The Golden Builders

by Tobias Churton

  Joachim Morsius, a very gifted scholar who had studied at Rostock and Cambridge, wrote to the Brotherhood (care of the printer), received no reply and then wrote a work defending their secrecy (Theosophi Eximii, Frankfurt 1619). He was friendly with Balthasar Walter (a Paracelsian alchemist) who informed Morsius that his spiritual master Böhme knew all about the true Rosicrucian doctrines. Böhme's reply to Morsius' enquiry into the Rosicrucian Reformation merely informed him of the need for the true reformation in Christ. Morsius then went to Stockholm to talk to the Swedish pansophist Johann Buraeus who was himself fascinated by the Fraternity of the Rose-Cross, but never seems to have found the satisfaction he craved. Morsius even met Andreae in Calw in 1629. Andreae did not, it seems, disillusion him in his quest. Morsius comes over as something of a romantic figure, belonging perhaps to a later time when poets throughout the continent would again pack satchels and head off in search of the Absolute.

  The list goes on : Daniel Sennert of Wittenberg, Galenist and Aristotelian: against. Alexander Rost of Rostock, prolific anti-Rosicrucian: against. Joannes Arndt and Melchior Breler44 in Lüneburg: in favour. Wenceslas Budowez, Comenius (initially), ‘I.B.’ - all in Prague - all in favour. Ratke in Köthen : pro. Christoph Bismark and Joachim Krusicke of Halle : pro. In Schleswig Holstein: Nicolas Tetting, Banier, the poetess Anne Hojers: all in favour. David Fabricius, also in Holstein: against. In Hamburg: Georg Froben: pro; Nicholaus Hunnius and Muller: anti. In Oppenheim in the Palatinate the publisher Theodor De Bry (publisher of Robert Fludd's Utriusque Cosmi Historia (1617) and other massive Hermetic works): pro. In Danzig, Corvinus: against, while Hermann Rathmann and Martin Ruarius were in favour.

  The frequent vagueness of the manifestos concerning details of the Brotherhood's beliefs enabled champions and opponents to paint the non-existent Order in whatever colours they fancied. For Julius Sperber, based in Danzig and a convinced apocalyptist attending on the New Age as fervently as Simeon in the Temple waited upon Jesus, Christian Rosenkreuz was the inheritor of the ancient secret doctrine stemming from Adam and which then passed through Noah, the Patriarchs, Zoroaster, the Chaldeans, the Egyptians, the Persians, the Jewish Qabalah, and then in a secret wisdom tradition begun by Jesus and reserved to the few Christians who could ‘take it’ - (this man seems to have had a very penetrating insight into the gnostic tradition) - it was passed on to Cornelius Agrippa, Johann Reuchlin (the great Christian Qabalist), Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola and Aegidius Guttmann (1490-1584), spiritual alchemist, esotericist and author of Offenbärung gottlicher Majestät (Revelation of the Divine Majesty). In Sperber's Echo der von Gott höcherleuchteten Fraternitet (Echo of the God-illuminated Fraternity. Danzig, 1615), Sperber saw the Rosicrucian Fraternity as having a claim on this inherited pristine gnosis. Sperber held an official position in Anhalt lands for Ludwig, Augustus' brother, at Köthen. I have seen some of Sperber's handwritten manuscripts held in Köthen castle in the former DDR: commentaries on the Apocalypse and on the work of Simon Studion - and I would say that the visions of the farthest-out psychedelicist would have a hard time ‘out-freaking’ the mind of this extraordinary person. Andreae found this sort of speculation too far-out-of-this-world for his taste, and no doubt began feeling something like regret. But the Rosicrucian furor had a momentum of its own.

  In Strasbourg: Johann Friedrich Jungius (who got another pro-Rosicrucian, the printer Zetzner, to print Andreae's Chymische Hochzeit in 1616 - “someone brought the text” he said) was pro, along with Figulus and Walch. Isac Harbrecht45 was against. In Lübeck, Joachim Morsius and Count Michael Maier were pro; Rochel and Dame : against.

  Michael Maier, the man who had sent the strange Christmas greeting to James I in 1612, becomes the single figure most identified as a classic ‘Rosicrucian’. He writes in his many works on the subject - always in staunch defence of the Brotherhood - with what appears to be great insider-knowledge. He strives to be acceptable to the Brotherhood but never claims to be on the inside. The inside of the Brotherhood has become for him, as for his correspondent Robert Fludd (1574-1637) in England, an altogether exalted fraternity : a spiritual body, not existing on this plane at all.

