The Golden Builders

by Tobias Churton

  15 Pico refers to II Esdras XIV. 44-46 : “In forty days they [five men whom Esdras is instructed to take apart from society] wrote two hundred and four books. And it came to pass, when the forty days were fulfilled, that the Highest spake, saying, The first that thou hast written publish openly, that the worthy and the unworthy may read it : But keep the seventy last, that thou mayest deliver them only to such as be wise among the people : For in them is the spring of understanding, the fountain of wisdom, and the stream of knowledge.” Pico takes these seventy secret books to be the basis for the hidden gnosis of the Jews, the Qabalah, which he has employed to prove the essential concordance of all philosophies, and to prove that Jesus Christ Himself employed this magical secret wisdom in order to transform the world.

  16 A True & Faithful Relation of what passed for many years between Dr John Dee and some Spirits. (Ed : Meric Casaubon. 1657). Casaubon took his material from Dee's diaries, chiefly from those of 1583-4.

  17 The Rosicrucians. (Weiser 1998.)

  18 De stella nova in pede Serpentarii : De stella incognita Cygni. 1606.

  19 Damcar and Fez had similar reputations to Harran and Baghdad for medieval Arabic learning. Andreae could have got his background information from his friend Wilhelm Schickhardt the Tübingen orientalist, while Damcar, wrongly in some English versions of the Fama changed to ‘Damascus’ appeared on the 1569 Mercator map of Arabia, as ‘Damar’ easily read as ‘Damcar’ – see end of Bibliography.

  20 Christianae Societatis imago. Tübingen, Eberhard Wild. 1620. (The model of a Christian society).

  21 Christiani amoris dextera porrecta. Tübingen, Eberhard Wild. 1620. (The right hand of Christian love offered).

  22 A Waldensian was a follower of Peter Valdès, who around the year 1173 believed in sharing property and living communistically, like the first apostles.

  23 It is curious how so many of the radical spiritual views of men such as Schwenckfeld and Franck would resurface as magical or occult ideas, where they can still be found today. It is a matter of debate whether such archetypes derived from magical circles in the first place - certainly there are gnostic precedents for beliefs associated with the radical reformers.

  24 The Golden Ark. Willem Gaillairt. Emden. 1560.

  25 Franck's observation on the perversion of learning was to extend right through to Gottfried Arnold's History of Heretics and Churches (Frankfurt. 1700), which was not only the first published book to explicitly link the thought of the first Valentinian Gnostics to that of Jacob Böhme, the Rosicrucians and the Paracelsians, (while referring to Giordano Bruno, Meister Eckhart, Thomas à Kempis and Johann Tauler on the way), but also based the entire theme of the book on the problem of the learned-perverted. On page two, Arnold asked the question, (a kind of summary observation of the previous two centuries' religious conflicts) : “Are not those who accuse and who are intolerant of dissent, not themselves either hypocrites and learned, or Godless and perverted?”

  26 cf. the climactic message of the (apparently unfinished) Chemical Wedding, written by a young Andreae : “The highest wisdom is to know nothing. Brother Christian Rosenkreuz. Knight of the Golden Stone. A.D. 1459.” (Of course, if the highest wisdom is to know Nothing, then we may infer that to know Nothing is to know All).

  27 William Browne of Tavistock (1588-1643). The Rose. This poem is quite possibly an allegory for the condition of Elizabeth of Bohemia (“The Rose”), daughter of James I, threatened in Prague by the Catholic armies of the Habsburgs in 1619, just before the outbreak of the Thirty Years War.

  28 It is highly unlikely that the rose can have referred to the Tudor-rose which John Dee had tried to serve in the person of Elizabeth I, (as Frances Yates suggested in 1972 in her book The Rosicrucian Enlightenment). James I was of course the founder of a new dynasty (as far as England was concerned), that of the troubled Stuarts.

  29 viz : the explicitly Hermetic Rosarium philosophorum; Secunda pars alchimiae de lapide philosophico vero modo praeparando. (1550).

  30 See page 40 on Sir George Ripley (b. circa 1415).

  31 That is the return to spiritual Innocence - Adam's knowledge before the Fall : the aim of Sir Francis Bacon's The Advancement of Learning. (1605), as well as the polyvalent circle and centre at the heart of John Dee's Monas Hieroglyphica (1564) which symbolised (among other things) the sun at the centre of the cosmos.

