Lapis Magazine

Charting Rosicrucian Europe by Christopher McIntosh

A profound and beautiful spiritual movement arose in Central Europe in the early 17th century. How far did its influence reach and what became of it after the destruction of the Thirty Years War?

Christopher McIntosh, D.Phil., Oxford, has written books on Rosicrucianism, the French occultist Eliphas Lévi and, more recently, Gardens of the Gods, dealing with the sacred and symbolic dimensions of garden design.

This article is a transcription of a talk presented in Kutna Hora, Czech Republic, as part of An Esoteric Quest in Central Europe: From Renaissance Bohemia to Goethe's Weimar.

My goal is to link the subject of Rosicrucianism first with the theme of the Quest, the pursuit of some vision or ideal; second with the theme of the Initiatory Journey or pilgrimage, the journey of spiritual discovery; and third with the theme of special places, places that are charged with spiritual or magical power.

Now all of these themes are present in Rosicrucianism. We are following in the footsteps of some famous Rosicrucians of the past, and we are visiting places that have a special link with the Rosicrucian story. I think it might be interesting to locate the journey that we are making within what we might call the Rosicrucian map of Europe, and also look at some of the other places in Europe that have a link with the Rosicrucian story.

Before we go any further it may be helpful to look again at what Rosicrucianism is and how it came into being. I will give you a brief résumé of the Rosicrucian story. Let me recapitulate briefly the circumstances and essential details of the story. As most of you know, it started with the publication of a document called the Fama Fraternitatis, the Fame of the Fraternity, which most likely was authored or co-authored by Johann Valentin Andreae, but it was published anonymously and had already been circulating in manuscript for several years. It was published at Kassel in 1614, so that’s the first place on our map. Kassel is more or less right in the center of Germany and in fact in the center of Europe.

This text and its sequel, the Confessio Fraternitatis, the Confession of the Fraternity, describe the existence of a Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross founded by one C.R. (subsequently identified by the name of Christian Rosenkreutz, a German born in 1378). We are told that Rosenkreutz was placed in a monastery at the age of five for reasons of poverty, and that while still in his growing years he set off to visit the Holy Land with one of the monks, who died when they reached Cyprus. Rosenkreutz then proceeded on his own to Damascus. In the Fama, it actually says Damcar and there’s some doubt about whether Damcar was a real place or whether Damcar might have been Damascus. At any rate, he proceeded to Damcar or Damascus, where he became acquainted with the wise men and beheld what great wonders they wrought.

There he also acquired a book called The Book M which he translated into Latin. The Book M is generally interpreted as the Liber Mundi, the Book of the World. He continued on to Fez in what is now Morocco, where he spent two years acquiring further occult knowledge, then returned via Spain to Germany where he gathered a small group of likeminded men and founded the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross to propagate the knowledge he had acquired and to heal the sick. The house they had built for themselves was called “The House of the Holy Spirit.”

Christian Rosenkreutz died at the age of 106 and was buried in a vault, which remained hidden for 120 years until it was discovered by one of the Brethren while carrying out repairs. Here, in a chamber lit by an artificial sun, they found the perfectly preserved body of Christian Rosenkreutz along with various treasures, including a version of The Book M and a mysterious object called the Minutus Mundus, the Miniature World. It was not exactly clear what this miniature world was, but it was some kind of microcosm of the universe.

The discovery of the vault was taken by the Brethren as a signal that a new age was dawning and that the time had come for the Brotherhood to declare themselves, and the text ends with an appeal to all the learned of Europe to contact the Brethren and join in their enterprise.

A little later a third manifesto appeared, very different from the other two actually, published at Strasbourg in 1616 under the title Die Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosencreutz, the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz. In this work the narrator, supposedly Christian Rosenkreutz himself, describes his experiences as a guest at the wedding of a king and queen who dwell in a splendid castle, and the whole affair takes place over seven days and develops into a sort of initiatory process involving a voyage and a sort of alchemical transmutation

I believe that what we are dealing with here is a movement of spiritual change and renewal—what we would call today a New Age Movement, based on a holistic vision that would heal the religious divide. Remember that this was at the time of a very sharp divide between Catholic and Protestant Europe, and the Thirty Years War was about to erupt. So this was a holistic vision that would heal this religious divide and bring religion, science and arts into one harmonious whole.