  It is never clear whether this spiritual body actually represents a body of unearthly initiates guiding humankind with occasional gifts of knowledge and insight or whether Maier has got Andreae's trick, that is, that the ‘Brother’ is a truly Christian person with a spiritual approach to all things, subsisting on angelic guidance and a member of the invisible fraternity of Christ's body : the Church which transcends space and time. It seems to me that Maier held both views at once : that the essence of the Fraternity was spiritual but there was yet some kind of organisation somewhere - or that there ought to be. It is noteworthy in this context that in 1619 Augustus of Anhalt, for whom Maier was working, along with Moritz von Hessen proposed a Societas Hermetica for the explicit study of Hermetic science while Augustus' brother Ludwig founded the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft (Fruit-bringing society) : a select order dedicated to the cultural renewal of Germany in the same year (Andreae was a member). Maier may also have known of Andreae's ideological centrality to the original movement. Maier's Themis Aurea (Frankfurt, 1618) not only gives the rules of the Fraternity (extrapolations from the Fama & Confessio) but also offers clues as to where it could be found :

  We cannot set down the places where they meet, nor the time. I have sometimes observed Olympick Houses not far from a river, and known a city which we think is called S. Spiritus - I mean Helicon or Parnassus, in which Pegasus opened a spring of overflowing water wherein Diana washed herself, to whom Venus was handmaid and Saturn gentleman usher. This will sufficiently instruct an intelligent reader, but more confound the ignorant.

  Here Maier clearly sees himself as one of the intelligent as distinct from the (already) confounded ignorant. Maier was brilliant at linking up Greek and Egyptian mythology into a complex alchemical system, regarding the ancient myths as allegories for alchemical processes. A dedicated reader might well check up with his beautifully produced collection of alchemical emblems46 where he or she would find in Emblem XII a delightful engraving, almost certainly by Matthieu Merian (De Bry's son-in-law), of a figure with a scythe (Saturn) flying above a mountain whilst vomiting out a large indigestible rock or (rejected) stone. Below the mountain is a little chapel with a cross on it, built into the side of an escarpment (into Nature?) whose steps lead down to a stream which flows about the mountain (Helicon). Behind the mountain is a river with a graceful city built on the opposite banks. Venus is present in the lush vegetation which surrounds the scene. The theme of the Emblem is written in Latin and German and tranlates as follows : “The Stone which Saturn ate for his son Jove, vomited, is then put on Mount Helicon for the remembrance of mankind.” Without pursuing the eloquent symbolism to the ends, we can say that Saturn (as Cronos : Time and Death), famous in the Greek myth for swallowing his children and vomiting them out again, is here placed in the positive rôle (following Plutarch's On the Ei at Delphi) of Saturn as a redemptive figure, that is to say that the swallowing, according to the Neoplatonic scheme, represents the return of the Many to the One. Partaking of the Chemical Stone re-unites the cosmos to its source. This is the fundamental theme of the emblem. Plutarch wrote that :

  When the god is changed and distributed into winds, water, earth, stars, plants, and animals, they describe this experience and transformation allegorically by the terms “dismemberment” and “rending”. They apply to him the names Dionysius, Zagreus, Nyctelius, Isodaites, and they construct allegorical myths in which the transformations that have been described are represented as death and destruction followed by restoration to life and rebirth.

  Plutarch (AD 46-120) was a priest at the centre of the Greek Mysteries at Delphi, and Delphi lies between the great mountains of Parnassus in the west and Helicon in the east47. The German humanist Conrad Celtes took the idea of Pegasus the winged horse producing a fountain on Helicon (when brushing the mountain with
his hooves) as the theme for a woodcut made in 1507 after learning of the ‘pagan trinities’ of Neoplatonic interpretation in Italy. Pegasus clearly stands as an image for the Holy Spirit.

