The effective demise of the credibility of magia, alchymia, cabala, even though credulousness in them remained (and among a few, remains to this day), can plausibly be attributed to the failure of the supposed ‘movement’ known as Rosicrucianism in the events that led up to the outbreak of the Thirty Years War. The Rosicrucian panic in the first quarter of the seventeenth century was what in dramaturgical terms would be called the crisis of occult philosophy, that is, the last great gasp of an outlook that had overstayed its welcome in the intellectual economy of the age, and in that final fling demonstrated its vacuity. Arguably, the interest in questions of methodology of the two chief formulators of philosophical and scientific method in the seventeenth century – Francis Bacon and René Descartes – was piqued not just by the Aristotelianism they rejected, but by the confusion of alchemy with chemistry, magic with medicine, astrology with astronomy, mysticism with mathematics, that was getting in the way of the advance of knowledge. What they rejected, in arguing for responsible methods of enquiry, was the very magia, alchymia, cabala which had engrossed the preceding century’s epistemological and metaphysical imaginations.
Was there actually anything that could be called Rosicrucianism or a Rosicrucian movement in the first decades of the seventeenth century, still less an actual fraternity – ‘the Brothers of the Rosy Cross’ – with a pedigree reaching back into the preceding century and long before? Some scholars say there never was an organised Rosicrucian movement at all, just a rumour to which hopefuls attached themselves – perhaps thinking that if they supported the putative movement, its members would get in touch and include them. The case is rather that many were intrigued by what they understood to be Rosicrucian ideas, and among these many were those who sympathised with its goals and what seemed to be its principles. Perhaps it is only in this by-courtesy sense that Rosicrucianism was a network among like-minded people, but not a formal or sworn-in cabal or secret society. For convenience therefore the name ‘Rosicrucian’ might as well be applied to those who felt solidarity with the ideals and ideas associated with the supposed movement.
A first and highly important fact to note is that Rosicrucianism was a Protestant phenomenon. So indeed were all the forms of occultism, alchemy, magic – the esoteric in general. They were supported enthusiastically by Frederick V the Elector Palatine, and although he was not in any official or even financial way their chief supporter, they suffered devastatingly when his brief tenure of the Bohemian throne ended at the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620. His defeat, and with his defeat that of the occultist aspirations linked with him, allowed the Catholic Church – or more accurately its militant wing, the Jesuits, in its vanguard – to devote great energy to suppressing interest in Rosicrucianism and anything occult associated with it. One chief way the Jesuits did this was to spread anxiety about supposed occult activities involving Hermeticism, magic or Cabala, as threatening individuals and cities. This was successfully done in the first half of the 1620s, so well indeed that after the panic about Rosicrucianism in France in 1623, open interest in occultism in general and Rosicrucianism in particular began to fade away.
One of the hammers of the supposed Rosicrucian movement was Marin Mersenne. So emphatic was Mersenne’s hostility to occultism that his public contest with Robert Fludd kept the educated populations of Europe riveted for years, and was a major source of occultism’s decline. This tale is told in the next chapter.
The immediate source of interest in and fears about Rosicrucianism in the years after 1612 was the publication of three books that gained immediate notoriety. One was the Fama Fraternitatis Rosae Crucis, oder die Bruderschaft des Ordens der Rosenkreuzer, printed in Cassel in 1614. It had been known in manuscript for some years, and its interest in Hermetic attitudes to the mystical powers of numbers was well known. The second book was the Confessio Fraternitatis or Confessio oder Bekenntnis der Societät und Bruderschaft Rosenkreuz published in 1615 also at Cassel. The third was The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz in the Year 1459 (Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosencreutz anno 1459) published at Strasbourg in 1616. As Frances Yates demonstrates, the aims and ideas of these manifestos were not new, but originated earlier in the familiar Renaissance occultist brew, almost all of the ideas finding their way into the Rosicrucian documents through one identifiable conduit: Dr John Dee.1
The manifestos announced that a ‘universal reformation of mankind’ was imminent, and would be made possible through the mediation of those learned men who followed the lead of ‘Frater C. R. C.’ – soon identified in the texts as Christian Rosencreutz himself – in the study of the occult sciences. The legend recounted in the manifestos ran as follows. Rosencreutz had lived to a great age – 106 years – and taught a select group of disciples the knowledge he had acquired as a result of studying in the East (note: once again the East, from which all things magical and Hermetic came). He did this because there was no general receptivity for his ideas at the time he lived, which was in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. He had instructed his disciples, just eight in number, to study medicine, remain single, treat the sick at no charge, remain brothers in their secret society, and find a replacement for themselves individually. But now, said the manifestos, after several generations of the Society existing in secret, the opening of thought and greater religious freedom made it possible for them to return to the task of widening membership of their brotherhood and bringing good people into it.
Remembering that occultism was motivated by a Faustian desire to find short-cuts to knowledge and control of the mysteries of nature explains much about the threat it posed to the view – the Church’s view – that those mysteries are not mankind’s but God’s alone to know. From the Church’s point of view there was no point in drawing a line between real and occult science. Finding a way of unlocking the universe’s secrets was every enquirer’s ambition, whatever kind of enquirer was involved – whether by the short-cuts of occultism, or by the empirical and quantitative methods of genuine science. The Church was against both; it did not distinguish them. Again the point presses that neither did all the practitioners themselves. But insofar as occultism was associated with Protestant enquirers and the Catholic Church was at war with occultism as contrary to orthodoxy, there was a parallel between this doctrinal conflict and the shooting war that broke out when Frederick of the Palatine went to Bohemia.
