Galenic and Aristotelian medicine. In fact Libavius was against the whole gamut of Renaissance occult philosophy : John Dee, Magia, Cabala, Hermes Trismegistus, Agrippa, Trithemius - anyone of a gnostic tinge. He was also deeply suspicious of the politics of the manifestos, linking their hopes to extravagant plans for a ‘Paracelsist Lion’. Following the defeat of Frederick V at the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620 (after the fateful monarch had acceded to the Bohemian Protestants' wish that he take the throne of Bohemia) the ‘Rosicrucians’ were even more strongly attacked as political renegades, utopian subversives and spiritual terrorists in a series of vicious pro-Habsburg pamphlets.
Another regular contributor to the anti-Rosicrucian pamphlet war was Friedrich Grick, a private tutor from Altdorf near Nuremberg who also wrote under the pseudonyms Irenaeus Agnostus (Irenaeus being of course the chief patristic anti-Gnostic theologian), Menapius and other fanciful names. Grick seems to have been obsessed by the Rosicrucians and one suspects that his perpetual forays into print, approving of this and disapproving of that, evinced some conflict in his own mind; he really could not let the matter drop. Like so many others at the time, he was hooked. He may also have been enduring an identity-crisis. In Tintinabulum Sophorum (Nuremberg, 1619) he talks of “our” Fama and “our” brotherhood. Indeed, he blames the Brotherhood for trickery and then tells his readers that Christian love is the gold of their alchemy. He seems rather confused and admits as much himself in a reply to one Justus Cornelius who had written to him - he was now setting himself up as an expert on the subject - (not difficult to do when the ‘real’ Rosicrucians refused to stand up) :
The first author of the Fama and Confessio R.C. is a great man and wishes particularly to remain a while longer concealed. He desired, however, only to learn the opinions of people and of these he experienced many kinds. …I originally took [him] for a mad or capricious innovator; for this reason I set myself against him and wrote the Fortalitum Scientiae but when my first writing saw the light I learned that I had written a tragedy with jesting words and, at least with the curious, had provoked judgement and condemnation.
Grick devoted his future works to rebutting those who used the Rosicrucian works for their own ends; he was embarrassed.
Meanwhile, Leipzig gave a good showing of pro-Rosicrucian works: Kerner, Schwanbach; Paul Nagel42 (Augustus von Anhalt's astrologer) and Paul Felgenhauer43. Erfurt's Johann Weber was against. Herrn Isaias Stiefel and Meth from Langensalzach were pro. Dresden's Matthias Höe was in favour, while Johann Francus of Bautzen had a foot in both camps.
The case of the gnostic Jacob Böhme of Görlitz, Upper Lusatia, is an interesting one. Even today some Rosicrucian enthusiasts count Böhme the German Theosopher as one of the Brotherhood since he had absorbed so much of the mysticism and Paracelsian terminology for which the manifestos appeared to demonstrate such approval, and clearly Böhme was an illuminated man. Böhme read the manifestos and thought them interesting but mad. His devoted follower Balthasar Walter, on the other hand, admired both the Rosicrucians and the messianic-type mystagogue Steifel. Böhme wrote against Steifel (the latter had used Böhmist theosophy), in response to which the astrologer Nagel and his friends moved to suppress Böhme's work, since they admired Stiefel so much. Nagel claimed he knew a nobleman who was a Rosicrucian (he might have been thinking of his patron Augustus von Anhalt) and himself went to great lengths to find the Brotherhood but, as for everyone else, the search proved vain. The mist thickened into fog, the fog into darkness. The less hard fact was forthcoming, the deeper and more fantastic the speculations became. One man appeared, Philip Ziegler by name, who claimed to be the King of the Rosicrucians, declaring that John Dee was one of their Fraternity. Confusion reigned. Recriminations flew thick and fast. Madness was in the air, and Andreae sighed.
Joachim Morsius, a very gifted scholar who had studied at Rostock and Cambridge, wrote to the Brotherhood (care of the printer), received no reply and then wrote a work defending their secrecy (Theosophi Eximii, Frankfurt 1619). He was friendly with Balthasar Walter (a Paracelsian alchemist) who informed Morsius that his spiritual master Böhme knew all about the true Rosicrucian doctrines. Böhme's reply to Morsius' enquiry into the Rosicrucian Reformation merely informed him of the need for the true reformation in Christ. Morsius then went to Stockholm to talk to the Swedish pansophist Johann Buraeus who was himself fascinated by the Fraternity of the Rose-Cross, but never seems to have found the satisfaction he craved. Morsius even met Andreae in Calw in 1629. Andreae did not, it seems, disillusion him in his quest. Morsius comes over as something of a romantic figure, belonging perhaps to a later time when poets throughout the continent would again pack satchels and head off in search of the Absolute.
The list goes on : Daniel Sennert of Wittenberg, Galenist and Aristotelian: against. Alexander Rost of Rostock, prolific anti-Rosicrucian: against. Joannes Arndt and Melchior Breler44 in Lüneburg: in favour. Wenceslas Budowez, Comenius (initially), ‘I.B.’ - all in Prague - all in favour. Ratke in Köthen : pro. Christoph Bismark and Joachim Krusicke of Halle : pro. In Schleswig Holstein: Nicolas Tetting, Banier, the poetess Anne Hojers: all in favour. David Fabricius, also in Holstein: against. In Hamburg: Georg Froben: pro; Nicholaus Hunnius and Muller: anti. In Oppenheim in the Palatinate the publisher Theodor De Bry (publisher of Robert Fludd's Utriusque Cosmi Historia (1617) and other massive Hermetic works): pro. In Danzig, Corvinus: against, while Hermann Rathmann and Martin Ruarius were in favour.
The frequent vagueness of the manifestos concerning details of the Brotherhood's beliefs enabled champions and opponents to paint the non-existent Order in whatever colours they fancied. For Julius Sperber, based in Danzig and a convinced apocalyptist attending on the New Age as fervently as Simeon in the Temple waited upon Jesus, Christian Rosenkreuz was the inheritor of the ancient secret doctrine stemming from Adam and which then passed through Noah, the Patriarchs, Zoroaster, the Chaldeans, the Egyptians, the Persians, the Jewish Qabalah, and then in a secret wisdom tradition begun by Jesus and reserved to the few Christians who could ‘take it’ - (this man seems to have had a very penetrating insight into the gnostic tradition) - it was passed on to Cornelius Agrippa, Johann Reuchlin (the great Christian Qabalist), Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola and Aegidius Guttmann (1490-1584), spiritual alchemist, esotericist and author of Offenbärung gottlicher Majestät (Revelation of the Divine Majesty). In Sperber's Echo der von Gott höcherleuchteten Fraternitet (Echo of the God-illuminated Fraternity. Danzig, 1615), Sperber saw the Rosicrucian Fraternity as having a claim on this inherited pristine gnosis. Sperber held an official position in Anhalt lands for Ludwig, Augustus' brother, at Köthen. I have seen some of Sperber's handwritten manuscripts held in Köthen castle in the former DDR: commentaries on the Apocalypse and on the work of Simon Studion - and I would say that the visions of the farthest-out psychedelicist would have a hard time ‘out-freaking’ the mind of this extraordinary person. Andreae found this sort of speculation too far-out-of-this-world for his taste, and no doubt began feeling something like regret. But the Rosicrucian furor had a momentum of its own.