Now this vision wasn’t invented by Andreae and his friends. It had been around for some time, brewing up in various different places. One of the key names in connection with it was Paracelsus or Theophrastus von Hohenheim, to use his real name. Paracelsus was an astonishing example of a universal mind embracing alchemy, medicine, astrology and religion, and he also had this holistic vision that went along with the expectation of a coming new age.

Paracelsus had died just half a century or so earlier but his ideas had become part of a quasi-religious cult sometimes referred to as the Sancta Theophrastia (based on the name Theophrastus), which looked for religious revelation not only in the scriptures but also in the physical world and the laws of science, and also in certain ancient wisdom traditions coming from the Middle East and borrowed from other religions. The Jewish Kabbalistic tradition is an example.

So this, I believe, was essentially what lay behind the Rosicrucian manifestos. The time in which they appeared, in the early 17th century, was a crucial moment in history. It was, you could say, a sort of window of opportunity, when Western Civilization might have gone in a different direction and this Rosicrucian-Paracelsian vision might have been realized. If that had happened, I think we would probably be living in a rather different world today, a much more holistic world. Well it didn’t happen as planned. I’ll go into that in a moment.

But at that time, the beginning of the 17th century, it seemed to many people that the promised new age was about to begin. This expectation was linked with certain places, and most of all with Bohemia and its capital, Prague. Those who have been to Prague know what a magical place it is. Prague has always had a reputation as a city of magic and it still has today, and rightly so. Few cities have had so many legends attached to them and probably no other city has inspired so many novels and stories on esoteric themes.

At the time we are talking about, Prague, under the Emperor Rudolph II, was enjoying a particular heyday as a vibrant center of esoteric studies and scientific pursuits in general. It was full of astronomers (such as Kepler and Tycho Brahe), alchemists, visionaries. The English Magus John Dee and his companion Edward Kelley went there. So what was it about Prague and Bohemia that drew all these people? Why was it that Rudolph moved his capital there from Vienna? Well, first of all, the name of the city tells us something. The name Prague in Czech—Praha—means “boundary, threshold, frontier.” Thresholds are traditionally magical places. They’re places where you stand between two worlds or between many different worlds and that, in itself, creates a special kind of energy. But I also think there’s something more than that.

This is the title page of the Fama Fraternitatis—Johann Valentin Andreae, as I said, was almost certainly the author or co-author of the Fama and was one of the key figures behind the Rosicrucian movement.

Take a look at this map showing Europe in the form of a queen. This is a very remarkable image.

This shows Europe at the height of the Habsburg Empire, which stretched from Spain (the figure is on its side) right over to the Balkans. As you can see, Spain is portrayed as the head wearing a crown and right in the center—in the solar plexus—is Bohemia. Clearly, Bohemia was seen in some sense as the power center of Europe. The map, dating from the 17th century, is reproduced in the book Opus Magnum (The catalogue of a remarkable exhibition of the same name, which took place in Prague in 1997. The book was edited by Vladislav Zadrobílek, who also organized the exhibition, and published by his firm Trigon).

Take a look at this other map, showing Bohemia in the form of a rose, with Prague right at its center. Now we can speculate about whether the rose has something to do with the Rose Cross. But certainly it’s a very striking image, and again it shows the special mystique of this land.

One explanation for this mystique might have to do with the fact that the territory of Bohemia was originally a vast crater in the earth’s surface caused by a meteorite that fell some 1,000 million years ago. There’s a possible connection here, although this is somewhat speculative, with the story of the Holy Grail. This theory is described in detail in the Opus Magnum volume that Vladislav Zadrobilek published.

In one of the most famous of the Grail stories, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, the Grail is described by the term lapis exilis which could be a garbled Latin version of lapis ex coelis, “the stone from the sky,” or lapsit ex coelis, “it fell from the sky.” At any rate, the theory is that Wolfram was referring to the meteorite and the crater that it made when it fell. Remember that the word “crater” is Greek for a “chalice” or a “cup,” so if this theory is correct then Bohemia itself is the Grail.