Narrowed to a clash between Catholic religion and Rosicrucianism, the conflict can be seen as having been definitely won by the former before the mid-1620s. The Church’s stormtroopers, the Jesuits, so successfully demonised Rosicrucianism, and savants such as Mersenne so successfully discredited it, that if it survived in any sense at all thereafter, it was as an underground rumour and legend merely.
The Fama Fraternitatis and Confessio Fraternitatis present themselves as invitations to their readers to join what they describe as the revived brotherhood or order which Christian Rosencreutz had founded. It was thereby too an invitation to know the secret wisdom that he had brought back from those extensive travels in the mysterious East. Whereas the Fama and Confessio were written anonymously, The Chemical Wedding has a known author: he was a Lutheran pastor of Württemberg named Johann Valentin Andreae, an accomplished author of other works, among them plays and an autobiography. The geographical aspect of this point is significant.
The state of Württemberg was ruled by Duke Frederick I, an avid Anglophile who had an ambition to be a knight in England’s Order of the Garter. To his delight he was appointed to the order by Elizabeth I, after soliciting her long and hard. He was avid also in his alchemical and occult interests, and provided an encouraging environment for the likes of Andreae.2 Elizabeth indulged him with the Garter as part of her pro-German Protestant policy, which had the same aim as France’s policy under Henri IV, namely, that of constraining Habsburg power. Württemberg abutted the Palatinate, whose Elector Frederick married the daughter of Elizabeth’s successor James I in 1613.
The marriage was a spectacular affair, for which plays, songs and pamphlets were written, and lavish festivals held. Actors and musicians accompanied the Elector and his bride back to the Palatinate, performing at the celebrations held at numerous staging-posts on the way to Heidelberg. Frederick was, recall, head of the Protestant Union, and the great noise about his family union with the King of England was meant to be obvious to all Europe. In the end the alliance proved to mean nothing, because when Frederick needed James’ help in defending his assumption of the crown of Bohemia, James abandoned him.
Frederick’s Chancellor, Christian of Anhalt, was another enthusiast for the occult arts and their promises. He was a patron of a Dee-like figure who claimed himself to be a master of those arts, one Oswald Crollius, who was Christian’s physician. Crollius had dedicated a book to Christian, and interested him in his own obsessions with occult ideas.3 Because of his prime-ministerial position at Frederick’s Court Christian was able to foster and indulge these tastes. The influence of Dee and Kelley was palpable in Heidelberg, which Dee had visited on his return journey to England in 1589. His stay in the city created a sensation, with scores of enquirers and noblemen jostling to meet him. Most of the works published in occult fields after his visit bore the stamp of the influence he exerted, especially the influence of the Monas Hieroglyphica which laid out his eclectic views on alchemy and occult philosophy.
Two Dee-inspired books which had a more direct influence on the Rosicrucian texts were The Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom by Henricus Khunrath, and a strange prophetic-seeming work by Simon Studion called Naometria, which had been first published in 1604. Studion’s book bore on its title-page an image of a rose with a cross at its heart, which many saw as anticipating the Rosicrucian documents that appeared ten years later. The Naometria had a special resonance for Frederick of the Palatinate and Christian of Anhalt; it predicted that 1620 was going to be an apocalyptic year, in which the ‘Antichrists’ – the Pope and Mahomet – would be overthrown. This prediction was unquestionably part of what encouraged Christian to tell Elector Frederick that his proper destiny and that of his cause lay in the Bohemian lands.
