The Forbidden Universe: The Origins of Science and the Search for the Mind of God

by Lynn Picknett

  Which leaves us with the big question, why choose that particular time to introduce Rosicrucianism to the waiting world?

  THE ALCHEMICAL WEDDING

  In 1612 James I bequeathed his daughter Elizabeth to the mystical Frederick V, the Elector Palatine, hereditary ruler of the German state of the Palatinate of the Rhine and leader of the Protestant Union, a coalition of Protestant German states formed four years earlier for mutual defence against the Catholic powers. This was seen as a great sign in esoteric circles; it revived those hopes that had once centred on Elizabeth I, Bruno’s great goddess, the self-created living icon of the bewigged and jewel-encrusted Gloriana. Her successor James I (of England and VI of Scotland) was notoriously suspicious of all forms of occultism. Upon his succession in the first decade of the seventeenth century, he withdrew royal patronage from Dr Dee, causing a serious decline in the old man’s fortunes and a sad slide into death. But the union between James’ daughter and the Elector unequivocally aligned England with the Protestant Union, which had a direct political appeal to James. But it was viewed among those hostile to the Church of Rome with a fervour bordering on the apocalyptic.

  As the geopolitics of seventeenth-century Europe spiralling into the Thirty Years War often seems like a morass of confusion, it is worth revisiting the Hermetic agenda at that time. Bruno and Campanella had worked to head off what seemed set to become a catastrophic confrontation between the forces of Protestantism and Catholicism by attempting to reconcile each sides’ claims to primacy. The Catholic Church claimed the authority of the apostolic succession going back to Saint Peter, while the Protestants, although a new movement, claimed to be returning Christianity to Jesus’ original vision. Meanwhile, the Hermeticists, by claiming Egypt as an antecedent to Christianity itself, were trying to offer a middle path to both sides – with astonishing naivety, or so it seems with hindsight. On a more realistic, political level, the Hermeticists plotted to gain influence over the most enlightened monarchs from both camps, for example when Bruno wooed Elizabeth I on one side and Henri III on the other. By the time of the betrothal of James’ daughter and the Elector Palatine, however, it was crystal clear that the Catholics, now headed by the Spanish Habsburg monarchy, were in no mood to compromise. So while individual Catholic Hermeticists such as Campanella stuck to their agenda, those on the Protestant side had to work and pray for a more robust counter movement to take shape – until there was another opportunity for reconciliation.

  The prospects of a new Elizabethan age, and of a united Protestant Europe, were made more likely by the fact that Princess Elizabeth, who was seventeen at the time of her marriage, was very likely to become queen. The heir to the throne, her older brother Henry, Prince of Wales, had died of fever just a few months before, and her younger brother, twelve-year-old Charles, had been in such poor health since infancy that few expected him to reach adulthood. (As things turned out, Charles did succeed his father as Charles I, but was doomed to be beheaded at the hands of Cromwell’s Parliament.)

  Frederick came to England at the end of 1612 for the wedding and fell for his bride at first sight. The celebrations ran on for months, extravagant even by the standards of royal weddings. The great poets of the day wrote rapturously of the couple, songs were composed and elaborate masques were written and designed by the greatest names. The celebrated metaphysical poet John Donne wrote of Elizabeth:

  Be thou a new star, that to us portends

  Ends of great wonder; and be thou those ends.

  Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, performed a series of plays at court during the months leading up to the wedding. His most overtly esoteric work, The Tempest (whose magician character, Prospero, was allegedly based on Dee) was performed on the betrothal night, 27 December 1612, with some additional scenes specially written for the occasion.

  With a deft PR touch Frederick and Elizabeth of Bohemia were married on Valentine’s Day 1613, after which the couple went to live in the romantic Heidelberg Castle in the Palatinate. Frederick had constructed for his love what was regarded as the eighth wonder of the world, the famed Hortus Palatinus, an Italian Renaissance-style landscaped garden, laid out in deeply symbolic fashion, complete with mechanically animated statues, imported tropical plants and a celebrated water organ.

