“The history of the world,” wrote the novelist Ishmael Reed, “is the history of warfare between secret societies.”
A fascinating statement, although an unprovable one. If these societies are really secret, how can we know anything about them, much less the influence they have had over history?
And yet there are secret societies, and they occasionally make an appearance on the stage of world events. Among the most famous were the Rosicrucians, an elusive order of adepts that caused a brief but intense furor among the savants of Europe in the early seventeenth century.
That is, if the Rosicrucians ever really existed—a subject that remains a matter of debate. We know next to nothing substantial about them. Much of what we do know comes from two short treatises that began to circulate in manuscript form around 1610 and were published in 1614, in western Germany. They are entitled the Fama Fraternitatis (The Rumor of the Brotherhood) and the Confessio Fraternitatis (The Confession of the Brotherhood). They were anonymously published, and we don’t know who wrote them.
Nevertheless, the two Rosicrucian manifestoes created a myth that has exercised an intense allure among spiritual seekers right up to the present. They tell the story of a man named Christian Rosenkreutz (literally “Rose Cross”), who was born in Germany in 1378. Although of noble birth, Rosenkreutz was poor and was early in life apprenticed to a man named “Brother P.A.L.,” who was determined to visit the Holy Land.
Brother P.A.L. took the young Christian Rosenkreutz with him on his pilgrimage, but died en route in Cyprus, leaving his apprentice to go on without him. Christian Rosenkreutz arrived in Damascus at the age of sixteen, where he learned Arabic and translated an enigmatic text known only as “the Book M.” into “good Latin.” From Damascus he went to Egypt and then on to Fez, in Morocco, where he was initiated into the arts of magic and Kabbalah. As the Fama puts it, “Of these of Fez he often did confess that their Magia was not altogether pure, and also that their Cabala was defiled with their religion; but notwithstanding he knew how to make good use of the same, and found still more better grounds [sic] for his faith, altogether agreeable with the harmony of the world.”1
After two years, C.R. (the Rosicrucian manifestoes often refer to him by his initials) left Fez for Spain, where he attempted to show the learned men something of his knowledge. “But it was to them a laughing matter; and being a new thing unto them, they feared that their great name should be lessened, if they should now again begin to learn and acknowledge their many years errors [sic].” Since “the same song was sung unto him by other nations,” C.R. made his way back to his native Germany, where he assembled a collection of eight adepts, “all bachelors and of vowed virginity,” and formed the Fraternity of the Rose Cross.
Their agreement was this: First, That none of them should profess any other thing than to cure the sick, and that gratis. 2. None of the posterity should be constrained to wear one certain type of habit, but therein to follow the custom of the country. 3. That every year upon the day C. they should meet together in the house S. Spiritus [i.e., of the Holy Spirit] or write the cause of his absence. 4. Every brother should look about for a worthy person, who, after his decease, might succeed him. 5. The word C.R. would be their seal, mark, and character. 6. The Fraternity should remain secret one hundred years.2
The brothers dispersed to pursue their work in other countries. One brother, known only as A., died in “Gallia Narbonensis,” that is, Languedoc. At this point, the Fama says, there was a gap in the transmission: “We must confess that after the death of the said A. none of us had in any manner known anything of brother R.C.” except for some minor details. Even the year of his death and the location of his tomb had been forgotten. But while refurbishing their building (presumably the building S. Spiritus), the brothers opened a wall and discovered a hidden crypt adorned with mystical diagrams and mottoes and containing the remains of C.R.—“a fair and worthy body, whole and unconsumed.” As we learn from the Confessio, Christian Rosenkreutz, born in 1378, had lived to the age of 106, which would mean that he died in 1484. His tomb was rediscovered 120 years after his death, which brings us to 1604—close to the time these tracts were written.
The brothers take this discovery as a sign of a “general reformation both of divine and human things.” The Rosicrucian treatises are firmly Protestant in their convictions. The Confessio states: “We do condemn the East and the West (meaning the Pope and Mahomet) blasphemers against our Lord Jesus Christ, and offer and present with a good will to the head of the Roman Empire our prayers, secrets, and great treasures of gold.”3 The “Roman Empire” is the Holy Roman Empire, the loosely strung confederation of states in Germany and Austria that lay claim to the mantle of the ancient Roman imperium. The Fama is a bit more equivocal about this entity: “In Politia we acknowledge the Roman Empire…for our Christian head; albeit we know what alterations be at hand.”4
The “head of the Roman Empire” must have meant Emperor Rudolf II, who espoused religious tolerance and whose court was a mecca for occultists, Kabbalists, and alchemists. Rudolf died in 1612, between the writing of these treatises (around 1610) and their publication (in 1614). The brothers echo a widespread expectation at the time that the situation would change after Rudolf’s death—which turned out to be true. In 1619, after a seven-year reign by Rudolf’s ineffectual brother Matthias, Ferdinand II became Holy Roman Emperor. Ferdinand proved to be a vehement defender of Catholicism. Indeed, his zeal helped start the Thirty Years’ War, which ravaged Europe between 1620 and 1648.
Rosicrucian Politics
One of the great themes of Western history has been the struggle between sacred and secular power. Since the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century A.D., Western civilization has taken the separation—indeed the adversity—between church and state as a given, something inevitable and possibly desirable. In the Middle Ages this opposition played itself out in the struggle between the popes, who claimed temporal as well as spiritual authority, and the Holy Roman Emperors, who sought to limit the church’s ability to dictate to secular monarchs. One might think that Dante, the greatest of all Catholic poets, might have sided with the papacy in this matter, but he did not. He was a member of the Ghibelline—that is, the imperial—party, and even wrote a treatise, De monarchia (On Monarchy), which argued for the sacred nature of imperial authority.
Four hundred years later, we see the Rosicrucian manifestoes also siding with the secular powers and condemning the pope. It would be hard to draw a direct line between Dante and the Ghibellines on the one hand and the Rosicrucians on the other, but the thrust of their ideas is very much the same. Since the Middle Ages, strong voices in the esoteric currents of the West have urged that the church cannot be trusted with secular (and perhaps even spiritual) authority and that its power must be severely circumscribed. If there is a “secret history” of the West, this issue lies close to the heart of it. Eventually this would lead to the notion of the separation of church and state as embodied in the U.S. Constitution.