In Strasbourg: Johann Friedrich Jungius (who got another pro-Rosicrucian, the printer Zetzner, to print Andreae's Chymische Hochzeit in 1616 - “someone brought the text” he said) was pro, along with Figulus and Walch. Isac Harbrecht45 was against. In Lübeck, Joachim Morsius and Count Michael Maier were pro; Rochel and Dame : against.
Michael Maier, the man who had sent the strange Christmas greeting to James I in 1612, becomes the single figure most identified as a classic ‘Rosicrucian’. He writes in his many works on the subject - always in staunch defence of the Brotherhood - with what appears to be great insider-knowledge. He strives to be acceptable to the Brotherhood but never claims to be on the inside. The inside of the Brotherhood has become for him, as for his correspondent Robert Fludd (1574-1637) in England, an altogether exalted fraternity : a spiritual body, not existing on this plane at all.
It is never clear whether this spiritual body actually represents a body of unearthly initiates guiding humankind with occasional gifts of knowledge and insight or whether Maier has got Andreae's trick, that is, that the ‘Brother’ is a truly Christian person with a spiritual approach to all things, subsisting on angelic guidance and a member of the invisible fraternity of Christ's body : the Church which transcends space and time. It seems to me that Maier held both views at once : that the essence of the Fraternity was spiritual but there was yet some kind of organisation somewhere - or that there ought to be. It is noteworthy in this context that in 1619 Augustus of Anhalt, for whom Maier was working, along with Moritz von Hessen proposed a Societas Hermetica for the explicit study of Hermetic science while Augustus' brother Ludwig founded the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft (Fruit-bringing society) : a select order dedicated to the cultural renewal of Germany in the same year (Andreae was a member). Maier may also have known of Andreae's ideological centrality to the original movement. Maier's Themis Aurea (Frankfurt, 1618) not only gives the rules of the Fraternity (extrapolations from the Fama & Confessio) but also offers clues as to where it could be found :
We cannot set down the places where they meet, nor the time. I have sometimes observed Olympick Houses not far from a river, and known a city which we think is called S. Spiritus - I mean Helicon or Parnassus, in which Pegasus opened a spring of overflowing water wherein Diana washed herself, to whom Venus was handmaid and Saturn gentleman usher. This will sufficiently instruct an intelligent reader, but more confound the ignorant.
Here Maier clearly sees himself as one of the intelligent as distinct from the (already) confounded ignorant. Maier was brilliant at linking up Greek and Egyptian mythology into a complex alchemical system, regarding the ancient myths as allegories for alchemical processes. A dedicated reader might well check up with his beautifully produced collection of alchemical emblems46 where he or she would find in Emblem XII a delightful engraving, almost certainly by Matthieu Merian (De Bry's son-in-law), of a figure with a scythe (Saturn) flying above a mountain whilst vomiting out a large indigestible rock or (rejected) stone. Below the mountain is a little chapel with a cross on it, built into the side of an escarpment (into Nature?) whose steps lead down to a stream which flows about the mountain (Helicon). Behind the mountain is a river with a graceful city built on the opposite banks. Venus is present in the lush vegetation which surrounds the scene. The theme of the Emblem is written in Latin and German and tranlates as follows : “The Stone which Saturn ate for his son Jove, vomited, is then put on Mount Helicon for the remembrance of mankind.” Without pursuing the eloquent symbolism to the ends, we can say that Saturn (as Cronos : Time and Death), famous in the Greek myth for swallowing his children and vomiting them out again, is here placed in the positive rôle (following Plutarch's On the Ei at Delphi) of Saturn as a redemptive figure, that is to say that the swallowing, according to the Neoplatonic scheme, represents the return of the Many to the One. Partaking of the Chemical Stone re-unites the cosmos to its source. This is the fundamental theme of the emblem. Plutarch wrote that :
When the god is changed and distributed into winds, water, earth, stars, plants, and animals, they describe this experience and transformation allegorically by the terms “dismemberment” and “rending”. They apply to him the names Dionysius, Zagreus, Nyctelius, Isodaites, and they construct allegorical myths in which the transformations that have been described are represented as death and destruction followed by restoration to life and rebirth.
Plutarch (AD 46-120) was a priest at the centre of the Greek Mysteries at Delphi, and Delphi lies between the great mountains of Parnassus in the west and Helicon in the east47. The German humanist Conrad Celtes took the idea of Pegasus the winged horse producing a fountain on Helicon (when brushing the mountain with his hooves) as the theme for a woodcut made in 1507 after learning of the ‘pagan trinities’ of Neoplatonic interpretation in Italy. Pegasus clearly stands as an image for the Holy Spirit.
Furthermore, Andreae was also more than familiar with the Christian interpretation of classical mythology. It had become both customary and somewhat prosaic in sixteenth century Germany simply to equate Greek gods and goddesses with respectable Christian figures viz : Jupiter=God the Father; Apollo=Christ; Minerva=Mary; Hermes=S. John the Baptist; Pegasus=the dove of the Holy Spirit. Andreae's Chymical Wedding is peppered with such associations. Note for example the copper kettle upon the tripodic sepulchre in the vault of Venus on Day Five of the Chemical Wedding. In the kettle is a tree which drops its fruit into the kettle and then into three smaller golden kettles from which the lustrous liquid overflows. Christian Rosenkreuz is informed that when the tree is all melted, its fruit will produce a King. This triadic arrangement is almost certainly a reference to the three Neoplatonic Graces who in their outgoing, receiving and return, embody the dynamic Venus. Whoso partakes of the melted tree which has flowed through the three golden kettles (the Graces) will be “a King”, that is : the philosophical Child whose mother is Venus, that is: Love. Where there is active Love, there is the Fraternity : the children of Love.
Andreae's theatrical romance TURBO, published (like the Chymische Hochzeit) in 1616, declares its mythical source on the title page (on which is an engraving of a tree weighed down heavily with fruit). The book derives this time not from Lazarus Zetzner but from HELICONE juxta parnassum : Helicon near Parnassus (Parnassus being the mountain of the poets) - and that is of course the same artistic source as the Fama Fraternitatis. It would seem that Maier was at least to a degree ‘in on the gag’. It should also be stated that acquaintance with this kind of rich initiatic symbolism, whose aim can best be described as gnosis, does in fact produce an invisible fraternity among those who have glimpsed the mysteries. In this sense a secret Fraternity does exist - and anyone can enter in who sees and siezes the point. This was certainly the point-of-view of Andreae and Besold. The question, as always in Hermetic matters, is one of perception.