  The appearance of the Rosicrucian manifestos in the two years immediately following the wedding was intimately bound up with the expectations of esoteric reform that centred on the couple. It was probably no coincidence that the Palatinate bordered on the Duchy of Würtemmberg, home to Johann Valentin Andreae. The works were preparing philosophical circles in Germany and beyond for the new era that they believed this golden couple would usher in – a unified Protestant Europe that would confront the ultra-Catholic nations.

  Other events underscore the connection between the marriage and the manifestos. Robert Fludd’s works of that period were published in two volumes in 1617 and 1619 in the Palatinate (despite being written in England), as were Michael Maier’s books (by the same publisher, in fact). Under Frederick and Elizabeth, the Palatinate became the centre of Rosicrucianism.

  So we see that the Rosicrucian movement was a continuation of the Hermetic reform kickstarted by Bruno and Campanella. The manifestos were gearing their readers up for the triumph of the Protestant reformers, personified in Frederick and Elizabeth, and the new golden age that they would usher in. This golden age would finally realize Christian Rosenkreutz’s dream of an open and cooperative brotherhood of philosophers, working for the benefit and betterment of mankind. The signs are that they thought that 1620 would be the destined year of change. Sadly, although it would indeed be a notable year, it was one of utter disaster.

  In 1619, Frederick V, the Elector of the Palatinate, accepted a new crown: the kingship of Bohemia. Seven years earlier Emperor Rudolph II – patron of Dee, Bruno, Maier and Kepler, among many others – had died, and the titles of Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia had passed to his uncompromising cousin Ferdinand II, pawn of the Jesuits and a leader of the German Catholic League, which had been created specifically to oppose the Protestant Union. His crackdown on Protestants and Jews led the Bohemians to offer their crown to Frederick, head of the Protestant Union. Frederick accepted, and with Elizabeth, moved from Heidelberg to Prague.

  Frederick and Elizabeth reigned in Prague for just twelve months, and were given the wonderfully romantic title Winter King and Queen of Bohemia, evoking beautiful but doomed heroes of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. In the autumn of 1620 a coalition of Catholic forces led by Ferdinand closed in, and after a bitter war at the Battle of the White Mountain on 8 November, the Bohemian forces were broken. The Rosicrucians could only watch. Meanwhile, outside forces presented them and the whole of Europe with the much wider horror of the Thirty Years War.

  Like the curse of the mythical Fisher King, the end of the Wedding’s great promise led to the devastation by war, massacre, famine and disease of large swathes of Germany. Protestantism and Jewry were wiped out in Bohemia. Frederick and Elizabeth, the iconic alchemical bride and groom and figureheads of the Protestant movement and Rosicrucian hopes, fled into exile at The Hague, where they maintained a semblance of grandeur on hand-outs from sympathetic relations. The Alchemical Wedding degenerated into bathos, the once-golden couple being sadly tarnished.

  For a while it really seemed as if all Protestantism was about to be snuffed out. The Hapsburgs would rule Europe, allowing the Catholic Church to re-establish itself by ‘punishment and pain’, to draw on Bruno’s all-too-accurate phrase. The future looked to be inescapably priest-ridden and grimly black with the smoke from the fiery pyres of martyrdom. The Hermetic reformers hurriedly regrouped. Rosicrucian mania in Germany abruptly ceased in the year that Prague fell. Campanella changed from opposing to advocating reform of the Spanish monarchy in the same year.

  THE INVISIBLES

  The Rosicrucian craze then shifted to France. In 1623 notices appeared in Paris announcing that membe
rs of the ‘College of the Brothers of the Rose Cross’ were present in the city, on ‘a visible and invisible stay’, prompting the rather evocative nickname of the Invisibles – a sure carrot to dangle before all conspiracy theorists.