  32 Speculative Free Masonry may have been just one of several outflows of this powerful and to a large extent secret movement.

  33 There is no doubt at all that one of the meanings of the word ‘Rose’ at this point in history was as a suggestive epithet for Elizabeth of Bohemia. This is revealed in a poem by Sir Henry Wotton (1568-1639). The poem is called Elizabeth of Bohemia. In the poem Sir Henry compares Nature's many beauties with those gifts indwelling Elizabeth : You violets that first appear,/ By your pure purple mantles known/ Like the proud virgins of the year,/ As if the spring were all your own;/ What are you when the rose is blown. This poem is no mere soubriquet. Wotton was British Ambassador to the Republic of Venice and an admirer and acquaintance of Trajano Boccalini (as was Andreae) whose work appeared with the first printed Fama. The Doge of Venice's attempt at independence from Papal domination and that of the Habsburgs relied on shifting power-patterns in European politics, in particular on whether James I would support his daughter when she and her husband accepted the throne of Bohemia in September 1619 - thereby bringing Protestant political power into southern Europe, something the Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand could not accept. Wotton used to call in at Heidelburg to see the Elector and his wife on his way back from Venice. See Izaak Walton's Life of Sir Henry Wotton (published as a collection of Lives in 1670, along with biographies of John Donne, Richard Hooker, George Herbert and Bishop Sanderson and, incidentally, one of Dr. Johnson's favourite books).

  34 Author : Impietas Wigeliana. Tübingen. 1622 - a treatise against Valentin Weigel.

  35 Author : Admonitio de Quorundam. Tübingen. 1620.

  36 Mögling saying in his Speculum Sophicum Rhodo Stauroticum (1618) that those who wished to join should follow the Imitatio Christi of Thomas à Kempis.

  37 Author : Naturae sanctuarium quod est Physica Hermetica. Frankfurt. 1619.

  38 Author : Epharmosis Mundi.. Marburg. 1616.

  39 Homagius was the nephew of Wilhelm Wessel, the Cassel printer, and a student at Marburg when in 1620, he was tried by the university for burning all his books except his Rosicrucian works and the Arbatel, (a magical textbook). On the express orders of Landgrave Moritz von Hessen, he was sentenced to “eternal imprisonment” in a frontier fort.

  40 Author : Fama Syderea Nova. 1618; Mysterium Arithmeticum sive Cabalistica et Philosophica Inventio…illuminatissimis laudatissimisque Fratribus R.C…dicta. Ulm. 1615; and Himmlische Geheime Magia oder Newe Cabalistische Kunst. Ulm. 1613. Faulhaber included mechanics, mathematics and perspective in his treatment of Divine Magic and new Cabalist Art. He was one of the first to respond to the Fama and interestingly enough, he met and was most impressed by René Descartes in Ulm in June 1620, when the French philosopher, (often regarded as the founder of the mechanistic or materialist philosophy), was looking for the Rosicrucian Brotherhood, while simultaneously journeying with the forces of the Habsburg army of the Duke of Bavaria. This must stand as one of the most ironic encounters in the history of thought.

  41 Author of Wohlmeinendes Bedencken der Fama und Confession der Bruderschaft das Rosencreutzes. Frankfurt, 1616, and a number of other negative responses to the Brotherhood

  42 Author : Astronomiae Negeliane. 1622.

  43 Author : Speculum Temporis Zeit Spiegel.. Freiburg. 1620.

  44 Author : Mysterium Iniquitatis Pseudo-Evangelicae. Goslar 1621.

  45 Author of Kurtze Grüdliche Beschreibung… : on new stars, and Typus Chemicum. Strasbourg. 1628.

  46 Atalanta Fugiens, hoc est Emblemata Nova de Secretis Naturae Chymica. Theodore de Bry. Oppenheim. 1618.

  47 Proclus and Iamblichus
both regard the mystical doctrine of the Greeks as deriving from the mystical doctrines of Orpheus. The Orphic mysteries were often linked to the genesis of Gnosis. Pausanias IX. XXX.4 describes a statue to Orpheus on Mt. Helicon.