This is a satellite picture of the territory of Bohemia, again taken from the Opus Magnum volume. It shows the crater that is now the territory of Bohemia, i.e., the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Bohemia and Moravia, and we are right in the middle of it. Now this may seem far-fetched, but it could help to explain the mystique of this region and why the control of Bohemia was fought over time and time again.

This brings us back to the Rosicrucian story because one of the rulers who wanted to gain control over Bohemia was the Elector Frederick V of the Palatinate, who was married to Elizabeth, the daughter of James I of England. Frances Yates, in her book The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, argues that Frederick was a sort of Rosicrucian monarch. Certainly his castle at Heidelberg was a very Rosicrucian place.

This is the castle of Heidelberg, the residence of Frederick V and the famous gardens beside it. These gardens were designed by the French garden architect Salomon de Caus. This is an engraving by de Caus. Now, as I say, this is to my mind very Rosicrucian. De Caus was another of those “universal” men—he was an architect, a garden designer, an engineer, an expert on music and a philosopher. And the garden expressed that universality. There were for example, parterres laid out so as to represent different musical intervals. There were grottos with statues that played tunes. There were ingenious automata and there were knot gardens laid out in intricate patterns, as you can see—all of it laid out on this marvelous hillside overlooking the town of Heidelberg. So this garden really embodies that holistic vision that I was talking about.

Unfortunately, Frederick was not content with Heidelberg. He wanted the crown of Bohemia and he went to war against the Habsburgs to try and seize it, and in 1620 he was defeated at the battle of the White Mountain near Prague. And thereby not only did he lose Bohemia, he was also driven out of Heidelberg and went into exile at The Hague, and the gardens fell into ruin. If you visit them today, there is unfortunately very little of the original gardens left, although the main walls and terraces and some remains of fountains and grottoes are still there.

By then the Thirty Years War was raging and everything collapsed into chaos and the whole Rosicrucian vision appeared to have gone up in smoke. But not quite, because the Rosicrucian idea spread very rapidly to other parts of Europe. In Britain for example, it had apologists like the alchemist and physician Robert Fludd and another alchemist, Thomas Vaughan, who published English translations of the Fama and Confessio. And there’s also a connection with Scotland through a man called Sir David Lindsay, Earl of Balcarres, an alchemist and hermetecist who possessed the earliest known manuscript of the Fama. At his home, Edzell Castle in the County of Angus, in Scotland, Sir David Lindsay created a remarkable garden of the planets.

Now here you see part of the garden—it’s a walled enclosure with carved panels representing the seven Planets, the seven Liberal Arts and the seven Cardinal Virtues. Here you see a representation of one of the Virtues—this is “Charity.” It shows a maternal figure looking out to several children.

One very striking thing about this garden is that there is a stone plaque over the entrance bearing the date 1604, which is the date given in the Fama Fraternitatis for the opening of Christian Rosenkreutz’s tomb, which was the signal for the new age to begin. So it seems very likely that Sir David Lindsay saw himself as part of the Rosicrucian tradition.

Meanwhile in Central Europe, the Rosicrucian current went more or less under ground, only to reappear a few decades later with the emergence of a new Rosicrucian order—called the Golden and Rosy Cross. What sparked this revival was a book which appeared in 1710 at Breslau, then in Prussia, now the Polish town of Wroclaw. This book was called Die wahrhaffte und volkommene Bereitung des philosophischen Steins der Brüderschaft aus dem Orden des Gülden und Rosen-Creutzes (The True and Perfect Preparation of the Philosopher’s Stone of the Brotherhood from the Order of the Golden and Rosy Cross Brotherhood).

As we can tell from the title, this is basically an alchemical treatise. Here we already have one of the major differences between this new Rosicrucianism and the earlier one. In the manifestos, the theme of alchemy is there, but it doesn’t play a central role and the physical side of alchemy is played down. Now, with the revival, alchemy, including practical alchemy, has become a major preoccupation of the Rosicrucian movement and the Rosy Cross has become the Golden and Rosy Cross.