In the time of the Rosicrucian manifestoes, the struggle played itself out in the political arena—dramatically and disastrously. The Rosicrucian movement was closely connected with Frederick V, the Elector Palatine (1596–1632).5 The Palatinate was a state in western Germany that was part of the Holy Roman Empire; the title “elector” meant that he was one of several princes entitled to vote in the election of the Holy Roman Emperor (which was not a hereditary office). Like the Rosicrucians of the manifestoes, Frederick was staunchly Protestant and devoted to the occult science of the age. His capital at Heidelberg was adorned with strange but beautiful Hermetic treasures: intricate mechanical figures, gardens designed around allegorical themes, water organs, singing fountains. Married in 1613 to Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of King James I of England, Frederick was also head of the Protestant Union of Princes.
The years 1610 to 1620 were a time of increasing tension in Europe. Catholicism, which had been in retreat from Protestantism for much of the sixteenth century, was in the midst of launching its counteroffensive, known as the Counter-Reformation. And the political mainstay of the Counter-Reformation was the Hapsburg dynasty, which ruled Spain, Austria, and many domains in between, including parts of present-day Italy, France, and the Low Countries. Ferdinand II was a Hapsburg (as were all the Holy Roman Emperors of that period, which helps explain the rather ambiguous acknowledgment of the Holy Roman Empire in the Rosicrucian manifestoes).
In 1617 the Catholic Ferdinand was crowned king of Bohemia (roughly equivalent to the modern-day Czech Republic). He rapidly moved to suppress the Protestant Bohemian Church, which had continued the legacy of the fifteenth-century reformer Jan Hus. Discomfited, the Bohemian nobles offered the crown to the Elector Palatine. He accepted in September 1619, writing in a letter to his uncle, “It is a divine calling which I must not disobey…my only end is to serve God and His Church.”6
Frederick obviously knew that this move would set him against the Hapsburgs. Yet a number of considerations motivated him to make it. One was the urging of many Protestant leaders throughout Europe. Another was the fact that he was counting on his alliances with the Dutch, with German and French Protestants, and with his father-in-law, the king of Great Britain, to support him against the Hapsburgs.
Frederick and Elizabeth went to Prague that autumn and reigned briefly in an ethereal atmosphere reminiscent of the days of Rudolf II. But Frederick’s hold on the Bohemian throne was not to last. The Hapsburgs marshaled their forces against him; the Protestant powers, including Britain, balked at coming to his aid. Frederick’s army met Ferdinand’s at the Battle of the White Mountain on November 8, 1620, and was utterly defeated. This event marks the beginning of the murderous Thirty Years’ War, from which Germany would take a century to recover. The Hapsburgs occupied the Palatinate and devastated it, also destroying the Hermetic treasures of Heidelberg. Frederick and Elizabeth fled and spent the rest of their lives as exiles at The Hague.
What, apart from a similarity of interests, links the Rosicrucian movement with Frederick? Frances Yates, in The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, lists a number of things. In the first place, the Fama and the Confessio were published in the state of Hesse-Cassel, which was near the Palatinate and shared its Protestant and Hermetic allegiances. Other Rosicrucian treatises, some of them written in response to the Fama and the Confessio, were published in Oppenheim, in the Palatinate, as were a number of other Hermetic and alchemical works. The manifestoes also make some oblique allusions to politics. The Confessio, for example, says, “There are yet some Eagles’ Feathers in our way, the which do hinder our purpose.”7 The eagle is a reference to the Hapsburgs, whose symbol was a double eagle. Even more tellingly, treatises on Rosicrucian themes abruptly ceased to appear after 1620—the year of the White Mountain debacle.
The victorious Ferdinand moved swiftly against his enemies. Widespread purges eradicated the Bohemian Church. The Hapsburgs also launched a carefully planned propaganda campaign to discredit both Frederick and the Rosicrucians. Lampoons and satires survive that show him fleeing in humiliation, and a Rosicrucian motto—Sub umbra tuarum alarum, Jehovah, “Under the shadow of thy wings, Jehovah”—was vitriolically parodied by broadsides showing the wings as those of the Hapsburg eagle. In Germany, the forces of the Counter-Reformation also launched vicious and intense witch hunts in an attempt to connect the Hermetic magic of the Rosicrucians with witchcraft, that perennial bogeyman of the early modern era.
The most curious of these propaganda campaigns took place in France. In 1623, placards appeared throughout Paris proclaiming the arrival of the “principal College of the Brothers of the Rose Cross,” who were “making a visible and invisible stay in this city.”8 A pamphlet appearing in the same year bore the title “Horrible Pacts Made between the Devil and the Pretended Invisible Ones.”
These announcements caused a sensation, although, as the reference to the “Invisible Ones” suggests, no member of the Rose Cross Order ever revealed himself in public, in France or anywhere else. Even before the fall of Frederick, no Rosicrucians had ever made their presence known, despite many earnest entreaties. Hence they came to be nicknamed “the Invisibles.”
Reading the Book of Nature
If the Rosicrucian movement was merely trying to advance the fortunes of the Elector Palatine as a bulwark for the Protestant cause, the brothers’ aspirations were futile. But a closer examination of the texts reveals a deeper purpose. Near the beginning of the Fama we read:
The pride and covetousness of the learned is so great, it will not suffer them to agree together; but were they united they might out of all those things which in this our age God doth so richly bestow upon us, collect Librum Naturae [the book of Nature], or a perfect method of all arts: but such is their opposition, that they still keep, and are loth to leave the old course, esteeming Popery, Aristotle, and Galen, yea and that which hath but a mere show of learning, more than the clear and manifested light of truth.9
Whether this passage was written out of mystical illumination or in a flight of fancy, it remains astonishing. These few convoluted lines set out an intellectual program that Western civilization would follow for the next four centuries; indeed we still follow it today. They deride the stale scholasticism of their time—“Popery, Aristotle, and Galen”—and call for a “perfect method” that involves reading the “book of Nature” directly rather than through the clouded lens of antique texts. In essence, this is the foundation of modern science.