Khunrath’s Amphitheatre was published in 1609, five years after Studion’s strange book. Dee’s influence on Khunrath is obvious; the latter’s views closely shadow those of Dee. In its own turn Khunrath’s book had an immediate and no less palpable impact on the Rosicrucian texts. Yates wrote, ‘In Khunrath’s work we meet with the characteristic phraseology of the [Rosicrucian] manifestos, the everlasting emphasis on macrocosm and microcosm, the stress on Magia, Cabala, and Alchymia as in some way combining to form a religious philosophy which promises a new dawn for mankind.’4
When the Confessio was published in 1615 it was accompanied by a pamphlet called A Brief Consideration of More Secret Philosophy, offered as a gloss or expansion of some of the more obscure themes in the Confessio. This pamphlet is in effect a paraphrase of parts of Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica, quoting the latter’s text frequently and at length. Likewise the Chemical Wedding by Andreae has Dee’s then instantly recognisable ‘Monas’ symbol not only on its title-page but in the text itself. Unquestionably, the connection between Dee, the influence he left on the German Protestant states and the Rosicrucian texts is close. The two regions of the Palatinate and Bohemia are where occult philosophy mingles with politics, the controversies of religion, and international affairs. As Yates put it, ‘[The] Rosicrucian publications belong to the movements around the Elector Palatine, the movements building him up towards the Bohemian adventure. The chief stirring spirit behind these movements was Christian of Anhalt, whose connections in Bohemia belonged right in the circles where the Dee influence would have been known and fostered.’5
The very long subtitle of the Fama Fraternitatis reads as follows: ‘Universal and General Reformation of the whole wide world; together with the Fama Fraternitatis of the Laudable Fraternity of the Rosy Cross, written to all the Learned and Rulers of Europe; also a short reply sent by Herr Haselmayer, for which he was seized by the Jesuits and put in irons on a galley. Now put forth and communicated to all true hearts’. The book opens with a resounding claim that ‘in these latter days’ a great promise is being kept: nothing less than a full revelation of nature’s deepest and most recondite secrets. The Fama goes on to say that:
[we may] boast of the happy time, wherein there is discovered unto us the half part of the world, which was heretofore unknown and hidden, but [God] hath also made manifest unto us many wonderful and never heretofore seen works and creatures of Nature, and moreover hath raised men, imbued with great wisdom, who might partly renew and reduce all arts (in this our age spotted and imperfect) to perfection; so that man might finally understand his own nobleness and worth, and why he is called Microcosmus, and how far his knowledge extendeth into Nature.6
In recounting the events of Christian Rosencreutz’s travels in the East to gather knowledge, the Fama emphasises the East’s great superiority in epistemological matters, and claims that this superiority arises from the fact that its savants openly communicate their ideas and findings to each other, in contrast to the many ‘magicians, Cabalists, physicians and philosophers’ in Germany who keep their secrets to themselves, in this way inhibiting the spread of knowledge. This point reminds one of Bacon’s argument that science is and should always be a co-operative enterprise, a view urged in his Advancement of Learning (1605).
The Fama dates Rosencreutz’s journey to the fifteenth century, and says that when he returned to Europe he set himself to teach what he had learned; but his efforts were rejected and ridiculed. He therefore started a secret society to preserve what he knew and pass it on. For a long time the tomb where Rosencreutz was buried was kept a profound secret. Its late discovery and reopening – said the Fama – thus revealing its treasures and books of secret knowledge, was predicted; this was the moment that Rosencreutz wished everyone to be prepared for. The Fama accordingly proclaimed that the time had come for Europe to wake up and undergo a ‘general reformation’. The tomb, said the Fama, was reopened in 1604.
Between them the Fama and the Confessio stirred controversy and excitement across the breadth of Europe. They were variously accepted, rejected, quoted, defended, attacked, believed as oracles or vilified as works of charlatanry; but they were read widely, whether by believers or sceptics. Significantly, those who were hostile to the texts were those most alert to the dangerous suggestions of imminent ‘alterations’ in the Holy Roman Empire, of which the Fama talked much; it claimed that the Rosy Cross brotherhood would help to change the Empire greatly ‘with secret aid’. These comments were clearly understood to apply to the Elector Frederick as the Protestant Union’s head; the Fama’s references to the ‘Lion’ – Frederick’s emblem – as the agent of these forthcoming changes made this quite explicit. When Frederick lost his crown at the Battle of the White Mountain a spate of caricatures, lampoons and cartoons pilloried him and Christian of Anhalt together, subjoining mocking references to their Rosicrucian associations.7
But although Rosicrucianism had its many enemies, from the Jesuits and the Roman Church generally to responsible scholars such as Andreas Libavius and sharp, well-informed critics such as ‘Menapius’ and ‘Irenaeus Agnostus’ – both pseudonyms – it also had a highly enthusiastic following. Literally scores of books and pamphlets followed the publication of the Fama and Confessio, written by people who hoped to be noticed by the secret brotherhood and to be invited into their number. There were direct appeals from men keen to learn the Rosicrucian secrets and to be part of the movement. There were also publications by people who themselves either claimed to be or seemed to be Rosicrucians, or who clearly knew a lot about Rosicrucian ideas – among them ‘Joseph Stellatus’ (a pseudonym), ‘Julianus de Campis’ (also a pseudonym), Theophilus Schweighardt, and more. Yates singled out one apparent Rosicrucian who seemed to have a profound grasp of the relevant ideas, ‘Florentinus de Valentia’, who gave a careful reply to an anti-Rosicrucian book by ‘Menapius’ in which he manifested excellent understanding of music, fine arts, architecture, navigation, geometry, mathematics and astronomy. In describing the sciences as standing in need of reform – here displaying the influence of Bacon (an influence that appears also in other Rosicrucian documents) – Florentinus says that astronomy is imperfect, astrology is uncertain, physics is under-supported by experiment, and ethics needs to be examined afresh.8
The comments made by Florentinus are astute. They serve as a reminder that despite the alloy of Hermeticism, Cabala and the rest in Rosicrucian ideas, they also contained a serious aspect. Florentinus insisted that it was not impious, other than by the exigent standards applied by orthodox Christians of all kinds, to understand ‘God’s book’, meaning nature. That book, he says, contains everything we need to recover the knowledge that was lost because of Adam’s Fall. (This theme – that to study nature was to read God’s book – was iterated repeatedly, by among others Newton and in the following century George Berkeley.)9
Some historians of ideas take the view that there is a positive side to the outflow of Rosicrucian literature in this period, because they see it as an encouragement to scientific investigation of nature, coupled as it was with rejection of Aristotelian views both in the content of philosophy and in the manner in which it was done. Enquiry into nature and rejection of Aristotle were vigorously opposed by the Roman Catholic Church, which was afraid of what the new sciences were revealing, and which was doctrinally committed to Aristotelian thought. The close connection between Catholicism and temporal power in the Holy Roman Empire made it automatic that opponents of science would anathematise Rosicrucian ideas, which they regarded as subversive of both the religious and temporal orders equally.