The author of this work called himself Sincerus Renatus. He was in fact a Silesian Protestant pastor called Samuel Richter. The fact that he came from Silesia is in itself very interesting. It is now on the border between Poland and the Czech Republic and Germany. It was then mainly a German-speaking territory.

Now Silesia is a very interesting region. The Lausitz, essentially part of the same territory, was the home of Jacob Boehme. Silesia was also the home of the great mystical poet Angelus Silesius, named after the region. So Silesia was a great breeding ground of mystical thinkers. The other significant thing about Samuel Richter was that he was a member of the German religious movement called Pietism. This is highly important because Pietism is one of the key influences in this revived form of Rosicrucianism.

Pietism was essentially an attempt to rediscover a purer and more authentic form of Christianity. It had its counterparts for example, in Quakerism in England and Quietism in France. The Pietists emphasized feeling, personal virtue and direct awareness of the divine, rather than what they saw as the empty dogmatism and formalism of the established churches. There is a strong Gnostic streak in the Pietists, as there is in the Rosicrucians. This is a very important feature—the belief that the human soul is somehow trapped in the world of matter and longs to find its way back to the divine realm—this is the essence of the Gnostic world view. This Gnostic streak is quite unmistakable and we find it cropping up again and again in the neo-Rosicrucian writings.

So we have Pietism, Gnosticism, alchemy and something else that should be mentioned as well, namely mining and metallurgy. The alchemist, the mining engineer and the metallurgist were often one and the same person. In Central Europe there has always been a special mystique to mining and metallurgy, as well as to alchemy. It’s no coincidence that Silesia was a mining area, and it’s no coincidence that for example Novalis, the great mystical poet of the Romantic period, was a mining engineer by profession. It’s also no coincidence that Kutná Hora is associated not only with silver mining, but with alchemy and hermeticism.

If we look at the writings of mystics like Boehme or many of the Pietist writers, we find they are full of alchemical and metallurgical images and metaphors. They speak of God as the “Great Smelter,” they compare the divine spirit to a holy tincture or quintessence, and some of them believed that the Holy Trinity was actually present in the world of matter in the form of the three Paracelcian principles of salt, sulfur and mercury. Many of them also practiced alchemy. Again, as we mentioned, Goethe had a Pietist friend, Fräulein von Klettenberg, who stimulated him to experiment with alchemy, and this was an important influence in Goethe’s life and work as we shall see later on in the Quest when we go more deeply into Goethe.

Now going back to the Golden and Rosy Cross Brotherhood, we don’t know precisely when it came into being. There are a number of other books and manuscripts of the early to mid-eighteenth century which describe it, and there have even been discovered some Italian manuscripts of the late 17th century referring to an Italian Golden and Rosy Cross Order, which may even have preceded the German one. However, the first reasonably solid piece of evidence is a document of 1761 describing a Prague Lodge (so this brings us back to Prague again) called the Lodge of the Black Rose and giving a list of members.

Another important thing to point out is that by now the Golden and Rosy Cross had become part of high-degree Freemasonry. To be admitted you had to have passed through a regular Masonic Lodge and from now on we find various Masonic systems of one kind or another invoking the Rosicrucian symbology.

So let’s look a bit more closely at this Golden and Rosy Cross Order. What was it like to be a member? Well, alchemy played a major part in its activities. Alchemical symbolism featured in the initiation ceremonies and members were supposed to have their own laboratories, and work diligently at their furnaces, and retorts and crucibles, and I think some of them blew themselves up in the process. There survive today many alchemical manuscripts that circulated among the Fraternity and, as you progressed up the Order, you supposedly received more and more alchemical secrets. So they took alchemy very seriously, as you can see from this engraving of a candidate being received into a Rosicrucian lodge clearly identifiable as such from the alchemical equipment on the shelves. You see some distilling apparatus there and some retorts and so on.