  Furthermore, Andreae was also more than familiar with the Christian interpretation of classical mythology. It had become both customary and somewhat prosaic in sixteenth century Germany simply to equate Greek gods and goddesses with respectable Christian figures viz : Jupiter=God the Father; Apollo=Christ; Minerva=Mary; Hermes=S. John the Baptist; Pegasus=the dove of the Holy Spirit. Andreae's Chymical Wedding is peppered with such associations. Note for example the copper kettle upon the tripodic sepulchre in the vault of Venus on Day Five of the Chemical Wedding. In the kettle is a tree which drops its fruit into the kettle and then into three smaller golden kettles from which the lustrous liquid overflows. Christian Rosenkreuz is informed that when the tree is all melted, its fruit will produce a King. This triadic arrangement is almost certainly a reference to the three Neoplatonic Graces who in their outgoing, receiving and return, embody the dynamic Venus. Whoso partakes of the melted tree which has flowed through the three golden kettles (the Graces) will be “a King”, that is : the philosophical Child whose mother is Venus, that is: Love. Where there is active Love, there is the Fraternity : the children of Love.

  Andreae's theatrical romance TURBO, published (like the Chymische Hochzeit) in 1616, declares its mythical source on the title page (on which is an engraving of a tree weighed down heavily with fruit). The book derives this time not from Lazarus Zetzner but from HELICONE juxta parnassum : Helicon near Parnassus (Parnassus being the mountain of the poets) - and that is of course the same artistic source as the Fama Fraternitatis. It would seem that Maier was at least to a degree ‘in on the gag’. It should also be stated that acquaintance with this kind of rich initiatic symbolism, whose aim can best be described as gnosis, does in fact produce an invisible fraternity among those who have glimpsed the mysteries. In this sense a secret Fraternity does exist - and anyone can enter in who sees and siezes the point. This was certainly the point-of-view of Andreae and Besold. The question, as always in Hermetic matters, is one of perception.

  The Devil in Paris

  In 1621 - a late date in the history of the Rosicrucian furore - one of the rare Catholic commentators, Philip Geiger, weighed in with his Counter-Reformation inspired Warnung für der Rosenkreutzer (Warning against the Rosicrucians) after Frederick and Elizabeth (the ‘Winter King and Queen of Bohemia’) had been defeated and exiled to the Hague while their beautiful capital of Heidelberg was being sacked by the Catholic army of the Duke of Bavaria. It was being widely touted by Catholic opponents that Frederick had used witchcraft in (what they saw as) his machinations against the Catholicity of the Holy Roman Empire. The Rosicrucians became objects of a witch-scare as part of a massive pro-Habsburg propaganda campaign. In France the conspiracy-angle really took off. According to Gabriel Naudé's Instruction a la France sur la verité de l'histoire des Frères de la Rose-Croix (Paris. 1623), placards appeared in the capital announcing that the Invisible Brothers were about to put in an appearance :

  We, being deputies of the principle College of the Brothers of the Rose Cross, are making a visible and invisible stay in this city through the Grace of the Most High, towards whom turn the hearts of the Just. We show and teach without books or marks how to speak all languages of the countries where we wish to be, and to draw men from error and death.

  Naudé's view was that ‘their’ mission was altogether more sinister. Another work published in that year of 1623 was more specific : Horrible Pacts made between the Devil and the Pretended Invisible Ones. The publication of this nonsense was clearly intended, and seems to have succeeded, in creating a witch scare. This was no joke. The burning of witches was a regular occurrence during this period, and the justice available for such cases was invariably a mass of prejudice. According to the latter work - a kind of prototype for 300 years of Satan-scares - 36 Invisibles were dispersed about the world in groups of six. The meeting to decide to send their ‘reps’ to Paris had occurred, it says, in Lyons the previous June, and was followed by a Grand Sabbath at which a demon appeared in great lustre. His appearance then made the adepts imitate the accusations made against the Templars i.e : that they prostrated themselves before the evil-one and swore to abjure Christianity in all its aspects. For so selling their souls they obtained the power to travel with full pockets to whereso'er they wished and were granted the eloquence to attract dupes for the Devil. In a perversion of the Fama's rules, it says that they could not be recognised because they were attired as ordinary men.

  Another book from the same year, La doctrine curieuse des beaux ésprits de ce temps (Paris, 1623) by the French Jesuit François Garasse, informs its readers that the Rosicrucians are a secret German sect run by their secretary, one Michael Maier. Their learning comes from the east - therefore it is heathenish - and in spite of appearances they are wicked, subversive sorcerers of universal danger who should be put to ignominious death on the gallows or wheel if captured. All this happened as Catholic armies poured into northern Germany : a progress of rapine and destruction characterised by a multiplication of witch-trials. It was all so much easier to murder your neighbour if you could pin on him or her an appropriate label : witch, sorcerer, heretic…Rosicrucian.