  48 In particular the Abbot of Sponnheim's book of angel and demon-conjuring, the Steganographia.

  49 Giorgi's (1466-1540) De Harmonia Mundi (1525) being a fundamental Renaissance Neoplatonist text.

  50 Boccalini's satire was in part aimed at the second Council of Trent, begun in 1562, the history of whose chaotic attempt at Catholic Reform had been written by his friend Paolo Sarpi, a friend both of Boccalini and of Sir Henry Wotton, British Ambassador to Venice (1568-1639), and a portrait of whom hung in John Donne's study. Donne (1573-1631) was chaplain to Elizabeth of Bohemia and Frederick of the Palatinate while they were together at Heidelberg. (Donne's life, like that of Wotton, was written by their friend Izaak Walton (1593-1683).

  51 Wense provided Andreae with information and contacts in the Italian liberal scene (especially Venice) through his friend Tobias Adami. Adami brought manuscripts to Andreae and Hess, including the ms. of the City of the Sun from the revolutionary friar and magus Tommaso Campanella who was imprisoned in a Naples dungeon at the mercy of the Habsburgs at the time when Haslmayr was arrested at Innsbruck (1612). Andreae was exceptionally well-informed.

  52 Vita ab ipso conscripta, presented to his friend Duke Augustus of Braunschweig many years later.

  53 Turbo sive moleste et frustra per Cuncta Divagans Ingenium. In Theatrum productum. (Helicone iuxta parnassum; that is : Zetzner. Strasbourg, 1616).

  54 Civis Christianus sive Peregrini quondam errantis restitutiones. Zetzner. Strasbourg. 1619.

  55 Reipublicae Christianopolitinae Descriptio. Zetzner. 1619.

  56 Theca gladii spiritus : Sententias quasdam breves, vereque philosophicas continens (Zetzner. 1616).

  57 Andreae never admitted to anyone in print that he had written any of the Rosicrucian works - but it was widely rumoured in academic circles, and his friends never doubted Andreae's involvement - but when one looks at the consequences, it is not surprising that he refused to attract attention to his part in the play. As stated, his method was to use the interest and energy aroused by the Manifestos for his own purposes.

  58 Invitatio Fraternitatis Christi, Ad Sacri Amoris Candidatos. Zetzner. 1617.

  59 Menippus sive Dialogorum Satyricorum Centuria inanitatum nostratium speculum. In Gramatticorum gratiam castigatum. Cosmopoli.

  60 Mythologiae Christianae sive virtutem et vitiorum vitae humanae imaginum Libri tres. (Zetzner, 1619).

  61 This insight could be happily applied to our own situation. How often are we told that we have achieved this, done that, mastered this, that or the other; that we are ‘modern’, ‘advanced’, ‘up-to-date’, technologically superior; that we have the best system, the finest judiciary, civil-service, police-force, public-services, newspapers, television : all the very epitome of Democracy, and so on and on?

  62 One thinks of John Lennon & Yoko Ono's declaration of “NUTOPIA” on the Mind Games album of 1973 : membership accorded by awareness of Nutopia: “no borders, no passports, only people. No laws, other than cosmic.”

  63 De Curiositatis Pernicie Syntagma.

  64 Turris Babel sive Judiciorum de Fraternitate Rosaceae Crucis Chaos (Zetzner. 1619).

  65 The Occult Philosophy and the Elizabethan Age. (Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1979. pp. 169-175)

  66 The fundamental problem is childishly simple and can be solved by a small, but infinitely creative shift in approach. See the world of matter as a manifestation of the spiritual Nous and unnecessary dialectical conundra cease to pain us.

  67 This image actually announces itself in the first section of the Chymical Wedding where Rosenkreuz dreams that he is in a dungeon full of madmen and only escapes when a rope comes down to him from a light above.

  68 Jerusalem - the Emanation of the Giant Albion 11.25. (1804).

  69 Jesus' father Joseph is described as a τεκτων (tekton - hence ‘architekton’ = master mason/builder/architect). Often thought to have been a ‘humble carpenter’, he could have been a builder in stone involved, as his family was, in the running of the Temple.

  70 The reference here to Christ raising a new Temple “without hands” is directly parallel to the account of the stone in Daniel II.34-35: “Thou sawest till that a stone was cut without hands, which smote the image upon his feet that were of iron and clay, and broke them to pieces. …and the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth.” The stone can transform itself and anything with which it comes into contact.

  71 Frances Yates discerned unmistakable Rosicrucian references in this work, especially in the allegorical illustrations with their overt use of rose-symbolism.