The storm of debate about Rosicrucianism, in the form of books and pamphlets on both sides, suddenly ceased in 1620. Yates gives the reason: the failure of Rosicrucian hopes, linked as they were with Frederick’s Bohemian ambitions, and both defeated at the Battle of the White Mountain. In 1621 a pamphlet appeared, Warning against the Rosicrucian Vermin. It said nothing new, merely iterating the by then standard charges against the supposed brotherhood and its ideas; but what was indeed new and highly significant was its place of publication: Heidelberg, Frederick’s erstwhile Palatinate capital, now occupied by Habsburg troops and under the control of Duke Maximilian of Bavaria.
Also in 1621 appeared the Palma Triumphalis, a hymn of praise to the Catholic Church and the miracles it performed. It was published at Ingoldstadt, a major Jesuit centre, and it was dedicated to Emperor Ferdinand II. The Palma attacked Rosicrucianism’s ideas and aims, ridiculing its ambition to ‘restore all sciences, transmute metals, and prolong human life’.10
Although the political hopes associated with Rosicrucianism died at the Battle of the White Mountain, the ‘movement’ itself had one big final flourish in it. In 1623 posters appeared in Paris announcing that the Brothers of the Rosy Cross had arrived in town, and were ‘making a visible and invisible stay . . . 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.’ The result was general panic. In his Instruction to France about the truth of the Rose Cross Brothers (published in the same year) Gabriel Naudé described the panic as swept along by a ‘hurricane of rumour’. The Church responded to the Brothers’ supposed presence in Paris by vigorously demonising them, saying that they not only forswore Christianity and the authority of the Church, but bowed themselves down before Satan, who manifested himself to them in glory.
Almost all attacks on Rosicrucianism in the 1623 scare, as beforehand, were vitriolic or hysterical. Naudé’s discussion is interesting because it was neither of those things, but instead both well informed and moderate. He placed Rosicrucianism in the Renaissance Hermetic tradition, and in reporting its promise that a new age of discovery was imminent he used the term ‘instauration’ to describe its conception of a renewal of knowledge. Use of that term demonstrates knowledge of Francis Bacon’s writings, among them The Great Instauration, which had been published not long before.11 Naudé’s aim was to oppose Rosicrucianism, but by means of careful assessment; after explaining what he took it to stand for he says, ‘Behold, gentlemen, the huntress Diana whom Actaeon presents to you naked.’ In the myth he alludes to, the goddess Diana, chaste and modest, reluctant ever to be seen naked by a male whether human or divine, was bathing in a pond when the hapless hunter Actaeon stumbled across her. In anger Diana transformed him into a stag, and made his own hounds tear him to shreds. Naudé’s invocation of the myth is clear; Rosicrucians are false philosophers who pretend to reveal truths, but who will be overcome by the real truth. Naudé concludes by agreeing with the Jesuits’ condemnation of Rosicrucianism, and he applauds Libavius for refuting them so conclusively.
René Descartes had at least a walk-on role in the Rosicrucian scare of 1623, though in fact it might have been a larger role than it seems. He had been travelling in parts of Europe central to the tumultuous events of the Thirty Years War – a telling fact in itself, if he was in some sense a spy – and appeared in Paris just as the Rosicrucian panic was beginning there. Pierre Baillet’s account is worth quoting. When Descartes arrived in Paris, Baillet tells us,
the affairs of the luckless Count Palatine, who had been elected King of Bohemia . . . and the transfer of the Electorate from Count Palatine to the Duke of Bavaria, which had been made at Ratisbon on the previous 15th of February [1623], were obsessing public discussion.12 Descartes could tell his friends a great deal about these matters, but in return they told him news of something that was giving them much anxiety, for all that it seemed incredible. It was that for several days there had been talk all round Paris about the Brothers of the Rose Cross, and it was beginning to be said that he [Descartes] was one of their number. Descartes was surprised at this news because such a thing was neither conformable with his character, nor with his inclination to think of the Rosicrucians as impostors and dreamers. In Paris people called them the Invisibles . . . six of them had come to Paris and lodged at the Marais, but they could not communicate with people, or be communicated with, except by joining thought to will in a way undetectable by the senses. The accident of their arrival in Paris at the same time as Descartes could have had an unfortunate effect on his reputation if he had kept himself closeted or lived solitarily, as he was wont to do on his travels. But he refuted those who wished to calumniate him through this conjunction of events, by making himself visible to everyone, and particularly to his friends, who needed no other argument to convince them that he was not one of the Rosicrucians or Invisibles. He used the same argument about invisibility to explain why he had been unable to find any of them in Germany.13