In 1621 - a late date in the history of the Rosicrucian furore - one of the rare Catholic commentators, Philip Geiger, weighed in with his Counter-Reformation inspired Warnung für der Rosenkreutzer (Warning against the Rosicrucians) after Frederick and Elizabeth (the ‘Winter King and Queen of Bohemia’) had been defeated and exiled to the Hague while their beautiful capital of Heidelberg was being sacked by the Catholic army of the Duke of Bavaria. It was being widely touted by Catholic opponents that Frederick had used witchcraft in (what they saw as) his machinations against the Catholicity of the Holy Roman Empire. The Rosicrucians became objects of a witch-scare as part of a massive pro-Habsburg propaganda campaign. In France the conspiracy-angle really took off. According to Gabriel Naudé's Instruction a la France sur la verité de l'histoire des Frères de la Rose-Croix (Paris. 1623), placards appeared in the capital announcing that the Invisible Brothers were about to put in an appearance :
We, being deputies of the principle 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.
Naudé's view was that ‘their’ mission was altogether more sinister. Another work published in that year of 1623 was more specific : Horrible Pacts made between the Devil and the Pretended Invisible Ones. The publication of this nonsense was clearly intended, and seems to have succeeded, in creating a witch scare. This was no joke. The burning of witches was a regular occurrence during this period, and the justice available for such cases was invariably a mass of prejudice. According to the latter work - a kind of prototype for 300 years of Satan-scares - 36 Invisibles were dispersed about the world in groups of six. The meeting to decide to send their ‘reps’ to Paris had occurred, it says, in Lyons the previous June, and was followed by a Grand Sabbath at which a demon appeared in great lustre. His appearance then made the adepts imitate the accusations made against the Templars i.e : that they prostrated themselves before the evil-one and swore to abjure Christianity in all its aspects. For so selling their souls they obtained the power to travel with full pockets to whereso'er they wished and were granted the eloquence to attract dupes for the Devil. In a perversion of the Fama's rules, it says that they could not be recognised because they were attired as ordinary men.
Another book from the same year, La doctrine curieuse des beaux ésprits de ce temps (Paris, 1623) by the French Jesuit François Garasse, informs its readers that the Rosicrucians are a secret German sect run by their secretary, one Michael Maier. Their learning comes from the east - therefore it is heathenish - and in spite of appearances they are wicked, subversive sorcerers of universal danger who should be put to ignominious death on the gallows or wheel if captured. All this happened as Catholic armies poured into northern Germany : a progress of rapine and destruction characterised by a multiplication of witch-trials. It was all so much easier to murder your neighbour if you could pin on him or her an appropriate label : witch, sorcerer, heretic…Rosicrucian.
Naudé in his Instruction to victim-France does not go as far as Garasse. He says that the placards were put up to cause a bit of excitement by “some people”. Furthermore, his position against the Rosicrucians is compromised since he favours much of the philosophy with which they are associated. He gives a fascinating list of the kind of authors approved by the Brotherhood. They include John Dee, Trithemius,48 Francesco Giorgi,49 the Hermetic Pymander (translated by François de Candale), Pontus de Tyard's Musical Theories (occult and Neoplatonic, and very influential), Giordano Bruno (and his book On the shadows of ideas. Paris, 1582), Ramon Lull (Alchemy), and a commentary on Magic by Paracelsus. Naudé cannot really say that these books are in themselves bad - 'tis the use they are put to - and that use is pernicious. The Rosicrucians must be charlatans, telling fables and distorting the truth. Interestingly he lumps their fancies in with Thomas More's Utopia and with Rabelais' Abbey of Thelema : a mythic establishment which will not gain concrete form for just under 300 years - when Aleister Crowley will found an ‘Abbey’ of this name in Sicily, abandoned in a flurry of press-led Satan-scares not entirely unrelated (from the psychological perspective) to the witch-scares of the 1620s.
Naudé must have felt conscious of having somewhat confused the issue by throwing in some favourite authors into the pot of paranoia brewing in Europe, for in 1625 he published an Apology for Great men suspected of Magic. In this work he maintains that innocent people are being attacked because the proper distinctions between types of magic are not observed. There are, he says, four kinds of magic : divine magic, Theurgy (freeing the soul from the body), Goetia (witchcraft), and natural magic, which is good science. Only Goetia is wicked. He suggests that people often become suspect for the wrong reasons : mathematical diagrams, because of their incomprehensible nature to the uneducated, frequently draw suspicion. This is not right, says Naudé. He wishes people could see John Dee's book on Friar Roger Bacon, then they would know that Bacon did not conjure demons. Try witches by all means, says Naudé - if, that is, you are sure that they are not religious magi or men of learning. The good magi according to Naudé are Zoroaster, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Ramon Lull, Paracelsus, Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Pico della Mirandola, and John Dee. It must have taken a certain amount of courage to publish the second book during the collective hysteria of the 1620s.
A kind of picture-magazine called The Miseries and the evils of the War was published in 1633 in Paris. It is a bit like the old LIFE magazine only instead of photographs there are a series of engravings made by a man called Israel for his friend Jacques Callot. The pictures come from the distant war. We see women being chased out of houses at the ends of halberds, the raising of armies, multiple violation of women, merciless hand-to-hand combat, men being suspended over fires and slow-roasted while their comrades cut throats and steal; regiments blasted by cannon-fire, the burning of churches, the looting of whole towns; whole armies watching burnings at the stake; men and women publicly broken on wheels erected in market-places while priests with crucifixes beg for recantation; row upon row of veterans with one leg, or walking with sticks to support wooden stumps while others pull themselves about on little sleds, limbless; beggars and starving peasants; men tearing the hearts out of victims and showing off severed heads to their fellow Christians; men hung from trees, young girls left in the mud as mothers and fathers weep; small bands of renegades and mercenaries out for anything they can find; public torture : men trussed up like turkeys and hung by the wrists from great gibbets built in town-squares, a great tree with over thirty captured enemies suspended from its branches, hung until their torsos fall from their necks; mass executions by firing-squad. This was the Thirty Years War - as real and cold and weird as any passage from the Apocalypse. And the verdict of the picture captions : “see how the guilty rebels pay for their treason!”