This passage becomes even more astounding when we consider that the two names most directly connected with the birth of the scientific method had links to the Rosicrucian movement. One was the English philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon (1561–1626). Bacon decried the metaphysics of his day, which he likened to spiders’ webs—beautiful and intricate, but in the end based on nothing. He called for a more precise method of experimentation so that scientific theories could be based on actual experience rather than on speculation. He preached what he called “the great instauration,” a systematic investigation of nature that would restore to man the connection with (and power over) nature that he had had before the Fall.10 Bacon was intimately connected with Rosicrucian currents. As Frances Yates remarks, “It was out of the Hermetic tradition that Bacon emerged, out of the Magia and Cabala of the Renaissance as it had reached him via the natural magicians.”11
Even more remarkable is the case of the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650). It is he, more than any other thinker except perhaps Bacon, who has been most closely associated with the emergence of the modern scientific worldview. His Discourse on Method could be seen as a book-length extension of the brothers’ injunction to study the Librum Naturae. As Descartes puts it, “As soon as I reached an age which allowed me to emerge from the tutelage of my teachers, I abandoned the study of letters altogether,…resolving to study no other science than that which I could find within myself or the great book of the world.”12 His Discourse sets out a program like Bacon’s, calling for a method that would unify all the sciences by basing them on mathematical principles, particularly the Cartesian coordinate system, which he devised and which still bears his name.
Descartes’ connections with the Rosicrucians are as fascinating as they are mystifying. A young man at the time the manifestoes were published, he went to Germany in 1619 to pursue his goal of learning through “travelling, seeing courts and armies, in mixing with people of different humours and ranks, in gathering a varied experience,”13 but also in search of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood (which, of course, he never found). He thought about joining the Catholic forces ranged against the Elector Palatine, but decided against it and sequestered himself away in a house on the Danube. “Finding no company to distract me, and having, fortunately, no cares or passions to disturb me, I spent the whole day shut up in a room heated by an enclosed stove, where I had complete leisure to meditate on my own thoughts.”14 These thoughts led him to the revolutionary conclusion that mathematics furnished the key to understanding nature.
By an odd coincidence, Descartes returned to Paris in 1623, when the Rosicrucian scare was at its height. Even more bizarrely, he found that his German sojourn had given him the reputation of being a Rosicrucian himself. His way of squelching this rumor was rather unusual. As Adrien Baillet, his seventeenth-century biographer, writes, “He made himself visible to all the world, and particularly to his friends who needed no other argument to convince them that he was not one of the Brotherhood of the Rosicrucians or Invisibles: and he used the same argument of their invisibility to explain to the curious why he had not been able to find any of them in Germany.”15
The Reality of the Brotherhood
All this leads to an overwhelming question: did the Rose Cross Brotherhood exist? Even more than most, this is an area in which we cannot admit negative proof. The lack of hard evidence cannot prove the nonexistence of an order pledged to secrecy. And while the brothers proclaimed in the manifestoes that they would soon bring their order to public awareness, if they existed, given the hostile atmosphere of the times it’s not surprising that they never fulfilled their promise.
On the question of the order’s reality, opinion falls between two extremes. Academic scholars—of whom the late Frances Yates was the most distinguished—tend to discount their existence in any literal sense. They acknowledge that there were Rosicrucian currents—ideas and ideals that were linked to esotericism, including Kabbalah, Hermeticism, and alchemy, but they generally discount the existence of any literal Fraternity of the Rose Cross. On the other hand, modern organizations that call themselves Rosicrucian, laying claim to the brothers’ legacy, tend to treat the story in the Fama and the Confessio as mostly factual. For those in between, it is not easy to tease out the truth. But several points can lead us to some tentative conclusions.
In the first place, nothing in the basic story of Christian Rosenkreutz’s life is inherently implausible. Throughout the Renaissance, there was a rich and thriving trade between Europe and the Levant, and we do not have to stretch our imaginations far to believe that an itinerant seeker could have made his way to Syria and Morocco. In broad outline, Christian Rosenkreutz resembles many of the peripatetic scholar-mages we’ve already encountered in this narrative. Nor do we have to be insanely credulous to believe that such a man might make his way back to Germany and collect a small group of disciples around him.
That much said, much of the Christian Rosenkreutz mythos seems fictitious. In 1616, a short work called The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz was published. An elaborate alchemical tale, it is explicitly allegorical. In this case we do know who its author was: Johann Valentin Andreae, a German cleric and esotericist. The Chemical Wedding is quite close to the manifestoes in spirit, so Andreae would very likely have been connected to the circle that produced the Fama and Confessio. In later years, he would refer to the Rosicrucian myth as a ludibrium—a word often translated as “joke” or “farce,” although it could also mean “entertainment,” quite possibly with a serious purpose. In any case, this suggests that the Rosicrucian manifestoes contain an element of fiction, perhaps a large one.
So there is probably some mixture of fact and imagination in the tale of Christian Rosenkreutz. Certain things, such as the description of the discovery of his tomb, are almost certainly allegorical. Even the name “Christian Rosenkreutz” has the flavor of allegory about it, both esoteric (the rose has long served as a mystical symbol) and programmatic: Luther’s personal coat of arms incorporated a rose and a cross. But the main story may have a core of truth. There were such seekers and adepts in those days, and the manifestoes could well conceal the story of one (or even a composite) of them. The same could be said of the society he founded.
All this aside, there is a deeper dimension to the rumor of the Brotherhood. In his biography of Descartes, Adrien Baillet makes a mysterious remark. Speaking of the Rosicrucians allegedly in France, he writes, “They could not communicate with people, or be communicated with, except by thought joined to the will, that is to say in a manner imperceptible to the senses.”16 The method of joining thought to the will bears a striking resemblance to Descartes’ description of his “meditation.” (What, after all, is meditation of any kind but a joining of thought to will?) Baillet’s statement is one of the earliest known instances of a theme that from this time on becomes increasingly prominent in the Gnostic legacy: the idea of hidden masters who make their presence felt through clairvoyant means.
For some who have investigated these areas, the Rosicrucian manifestoes do not depict a society that exists on the physical level, but figuratively point to a group of individuals who operate at a higher level of consciousness. The twentieth-century esotericist Paul Foster Case observes:
This fraternity is not an organized society like the Freemasons. One may not join it by making application for membership, paying entrance fees and dues, and passing through ceremonies. The Rosicrucian Order is like the old definition of the city of Boston: it is a state of mind. One becomes a Rosicrucian: one does not join the Rosicrucians….