  Announcing the presence of the Invisibles generated a Jesuit propaganda campaign whose hysteria matched that of a witch hunt. Here were members of a secret magical brotherhood – sorcerers, no less – abroad in the city, up to God knows what and only God would know what because they were invisible. Books and pamphlets speedily appeared warning that the Invisibles were part of a devilish plot. The anonymous but presumably delightful Horrible Pacts made between the Devil and the Pretended Invisible Ones claimed that the Invisibles were part of a global Satanic conspiracy, that six groups of six members in different areas around the world were plotting mankind’s downfall. Another pamphlet specifically named Michael Maier as their leader. The Jesuit François Garasse called them ‘a diabolical secret society who should be broken on the wheel or hanged on the gallows’.17

  If this seems all rather sensational, then no doubt that was the intention. After all, claiming to be invisible Rosicrucians was likely to provoke overheated imaginings. The PR genius involved in whipping up this type of frenzy suggests that the notices were actually the work of Rosicrucian haters, or more accurately enemies of Rosicrucianism.

  Why should anyone want to stir up anti-Rosicrucian paranoia, especially at that particular place and time? As Parisian intellectuals became fervently hooked on the manifestos’ furore and the works of their defenders such as Michael Maier, generating a major scare would have acted like a cold shower on potential new devotees. If all the hot air about pacts with the devil gave the impression that to dabble in Rosicrucianism would guarantee an eternity of being prodded by poker-wielding demons, then a similar fate would surely await them whilst they were still alive, care of the Pope’s men.

  It is unlikely to be a coincidence that in the same year the Hermetic tradition also came under a sustained onslaught in Paris, from Marin Mersenne, a Jesuit-educated monk. In works published from1623 he attacked everyone from Pico della Mirandola onwards, reserving special hostility for Robert Fludd, with whom he engaged in a high-profile war of words. He wrote of Bruno that he had ‘invented a new way of philosophy in order to secretly fight against the Christian religion’.18 And tellingly, Mersenne was the first to use Casaubon’s redating of the Hermetica against its devotees.

  ‘FROM MAGIC TO MECHANISM’

  The Invisibles scare and Mersenne’s onslaught on Hermeticism also forms the unexpected backdrop to the rise of the arch-rationalist of the time, he who also set the tone for the coming age of science. The philosophy of René Descartes (1596–1650) would ultimately lead to the divorce between the magical and scientific components of the Hermetic tradition. But, importantly, his career also demonstrates how this divorce was due as much to the exigencies of the time as it was to a change in the intellectual direction.

  Descartes was the Jesuit-educated French philosopher who argued that all physical phenomena could be reduced to, and explained in, purely mechanical terms. ‘Cartesianism’ represented a ‘shift from magic to mechanism’.19 But he also introduced the idea of a duality between mind and body, the consequence of which we are still coming to terms with.

  Although his work is usually portrayed as a reaction against religion, the target of his argument was actually Rosicrucianism. Descartes was certainly not viewed as an enemy of Catholicism at the time. Quite the opposite – his ideas were actively encouraged by at least one leading Catholic theologian because of the ammunition they provided the Church in its onslaught against Rosicrucianism and Hermeticism.

  Indeed, in his young days Descartes had been something of a Papist swashbuckler; as a twenty-four-year-old he had fought with the Catholic forces at the Battle of the White Mountain of 1620 that smashed the hopes of the Alchemical Wedding. He entered Prague with the victorious troops. It was when quartering during the long months of the previous winter that he heard talk of the Rosicrucians and – perhaps oddly for a Pope’s man – found himself interested in them. Realizing that the Fraternity’s ideals and principles chimed with his own developing ideas, Descartes tried to make contact with it. He failed, but while he was holed up at Ulm in the summer of 1620 he met the mathematician Johann Faulhaber, who had tried to approach the Fraternity as a would-be member and had some useful knowledge to share with him.

  Descartes returned to Paris in 1623, and found himself in the middle of the ‘Invisibles’ scare. This threatened to be somewhat dangerous for him given that it was known that he had been interested in the Rosicrucians while in Germany. As the anti-Rosicrucian hysteria was threatening to turn into a lynch-mob scenario, to save his skin, Descartes made a point of denouncing the Rosicrucian ‘calumny’.