Baillet then adds that Descartes’ deliberate visibility and insouciant dismissal of the allegations ‘served to calm the agitation of his friend Father Mersenne’, who had been particularly upset by the rumours because he did not share others’ dismissive view of Rosicrucianism. Mersenne was convinced that Rosicrucians were real and dangerous, because he had read ‘what several Germans, and Robert Fludd, the Englishman, had written in their favour’, and he believed them.14
It might indeed have been coincidental that Descartes arrived in Paris just as the Rosicrucian scare began, after several years of travels around an unsettled and often dangerous Europe, probably looking for Rosicrucians on behalf of the Jesuits to spy on them; and it might be yet more of a coincidence that he was somehow associated with Rosicrucianism itself in the minds of some. But a considerable body of additional evidence – even if it is circumstantial – supports the hypothesis that he was not as uninvolved as he wished his friends in Paris to think. This evidence suggests either that he was indeed an agent, and if so almost certainly for the Jesuits, charged with investigating or watching alleged Rosicrucians; or that for a time he actually was – or wished to be – a Rosicrucian himself. The evidence, ambiguous as between these possibilities, but not quite so ambiguous as to justify some sort of interest, is as follows.15
First there is what Descartes wrote in a notebook or diary called the Olympica, a work known to Baillet, and also to the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz who owned it and transcribed passages from it, which is why we have those passages now. The notebook was subsequently lost, which is a great pity because it recorded the famously portentous dreams Descartes experienced on 10 November 1619 and which he claimed had shaped his whole philosophical outlook thereafter. The story of that notebook is extraordinary; first, the original was lost after Leibniz made transcriptions from it, then Leibniz’s original manuscript transcriptions went missing after a nineteenth-century French scholar published an edition of them. What remains is a version of them made in the late nineteenth century by Charles Adam, the editor (with Paul Tannery) of the Oeuvres de Descartes. Assuming the reliability of the text, here is what Descartes so enigmatically and suggestively wrote:
Polybius Cosmopolitanus’s Thesaurus Mathematicus teaches the true ways of resolving all difficulties of this science and demonstrates that the human mind can go no further in this respect. This calls forth hesitation and rejects the recklessness of those who promise to perform miracles in all sciences. It also supports the agonising work of many who (F. Rosi Cruc), entangled night and day in some Gordian knots of that discipline, exhaust their minds in vain. This work is offered again to the savants of all the world, and especially to the most celebrated F. R. C. in G. [Fraternity of the Rosi-Crucians in Germany].
Now the sciences have been masked; they would appear in all their beauty, if their masks were to be removed. For to anyone who sees clearly the chains linking the sciences, it will seem no more difficult to keep them in mind than to remember the series of numbers.16
These words suggest that Descartes was planning to write a book with the title Thesaurus Mathematicus under the pseudonym ‘Polybius Cosmopolitanus’, and that it was to be dedicated to the Fraternity of the Rosy Cross. ‘Polybius’ is a pseudonym Descartes actually used; when he visited Johann Faulhaber at Ulm in the summer of 1620 (Faulhaber described him as ‘a clever young French mathematician’) he introduced himself using that name. And as we shall see, among Descartes’ most urgent concerns was to find a method of enquiry that would lead to certain knowledge. This part of his quest is the one that has remained a live matter for philosophical debate ever since.
Furthermore, the dreams that Descartes describes in the notebook passages bear striking parallels with a Rosicrucian work published by Rudophilus Staurophorus in 1619, called the Raptus Philosophicus. In this book a young man pauses at a crossroads, wondering which way to go, is approached by a woman who says that she is Nature and shows him a volume containing all knowledge, but the contents of which have not been put into order.17 The Descartes scholar Stephen Gaukroger carefully notes that we have no evidence that Descartes ever read Staurophorus, and equally carefully points out that the conceit shared by their respective dreams is a cliché – a fork in the road on the journey to knowledge, a person (often a woman personifying Wisdom, reminiscent of the goddess Athena) who points the way. Clichés are available for anyone to use.
But even if we discount the Raptus of Staurophorus as the model used by Descartes for his seminal dreams, another equally plausible Rosicrucian model is Andreae’s Chemical Wedding itself. A significant incident in Descartes’ dream is that he was startled awake, even as he dreamed, by a loud bang in his ear. In the Chemical Wedding the Angel of Truth is announced to Rosencreutz by a trumpet blast. Rosencreutz’s way is opposed by a powerfully blowing gale, against which he has to struggle; but he manages to get into a castle where he meets with a number of acquaintances and is shown a huge globe in which the heavenly bodies are visible even by daylight. He also finds an unfinished encyclopaedia, and a voice asks him, ‘Where are you going?’ The similarities to Descartes’ dreams are remarkable.