How did the authors of the Rosicrucian Manifestos react to this decade and more of mystery and madness - following the publication of the Fama in 1614? We shall never know what Tobias Hess thought of the furor because he died in Tübingen in the same year as Wessel published the Fama, much missed by his close friends Andreae, Joannes Stoffel, Wilhelm Bidembach and the lawyer Thomas Lanz, who wrote of Hess on 27 November of that year :
My Hippocrates has died, my Machaon, HESS, whose abilities made him a God to the sick. Sorrow protests here : “either he should not have been born, or he should not have passed away so soon.” But reason said : “Hess was a peer to Job, unless he has born more crosses than he”. But since this worn out world treads down on virtue and rewards those without merit instead of the meritorious, God has called this man of merit and now he is a citizen of Mount Olympus and he is full of joy, he, HESS, who before has been so unhappy.
For Christoph Besold the furor merely confirmed what he had always suspected about the stupidity and waywardness of humankind : curiosity satisfies, the truth can ‘go by the board’. In 1634 he would convert to Catholicism : “A long-time wanderer got snatched away by the wind” is how Andreae described the occurrence in his Autobiography. Andreae reckoned Besold's knowledge was too vast for his move to Rome to carry much conviction. Andreae regarded the move as spiritual death. What seems most likely is that Besold's tired mind was simply sick to death of controversy. The on-going atrocities of the war must have made him see again that fighting over religious affiliation was utterly pointless. It seems his spiritual homeland was, in a sense (like the frustrated Victorian romantics who followed Cardinal Newman to Rome) in the (so-called) undivided Church of the Middle Ages. When his encyclopaedic Orbis Novis Thesaurus was published after the war he was content to use Libavius' entry to sum up the Rosicrucians : “Chiliasts, Prophets, reformers, Paracelsians, Paradise and Rose-garden dreamers…” In Besold's copy of the Fama (now in the university library of Salzburg) he wrote : “Autorum suspicor J.V.A.” There was no suspicion about it; he knew perfectly well of Andreae's contribution - but with the insanity of the war raging, it was wise to be discrete.
Besold's view of the world seems to be well embodied in the extract from Boccalini's News from Parnassus which was printed with the Fama in 1614. It is highly likely that Besold was the translator. The inclusion of the text ought to have alerted readers to the true nature of the manifesto : a ludibrium (as Andreae called it) - a dramatic joke with a serious intent. The “Reformation of the whole wide world” is presented in the Boccalini extract as universally desirable but practically impossible. In it we have the picture of Apollo holding court on Parnassus (remember Helicon juxta Parnassus as the source of Andreae's Turbo in 1616) where Pico della Mirandola is complaining that the noise of the reformers is preventing him from thinking! The news of the world heard on Parnassus is so bad - people are committing suicide rather than endure it any longer - that Apollo calls as many wise people as possible to debate how to reform the world. The big guns arrive : Socrates, Solon - all have their say. One suggests that the problem is that people lie, therefore it would be a good idea to put a window in their chests so you could see what their heart was thinking. Another objects that this would make social intercourse a matter of frustration. Another suggests that the problem is greed and money - therefore why not get rid of gold altogether and let everybody have the same? This is in turn rejected as producing social sterility, sameness, tedium and a loss of value. And so the arguments rage. Nobody can agree on the ideal solution to the ills of the world. Eventually, Apollo sighs at the terminal wisdom of the world and suggests announcing to the expectant crowds at the foot of the mountain - who are anxiously attending the court's deliberation - that the prices of vegetables are to be lowered. The result : widespread rejoicing!50 It should not be difficult to imagine how a man who saw the humour of this would regard the Rosicrucian furor.
And Andreae, what of him? In April 1614 he married the niece of Bishop Erasmus Grüninger (Besold became godfather to his three children, along with Abraham Hölzl and Wilhelm Wense51) and settled into a tireless Christian ministry in Vaihingen, not far from Tübingen. What with the death of Hess and these new assumptions of responsibility, Andreae's imaginative mind was doubtless steadied to some extent. However, that mind had already been moving towards a more serious approach to the problems of Germany before the Fama was published. He was under the eye of his father-in-law. Furthermore, Andreae was attacked by members of the university as a dreamer with dangerous views, as a friend of the Paracelsian Hess, as a social revolutionary, suspected heretic, secret magician. At some stage he would have to justify himself and make it clear to all what it was that he stood for. His first task was to clear his table of unpublished writings so that he could devote himself to his main work of presenting unambiguously his own conception of the ideal fraternity.
Andreae was twenty-eight years old when he began the editing and re-writing process, and his work had attained a new maturity. It would be easy for him to disown his older work to some extent as the peregrinations of a young mind. With regard to the Fama, that task would be even easier since the furor demonstrated the need not only for himself, but for German religious culture in general to ‘grow up’. In his Autobiography52 Andreae wrote that he had devoted the early months of 1610 to a number of writings which were later brought to the light of day by the agency of other people. It is difficult to find any candidates for these works other than the Fama Fraternitatis and a reworking of the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz. Perhaps it was Andreae or one of his associates who brought the Chymical Wedding to Jungius, Lazarus Zetzner's reader in Strasbourg. After the publication of the Confessio Fraternitatis in 1615 - the second ‘manifesto’ almost certainly conceived and directed by Tobias Hess (but not intended for publication) - it might have struck Andreae that it would be interesting for someone to consider his youthful work written (he notes in his Autobiography) in 1605. The Chymische Hochzeit would have to appear to all but the dullest dolt as a work of fiction, he doubtless thought. Thus people might get the idea that the Fama should also be regarded as a specialist type of literature. It could be that Andreae was trying to save the day before the Rosicrucian business got completely out of hand. Alas the Chymical Wedding was taken as yet another hieratic pronouncement from the mysterious Brotherhood.
The Chymical Wedding was published in 1616 along with two other works which should have had the effect of neutralising the absurd notion that the weird Brotherhood of Christian Rosenkreuz actually existed, as well as guiding enthusiasts of the Fama into the direction in which Andreae wished them to go. One gets the feeling that for the first two or three years after the publication of the Fama Andreae was more or less pleased to keep the pot boiling so long as his works might influence the outcome of the furor. Andreae's initial pleasure in the sport is revealed in a speech put in the mouth of Alethea (=Truth) in his Christian Mythologies, published in January 1618 :
When it came about, not a long time since, that some on the literary stage were arranging a play scene of certain ingenious parties, I stood aside as one who looks on, having regard to the fashion of the age which seizes with avidity on new-fangled notions. As spectator, it was not without a certain quality of zest that I beheld the battle of the books and marked subsequently an entire change of actors.