The Order is designated as being invisible by the manifestoes themselves. It does not come in corporate form before the world, because by its very nature it cannot. True Rosicrucians know one another, nevertheless. Their means of recognition cannot be counterfeited nor betrayed, for these tokens are more subtle than the signs and passwords of ordinary secret societies.
Let none suppose that because the Rosicrucian Order is invisible it is composed of discarnate human intelligences. Neither are its members supermen inhabiting a region vaguely designated by the term “higher planes.” The Order is invisible because it has no external organization. It is not composed of invisible beings. Its members are men and women incarnate on earth in physical bodies. They are invisible to ordinary eyes because the minds behind those eyes cannot recognize the marks of a true Rosicrucian.17
This train of thought admittedly leads to unusual conclusions. Could Descartes, whose name has become synonymous with a linear, rationalistic approach to reality, have been inspired by hidden intelligences whose existence rationality could never prove? And could the scientific enterprise have been seeded by levels of consciousness that science itself tends to deny? It would be peculiar if it were so, but history offers many ironies that are just as droll. While skeptics may dismiss these ideas as nonsense, they are worth examining—if only to see how those who pursue esoteric teachings understand themselves.
The Divine Cobbler
As fascinating as it was, the Rosicrucian furor was only a part of the era’s intense preoccupation with Hermeticism, alchemy, and Kabbalah, as well as theology of more conventional forms. One of the most powerful visionaries of the time had nothing to do with the Rosicrucian tracts, which, in fact, he thought were mad.18
Jacob Boehme (or Böhme) was born in 1575 in Görlitz, a town in what is now southeastern Germany.19 Of humble origins, he lacked the physical strength to take up the backbreaking work of agriculture, so he became a cobbler. He led an unremarkable life until one day in 1600, when he found himself gazing on a glint of light reflected from a pewter dish. “In one quarter of an hour I saw and knew more than if I had been many years together at a university,” he would later recount.
It took Boehme twelve years before he was able to formulate some of these insights in writing. His first book, the Aurora, was finished in 1612. He did not intend to publish it, but unfortunately a copy of the manuscript fell into the hands of Gregor Richter, the Lutheran pastor of Görlitz. Denouncing Boehme as a heretic, Richter managed to have a decree enacted that forbade him from writing for five years. Boehme even served time in prison. But in 1618, he started writing again and in the next five years composed the rest of his works, including The Three Principles of the Divine Essence, The Threefold Life of Man, and The Way to Christ. He died in 1624, surviving his nemesis, Richter, by a little more than six months. His followers, many of whom never met him, vested him with such extravagant epithets as “the Divine Cobbler” and Philosophus Teutonicus, “the Teutonic Philosopher.”
What was it that so angered Richter? As Arthur Versluis, a scholar of esoteric movements, suggests, it may have been Boehme’s contempt for mere book learning as a replacement for the living experience of the spirit. Boehme contended, “Man can undertake nothing from the beginning of his youth nor in the whole course of his time in this world that is more profitable than to know himself.” Taking this stance put Boehme against the external authorities like Richter, for whom doctrines and the letter of scripture were the final authority.
For Boehme, this mandate, which echoes the ancient admonition of the Delphic oracle to “know thyself,” extends beyond mere knowledge of the inner landscape. God has, in Boehme’s words, enabled man to “penetrate into the heart of everything, and discern what essence, virtue, and property it has, in creatures, earth, stones, trees, herbs, in all moveable and immoveable things.”20 Although Boehme was not a part of the circle that produced the Rosicrucian tracts, his sentiments often echo theirs.
The most common response to Boehme’s works is that they are extremely difficult. This is partly because even today many of them are available in English only in the seventeenth-century versions of Boehme’s follower John Sparrow. And yet ultimately their difficulty seems to be due to the immensity of the task of compressing Boehme’s mystical insights into the tiny yet cumbrous vehicle of human language.
Thanks to the indisputable power of his vision, Boehme managed to win friends among the learned and influential (one of whom had to pull strings to have Boehme given a Christian burial after his death). A number of them were versed in the esoteric traditions of the day, and Boehme seems to have picked up at least some of the concepts and terms of Kabbalah and alchemy from them. (One disciple, Balthasar Walter, had traveled to the East in search of “Kabbalah, magic, and alchemy,” rather like Christian Rosenkreutz.) 21 But Boehme’s vision remains uniquely his own. It led him to produce a theosophy—an esoteric exploration of how God makes himself known. Unlike conventional theology, which tends to restrict itself to interpretation and reinterpretation of dogmas and doctrines, theosophy is much more audacious. It attempts nothing less than to draw a mystical anatomy of the body of God.22
Boehme’s spiritual vision begins with the wish of the divine to know itself. “Boehme does not hesitate to say that the Absolute does not know itself,” writes the French scholar Pierre Deghaye. “Thus it is to himself that God is revealed as much as to the faithful. The hidden God is the unknown divinity which does not know itself. This divinity aspires to be known not only by the creature but also to itself.”23
The divine wishes to know itself—but if the divine is all-encompassing, what is there for it to know, and what is there for it to be known with? So God must compress himself into something that knows and something that is known—or, viewed from another angle, something that desires and something that is desired. As Boehme puts it in his dark language, “The first property is a desirousness, like the magnet, viz., the compression of the will; the will desireth to be something, and yet it hath nothing of which it may make something to itself; and therefore it bringeth itself into a receivingness of itself, and compresseth itself into a something, and that something is nothing but a magnetical hunger, a harshness.”24
Students of the Kabbalah will recognize echoes of its teaching here, for what Boehme is saying very much resembles the Kabbalistic concept of tzimtzum, the “withdrawal” of God from a part of reality so that the universe may arise, creating a mirror in which God can behold God. What is unique to Boehme is the force of his language. What the Kabbalists describe with serene abstraction here takes on an intense violence of expression. For the processes of divine manifestation, Boehme uses such terms as “hardness,” “harshness,” “sourness,” “astringency,” the “sting.” The overall impression is one of vast cosmic forces, struggling and striving, each producing its opposite and, in the unendurable tension of their desire, giving birth to a world—nature, both earthly and celestial, as the mirror in which God beholds God. Underlying this all is the primordial tension between light and darkness—the darkness out of which all arises, and the light by which it comes to be known.