Descartes reports having three dreams in succession on the same night, or more precisely, two dreams intermitted by the apparently strange occurrence of the loud ‘bang’ above mentioned, an experience like having an explosion or pistol shot go off next to his ear. All day before going to bed Descartes had been in an excited and overwrought state, thinking hard about what methods of enquiry would lead securely to knowledge. He felt that he was close to discovering what such a method should be. As his notebook relates, and as his peculiar ‘second dream’ confirms, he went to bed exhausted, in an excited and febrile state, and the first dream came to him immediately he fell asleep.18
In this dream Descartes ‘felt his imagination struck by the representation of some phantoms’, Baillet reports,
which frightened him so much that, thinking that he was walking in the streets, he had to lean to his left in order to reach his destination, because he felt a great weakness in his right side and could not hold himself upright. He tried to straighten himself, feeling ashamed to walk in this fashion, but he was hit by turbulent blasts as if of a whirlwind, which spun him round three or four times on his left foot. Even this was not what alarmed him; the difficulty he had in struggling along made him feel that he was going to fall at every step. Noticing a school open along his route he went in, seeking refuge and a remedy for his problem. He tried to reach the school chapel, where his first thought was to pray. But realising that he had passed an acquaintance without greeting him, he sought to retrace his steps to pay his respects, but was violently repulsed by the wind blowing into the chapel. At the same time he saw another person in the school courtyard, who addressed him by name and politely told him that if he wished to find Monsieur N he had something to give him. Descartes took it that the thing in question was a melon from a foreign country. What was more surprising was that the people clustering around that person in order to talk with him were straight and steady on their feet, although he himself was still bent over and unsteady on the same ground. Having almost knocked him over a number of times, the wind had greatly lessened.
Descartes woke to find that there was, says Baillet, a real pain in his side, which made him think that an evil spirit had caused the dream. He turned on to his other side, therefore, praying to God to shield him against any evil consequences of the dream, and to forgive his sins, which he acknowledged were many and great; for though he had lived in a way that was largely innocent, as any ordinary standard of judgment would have it, he knew that he really merited thunderbolts to fall on his head from heaven.
He could not go back to sleep immediately. After two hours’ thinking he fell back to sleep, only to start dreaming again immediately, in a frightening way. ‘He thought he heard a sudden, loud noise, which he took for thunder,’ Baillet writes. ‘Terrified, he immediately woke. Upon opening his eyes he noticed sparks of fire scattered about the room. He had experienced this phenomenon many times before, and it did not seem strange to him that when he woke in the night his eyes sparkled enough for him to see objects close to him.’ After a time his fears diminished, and he again fell asleep, again to dream – but this time a peaceful dream, and a highly meaningful one.
Descartes now dreamed that he found a book on his table, not knowing who had left it there. On opening it he saw that it was a dictionary, which pleased him because dictionaries are so useful. He simultaneously noticed another new book next to it, again without knowing who had put it there. It was a collection of poems by a variety of authors, bearing the title Corpus Poetarum. When he opened it at random his eye fell upon the line, quod vitae sectabor iter?, which means, ‘What way in life shall I follow?’
At that point he became aware of a stranger standing near by, who handed him a poem beginning with the words ‘Yes and No’, and saying that it was an excellent poem. Descartes recognised that the line was a quotation from the Idylls of Ausonius, and that this was included in the anthology he had just picked up from the table. To show the poem to the stranger Descartes began searching for it, boasting that he knew the anthology’s arrangement perfectly. While he leafed through its pages the stranger asked where the anthology had come from; Descartes said that he did not know, but that just a short while ago he been looking through another book, which had suddenly disappeared, and he did not know who had brought that book either. He was still hunting for the Idylls when he saw the dictionary reappear on the other side of the table, and he noticed that it was now no longer as complete as when he had first opened it.
He found Ausonius’ poems at last, but ‘Yes and No’ was not one of them. Descartes told the stranger not to mind, because he knew a better poem by Ausonius, which begins ‘quod vitae sectabor iter?’ The stranger was eager to see it, so Descartes began leafing through the pages again. In the process he came across a number of portraits engraved in copperplate, which made him comment on how handsomely produced the book was; but before he could locate the quod vitae poem the anthology and the stranger both suddenly disappeared.
Descartes was not woken by this third dream, Baillet says, but even in his sleep he wondered whether what he had just experienced was a dream or a vision, and he set about interpreting it: ‘He judged that the dictionary could only mean all the sciences gathered together, and that the anthology of poets entitled the Corpus Poetarum represented, in a more particular and distinct way, the union of Philosophy and Wisdom.’
When at last properly awake Descartes analysed his dreams in detail. He interpreted the poetry anthology as representing Revelation and Enthusiasm, ‘for the favours of which he did not despair’, says Baillet. By ‘Yes and No’ he understood Truth and Falsehood. ‘Seeing that the interpretation of these things accorded so well with his inclinations,’ Baillet adds, ‘he was so bold as to believe that the Spirit of Truth [God, presumably] had wished, by means of this dream, to open to him the treasures of all the sciences.’
Descartes, in short, understood the dreams to be prophetic. Baillet adds that Descartes had confirmation of their prophetic status that very same day: ‘It remained only to explain the little copperplate portraits he had seen in the second book. He looked for no further explanation of them following the visit, later that same day, of an Italian painter.’ The idea that Descartes believed in the possibility of foretelling the future is intriguing, for it is at odds with two commitments he was supposed to have made: one, to the teachings of Catholic Christianity which regarded prognostication as sinful, and the other to the rational demands of a scientific world-view. Perhaps the explanation is the date of the dreams – Descartes was still young and not yet finished in his views, particularly as regards scientific method.