  72 Comenius was also Hartlib's intermediary in the latter's contact with Jacob Böhme's disciple, Abraham von Frankenburg (the first man in print to identify the Rosicrucian philosophy with that of the Valentinian Gnostics). In a letter from Hartlib to Frankenburg of 1646, Hartlib refers to Frankenburg's pamphlet “with the fourfold and geometrical figures”, as well as to Alchemy, Neoplatonism, Qabalistic symbolism, the Jesuit Hermetist Athanasius Kircher, Benedictus Figulus, the Tabula Smaragdina, and a request to obtain Gaffarel's Codicus Caballistarum, Avis sur les Langues and the Abdta Divinae Kabala Mysterium.

  73 Hugh Trevor-Roper in Three Foreigners & the Philosophy of the English Revolution (Encounter, Feb. 1960) wrote that Cromwell's supporters were fired by a vision of society “made vivid to them by three philosophers, none of whom was English but who may be called, both in their limited aims and their wild bloodshot (sic.) mysticism, the real philosophers and the only philosophers, of the English Revolution.”

  74 Descartes had dedicated his philosophical and mathematical Principia to Elizabeth of Bohemia in 1644, and went to live in Leiden, Holland, to be near to her - they respected each other - in that same year.

  75 Petty, an academic favourable to Parliamentarian authority in Oxford, had been given rooms in Brasenose College, formerly occupied by a Fellow of that College who, among a number of other Fellows were forcefully ejected from the College by Cromwellian troops for their Royalist leanings. The significance of this kind of interference in university life will soon become clear. Petty went over to Charles II at the Restoration and was subsequently knighted.

  76 Dr Everard D.D., a suspected heretic, translated the Divine Pymander of Hermes Trismegistus, published by G. Moule in 1650. A year later, Moule published Henry Cornelius Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy.

  77 This edition contained a peculiar substitution, with which Vaughan or his patron may have played a part. Chapter 34 of the Latin version, dealing with idolatry, refers to the “detestable heresie” of the Templars. In this English version, “The Templars” has been replaced by “old Church-men” (ie : monks or unreformed superstitious Catholics). Someone cared about the reputation of the Knights Templar.

  78 John Webster, Academiarum Examen, or the Examination of Academies. London , 1654.

  79 Vindiciae Academiarum, Oxford, 1654. Ward was later to become bishop of Salisbury and a close friend of Izaak Walton, who was also a friend of Elias Ashmole, and whose Compleat Angler (1653) is in many ways a vindication of that spiritual philosophy to which the beliefs of the imaginary Rose-Cross Brotherhood were not inimical. Walton refers with favour to the Rosicrucians and chymists generally. He also acted as a royalist agent (1651) and seems to have been part of a network of pro-Royalist writers and spiritual sympathisers. His Compleat Angler reads like a coded message to disaffected and dispersed Royalists and spiritual Anglicans during the Cromwellian Protectorate.

  80 Margate, 1923. For the Masonic Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia.

  81 Lindsay, a close follower of the Rosicrucian mystery, created a remarkable Garden of the Planets at his home in Edzell. The plaque above the gate to the garden still bears the significant date of 1604, the year
of the new stars in Serpentarius and Cygnus and of the discovery of the Vault of Christian Rosenkreuz.

  82 Ashmole published his first alchemical book in 1650, Fasciculus chemicus, an Introduction to a work by Dee's son, Arthur, then still alive, a physician to the Czar of Russia.

  Illustrations

  Beyond conflict, with the globe at his finger-tips: a popular representation of Thrice Greatest Hermes: a link between earth and the mystery of God.

  The extraordinary figure of Paracelsus. Note the books scattered on the earth behind him: the universe was the liber mundi, (the book of the world), written with the finger of God and open to all those who sought. But Paracelsus had to hide much of his theology for fear of persecution. The ‘stone’ was everywhere, but remained unseen.

  The Portal to the Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom: Heinrich Khunrath invites us to penetrate the darkness of Nature to rise to the Light. Nature: a divine revelation to the initiated, hidden in its depth to the profane.

  Caspar Schwenckfeld, spiritual hero: “I cannot be one in faith with either the Pope or Luther, because they condemn me and my faith, that is, they hate my Christ in me.” Flesh made radically spiritual.

  Johann Valentin Andreae, aged 42: intellectual and imaginative genius of the Rosicrucian enterprise at its best.