So we’re not here in the realm of the Jungian idea of alchemy just as a set of symbols for a spiritual process; this is very much physical, nitty-gritty alchemy. The Order was grouped into circles of nine members each, and had nine grades of initiation, each involving elaborate initiation rituals. In ascending order, the grades were as follows: Junior, Theoreticus, Practicus, Philosophus, Minor, Major, Adeptus Exemptus, Magister and Magus. That may be familiar to some of you because this grade structure, slightly modified and extended to 10 grades, was adopted by the English Occult Order, the Golden Dawn, and later by other Rosicrucian orders.

Here you see a symbolic tableau used at the initiation of members into the grade of Minor corresponding to the Adeptus Minor grade in the Golden Dawn. As you can see, it shows a form of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life with the Sefiroth arranged in two pentagonal figures here. Above is the eye of God in the triangle and in-between a sort of Adam Kadmon figure. The crosses on his clothing and in the sphere underneath emphasize the basically Christian nature of the Order.

The Order was highly hierarchical and secretive but, despite the secrecy, we know the names of many members, some of whom were quite prominent. One, for example, was the naturalist and explorer Georg Foster who accompanied Captain Cook on his second voyage around the world. Foster, however, became disenchanted and eventually left the order.

By the 1770s, the Golden and Rosy Cross was well-established all over central Europe, with centers in places like Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt am Main, Regensburg, Munich, Vienna and Prague, and there were also centers further east in Poland, Hungary and Russia.

One interesting center was at the Castle of Rájec near Brünn (now Brno) in Moravia, the home of one Prince Salm-Reifferscheidt. He was evidently a remarkable figure, a sort of Rosicrucian man of learning whose interests encompassed the world of the French Enlightenment philosophes, the world of modern science and the world of alchemy and spiritualism. He gathered about him a highly eclectic group of individuals, philosophers, chemists, metallurgists and so on. So here we have a group of people very much in the spirit of the original Rosicrucianism of a century earlier—a sort of invisible college pursuing a universal vision of knowledge at the cutting edge, as they saw it, of scientific research and at the same time rooted in the older inner traditions of alchemy and philosophy. And we must not forget that someone like Prince Salm-Reifferscheidt would have known the original Rosicrucian manifestos intimately and may very well have been working quite consciously to create a Rosicrucian invisible college in line with the original vision of Andreae and his circle a century and a half earlier.

The Russian branch of the Order also had some remarkable members, notably the great writer and publisher Nikolai Novikov whom you see in this picture here. Novikov and another Russian Rosicrucian, Lopuchin, ran a publishing house called the Typographical Society, which made available to the Russian public for the first time, in Russian, the works of foreign mystical writers like Jacob Boehme, Angelus Silesius, Louis Claude de Saint Martin, the French Quietist writer Madame Guillaume and the English mystic Pordage. So Novikov is a major figure in Russian history and an interesting example of someone who was a supporter of the progressive ideas of the Enlightenment but also deeply interested in esoteric traditions. Unfortunately, Novikov fell foul of the Empress Catherine the Great, who was opposed to Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism, and she had him thrown into prison. But fortunately, he was released four years later when she died and her son came to the throne.

The Golden and Rosy Cross also spread to Poland along with another Neo-Rosicrucian Order called the Bon Pasteur and Warsaw became quite a center of Rosicrucian activity. Even the Polish king Stanislas Poniatowski was initiated into both Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism.

Another Rosicrucian king was the nephew of Frederick the Great, namely Frederick William II, who became king of Prussia in 1786 when his uncle died. He already as crown prince had been initiated into the Golden and Rosy Cross Order through the influence of his military aide de camp Johann von Bischoffswerder, and he appears to have been a keen member.

Historians have not been very kind to Frederick William. He has generally been portrayed as a weak and rather ineffectual successor to Frederick the Great. But I actually find him a rather likeable and engaging figure. He was a curious combination of mystic, libertine and artistic patron. He had several mistresses and a couple of bigamous marriages. At the same time he kept an orchestra with a European reputation and he patronized composers such as Mozart and Beethoven and he built a beautiful palace at Potsdam and a park to go with it filled with Rosicrucian motifs.