The bang that woke Descartes seemed significant both to him and to some who have written about him. Neurology now recognises this phenomenon as a harmless occurrence which it prosaically labels ‘exploding head syndrome’. Just as Descartes describes, it involves a subject ‘hearing’ an explosion inside his head while falling asleep, so loud and unexpected that it jerks him awake. There is no preceding disease or harmful consequences: it just happens, with no outcome other than that its subject is awake and startled. The bangs seem to occur in subjects who are very tired or very stressed. They are most likely some sort of neurological discharge, caused in a similar way to the feeling of tripping just as one is drifting into asleep. The tripping sensation might be a junior version of the exploding experience, if both are ways that the central nervous system reboots itself to keep levels of excitation uniform. Quite a variety of seemingly odd subjective neurological events can occur in the margins of sleep, so it is easy to understand how they might seem significant, until one learns that they are merely common and arbitrary.19
The point of this excursus is to demonstrate how similar are Descartes’ dreams or ‘dreams’ – embellishment is always a possibility – to Rosicrucian accounts of awakenings to the path of knowledge. If neither of the texts quoted earlier inspired Descartes’ dreams, the similarities are all the more remarkable.
To these coincidences must next be added the fact that Descartes knew a lot of people who either claimed to be Rosicrucians, or stated themselves to be sympathetic to their ideals. One was Jacob Wassenar, who claimed to be a Rosicrucian and – despite or because of which? – with whom Descartes became friendly when he moved to the United Provinces. A 1624 treatise entitled Historisch Verhaal explicitly named Descartes as a Rosicrucian; it was written by Nicolaes Wassenar, said to be Jacob Wassenar’s father. This book predated Descartes’ move to the Netherlands by four years. Another individual with Rosicrucian associations was Cornelius van Hooghelande, a physician who was interested in alchemy. Descartes enjoyed a long and close friendship with him after moving to the United Provinces. As with the Wassenars, both van Hooghelande and his father were open in their adherence to Rosicrucian ideas. When Descartes went to Sweden in 1649 to serve at the court of Queen Christina – his last, and fatal, move – he gave his private papers to van Hooghelande for safekeeping.
Another piece of evidence is that Descartes corresponded with John Pell, an Englishman who was a member of the Invisible College that eventually became London’s Royal Society. Pell was an associate of Samuel Hartlib and Theodore Haak who were also fellows of the Invisible College. Haak was a native of the Palatinate; members of his family had been counsellors to the Elector. His family left the Palatinate after the Bohemian disaster. He studied at both Oxford and Cambridge, and on behalf of the English government translated foreign texts and engaged in intelligence-gathering. When Frederick V’s son was restored to the Palatinate throne in 1648 Haak was asked to be his secretary, but he turned the offer down because he wished to remain in his adopted country.
Haak’s wide continental activities – among many other things he helped Protestant clergymen who had been expelled from Bohemia and the Palatinate after the debacle of the White Mountain – were similar to those of Hartlib, who was likewise a helper of exiles displaced by the Thirty Years War. These exiles were one source of the rich exchange of ideas that fuelled progress in the first half of the seventeenth century, rather as were the Jews forced out of Germany in the 1930s who went to Britain, the United States and elsewhere.
Descartes’ numerous and suggestive Rosicrucian associations have prompted some, from Daniel Huet in the 1690s to Charles Adam in the 1890s to Watson in the late twentieth century, to conclude that Descartes was indeed a Rosicrucian. Huet provides a reminder that fanciful theories easily arise: he claims that Descartes did not die in Sweden in 1650, but spread a rumour that he had done so; and then after a fake funeral went to live secretly in Sweden’s far north so that he could pursue Rosicrucian studies. As proof Huet quotes letters purportedly written by Descartes to Queen Christina in the years 1652 and 1656, two and six years respectively after his recorded death.
So, was Descartes a Rosicrucian? Or was he a spy on behalf of the Jesuits into Rosicrucian personnel, practices and principles? Much is consistent with the former hypothesis. But much is consistent with the latter hypothesis too. If the latter hypothesis is true, it would still be consistent with his later friendship with the likes of the Wassenars and van Hooghelandes, because by that time the Rosicrucian scare was over, he had himself been obliged to go as an exile to the Netherlands, and he would have found that for all the intellectual posturing of some of the Rosicrucian texts, there were notions in them that were not far from those of serious science anyway.
I go for the second hypothesis. Apart from the difficulty – always worth repeating – that there was probably no formal Rosicrucian movement as such, the claim that Descartes was himself a Rosicrucian, even if he was sympathetic to at least some Rosicrucian ideas, is highly doubtful. The first point is his Jesuit loyalties, the second is that he never displays anything but opposition to magia, cabala, alchymia, and a third is that his friend and helper Marin Mersenne, educated as he was by the Jesuits at La Flèche, was a vehement opponent of Rosicrucianism.20 It is true that similarities exist between the Rosicrucian rules and Descartes’ own rules about living ‘hidden from view’, applying his medical knowledge for free, and seeking ways (in his case by natural scientific means) to lengthen life. There is also his urgent desire to find a methodology that would be a secure path to knowledge, and his passion for mathematics. But these ambitions were general, not the possession of Rosicrucians only; so they are far from conclusive.
