The Fame and the Confession

In 1614 a pamphlet of a few dozen pages was printed at Kassel, in Hesse. It announced to the learned of Europe that a secret fraternity had existed among them for more than a century, that the tomb of its founder had lately been opened, and that the time had come for a general reformation of the whole wide world. It invited those who wished to join the work to make themselves known. Hundreds of people answered, in print, in Latin and in German, for more than a decade. As far as anyone has ever been able to show, none of them received a reply. This is the story of that pamphlet and its two companions, which the Order gives to every Squire, and from which it claims nothing but an impulse.

The story of Brother C.R.

The pamphlet is called the Fame of the Fraternity, the Fama Fraternitatis, and it tells the life of a German of noble but poor family, known only by his initials, whom later readers named Christian Rosenkreuz. Placed in a cloister as a boy, he set out while still young on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. His companion died on the way, and the young man went instead to a city in Arabia that the Fame calls Damcar, where the wise men received him as one long expected, taught him their language, their mathematics and their physic, and gave him a book of nature that he translated into Latin. He went on to Egypt and to Fez in Morocco, where he learned the inhabitants' magic and Kabbalah and found that it was corrupted, as ours is, by error, but that it could be purified.

He returned to Europe hoping to share what he had learned with its scholars, and they laughed at him. So he went home to Germany, built himself a house, and gathered first three companions and afterwards four more, so that they were eight in all, to whom he taught what he knew. When they had written down the substance of it, the brethren agreed to separate and travel, each to a different country, and to keep six rules among themselves.

The six agreements

The rules are given in the Fame almost in passing, and they are worth setting out in full, in substance if not in the old words:

• First, that none of them should profess any other thing than to heal the sick, and that without payment.
• Second, that none should be obliged to wear any particular habit, but each should follow the custom of the country in which he lived.
• Third, that every year on a certain day they should meet together at their house, called the House of the Holy Spirit, or else write the cause of their absence.
• Fourth, that every brother should look about him for a worthy person who might succeed him after his death.
• Fifth, that the letters R.C. should be their seal, mark and character.
• Sixth, that the fraternity should remain secret for one hundred years.

Anyone who knows the Order will recognise much of its own Rule in these six lines. The healing mandate of the Second Degree is the first agreement, and the Charter's refusal to charge for instruction is its corollary. The second is the discipline of silence: the brethren of the Rose Cross were to be known by their works and not by their clothes, and members of the Order wear nothing outside the Commandery that marks them as members. The third is the Annual Convocation at Michaelmas, and the fourth is the work of every sponsor and every Preceptor. The sixth is the discretion the Order asks of its members, though the Order has never thought it necessary to hide its existence for a century. Edmund Ashby did not copy the six agreements into the Articles. He had taught the Fame for so many years that he did not need to.

The opening of the vault

The founder, the Fame continues, died at a great age and was buried in a vault whose location was forgotten. Some one hundred and twenty years later, as the brethren of a later generation were altering their house, they found a hidden door bearing the words Post CXX annos patebo: after one hundred and twenty years I shall be opened. Behind it was a vault of seven sides, lit by an inner sun set in its ceiling, its walls inscribed with figures and its floor divided into triangles. In the midst stood an altar, and beneath the altar lay the body of the founder, whole and uncorrupted, holding in his hand a little book which the brethren valued next to the Bible.

The brethren took the opening of the vault as a sign that the time of secrecy was over. The Fame ends with their summons: that the learned of Europe should consider these things, and that those who wished to join them, in good faith and for the honour of God, should declare their minds in print, and would be answered. It promises a reformation of learning and of religion, an end to the errors of the schools, and a time in which the book of nature would be opened to all.

The Confession and the Chemical Wedding

A second pamphlet, the Confession of the Fraternity, appeared in Latin in 1615. It is sterner and more urgent than the Fame. It fixes the founder's birth in 1378 and gives him a life of one hundred and six years; it declares the fraternity's adherence to the reformed religion and its hostility to the Pope; and it speaks of the approaching end of an age, of new stars seen in the heavens as signs, and of a great book of nature in which the fraternity reads. It is a more political document than the Fame, and less beautiful.