Andreae after 1617 would change his tune, and, as we shall see, it is not difficult to see why. Nevertheless, 1616 marked a good beginning for Andreae's life as a published writer. We can see him facing up to his own youthful escapist drives in Turbo.53 Turbo is a beautiful work on a Faust-like theme but with the emphasis on the search for wisdom rather than power. The play tells of how Turbo (a play on the alchemical work the Turba philosophorum) studies, then goes to France where he has a disappointing love-affair. He puts all his hopes into alchemy. The treatment of alchemy is somewhat ambiguous, since it is a scenario for charlatanism, especially where the “accursed gold-making” is concerned : a practice ridiculed in the Fama. Andreae is emphasising the spiritual alchemy which leads to the regenerated human-being. Alchemists are mocked in Turbo as devotees of ‘Beger’, an anagram of that famous Arabic alchemist known to the west as Geber. We are also introduced to Andreae's alter-ego Peregrinus, who reappears in two works, one published in 1618 and the other in 1619.54 In these succeeding works we find the signs of the new Andreae. After years of wandering among the errors of the world - the “land of errors”- Peregrinus arrives in Elysium. His steadfastness in the face of the world's manifold illusions (cf : Bunyan's later Vanity Fair in The Pilgrim's Progress) earns him a new life given by God, the “highest doctor”. Peregrinus changes and becomes a new man. In fact he becomes a Christian. The new attitude is clear in the dialogue between ‘Christianus’ (a kind of retired Peregrinus) and ‘Curiosus’ written for Menippus a year before Civis Christianus in 1617, and which was quoted at length earlier. Now I hope we are beginning to get a glimpse of where Andreae ‘was coming from’ and why he was to become so impatient with the Rosicrucian Furore.
Later in the year (1619) Peregrinus will appear yet again, washed up on the shore of a mysterious island while his heart is being cleaned. The island contains the object of Andreae's utopian masterpiece : the city of Christianopolis55, Andreae's ideal civic society, full of science, medicine, art, idealism, harmony, cosmic consciousness, practical charity - all running under benign angelic care. This latter work must have been in England's Sir Francis Bacon's mind when he published his ideal island civilisation in his New Atlantis (1627), another Utopian, Rosicrucian-inspired classic, and itself an inspirer of enlightened scientific advance throughout the years of the Civil War in Britain and the Thirty Years War in Germany.
Andreae's first batch of printed writings also included the Theca56. This book offers clear evidence that Andreae and Hess participated in the production of the Confessio Fraternitatis57. The Theca retains those passages of the Confessio with reference to the superiority of the Bible and associated pious observations. The words of the Confessio regarding the highest philosophy which “containeth much of Theology and medicine, but little of the wisdom of the law” reappear in the Theca. The Naometrian and chiliastic material is rejected outright, considered by Andreae to be products of the curiosi. The references to the R.C. Brothers are replaced by references to “the good”, the “humble” : those chosen by God as ‘His own’ who can interpret his signature in His Creation and in His Word. Was this work put out to defend Hess's reputation after the calumny thrown at him in his lifetime by academic ‘colleagues’ at Tübingen? The book says that it owes its authorship to Hess “in part from published works” chosen and “in part suggested by the consideration of pious thoughts.” However in 1642 a communication from Andreae to Augustus of Braunschweig contradicts this, saying that it was his own work.
There is still an enigma surrounding the Theca but happily it is of no great importance to us - suffice to say that it shows the literary involvement of Andreae and Hess in the genesis of the Rosicrucian movement, an involvement also supported by Joannes Arndt's close friend Melchior Breler who was physician to Augustus of Braunschweig (Andreae's friend and patron) and who wrote that the Fama was assuredly written by “three eminent men” in order to discover the Philosopher's Stone.
In 1617 Andreae had a shot at hitting two birds with one (philosopher's) stone. Firstly, the incessant communications begging entry into the Fraternity of the Rose-Cross and secondly, Andreae's first explicit printed attempt to define the essence of Christian spirituality. His method was gentle. He invites his readers to join the Fraternitas Christi : the Fraternity of Christ. Entry is free. No magical skills are necessary but it might require some very hard work58. How many would wish to be a candidate for membership in a spiritual Brotherhood whose only aim was sacred love? There was no furore.
In this beautiful little book Andreae contrasts the world, inspired and governed by Satan, with the little number of real Christians. Although they are few, they are yet secure on the perfidious ocean in the little barca of Christ, whose mast is the cross. (Journeying across the oceans to the mystical homeland is another favourite image of Andreae - as is that of discovering wonders in secret vaults). Christianity in its deepest and purest form (invisible to the world) is the great fraternity worth responding to because Christ's love wanted it to be so. Those who enter become “friends of God”, a designation used, incidentally, by the medieval Cathars for those who joined them. Andreae links the life of this Fraternity to the exploration of nature. Looking at the magnificent harmony which men of learning have discerned in the cosmos, what more beautiful task exists, asks Johann Valentin, than to discover the wisdom of the creator in all its creatures? Such study requires effort, disciplined, arduous, prolonged work. Renunciation is required, not lust for power. The true scientist, if he is to be true, needs be a man of God Whose Mind is discernible in all things. In the same year Andreae will personify this attitude in the figure of Christianus. Magic is neither more nor less than the diligent study of all the sciences. The method of magic : hard work and perseverence. Christianus is contrasted to Curiosus, the person who believes that magic is a short-cut to the truth. According to Andreae the search for the Truth requires self-mastery and Christian discipleship : disciple, as in discipline. The greater part of mankind are characterised as the curiosi, forever distracted by the latest new thing, unconsciously gripped by the Satan of the world; trapped among the vanities of the world, they live in chains they cannot feel. The supreme reason is not to listen to human reason but to believe in God who is omnipresent, omniscient, just and merciful and to manifest faith in reality. Only the heart inhabited by God is really aware of the authentic philosophy, the aim of whose study is to regenerate man who, on becoming regenerate, is made son, brother and heir to the wealthiest fraternity imaginable : true cosmic citizenship.
What a contrasting sight greeted Andreae's eyes in October 1617! The potential citizens of the cosmos had other things on their minds. Pamphlets flew from one end of Europe to the other. Theologians bickered, tempers flared, knives were drawn. It was the centenary year of the Reformation - 100 glorious years of ‘freedom’!
Meanwhile, news was arriving from Bohemia. Ferdinand, persecutor of the Styrian Protestants had been advanced to the thrones of Hungary and Bohemia and planned to succeed his elderly cousin Matthias as Holy Roman Emperor. Ferdinand did not give a mark for promises made to the Bohemian Protestants. He was a Counter-Reformer and believed that the sword was more powerful than the pen. Back in Tübingen, self-congratulation was the order of the day. Lutheran orthodoxy was there to stay. What a joy to be in the Truth! What a pleasure to have taken the Right Side! This is how Andreae saw through what he sincerely considered to be a vast hypocritical illusion. He put pen to paper and wrote one of the most brilliant and precise works of practical satire ever written : Menippus59.
