In 1895, W. B. Yeats wrote an essay titled “The Body of the Father Christian Rosencrux,” which begins by describing how the founder of Rosicrucianism was laid in a noble tomb, surrounded by inextinguishable lamps, where he lay for many generations, until he was discovered by chance by students of the same magical order. Having said this, Yeats goes on to attack modern criticism for entombing the imagination, proclaiming that “the ancients and the Elizabethans abandoned themselves to imagination as a woman abandons herself to love, and created beings who made the people of this world seem but shadows . . .”
On the whole, Yeats' use of the image of Christian Rosenkreuz seems irrelevant until the reader comes to this sentence: “I cannot get it out of my mind that this age of criticism is about to pass, and an age of imagination, of emotion, of moods, of revelation, about to come in its place; for certainly belief in a supersensual world is at hand....” In this statement, Yeats shows his own deep understanding of the whole Rosicrucian phenomenon. That is what it was really about; that is the real explanation to reverberate down three-and-ahalf centuries.
The “hoax” began—as Christopher McIntosh describes in these pages—with the publication, in 1614, of a pamphlet called Fama Fraternitatis of the Meritorious Order of the Rosy Cross, which purported to describe the life of the mystic-magician Christian Rosenkreuz, who lived to be 106, and whose body was carefully concealed in a mysterious tomb for the next 120 years. The author of the present book translates “fama” as “declaration,” but my own Latin dictionary defines it as “common talk . . . a report, rumour, saying, tradition.” So it would hardly be unfair to translate “fama” as myth or legend.
At all events, this mysterious pamphlet (which can be found printed in full as an appendix to The Rosicrucian Enlightenment by Frances Yates)1 goes on to invite all interested parties to join the Brotherhood, and tells them that they have only to make their interest known—either by word of mouth or in writing—and the Brotherhood will hear about it, and probably make contact. This is, in itself, a suggestion that the Brotherhood has magical powers—perhaps some crystal ball that will enable them to “tune in” to anyone who is genuinely interested.
Two more works followed the pamphlet—as Mr. McIntosh relates—and many people took the trouble to publish replies, indicating their eagerness to join the Brotherhood. No one, as far as anyone knows, ever heard from the Brotherhood. Yet the very idea of their existence caused tremendous excitement. This is what everybody had been waiting for—a kind of prophecy of a Second Coming: “Howbeit we know that after a time there will now be a general reformation, both of divine and human things, according to our desire . . . .”2 “The land of heart's desire” was about to become a reality.
Christopher McIntosh suggests, very plausibly I think, that the first two pamphlets were probably a joint effort of a group of idealistic philosophers based in Tübingen, perhaps inspired by an early “novel” by one of their number, Johann Valentin Andreae. This “novel,” The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz, was published as the third “Rosicrucian” document in 1616.3
All of this raises interesting questions: Why did the Brotherhood ask for volunteers and recruits if they had no intention of replying? If the authors of these documents were idealistic, then what was the ultimate aim of the whole exercise?
The main clue to the answer, I believe, lies in a phrase in Johann Andreae's will, made in 1634, when he was 48. Andreae writes: “Though I now leave the Fraternity itself, I shall never leave the true Christian Fraternity, which beneath the Cross, smells of the rose, and is quite apart from the filth of this century.” “The filth of this century”; “this filthy century”—either phrase might have been used by W. B. Yeats if his language had been a little more emphatic.
In his autobiography, Yeats says that Ruskin once remarked to his father that, as he made his daily way to the British Museum, he saw the faces around him becoming more and more corrupt. Untrue of course: people don't really change that much—or that fast. But Ruskin's words express the hunger of a man who feels that he lives in an age when no one really cares about the things that matter. T. S. Eliot expressed the same feeling in The Waste Land and The Hollow Men. The invention of Christian Rosenkreuz is, likewise, not so much a hoax as a cry of rejection and a demand for new ways: in short, a kind of prophecy.