Boehme’s thought thus echoes the ideas of the Manichaeans. But Boehme was not a Manichaean, and his doctrine differs from theirs in at least one profound sense: he does not regard the darkness as inherently evil or the light as inherently good. The darkness is merely unknowing, and the light is what makes it known. And yet Boehme’s teaching does at times stray toward the edges of dualism; it’s not surprising that one of his disciples, Johann Georg Gichtel (1638–1710), went so far as to defend Manichaeism.25 Another disciple, Abraham von Franckenburg, compared Boehme’s system to ancient Gnosticism, as did some of Boehme’s eighteenth-century English disciples.26
These facts may lead someone to ask how close all these different teachings and movements really were to the Gnostic legacy. From a historical point of view, the connection is indirect, through the intermediaries of such traditions as Kabbalah and Hermeticism. Sometimes, too, it is a matter of independent visionaries attaining the same insights. As Arthur Versluis notes:
There is little reason to posit some kind of historical continuity between [Boehme’s] theosophy and early Christian gnosis; while there are certainly numerous historical enigmas involved here (the resemblance between some forms of Jewish Kabbalah, Mazdaean, Manichaean, and Gnostic Christian religions has been noted before), it seems unnecessary and conspiratorial to posit a grand historical “initiatory transmission” when it should be obvious that in question is not historical transmission, but the rediscovery of essentially the same religion of light in different cultural contexts.27
Even so, the name of the Gnostics is invoked more than once, in connection not only with Boehme but with the Rosicrucians as well. The Restoration satirist Samuel Butler makes the following remark in a footnote to his Hudibras: “The Fraternity of the Rosy-Crucians is very like the Sect of the ancient Gnostici who called themselves so, from the excellent learning they pretended to, although they were really the most ridiculous Sots of all Mankind.”28
Viewing the matter in a more positive light, Paul Foster Case observes:
Rosicrucian religion…is Christian Gnosticism. It is opposed to organized religious authority because that authority imposes creeds, plays on the fears and hopes of believers, and in Christendom founds itself on the essential ignobility and worthlessness of man. Rosicrucian religion begins by proclaiming man’s nobleness and worth and proceeds to declare its knowledge of the Christos. It describes that knowledge as being progressive and as leading eventually to conscious immortality.29
The Rise of Masonry
As we’ve seen, the Rosicrucian brotherhood, if it existed, probably did not exist in any form that would be recognizable from the manifestoes. And yet it did in a sense prove to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Fama and the Confessio created a fascination with occult brotherhoods that has gripped the Western world up to the present time. And the most powerful and far-reaching of these brotherhoods is Freemasonry (also known as Masonry, or sometimes the Craft).
The Rosicrucian furor did not create Freemasonry: Masonic texts go back to the fourteenth century. But something happened in the time of the Rosicrucian manifestoes that would galvanize Masonry and bring it to the center of public attention. To understand how this happened, it would be helpful to begin by exploring the extremely vexed question of where and when Freemasonry began.
Like the Kabbalists and Hermeticists, the earliest Freemasons had a rich if mythical account of their own genesis, summarized in the oldest surviving Masonic texts, called the “Old Charges.” And the oldest surviving versions of these are preserved in two English manuscripts: the Cooke and the Regius manuscripts, dating to about 1400.30 They contain a mythical history that traces Masonry back to antediluvian times, to “a mann that was clepyd lameth [sic].” “Lameth,” presumably Cain’s descendant Lamech (Gen. 4:18–19), produces two sons, “Iaballe [or Jabal] and the other hight juballe,” the elder of whom “was the first mann that ever found gemetry and masonry and he mad howsis & [is] named in the bybulle.”31 When Jabal’s descendants realize that God is about to punish the wickedness of humanity with fire or flood, they inscribe their learning on two different kinds of stone, one of which would not burn and the other “that wolle not sinke in water.”
After Noah’s flood, the pillars are found by two individuals, Pythagoras and “Hermes the philisophre.” Later, Abraham, during his sojourn in Egypt, teaches the Egyptians the science of geometry; his principal disciple is Euclid. The Israelites learn Masonry in Europe, and Solomon uses it to build the temple in Jerusalem. Later still, Masonry in England is organized by St. Albans and established by King Athelstan.
As charming as this account is, it obviously has little if any historical truth. In true medieval fashion, figures from the Bible and classical antiquity are jumbled together without any comprehension of actual chronology. Pythagoras, who lived in the sixth century B.C., comes before Abraham, whose life is traditionally dated to around 1900 B.C. Even so, two things are striking about the story in the Old Charges. In the first place, it resembles the legendary histories of the Kabbalah and Hermeticism, which are also traced back to antediluvian times and evoke the heritage of Egypt. In the second place, it foreshadows later Masonic themes: for example, the names of the sons of “Lameth,” Jabal and Jubal, anticipate the names of the three “ruffians,” Jubelo, Jubela, and Jubelum, who, in the rite of the Master Mason degree, slay the Master Mason Hiram Abiff.32 Thus at least some of the later Masonic teachings may be traced back to this period.
All in all, though, the story in the Old Charges is a legend. More recent and more historical accounts can generally be ranged into two categories. The first connects Masonry with the Knights Templar. The Templars, a military order of knights established in 1118 to protect pilgrims to the Holy Land, rapidly became one of the most successful organizations in history. Within a century of their founding, they commanded an empire of fortifications and estates that spanned from Palestine to the British Isles. But with the recapture of the Holy Land by the Muslims in the late thirteenth century, the Templars seemed to have lost their raison d’être. They were brutally suppressed in 1307 by King Philip the Fair of France (who coveted their tremendous wealth) with the connivance of Pope Clement V. All Templars found were imprisoned, and a strange series of confessions was extracted from them. They were accused, for example, of spitting on the crucifix in their secret rites and worshipping an idol named Baphomet.
All of this is well-documented historical fact (although it’s hard to say how much of the Templars’ confessions is to be believed, since they were for the most part extracted under torture). From here, proponents of alternate history take the matter in quite a different direction. By this account, some of the Templars managed to flee to Scotland, which had been placed under excommunication in 1312 and which was struggling to fight off an English invasion. Indeed a Templar contingent is said to have turned the tide at the crucial Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, in which the Scots under Robert the Bruce decisively drove out the English.