The title-page gave its source as Cosmopolis : City of the Cosmos. The book was dedicated to the “sensible and simple” people of the Antipodes, implying that his own hemisphere was ridiculous. Andreae took on the whole German situation. He declared that the true Christian athletes for evangelical purity, Luther and his friends - men who aimed in the first instance to spiritualise and revive the Church had been betrayed by a fantasy, a joke. (The reference to Luther and the popular reformers was a necessary courtesy which, once made, slips out of the main picture. Andreae was no simple Protestant).
The author of Menippus did not pull his punches. As far as he was concerned, to serve Christianity was to serve the Truth : to tell it like it is. Andreae set about pouring some light into the dim cave in which the fools lived, congratulating one another, backbiting each other, jealous of one other, impatient with one another, judging one another, destroying one another. Johann Valentin Andreae believed the pen was mightier than the sword.
Dr Carlos Gilly (to whom we should all be indebted for having discovered and undertood the value of so much ‘new’ Rosicrucian material) has described Menippus as a work coming from the “radical left-wing of the Reformation”, and I believe him to be absolutely right. The 61st discourse, for example, calls in no uncertain terms for full religious tolerance. A person's belief should not be linked to the state he was born in. All religions contain good people. Andreae followed the Spanish radical Giacomo Aconcio in declaring all theological disputes to be unimportant. Heretics do not exist. They are created in the minds of theologians, who seem to have nothing better to do. It is always pious people who are branded as being “impious” or heretical. University professors should listen to the “exemplary martyrdom” of the Anabaptists who are rejected by those who consider themselves educated. Christ will recognise His own, even in the flames.
Andreae denies the right of Christians to make religious judgements. It is clear that there are Christians who surpass even the barbarians in cruelty and torture, frequently applied over matters where no definitive judgement exists, frequently applied in dark places with torture instruments, threats and fire. Those who shout loudest against the Machiavellian character of the aristocracy are themselves the most Machiavellian. Machiavellianism has always existed. All Machiavelli was doing was plainly stating the perennial wheelings and dealings of the ruling classes. If Andreae had wished ‘to make friends and influence people’ he would not have written Menippus. It brought him more hatred and envy than any other work. He was on his way to becoming an intellectual exile. Copies of Menippus were confiscated in Tübingen. Andreae had upset the status quo.
An extremely dangerous attack came in vocal and printed form from Tübingen's professor of oratory, Caspar Bücher. Bücher described Menippus as an “alchemical abortion” : the author biting the hand that had fed him, putting him in the rank of low-level ranters, haters of learning such as Karlstadt : a notorious anti-intellectual and Anapbaptist radical. In disguised form, Bücher hinted that all the world knew who this ‘Menippus’ was. (The book had been published anonymously). Everyone knew that he belonged to the circle of Tobias Hess and that they planned a quixotic ‘reformation of the whole world’. Was Andreae thinking of Bücher and his slander against his late friend Hess when he wrote the following in The Immortality of Hess?
Now, where are you, who force your paper peerage down everyone's throat, while he [Hess] covered his noble birth, you, who pretend to have friends in the highest circles, where he just stayed away from them; you, who beg the great ones to tip you, while he disdained huge salaries, you, who gather the crumbs of the rich, while he did not wish to brush shoulders with the upper-classes. No-one else but our Hess would have been able to resist the temptations of court life, the ambushes of money and the tickles of homages, for he was inaccessible to the invitations of the wealthy, but free and open-handedly reacted to requests of anybody else.
The storm around Menippus led to a swift second edition, but Andreae hesitated to follow it up with his next work, Christian Mythologies.60 He had already lost friends over Menippus and there was his family to think about, and his future as a writer. Andreae thought it out and with the encouragement of genuine friends set to publishing his new collection. Andreae says he must speak out; not to do so would be a criminal sin. If Truth hides herself, even the stones would cry out : “We are not going, by the horror of our predecessor's faults, to sin by default where they sinned by excess”, wrote Andreae. This time he would nail his colours to the mast and put his name to the work. The theme of the book is nothing less than the Truth.
The title-page shows the gates to a temple. On either side of the gates are simple pictures showing all the creative deeds of man, precisely portrayed so that every visitor can learn a basic framework for knowledge without having to wade through an entire library: Theology; Mathematics; Grammar; Politics; History; Mechanics and Agriculture. At the base is a head with three faces. Looking to the left towards the word ‘Truth’ is the face of a youth. In the centre : middle-age; and looking to the right, where is written the ‘Good’ is an aged face. The three ages each bear an inscribed imperative : for youth, discuss it; for middle-age, pursue it; for old age : be wise.
Andreae followed Theodore Zwinger, whom he much admired, in using simple pictures as educational aids (rare at the time), an educational ideal more fully expressed in Andreae's Christianopolis which both Zwinger and Andreae's younger contemporary and correspondent Comenius both believed in. The aim was to make the entrance to the Temple of Science as straightforward a matter as possible, without pomposity and obscurantism, so prevalent and damaging a feature of the university life which he parodies so successfully. Christian Mythologies' collection of allegories and fables ‘takes on’ alchemists, astrological calendar-makers, the Rosicrucian Furore, the class-system, Scepticism, the Universities, Error and the exile of Truth. Andreae also gives an answer to Bücher's savage personal attack on him.
There are two kinds of literati I especially fear; the too-talkatives and crafty exponents of dialectic and rhetoric. Because they try to convince me of what they want and want to blame me for anything they like.
Andreae says that such people are always trying to make people believe that they live in the most learned and God-fearing time of all times, and that anyone who criticises this is guilty of treason against the Fatherland61.
If anyone dares saying that one should not let the unworthy become teachers and doctors, then he is immediately interpreted as trying to undermine the upper-classes. If a man says that the young should learn languages, then he gets the answer that you should emigrate to the Garamants of Libya. Should one criticise that the doctor and tutor title could only be had by paying large sums of money, the answer comes back that society cannot consist of tailors and cobblers alone. If one maintained the view that to address people with very long titles is barbaric, then you would be for all times proclaimed as an adherent of Karlstadt. And if one further objected that the poor people are treated like animals, this would mean refusal to accept your superiors. If a man should preach reciprocal love, he would immediately be called a Rosicrucian. If you would ask for more freedom, the people would fear that all the barriers were coming down. And more : if you don't like to swear, then you're an Anabaptist. If you dislike boozing and feasting, then you're a Papist; if you fight against prostitution, then you will be taken for a fanatic and a dreamer; if you try not to lie, then you must be a disciple of Schwenckfeld; and if lastly you dislike pictures and pomp, then you are certainly taken to be a Calvinist.
Andreae hits the nail on the head, time and time again. Regarding the Rosicrucian Furore, Andreae comes up with an extraordinary and painful inversion of the myth of the discovery of the tomb of Christian Rosenkreuz, linking it directly to his attack on corruption.