It is worth noting that there are apparently two kinds of legend that seem to exercise great fascination over the minds of men. The first involves wickedness or horror—Faust, Frankenstein, Dracula, Sweeney Todd, even Jack the Ripper. The second involves, not so much goodness as greatness, superhumanity; and this can be found in legends of Hermes Trismegistos, King Arthur, Parsifal, and Merlin, as well as the modern Superman and Batman comic strips. In “Hellas,” Shelley used the figure of an old Jew to portray this type—the Wandering Jew of the Bible—who lives “in a sea cavern amid the Demonesi,” and who is a master of all wisdom.4 Yeats later remarked that he joined the Theosophical Society because he wanted to believe in the real existence of the Old Jew “or his like.”
For, of course, both the “magical” organizations to which Yeats belonged—the Theosophical Society and the Golden Dawn—drew a leaf out of Pastor Andreae's book, and set out to build their organizations on a myth propagated as reality. Madame Blavatsky claimed to be in communication with Secret Masters in Tibet. And the story behind the Golden Dawn was at least as circumstantial as the account of the life of Rosenkreuz. In 1885, according to this story, a clergyman named Woodford was rummaging through the books in a secondhand stall in Farringdon Road when he came across a manuscript written in cipher; a friend, Dr. William Wynn Westcott, identified the cipher as one invented by a 15th-century alchemist, Trithemius. It proved to contain five magical rituals for introducing newcomers into a secret society. In the manuscript, there was also a letter which stated that anyone interested in the rituals should contact a certain Fräulein Sprengel in Stuttgart. It was Fräulein Sprengel, the representative of a German magical order, who gave Westcott permission to found the Golden Dawn.
The cipher manuscript may just possibly have existed (although it was not picked up in a bookstall in Farringdon Road). The letter about Fräulein Sprengel certainly did not, nor did that lady herself. Yet the story accomplished its effect, and the Golden Dawn grew into one of the most impressive magical organizations of the late 19th century. And—as Mr. McIntosh relates—the legend of Christian Rosenkreuz came to play a central part in its magical procedures.
A few decades ago, the Golden Dawn was held in very low esteem by literary scholars who had heard about it. I remember attending evening classes on Yeats soon after the War, and our teacher, Professor Philip Collins, remarking that he had expected to find Yeats' comments about magic and occultism completely preposterous, and was surprised to find that they had a reassuring ring of common sense. All the same, he took it entirely for granted that the Golden Dawn was a society created by charlatans and supported by the gullible. I daresay most professors of modern literature still take that view.
But there are now a great many students of the “paranormal,” who are willing to acknowledge that, in some strange way, “magic” can produce extraordinary effects. Anyone who doubts this should read Yeats' essay on magic where he describes in detail a magical operation conducted by MacGregor Mathers (another founder of the Golden Dawn) and his wife, in which Mathers was able to take control of Yeats' imagination and induce curious visions.5
It is important to recognize that “magic” usually involves the control of mental states rather than the production of physical effects upon matter—witches flying on broomsticks, etc.—although physical effects can be produced. The mental effects all take their starting point from telepathy, while the physical ones may be regarded as deliberately induced “poltergeist effects,” in which objects are made to move by some curious power of the unconscious mind. (I have come increasingly to believe that the right half of the brain is involved here, and that the actual energy used is the same energy that causes a dowsing rod to twist in the hands of the water diviner—probably some form of Earth magnetism that can be channeled by the right cerebral hemisphere). It seems perfectly clear that Mathers had learned the trick of controling these generally unrecognized energies.
I agree that there appears, at first sight, to be little connection between this concept of “magic” and the history of Rosicrucianism, as explained in the following pages by Christopher McIntosh. Yet in the course of reading his book, I have come to feel the connection increasingly strongly. It began to crystallize when I read his account of Heraclitus of Ephesus (in chapter 1), who believed that the universe dies like a living organism, and leaves behind a seed from which a new universe originates. Everything in the cosmos derives from a basic substance, a kind of fire, and everything moves in a cyclical process.