The third document, printed at Strasbourg in 1616, is quite different from either. The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz is not a manifesto but a romance in seven days. On the eve of Easter, an old man sitting at his table is visited in a storm by a winged messenger who leaves him an invitation to a royal wedding. He sets out, is lost, is tested, is weighed in the scales with the other guests and found barely sufficient, and is admitted to a castle where he witnesses the marriage, the death and the restoration to life of a king and a queen, the last by a long alchemical operation upon a tower of seven floors. At the end he and his companions are made Knights of the Golden Stone, and sworn to five articles. Then, because he once looked without leave upon the sleeping Venus, he must stay behind as porter of the castle. The text breaks off with the note that two leaves are missing. Squires of the Order generally find it the funniest of the three documents and, on a second reading, the saddest.

Who wrote them

The fraternity of the Fame has never been found, and the scholars are now agreed that the documents came out of a circle of friends at the Lutheran university of Tübingen, among them the young theologian Johann Valentin Andreae. Andreae admitted writing the Chemical Wedding as a youth, and in later life he called the whole affair a ludibrium: a jest, or a play. He went on to write a Christian utopia, Christianopolis, in 1619, and to found small Christian societies for mutual help and study. His family's arms bore a Saint Andrew's cross with four roses.

The word ludibrium has misled many readers into thinking that the manifestos were a hoax. A play may be serious. Andreae and his friends seem to have wished to stir the learned of Europe toward a reformation of knowledge and of life, using a fiction to do it, as the authors of the Grail romances used a fiction to speak of the soul. That so many readers took the fiction for fact, and that so many of them set out to find the fraternity, tells us less about the authors than about the hunger of the age.

The storm of pamphlets

The hunger was great. Between 1614 and the 1620s several hundred books and pamphlets appeared for and against the fraternity. Some writers begged to be admitted; some denounced the brethren as heretics or sorcerers; some claimed to be members. The English physician Robert Fludd wrote a defence of the fraternity in 1616, and the German alchemist Michael Maier, physician to the Emperor, wrote several, among them a treatise on the laws of the fraternity called the Golden Themis, in 1618. In 1623 placards appeared on the walls of Paris announcing that the brethren of the Rose Cross were among the citizens, visibly and invisibly, and the city talked of little else for a season.

Some historians have connected the manifestos with the brief reign of the Elector Palatine, Frederick, and his English wife Elizabeth, at Heidelberg and then at Prague, and with the hopes for a Protestant renewal that perished with their defeat at the White Mountain in 1620. Not all historians accept this connection, but it is certain that the Thirty Years War, which began in those years, swept away the world in which the manifestos had been written. The fraternity of the Rose Cross became, for the rest of the century, an invisible college: an idea of learned and pious men working in secret for the good of mankind, which many invoked and none could locate.

After the manifestos

In the eighteenth century the name was taken up by real societies. The most important was the Order of the Golden and Rosy Cross in the German lands, a graded alchemical and Christian order which drew its members from the Masonic lodges and numbered among them the prince who became King Frederick William II of Prussia. In the nineteenth century new Rosicrucian societies were founded in England in the 1860s and in Paris in 1888, where the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross was established by the poet Stanislas de Guaita with Joséphin Péladan and the young medical student Papus, of whom the fifth study in this series has much to say. In the twentieth century the name was claimed by a great many bodies, some of them large.

The Order makes no judgment on any body that has taken the name of the Rose Cross since 1614, and claims no connection with any of them. It asks of them, as it asks of itself, only the test that the Fame itself proposes: that the brethren should be known not by their profession but by their works, and above all by the healing they give without payment.

What the Order takes

The page on the Rosicrucian Stream says what the Order takes from these documents: the mandate to heal, the alchemy of the heart, the discipline of silence and the symbol of the Rose Cross. It says also, and I repeat it here, that the Order does not claim that the fraternity of the Fame ever had a continuous organised existence, nor that the Order has inherited any such organisation. The Squire reads the three documents in the Second Degree not as history but as instruction: the Fame as an account of the seeker's journey, from the cloister to the far country and home again; the Confession as a warning that the reformation of the world is urgent; the Chemical Wedding as a picture of the soul's death and renewal, and of the price of looking where one has not been invited. Edmund Ashby, who brought the Rosicrucian stream to the Order, used to tell Squires that the Rose opens only upon the Cross, and the Cross is borne only by the willing; the Chemical Wedding, he said, is a long illustration of that one sentence.

It remains to say why the Order, which is not Rosicrucian and claims nothing from the Rosicrucians, gives these documents to every Squire. It is because their central conviction is ours: that the reformation of the whole wide world begins with the reformation of the one who would reform it, and that the proof of the reformation is the healing that follows. The vault of Brother C.R. was opened after one hundred and twenty years. In the experience of the Order, each seeker opens it again, for the first time, and finds there not a body but a task.