  Naudé in his Instruction to victim-France does not go as far as Garasse. He says that the placards were put up to cause a bit of excitement by “some people”. Furthermore, his position against the Rosicrucians is compromised since he favours much of the philosophy with which they are associated. He gives a fascinating list of the kind of authors approved by the Brotherhood. They include John Dee, Trithemius,48 Francesco Giorgi,49 the Hermetic Pymander (translated by François de Candale), Pontus de Tyard's Musical Theories (occult and Neoplatonic, and very influential), Giordano Bruno (and his book On the shadows of ideas. Paris, 1582), Ramon Lull (Alchemy), and a commentary on Magic by Paracelsus. Naudé cannot really say that these books are in themselves bad - 'tis the use they are put to - and that use is pernicious. The Rosicrucians must be charlatans, telling fables and distorting the truth. Interestingly he lumps their fancies in with Thomas More's Utopia and with Rabelais' Abbey of Thelema : a mythic establishment which will not gain concrete form for just under 300 years - when Aleister Crowley will found an ‘Abbey’ of this name in Sicily, abandoned in a flurry of press-led Satan-scares not entirely unrelated (from the psychological perspective) to the witch-scares of the 1620s.

  Naudé must have felt conscious of having somewhat confused the issue by throwing in some favourite authors into the pot of paranoia brewing in Europe, for in 1625 he published an Apology for Great men suspected of Magic. In this work he maintains that innocent people are being attacked because the proper distinctions between types of magic are not observed. There are, he says, four kinds of magic : divine magic, Theurgy (freeing the soul from the body), Goetia (witchcraft), and natural magic, which is good science. Only Goetia is wicked. He suggests that people often become suspect for the wrong reasons : mathematical diagrams, because of their incomprehensible nature to the uneducated, frequently draw suspicion. This is not right, says Naudé. He wishes people could see John Dee's book on Friar Roger Bacon, then they would know that Bacon did not conjure demons. Try witches by all means, says Naudé - if, that is, you are sure that they are not religious magi or men of learning. The good magi according to Naudé are Zoroaster, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Ramon Lull, Paracelsus, Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Pico della Mirandola, and John Dee. It must have taken a certain amount of courage to publish the second book during the collective hysteria of the 1620s.

  A kind of picture-magazine called The Miseries and the evils of the War was published in 1633 in Paris. It is a bit like the old LIFE magazine only instead of photographs there are a series of engravings made by a man called Israel for his friend Jacques Callot. The pictures come from the distant war. We see women bein
g chased out of houses at the ends of halberds, the raising of armies, multiple violation of women, merciless hand-to-hand combat, men being suspended over fires and slow-roasted while their comrades cut throats and steal; regiments blasted by cannon-fire, the burning of churches, the looting of whole towns; whole armies watching burnings at the stake; men and women publicly broken on wheels erected in market-places while priests with crucifixes beg for recantation; row upon row of veterans with one leg, or walking with sticks to support wooden stumps while others pull themselves about on little sleds, limbless; beggars and starving peasants; men tearing the hearts out of victims and showing off severed heads to their fellow Christians; men hung from trees, young girls left in the mud as mothers and fathers weep; small bands of renegades and mercenaries out for anything they can find; public torture : men trussed up like turkeys and hung by the wrists from great gibbets built in town-squares, a great tree with over thirty captured enemies suspended from its branches, hung until their torsos fall from their necks; mass executions by firing-squad. This was the Thirty Years War - as real and cold and weird as any passage from the Apocalypse. And the verdict of the picture captions : “see how the guilty rebels pay for their treason!”

  The Assassination of Truth

  How did the authors of the Rosicrucian Manifestos react to this decade and more of mystery and madness - following the publication of the Fama in 1614? We shall never know what Tobias Hess thought of the furor because he died in Tübingen in the same year as Wessel published the Fama, much missed by his close friends Andreae, Joannes Stoffel, Wilhelm Bidembach and the lawyer Thomas Lanz, who wrote of Hess on 27 November of that year :