Andreae envisions a scene where a number of his contemporaries, following certain indices, discover a secret vault. In an almost sick parody of the Fama the explorers break down a wall, whereafter torches in hand they enter the darkness. Bearing their fiery torches aloft they discover a modest sarcophagus with an inscription upon it : mea tempora - ‘my times’. The men anxiously remove the lid. Inside the sarcophagus lies a cadaver, horribly mutilated, soiled and decaying, the flesh consumed. After great effort they succeed in uncovering a beautiful bronze plaque by the cadaver's rotting head :
I, THE TRUTH DAUGHTER OF GOD ASSASSINATED BY THE DUPLICITY OF SATAN BY THE CORRUPTION OF THE WORLD BY THE FEEBLENESS OF THE FLESH BY THE DESPOTISM OF TYRANNY BY THE INDOLENCE OF THE PRIESTS BY THE MALIGNITY OF POLITICS BY THE SUPERFICIALITY OF HISTORIANS BY THE FOLLY OF THE WISE BY THE STUPIDITY OF THE PEOPLE
I REST HERE WITHIN THE MUD OF THE LIE IN ONE HUNDRED YEARS THE SUN WILL SEE ME AGAIN GREETINGS O POSTERITY!
This is the tomb of Truth. In a startling image, Andreae has succeeded in condensing his entire outlook and the real substance of the Fama as well. As the ‘myth’ continues, once this crushing epitaph is published all who read it react with a mixture of sadness and joy. The past is vilified for not understanding the error. The response of one observer (Bücher?) is to exalt the present, while another erects a magnificent funerary monument to dignify the rediscovered Truth, adding the following words to those on the plaque :
If we had lived in the times of our fathers We would have been their accomplices in the assassination of the Truth
This is Andreae with the gloves off. It is a sign of the perversity of the world that while his Rosenkreuz fantasy is remembered, this devastatingly truthful work lies rotting in obscure libraries. The Truth is assassinated…
As ought to be crystal clear by now, the essential proposition of the Christian Mythologies is the resurrection and the return of the Truth. Truth is not to be found in the world but in the sacra universitas, the holy city. The door to this bastion is inscribed with the following : The Word of God. Andreae is still working for the spiritual reformation. Rejected by the masses, dishonoured by the philosophers and pseudo-savants, unwanted at court and repudiated by the Church, Truth had no choice but to exile herself. In Andreae's dialogue between Philalethes (Lover of Truth) and Alethea (Truth), the former seeks refuge in Eleutheropolis (from the Greek eleutheros=liberty) the City of Liberty, but this country of Liberty is only a Utopia62. Besides, Truth is faithful and still hopes that the darkness extending over Germany is only an eclipse, and that at some time the Light - not the ‘last light of the apocalypse’ - will shine again in all its startling glory. Social inequalities will cease as will all things that stem from the gulf between belief and practice.
With regard to the Rosicrucian Fraternity -what, that again! one can almost hear Andreae saying - the imaginary fraternity which promised so much in its conception, the whole business has gone beyond a joke:
Most indubitably I - Alethea [Truth] - hold nothing in common with this Brotherhood… seeing that at this present the theatre is filled with altercations, with a great clash of opinion, that the fight is carried on by vague hints and malicious conjectures, I have withdrawn myself utterly, that I may not be involved unwisely in so dubious and slippery a concern.
Andreae's succeeding works represent not only an elucidation of what he stood for but also, it seems to me, a kind of expiation for his share of the responsibility in setting off such a cavalcade of bizarreries, for encouraging the “little curiosity brothers”, those who preferred, as he put it, “some artifical or strange way” to the simple, beautiful truth. And yet even in the madness was method, for it is without doubt true that the search for the fictitious Brotherhood has led - and still leads people to a real experience of the spiritual life - and if the Rosicrucian idea was truly inspired, then are we to deny that it was anything less than the spirit of love which inspired him?
Perhaps most touching in the Christian Mythologies are Johann Valentin Andreae's heartfelt words reserved for the two men who, he says, have influenced him the most : Tobias Hess and Christoph Besold. Indeed, the last of the three books is dedicated to Besold :
I owe a little to a lot of people. To very few, I owe a lot. To you, excellent man, I owe everything. Because whatever you initiated in and for me for so many years, now others who were jealous and envious of you, now shout out with trumpets, as if it were their own.
In 1619 Andreae turned his attention for the last time to his most remembered creation, the Fraternity of the Rose-Cross. The furor was getting in the way of the truth; the Fama had ceased to be an enlightening phenomenon. While initially it had made people stop and think - and Andreae was content to watch its progress with a chuckle, now it was a “fantasy”: “the heart and scandal of occultism in our time”. “Would that the remaining chimes and little bells by which this fable was noised abroad be melted down; I mean that I wish their prolific writings would all go up in smoke!”63 It should be noted that he refers to their prolific writings : the dozens of comments on the Fama, the speculations, the claims, the hysteria. He knew what the Fama was all about, and he was content to know some few others now did as well. He did not stand in the way of Joachim Morsius when the latter visited him in Calw in 1629. Ambivalence was central to Andreae's genius.
In Turris Babel64 Andreae finally ‘called time’ on the furore. He reckoned that those who claimed to be Rosicrucians could well be Christian (the implicit but unseen fraternity of humankind) but that the manifold writings referring to his non-existent Brotherhood tended to attract the curiosi who want fancy spectacles without having tried to use their own eyes first. Andreae set his sights clearly, once and for all :
I shall cultivate the religion of Christ; I shall respect the government of Christ; I shall devote myself to Christian knowledge; I shall embrace the Christian way of life; I shall delight myself with the roses of Christianity and shall bear its cross; I shall uphold Christianity's order, and shall submit to its discipline; I shall live as a Christian and I shall die as a Christian. And then it will truly happen - to use their words that IESVS MIHI OMNIA.
The following statement appears in Dame Frances Yates' last book, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age65:
Many suggestions as to the origin of the name [Rosicrucian] have been made, but in moving along the historical line which we are following, the suggestion which seems most likely is that the [Francesco] Giorgi type of Christian Cabala acquired this name when it became associated with Elizabethanism, with the Tudor Rose, with [John] Dee's scientific British imperialism, with a messianic movement for uniting Europeans against the Catholic-Habsburg powers.
The Yates view of a British origin for the Rosicrucian movement, tied in directly to movements around the election of Frederick V of the Palatinate with Christian Rosenkreuz a Germanicised version of Spenser's ‘Red Cross knight’ from the Faerie Queen will simply not hold water. It is almost completely misleading. A full analysis of the life and associations of Johann Valentin Andreae removes the need for such a broad-sweep approach.