In Scotland, according to this theory, Templar tradition went underground. The chief evidence for its continuation is in stone. It is a curious building called Rosslyn Chapel, several miles outside of Edinburgh. For proponents of alterative history, the carvings at Rosslyn represent a kind of missing link between the Templars and the Freemasons. By this view, the Templars were architects first and fighters second. It was their arcane sacred geometry that was preserved in Scotland and resuscitated in the late sixteenth century to create the Freemasonry that is known from history.
Such is the first theory. It has gained currency over recent decades, being expounded in such popular books as John J. Robinson’s Born in Blood and Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh’s The Temple and the Lodge. Rosslyn Chapel provides the backdrop for the climax of The Da Vinci Code. Moreover, the Templar-Mason connection has been embraced by many Masons, who have given Templar names to some of their higher-grade degrees. A youth organization sponsored by Masons is known as the Order of DeMolay in honor of Jacques de Molay, the last Templar Grand Master, who was burned at the stake in Paris in 1314.33
But there are some key problems with the Templar-Freemason connection. To begin with, there is the plain fact that the Templars were primarily a military order. Whatever esoteric knowledge they had probably had little to do with geometry or sacred architecture. Furthermore, there is the evidence of such texts as the Old Charges themselves, which draw a very clear and strong connection between the ancient builders and the stonemasons of their own time. There is no suggestion, overt or veiled, that the Templars had anything to do with Masonry.
The most plausible version of the origins of Masonry is the standard one—or at least a version of it. It’s well known that in the Middle Ages guilds were predominant in many trades, serving as a combination of union, technical school, benevolent society, and guarantor of professional standards. Because the medieval world was focused on the sacred, the guilds had a spiritual element as well; they resembled lay religious fraternities. Some of them, including the trade guilds of France, known as the compagnonnages, even transmitted a kind of initiatic wisdom.
The Masons were among these guilds. They differed from most guilds in two ways. On the one hand, the nature of their work ensured that masons would spend more time traveling from job to job than would men of most trades. This made it necessary to create certain signs and words by which a mason could make himself known in a strange city. In the second place, as we can see from the Old Charges, the Masons had a much richer tradition about their past than most guilds. Both of these characteristics would help transform Masonry from a trade organization into one of the most influential movements in Western history.
The transformation began in Scotland, and its key figure was a man who is hardly remembered today. His name was William Schaw (c. 1550–1602), and he was master of works to King James VI of Scotland. This position gave him authority over the nation’s lodges of masons, and he soon regularized their organization and incorporated new elements into their practice. In 1598 and 1599, he issued two sets of statutes that were to radically alter the face of Masonry. One of the most curious provisions enjoined the lodge warden to test every applicant for membership in “the art of memorie and science thairof.”34 As I’ve noted in regard to Giordano Bruno, the Renaissance art of memory involved intense powers of visualization, including the construction of a “memory palace.” We do not know whether Schaw introduced the art of memory to the Masonic lodges of Scotland or whether it had been practiced before his time. Nor is it certain that this “art of memorie” was akin to Bruno’s; it may have been something simpler designed to facilitate rote learning of rituals. At any rate, this provision suggests that Masonic training at the end of the sixteenth century included some esoteric knowledge.
This knowledge began to exercise an increasing attraction for men who were not working (or “operative”) masons. Soon after the Schaw Statutes, we see Masonic lodges beginning to admit gentlemen, who in most circumstances would have been loath to admit any connection to ordinary trades. The fact that they were drawn to Masonry suggests that they believed some hidden knowledge was to be gained there.
Such was the situation when the Rosicrucian furor burst upon the public. No one would seriously argue that the Rosicrucian manifestoes were talking about the Masonic lodges. On the other hand, the similarity between the invisible brothers of the Rosy Cross and the highly visible brothers of the Masonic fraternity was evident to many. By 1638, an obscure Scottish poet named Henry Adamson could write these lines:
For what we presage is not in grosse,
For we be brethren of the Rosie Crosse;
We have the Mason Word and second sight,
Things for to come we can foretell aright.35
The “Mason Word” was a kind of secret password that would enable Masons to recognize each other. Rituals of identification—passwords, grips, and scripted questions with responses—became more and more elaborate as Masonry continued to evolve in the seventeenth century. Some of these cast light on the esoteric nature of Masonic teachings.
The Mason Word, for example, has been known to the public since the late seventeenth century. The password for the Entered Apprentice (the first and lowest of Masonic degrees) is Boaz; that for the Fellow Craft (the second degree) is Jachin. These allude to Solomon’s Temple in the Bible: “And he set up the pillars in the porch of the temple: and he set up the right pillar, and called the name thereof Jachin; and he set up the left pillar, and he called the name thereof Boaz” (1 Kings 7:21; cf. 2 Chron. 3:17). Around the beginning of the eighteenth century, a third degree, that of the Master Mason, was introduced; its word was Mahabyn. The meaning of this word is obscure, and many highly ingenious and highly implausible explanations have been offered for its origins.
The pillars have another meaning that will be obvious to any student of the Kabbalah.36 Kabbalistic teaching speaks of two “pillars”: the Pillar of Mercy and the Pillar of Severity, or, to phrase it differently, Force and Form, respectively. Force, or Mercy, is generally pictured on the right; Form, or Severity, on the left. (Kabbalists would also say that this is the inner meaning of the two pillars in front of the Temple in Jerusalem.) Because Kabbalistic ideas had such a wide currency in this period, this association must have been evident to many who took these degrees. It also harks back to the two pillars of stone in the Old Charges on which the antediluvians sought to preserve their knowledge from cataclysm.
Another detail resonates still more powerfully with the Rosicrucian manifestoes. Here is a question-and-answer sequence from a late seventeenth-century Masonic catechism:
Q. Where shall I find the key of your lodge?
A. Three foot and a half from the lodge door under a perpend esler and a green divot. But under the lap of my liver where all the secrets of my heart lie.
Q. What is the key of your lodge?
A. A weel [sic] hung tongue.
Q. Where lies the key?
A. In the bone box.37
This passage makes it clear that the true lodge was not a physical building, but was contained in the human heart and head—the latter being the “bone box” that holds the tongue. Historian David Stevenson contends, “There is a strong case for regarding the mental lodge described in the catechisms as a memory temple, crude and confused perhaps by the process of being handed down over the generations.” What this means is that the true lodge is a temple not built by human hands; it is an invisible temple that exists in the realm of thought. This in turn would explain why Schaw insisted that Masons be versed in the art of memory, since this art hones the skills of imagination and visualization to a high degree.38 Note also how this invisible temple resembles the invisible “house of the Holy Spirit” in which the Rosicrucian brothers were said to meet.