Just before reading this, I had been writing an outline of a book on astronomy, and had been describing the Big Bang Theory of the universe. Heraclitus described this with some precision. According to the Big Bang Theory—for which the evidence is now overwhelming—the universe did begin (around ten billion years ago) as pure, undifferentiated “fire,” from which the elements were to crystallize later. It will continue to expand for another few billion years, until its own gravity causes it to collapse again. It will eventually become a concentrated mass of matter, whose size will be far larger than the “critical mass” needed to create a Black Hole. But then, according to the latest astronomical theory, a Black Hole does not go on collapsing into itself indefinitely, but eventually explodes once more. If this is correct, then Heraclitus's scheme would be weirdly accurate. In fact, the only thing Heraclitus failed to grasp was that the new “seed” would be smaller than the previous one because so much energy would have been irrecoverably lost in the whole process.
Now you may say that Heraclitus was only making an “informed guess” about the universe. But when a guess comes this close to reality, I personally begin to wonder whether it could not be something more than guesswork. That is, whether there is not some other way of knowing the universe, directly and intuitively. Mystics have always said so, and in his remarkable Drug Taker's Notes, R. H. Ward speaks of a “mystical” experience he had under dental anaesthetic. He says that after the first few inhalations, he passed “directly into a state of consciousness already far more complete than the fullest degree of ordinary waking consciousness.” He repeats this point several times, speaking of how “consciousness diminished” again toward ordinary consciousness, and how “the darkness of what we flatter ourselves is consciousness closed in upon me” (i.e., as he was once more waking up).6
Even more interesting, however, is Ward's description of passing through what he calls “a region of ideas,” where the insight was intellectual rather than emotional. He adds: “one knew not merely one thing here and another thing there.... one knew everything there is to know.” Robert Graves has described a similar mystical experience in a story called The Abominable Mr. Gunn (he told me it was autobiographical), and here again it is clear that the sense of “knowing everything” is meant in a literal sense, as if we had some strange faculty that could reach out and acquire any piece of knowledge at will.
If there is anything in this theory, it may be that there is a tradition of knowledge that precedes the development of modern intellectual consciousness. This could explain why neolithic man went to the trouble of building vast stone computers like Stonehenge more than two millennia before the Chaldeans, who are usually given the credit for being the first astronomers, began to study the heavens.
At all events, it seems clear that the doctrines of Christian Rosenkreuz were based on those of the Gnostics, and on the notion which Christopher McIntosh has expressed so admirably by the analogy of man being “under water,” with the region of knowledge and insight above the surface. T. S. Eliot said much the same thing in a chorus from his poem, “The Rock.”
Fundamentally, then, I am not speaking about a hoax, or even about “wishful thinking,” but about the most profound problem of the human race. Again, Ward comes excitingly close to putting his finger on it when he says that a part of him disliked his mother for “making him live two lives”—the natural instinctive life of a child, and the superimposed and artificial life of “the world.” He goes on to say that, under LSD, it seemed to him that all children are ruined by adults through being conditioned to the life of this world so that they live two lives, one secretly, and one for adult approval. But then “ruin” is not inevitable.
For example, all my own books, from The Outsider onward, have been about precisely this subject: the “outsider's” rejection of “the world,” his desire to turn inward to a world of truth that he feels resides in his own depths. So, plainly, I have not been entirely ruined. Ward himself remarks that he is surprised that he is not more wicked and madder than he is, considering his upbringing. Most of us do, in fact, survive, because that inner hunger is so intense.