  As we saw earlier, in the vanguard of the opposition to Rosicrucianism in Paris and beyond was the monk Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), of the exquisitely named Order of Minims. As we have seen, he was the first to use Isaac Casaubon’s redating of the Hermetica against the likes of Robert Fludd. Eight years Descartes’ senior, he had been a fellow student at the Jesuit college at La Flèche in the Loire, and the two men were close friends.

  Besides being a theologian, Mersenne was a mathematician and scientist, best remembered today for his work on acoustics and prime numbers, a dubious combination of interests for a devout Catholic at the time, as the Counter Reformation, and particularly the overthrow of Frederick V, had invested these subjects with a heavy taint of occultism. Mersenne was eager to rescue his fields of interest from any suggestion of diabolism. In 1623, the year of the ‘Invisibles’ scare, Mersenne published Famous Questions in Genesis

  (Quaestiones celeberrimae in Genesim), which despite its title was a fierce attack on the occult philosophy and its advocates, especially Pico della Mirandola, Ficino, Agrippa and, particularly, Robert Fludd. On the other hand, he was a defender of Galileo, and expressed some admiration for the intellect of Campanella, who he met in Paris when the Italian was under Cardinal Richelieu’s patronage, although he dismissed his philosophy outright.

  To Mersenne, Descartes’ concepts were potentially an excellent way of ridding natural philosophy of any suggestion of the esoteric, so he encouraged him to publish and helped promote his work, effectively acting as his agent for his first book, Meditations on First Philosophy (Meditationes de prima philosophia). Ironically, the full title was Meditations on First Philosophy, in which is Demonstrated the Existence of God and the Immortality of the Soul – Descartes wasn’t as extreme a rationalist as he is often portrayed today. In fact, given Descartes’ religious beliefs and Mersenne’s support, the Cartesian revolution was, if anything, a Catholic reaction against Rosicrucianism and Hermeticism.

  After Descartes, natural philosophy bifurcated into two camps, each advocating a different way of acquiring knowledge. There was the mechanist philosophy, in which everything could be reduced to and understood in terms of physical properties – the characteristics of bodies and the forces that act on them. On the other side was the Hermetic approach, which saw things more holistically, every imaginable thing being inextricably part of a great living whole. Ultimately, of course, mechanism won the day, although it was by no means an overnight victory.

  With the rise of Descartes’ influence, the philosophy that had driven the Renaissance was at its lowest ebb, seemingly heading for complete extinction. In half a century Isaac Casaubon had challenged it historically, the Thirty Years War had dashed its hopes politically and now Descartes was undermining it philosophically. But this was not the end of the story. There were those who kept the Hermetic torch alight, even in the heart of Rome itself. And it was yet to see its greatest triumph in the scientific world.

  Chapter Four

  1 Fowden, p. xxii.

  2 Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 21.

  3 From Thomas Vaughan’s 1652 English translation of the Fama, reproduced in the appendix t
o Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, p. 238.

  4 See Churton, The Golden Builders, pp. 105–17.

  5 Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, p. 250.

  6 Churton, The Golden Builders, p. 93.

  7 Ibid., p. 132.

  8 Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, p. 47.

  9 Churton, The Golden Builders, p. 131.

  10 Ibid., p. 143.

  11 Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (1493–1541) – he adopted the name Paracelcus to show he was greater than Celsus, the Roman author of a classic encyclopaedia of medicine – was a Swiss botanist, herbalist and physician. He was heavily influenced by the works of Pico and Ficino, applying the principles of Hermeticism and talismanic magic to healing. His ideas about the combination and manipulation of the elements also led to him to alchemy. Some think that Christian Rosenkreutz was intended to represent Paracelsus, despite the fact that the Fama explicitly says that he wasn’t a member of the Rosicrucian fraternity, although adding that it did allow him access to the book containing their accumulated wisdom, the ‘Book M’.

  12 Churton, The Golden Builders, p. 157.

  13 See Yates, The Art of Memory, chapters XV and XVI.