None of this means that the Rosicrucian manifestoes were talking about the Masonic brotherhoods of their day. But it does suggest that the Masonic ritual and symbolism that evolved from Schaw’s time on drew consciously and deliberately upon esoteric sources, including Rosicrucianism and Kabbalah. This in turn would mean that men seeking esoteric knowledge would naturally gravitate toward the Masonic lodge.
Masonry in the Public Domain
But the thirst for occult knowledge does not in itself explain the extraordinary expansion of Freemasonry in the eighteenth century. A more compelling reason is suggested by an entry in the journal of an Englishman named Elias Ashmole. Ashmole (1617–92) was an alchemist, astrologer, and most of all an indefatigable amasser of antiquities: his collection forms the nucleus of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. On October 16, 1646, Ashmole says in his diary, he was admitted to a Masonic lodge in Warrington, Lancashire. What is notable about this—apart from the fact that it is one of the first documented Masonic initiations in England—is the company. Also present was his cousin Henry Mainwaring, who was a member of the Parliamentary faction in the English Civil War that was then raging. Ashmole himself was a Royalist, fighting on the other side. Other Masons present included Catholics. (Catholics had not yet been forbidden to become Masons.) So this early Masonic lodge was able to join Anglicans, Puritans, and Catholics together in fraternal fellowship at a time when religious strife in England was at a peak.
This detail goes far to explain the success of Masonry. Masonic membership in those days was offered to all Christians; in the eighteenth century it would be extended to all who believed in a Supreme Being. Masonry, which came of age at the end of over a century and a half of bitter religious warfare that had ravaged much of Europe, offered a haven from the endless strife over faith that inflamed so much of public opinion in those days. To this day it is forbidden to discuss religion or politics in the lodge.
Nevertheless, man is a political animal, and politics soon began to seep into the Masonic world. One example was the Gold- und Rosenkreutz (or “Golden and Rosy Cross”) of eighteenth-century Germany.39 The Gold- und Rosenkreutz was not a shadowy entity like the Brotherhood of the manifestoes. It actually existed, and we know a considerable amount about its membership and its practices; for example, it had ten grades of initiation, based on the ten sefirot of the Kabbalah. Moreover, it was only open to men who had already passed through regular Masonic initiation.
By the 1770s the Gold- und Rosenkreutz had lodges all over Central Europe. It reached the height of its power in Prussia in the years after 1786, when one of its members, a nephew of Frederick the Great, came to the throne as Frederick William II. For much of Frederick William’s reign, his court was dominated by a small Rosicrucian clique that gained a reputation for right-wing reaction, attempting—ironically, considering the original nature of the Rosicrucian impulse—to tighten religious orthodoxy. Such abuses, as well as internal conflicts, caused the dissolution of the Gold- und Rosenkreutz after Frederick William’s death in 1797.
Another, much more notorious quasi-Masonic lodge was the Bavarian Illuminati, started by a young Bavarian university professor named Adam Weishaupt in 1776.40 The Illuminati were the opposite of the Gold- und Rosenkreutz: they were radicals attempting to combat Catholicism and particularly the Jesuits, then the leading religious influence in Bavaria. Weishaupt’s aim was to foster the egalitarian program of the Enlightenment, but his arrogant and capricious behavior nearly destroyed his own organization, which he only managed to preserve by hitting on the ingenious device of infiltrating regular Masonic lodges in Germany and Austria. In the 1780s, however, this scheme came to light, and in 1785 the Elector of Bavaria issued an edict condemning both Freemasonry and the Illuminati.
In all likelihood this was when the Illuminati fell apart as an organized entity, though various right-wing forces (including the Gold- und Rosenkreutz) circulated the idea that the Illuminati were still operating and endangering the safety of well-ordered states, an idea that has continued to surface ever since. To this day rumors about this fascinating but short-lived body survive, sometimes seriously (in the works of conspiracy theorists), sometimes as a kind of ludibrium, or half-serious joke (as in the works of the contemporary writer Robert Anton Wilson, coauthor of the Illuminatus! trilogy).
Even apart from the Illuminati, Masonry in the eighteenth century came to be associated with social change—the overturning of the ancien régime, dominated by monarchs and the church, in favor of the then-revolutionary concept of representative government. A number of the Founding Fathers of the United States were Masons, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. One estimate says that of the fifty-five men who signed the Declaration of Independence, nine are known to have been Freemasons.41 The Masonic lodges were similarly influential in the French Revolution, though, as historian J. R. Roberts suggests, chiefly in the sense that “both the lodge or-ganisation and the familiarity which it created meant that freemasonry was in principle helpful to collective action.”42
Catholics versus Masons
Currents such as these help explain the increasing discomfort of the Catholic Church about Masonry. In 1738 Pope Clement XII promulgated the bull In eminenti, excommunicating all Masons. The stated grounds were that Masonry fostered the association of persons of different religious faiths, which the pope evidently regarded as undesirable. Further reasons included the misuse of the oath of secrecy as well as “other just and reasonable motives known to us.” (These are not specified.) Other documents from the period indicate that the church regarded Masonry as an enemy of Christendom, although it remains unclear why.43
At any rate, Clement’s bull was reissued by his successor, Pope Benedict XIV, in 1751; further condemnations followed in 1786, 1789, and later. Although the church did not strictly enforce its ban on Freemasonry during those years, the opposition between the two would harden in the nineteenth century, when it would cost the church dearly. As in the American and French revolutions, Masons played a key role in the unification of Italy in the period between 1850 and 1871. Giuseppe Garibaldi, for example, one of its greatest leaders, was Grand Master of the Grand Orient Lodge of Italy. And it was the unification of Italy that finally took temporal power away from the church. In 1871, when the city of Rome voted to join the unified Italian nation, the papacy finally lost its hold on the region of central Italy that since medieval times it had ruled as the Papal States. All in all, then, the church may have been right to suspect the Freemasons.