Andreae has been too often regarded as a kind of weird, strange or fringe figure, at one with the kind of literature sparked off by the publication of the Fama. Andreae was a most serious ‘player’ in the period, intellectually exiled not for strange occult opinions but because he had the courage to describe things as they were. Was then the man who wrote the Fama a ‘Rosicrucian’? In terms of what that word has come to denote, we had better say that he was not. It would be more correct to think of him as a ‘left-wing’ radical reformer of exceptional wisdom, knowledge, inspired cynicism and practical spiritual experience; he was certainly not a hot-head or automatic rebel. His writings on the social system of Germany in his day are remarkably prescient and advanced. Christian Socialists of the nineteenth century such as F.D. Maurice could claim him as a (superior) predecessor without doing violence to Andreae's real place in history (which of course utterly transcends politico-religious socialism). Furthermore, his scientific views were extremely advanced and aware. In the battle (1623-1633) between the Rosicrucianist and Paracelsian Dr Robert Fludd and the ‘mechanistic philosophy’ of the Jesuit Marin Mersenne (friend and promoter of René Descartes) stimulated by the Rosicrucian Manifestos, it is obvious to this author that Andreae would have sought a harmony between the world as experienced by the senses and the world as conceived in the spirit.
The appalling split between spirit and matter, of which Descartes has been seen as the harbinger, could easily have been avoided if truth had not been buried in sectarian squabbling. (Scientists and philosophers can be sectarians too - a mentality Andreae tried so hard to abolish). It has taken well over 300 years to establish the open-mindedness which could have been, and should have been established as a principle of learning in the seventeenth century. This split between the respective realities of mind and matter lies behind the intuitive suspicion of the modern which has driven people of feeling and intuition into near-despair as the orthodoxy of single-minded, blind and pathetically confident materialism has been thrust ever more desperately upon the world : a vain sense of security which is still held to be the ‘distinctive contribution’ of the West to world culture66.
Was Andreae an occultist? This question is anachronistic for the early seventeenth century. The idea of ‘occultism’ as a separate subject or fringe discipline is a relatively late development. What we would call ‘scientific’ and occult mentalities interwove in this period. One needs only to recall the now generally recognised fact that Sir Isaac Newton spent more time on alchemy than he did on gravitational science to realise that Nature for the men of learning had become an infinitely fascinating vista where all manner of unknown energies operated. Newton was happy simply to illuminate one area of the cosmic picture which indicated an harmonious, mathematically intelligible structure. Andreae would have been delighted to read Newton's Principia. Undoubtedly the greatest praise for mathematics as a discipline in the Renaissance and its aftermath came from highly gnosticised magi such as Pico della Mirandola and John Dee. The gripe of men like Andreae was not against the idea of Magic, (Andreae was a keen and advanced mathematician) but of its perversion in cheap, marketable form as in for example, popular astrology, and claims for all-embracing knowledge systems built on a portion of insight (such as Khunrath's Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae. 1598).
‘Magic’ for Andreae embraced all aspects of knowledge, since it is above all a natural system of thought, resting on the awareness that nature is magical : seen through the right eyes it bears a spiritual quality (“Was Solomon in all his glory arrayed as one of these?”). For Andreae, Magic does not mean Myth. It does not mean woolly-thinking and above all it does not mean escapism. While the image of the stage- ‘magician’ has unfortunately dominated the usage of the word magic in the West (when it is not seen as a ‘black art’), it is clear that the cosmos can be seen as one vast magician's topper, continually bringing forth the unknown and the marvellous. If we limit our emotional and spiritual response to the universe as scientists, it is merely to concentrate on the measuring of new phenomena. Scientists without awe and wonder do not make the best scientists. It is not surprising that our culture is experiencing a reaction to the myopic dogmatism of scientism, that is, science as a belief system. It is, I think, remarkable and regrettable how many second-rate theologians and philosophers have hung onto the hem of dogmatic scientism's garment in the hope of godless miracles.
Was Andreae a Gnostic? Dr. Carlos Gilly put it this way to me in 1989 :
The Rosicrucian Movement was undoubtedly a gnostic movement. However, if any of the authors of the Rosicrucian Manifestos had been asked if he considered himself a Gnostic, he'd have answered that he did not. At that time, the image that people had of Gnostics was practically handed to them by the writings of the opposing side : the one-sided writings of the Fathers of the Church who had fought Gnostics from the first centuries of Christianity. However, within the Rosicrucian Manifestos can be found many elements of traditional Gnosis so that the Manifestos can be seen as a kind of ring in the chain which goes from Valentinian Gnosis, the Gnosis of the 2nd and 3rd centuries after Christ; passing through the Cathars, passing through the alchemists of the Middle Ages, passing through the mysticism of the Middle Ages; the Neoplatonic and Renaissance movement - and, above all, passing through Paracelsus.
Furthermore the gnostic character of the Rosicrucian thought-world was recognised at the time both by their enemies and particularly by the admirers of Jacob Böhme (such as Abraham von Frankenburg and Gottfried Arnold) with whose writings the Rosicrucian works were frequently associated and often read side by side with. There are many elements of Andreae's thought - not counting his early and fecund immersion in the world of alchemy - which are clearly of Hermetic provenance : the discipline of the senses; the refining of the mind in order to receive divine guidance; the suspicion of the material/ego - (divorced from spirit) world as in the grip of Satan; the idea that life is a journey upon a perilous ocean towards a spiritual homeland; the idea of man locked in a prison67; the emphasis on spirit and love over formal beliefs and works; the recognition of the transmundane light existing in all religions; his overwhelming sense of the Dignity of Man and the sorrow at seeing such a potentially divine creature behaving as a monster and, above all, his dramatic sense of the cosmic dimensions of human problems and the realisation that Christ's Kingdom - which for Andreae is a kind of joyful, anarchic, truly free-willed and spiritually-minded collective - is not of this world.
Nevertheless, Andreae's sense of the spiritual does not make him cower away from the fundamental facts of life. He would have us be “citizens of the world and not the foreign wanderer.” This belief represents his fundamental faith in the mystery and magic of life - and the necessity to fully experience life so as to appreciate, when it comes, the divine harmony which, though Andreae believed it to be frequently invisible to us, nonetheless informs the ‘system’ as a whole.
Some Sufis have held the view that Christianity is an esoteric form of Judaism in its widest sense, and that the effort to make it into a formalised Church has obscured the heart of the matter. Andreae might have gone along with the substance of this view but only so long as we do not mean by the word ‘esoteric’ a side-line or specialist concept of the religion. The truth within Christianity was for Andreae as for other ‘radicals’ hidden to the eyes of the worldly : only in this sense might the truth be thought to be esoteric. He certainly saw the truth as exiled from the Church of his day, but his radicalism subsisted only in being faithful to the spirit of truth which has forever been to the mind of man something elusive, non-possessible, ambivalent and paradoxical - always confounding the “wisdom of the world”. At first sight it always looks difficult. The obliqueness of the truth is merely a sign that the eyes of material perception are unfocused and out of kilter with reality. That The Truth will make you free was the Christian message Andreae most wished to be understood and acted upon.