This, I believe, explains why Rosicrucianism has continued to exert its grip on the Western mind. It is not because we are hopelessly gullible, or because we would like to believe in absurd fantasies. In a legend like that of Christian Rosenkreuz, we seem to catch a glimpse of what we ought to be, and what we could be. If we set about it with sufficient determination, the grip of “the world” can be broken—or at least, weakened until it ceases to induce a constant feeling of alienation. We are a planet of a double star, torn between two powerful gravitational forces. We have to learn to move inward without losing control over the external world and not, like Rimbaud, simply surrendering ourselves to an “ordered derangement of the senses.”
I am not, of course, denying that much of the current interest in occultism has its root in “escapism” of the most ordinary kind; but I still believe that it is the real content of “occultism” that attracts powerful minds. Christopher McIntosh strikes me as an interesting illustration of this proposition. It is only necessary to glance at this book to see that his is a trained mind working within the academic tradition. His first book, The Astrologers and their Creed (1969), is basically a brilliant piece of research into the history of astrology.7 In the very last chapt er, “The Verdict on Astrology,” McIntosh concedes that it cannot be defended scientifically; but he goes on to cite the researches of the Gauquelins into the actual statistics about people born under Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, etc., to show that there does now appear to be some solid scientific basis for believing that human temperament is influenced by the planets. You could say that the book is skeptical until the last two pages.
McIntosh's next work, Eliphas Lévi and the French Occult Revival8 is again, quite simply, an excellent piece of biographical research—one of the few books on this important “magician” in English. At no point does he seem to give too much credit to Lévi's magical claims. He is interested in Lévi as a personality and as a thinker, but not really as a mage.
Before writing this foreword, I asked McIntosh to tell me how he became interested in the Rosicrucians. His reply was immensely interesting. He related that he had been interested in “occult” subjects since he was an undergraduate at Oxford in the early 1960s. He came across many references to the Rosicrucians, but A. E. Waite's enormous and turgid volume left him confused. Since he had always enjoyed writing things that gave him the opportunity of doing some detective work—especially when it involved reading in French and German—he settled down to studying the original sources. The book was started in 1972, the year Lévi came out.
During the course of writing the book, however, McIntosh's attitude toward his subject changed. “When I began it, I was going through a phase of rather dry, scholarly objectivity in my attitude to such subjects and I intended to examine Rosicrucianism simply as a rather curious historical phenomenon without really expecting to find that it contained a teaching of any real depth or coherence. Since then, not only has my attitude changed—I have become much more pro-occult—but I also found during my researches that Rosicrucianism goes deeper than I had realized, and does contain something valuable and coherent. So you could say that this book has been an important experience in my life. It has taught me that, sooner or later, anyone studying these subjects from an academic point of view has to make the decision whether they are going to take a personal stance for or against. To turn away from this decision and try to remain neutral is, to me, death.”
McIntosh goes on to apologize for not having conveyed this sense of the real inner meaning of Rosicrucianism sufficiently. But having read his manuscript for the second time, I can reassure him. I have also read most of the major texts on the subject, so I am in a position to assure him that his own is far and away the best. And since it also happens to be an interesting and exciting story, it should at last secure for the mysterious Rosenkreuz the interest he deserves.
—Colin Wilson
1 Fama Fraternitatis of the Meritorious Order of the Rosy Cross, reproduced in Frances Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 238.
2 Fama Fraternitatis or a Discovery of the Fraternity of the Most Noble Order of the Rosy Cross; see Frances Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, p. 239.
3 The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz [Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosencreutz, Anno 1439] (Strasburg, 1616). English translation by Ezechiel Foxcroft (London, 1890).
4 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Hellas” in The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford University Press. 1932), lines 163-164.
5 W. B. Yeats, Ideas of Good and Evil (London: A. H. Bullen, 1903).
6 This and the passage that follows come from R. H. Ward, Drug Taker's Notes (London: Victor Gollancz, 1957), pp. 26-28.
7 Christopher McIntosh, The Astrologers and their Creed: An Historical Outline (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969).
8 Christopher McIntosh, Eliphas Lévi and the French Occult Revival (New York: Samuel Weiser, 1974; London: Rider, 1972).