We need not demonize Catholicism in order to appreciate the ideals that the Rosicrucians and their descendants have contributed to our civilization. The beginning of the Fama says that one goal of the coming age would be “that man might…understand his own nobleness and worth”44—an ideal that harks back to Pico della Mirandola, one of whose most famous works is The Oration on the Dignity of Man. Today all this may sound unremarkable, but in those days it was revolutionary. The Christianity of the Middle Ages was far more likely to emphasize the baseness of human nature than its “nobleness and worth” and to view church and king as better safeguards of conscience than the individual himself. With the inevitable abuses and exceptions, the Rosicrucian legacy has helped realize this aim. Whoever they were, whatever they knew or did not know, the Rosy Cross Brothers seemed to foresee a time when all human beings might live in dignity, self-respect, and, perhaps, self-government. We are, of course, not yet in such an age. But we may be closer than we were four hundred years ago.
Adventurers and Visionaries
Although it has been called the Age of Reason, the eighteenth century was fascinated with occultism. Interest in the subject was so high in France just before the Revolution that the king’s police found more useful informants in astrologers and fortune-tellers than in the more conventional sources of priests or doctors. The feverish Paris of the 1780s was much taken with an Austrian doctor named Franz Anton Mesmer, who practiced “animal magnetism,” later known as “mesmerism.” In Mesmer’s view, illness was caused by disruptions in the invisible life force, or “magnetic fluid” by setting this right, Mesmer believed he could cure practically any ailment. His success rate was good but not flawless, eventually leading the fickle Parisian public to tire of him. Even so, his legacy persists: a follower of his, the Marquis de Puységur, would develop hypnotism as it is known today.45
The eighteenth century was also replete with exotic occult characters whose names still carry resonance—Cagliostro, the Comte de St.-Germain. About these men, who spun an aura of mystery about themselves, we know very little, and we know even less that is reliable; often even their real names are in question. They were magician-adventurers, descendants of the Renaissance magi living in a more tolerant—or more disenchanted—age, when evidence of occult power could earn one a welcome among blasé aristocrats.
The Comte de St.-Germain may have been a Sephardic Jew born in Portugal in 1710; he may also have been a Transylvanian nobleman named Francis Ragoczy. Wild rumors about him circulated—that he was centuries old, that he lived on nothing but an elixir that he made himself, that he had invented Freemasonry. He died in Germany in 1782—but then was seen in Paris during the Revolution several years later.46 To this day, as an “ascended master,” he remains a vivid presence for devotees of the New Age, a number of whom claim to have had communications from him.
Count Cagliostro, who styled himself “the Grand Copt,” was probably an Italian adventurer named Giuseppe Balsamo.47 “About me,” he declared, “many lies and nonsensical stories have been written, but the truth is known to no one at all.” Certainly he made little effort to set the record straight. Most scholars believe he was born in Sicily in 1743, the son of a jeweler. Cagliostro claimed to have knowledge of the Elixir of Life, and made most of his living by selling remedies derived from it. He also devised an Egyptian Rite of Freemasonry that he promoted heavily in the 1770s and 1780s. (Some versions of his story say he was initiated into this rite by the Comte de St.-Germain.) Like Giordano Bruno, Cagliostro saw a return to the religion of ancient Egypt as the remedy for the sects and schisms of his era, which by this time had begun to afflict Freemasonry as well. Implicated (though not convicted) in the famous affair of the Queen’s Necklace in 1785, in which a couple of adventurers swindled a French prelate over a fabulously expensive necklace supposedly intended for Marie Antoinette, Cagliostro never recovered either his reputation or his aplomb. In 1789, he visited Rome in a quixotic attempt to convert Pope Pius VI to his version of Freemasonry. Instead he soon found himself in a prison run by the Inquisition. He died there in 1795—one of the Inquisition’s last victims.
Another powerful figure, less pretentious but ultimately no less mystifying, was Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), a Swedish philosopher and engineer who began to have elaborate visions of the unseen worlds when he was in his mid-fifties.48 Swedenborg’s visions, described in lengthy, often ponderous volumes (“In dry Latin he went on listing / The unaccountable last things,” as Jorge Luis Borges would write of him), spoke of elaborate resemblances—or “correspondences”—between the celestial and the earthly realms.
Swedenborg’s ideas fed the imaginations of artistic geniuses from William Blake to Honoré de Balzac to Charles Baudelaire. Blake spoke of using Swedenborgian themes in his poetry and art, contending that “the works of this visionary are well worthy [sic] the attention of Painters and Poets; they are foundations for grand things.”49 (Blake would later turn away from his master, as we’ll see in chapter 9.) Baudelaire’s celebrated sonnet “Correspondences,” which speaks of resonances between invisible worlds and our own, was inspired by Swedenborg’s thought; the poem would in turn inspire the entire Symbolist movement in art. In 1835 Balzac published an extremely curious “Swedenborgian” novel (as he described it) entitled Seraphita, which is set in the remotenesses of the Norwegian fjords and centers on a strange hermaphroditic being, a “Christian Buddha” known as Seraphitus/Seraphita. Swedenborg’s writings helped convince Balzac of the reality of the spiritual dimension. Speaking of Seraphita in his 1842 introduction to La comédie humaine, Balzac invokes “the mystics, the disciples of St. John, and…those great thinkers who have established the spiritual world—the sphere in which are revealed the relations of God and man.”50 Swedenborg’s ideas permeated Masonry as well, leading to the creation of Swedenborgian degrees in certain lodges.
It may seem odd that the Enlightenment and its aftermath, which textbooks portray as the high point of rationalism and skepticism, should have felt such an intense thirst for the esoteric. On a closer look, however, it is not so strange. The Enlightenment was an age when intellectual horizons were widening at an unprecedented pace. When such expansion is in the air, it is not easy—or, perhaps, desirable—to make fine distinctions between the “rational” and “irrational,” the mystical and the practical. We can see an analogy in the California of the last fifty years. California is often the butt of jokes for its zany mysticism and its enthusiasm for the outlandish, but during exactly the same period it has also been the center of technological innovation in the United States and possibly the world. This is probably not mere coincidence. Rather it is that in certain times and places, the sense of what is possible begins to spontaneously expand. And precisely because it is expanding, the spirit of the time is uninterested in drawing arbitrary distinctions; the creative mind discovers unforeseen connections in many realms, which feed and inform each other. So it may have been in the Enlightenment. If nothing else, it might serve as a reminder that the dimensions of thought dismissed as dreamy and impractical have their own uses, and that practical applications might not be possible without them.