In my view what settles the matter is Descartes’ Jesuit connections. He was loyal to the Jesuits all his life, scrupulously careful to avoid giving them any offence but rather craving their approval, and ambitious to have them adopt his writings as textbooks in their schools.21 If he had indeed worked as an agent of the Jesuits under commission to find out about Rosicrucian activity and to keep a watch on it, he would have been just one of many they employed for the task. To describe Descartes as a Jesuit spy, travelling around Europe in quest of information about occult activities, would be neither dramatic nor surprising given the situation of Europe at the time. The sort of people most able to travel were scholars, aristocrats, merchants and soldiers, and only the two first were likely to know Latin and thereby have access to the sorts of circles where, if they existed, Rosicrucians might gather. So if the Jesuits knew of a clever young man with interests and skills in many of the same subjects as the Rosicrucians professed, they would be quite likely to make good use of him.
It seems plausible therefore to surmise that Descartes might have been employed in this way when he was a young man. We know that he wandered around Europe between 1619 and 1625, popping up in many of the key places – and some of the most tense places – associated with the early phases of the Thirty Years War. He used pseudonyms, he visited places alleged to be centres of Rosicrucian interest, he was in Bohemia at the time of the crisis, he was in the Val Telline as the likelihood of armed conflict loomed there, he was in Paris at the time of the Rosicrucian panic, all this while rumoured to be associated with Rosicrucians. Moreover, although he had been bequeathed a small farm in Poitou, he was not wealthy, and these years of extensive travel required money. Perhaps he was paid to be in those places at those delicate times.
The final large clue is the reason why he quitted France for exile in the Netherlands, returning only for brief visits years later. While in Paris in 1628 Descartes was invited to a private interview with Cardinal Bérulle, one of the most powerful and influential men in France. The interview took place just as the Jesuits were yet again in trouble with the French government, and just as France was giving renewed diplomatic support – along with intimations of military support – to the Protestant side in the Thirty Years War, the intention as always being to constrain the growth of Habsburg power, which at that point was gaining ascendancy. Immediately after this interview Descartes departed for the United Provinces, and did not set foot in France again for a dozen years, by which time the people and circumstances present when he left had both ceased to exist. In that interview, I surmise, Descartes was told that his connection with Jesuit activities in support of the Habsburg cause was unwelcome to France, and that he was advised to leave the country.
The story of Rosicrucianism is the end-point of what is arguably the gestation period of the modern mind, the period in which enquiry began to enjoy increasing freedom from the heavy constraints of both religious orthodoxy and magical thinking. The process had started in the early Renaissance with the humanistic turn to interest in things of this life in this world, and was dramatically furthered by the Reformation’s assertion of liberty of conscience, which quickly became a desire for liberty of enquiry in general.22 This efflorescence of thought consisted in a mixed luxuriance of what was both good and bad, weeds and crops together, the former all the occult enthusiasms, the latter – with more assiduous cultivation – resulting in the maturation of science and philosophy as we know them now. Thus out of the chaos of ideas constituting magia, cabala, alchymia, with astrology and Hermeticism’s mystical employment of number besides – or alongside it, or despite it, but certainly in opposition to it eventually – came science. It is probably most right to see science not as the child of the other forms of speculation, but as being among the speculations that proved worth taking seriously.
If one were asked to put beginning and end dates to this gestation period, a plausible suggestion would be that ‘occult science’ had its heyday in the period between 1480 and 1620. Perhaps that too neatly gives Rosicrucianism the status of a climax – remember Newton and Boyle – but the latter date has another recommendation: it was the point at which Bacon and Descartes were thinking about method not as the occultists had, but as scientists do; and this, as subsequent intellectual history shows, was the significant thing.
A necessary rider to the foregoing is that rejection of Scholasticism, the philosophical tradition whose roots lay in Aristotle’s logic, science and metaphysics, was as much a premise for many of the occultists as it was for the likes of Bacon and Descartes. This adds an interesting complexity to the situation, given that occultists and scientists (especially when the same person was both) shared a number of premises, and those premises were – as noted earlier – at odds with Church orthodoxy. The situation was not therefore one in which there was a two-way fight between occultist and scientific ways of thinking, another two-way fight between religion and occultism, and another two-way fight between religion and science, but a three-cornered relationship which was sometimes a fight and sometimes not, between each of the three and the other two. At the same time as these tricorn intellectual relationships were pulling and pushing, they were doing so against the very present backdrop of the Reformation’s religious divisions and the conflicts they generated. It is easy to see therefore why religious orthodoxies on all sides, but especially the Catholic Church, were themselves in a state of difficulty about the new ideas. It was difficult enough for proponents of the real and the occult sciences alike to work out what was fanciful and what was fruitful in what they were doing, but defenders of religious orthodoxy were at a double disadvantage in that all the new ideas threatened their beliefs, but they were not sure which of the threatening ideas were the ones to worry about most. Of course it must have been possible for some of the astuter minds to distinguish between a Dr Dee and a Galileo, but because both Dee and Galileo offered threats to the interests of orthodoxy, both kinds of thinking had to be proscribed. If you put Giordano Bruno on the magia, cabala, alchymia side of things, and Galileo on the proper science side of things, you get a feel for the difficulties, especially as they puzzled the Catholic Church. It burned Bruno at the stake in 1600 and would have burned Galileo in 1632 if he had not recanted, which illustrates the point that no matter what form of unorthodoxy a person then subscribed to, it carried dangers, and that the new mind of humankind had a perilous birth because of it.