This is the new garden in Potsdam, close to Berlin, and here you see one of the motifs—it’s an ice house in the form of an Egyptian pyramid. Now pyramids are a common motif in Masonic and Rosicrucian imagery, representing the idea of an age-old wisdom tradition going back to ancient Egypt and taking its highest expression in architecture.

This pyramid also has a set of seven alchemical symbols picked out in gold leaf over the doorway. This reminds us of the key role that alchemy played in the Golden and Rosy Cross.

Here you see the Egyptian theme again on this orangerie made to look like an Egyptian temple with the sphinx over the portico and two figures of gods in black marble flanking the doorway. The whole park is a very beautiful place laid out along the side of a lake. If you’re ever in Potsdam, I can recommend visiting this palace and garden.

The Golden and Rosy Cross basically came to an end after the death of King Frederick William II in 1797, by which time it was already falling apart because of internal disputes and adverse publicity. But it’s worth mentioning an offshoot called the Asiatic Brethren, which was unique for its time in that it had a mixed Jewish and Christian membership, and the rituals and symbolism of the Order had a strong Jewish element. The Asiatic Brethren in turn had an offshoot in the form of a Masonic lodge at Frankfurt of mixed Jewish and Christian membership called the Lodge of the Rising Dawn, which may have been the antecedent to the Golden Dawn.

The head of the Asiatic Brethren in the 1780s and 1790s was the Landgrave Carl von Hessen-Kassel, one of the most fascinating and influential figures at the time in the world of Masonry, Rosicrucianism and hermetic studies. He not only belonged to innumerable orders and rites, but he was a practicing alchemist and was a friend of the mysterious French alchemist, the Comte de St. Germain, whom he harbored during the last years of St. Germain’s life on his estate Louisenlund in what is now Schleswig-Holstein, which he turned into a great center of Masonic and esoteric activity. The park at Louisenlund (about an hour’s drive northwest of Kiel) was laid out in the form of an initiatic journey that involved the candidate passing through a dense wood finding his way through a labyrinth and encountering various alchemical and allegorical images along the way.

In the park was an alchemist’s tower with a laboratory and a room where Masonic rituals were conducted. There was also a pond with a secret grotto concealed behind a waterfall, in which the most solemn rituals were held. Over the years, unfortunately, most of these symbolic features have disappeared. All that remains of the alchemist’s tower, for example, is this Egyptian stone doorway which was moved to a different position, and cemented into the wall of a stable building where it stands completely out of context. Today this property belongs to a private school.

I’ve also put Stockholm on the map, because there was a very important transmission of Rosicrucianism to Sweden, particularly with a man called Johannes Bureus, who was a great apologist for the Rosicrucian tradition and there was quite a center of Rosicrucianism in Stockholm.

So far I haven’t mentioned Weimar. So what about Goethe? Well, we know that Goethe was a Freemason. He was a member of the Lodge Amalia in Weimar along with his patron the Duke Karl August. It’s debatable whether we can call Goethe a Rosicrucian but we do know that he was extremely interested in Rosicrucianism. He wrote an unfinished poem on Rosicrucian themes called Mysteries (Die Geheimnisse) and a story inspired by the Chemical Wedding called The Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. He also wrote the novel Wilhelm Meister, in which the young hero Wilhelm is initiated into a secret society called the Turmgesellschaft, which is somewhat reminiscent of a Rosicrucian Order.

Now when we go to Weimar, we’ll be visiting the park along the banks of the river Ilm, which Goethe helped to plan together with Duke Karl August. I’d like to show you three items in the park. The first item is the Snakestone. This is a very alchemical image—a snake curled around a stone—and it’s also an image that one sees often in Masonic illustrations. The Latin inscription on it says genio huius loci, “to the spirit of this place.” It’s a rather mysterious object. If you read about it in the guidebooks it says that this was simply a monument either to Karl August or to somehow represent the spirit of the river Ilm. But I think it’s much more than that—I think it’s very alchemical and you can look at it when you go to Weimar.

Then there’s this grotto with a sphinx reclining in it, again invoking the theme of Egyptian wisdom which we saw in the garden at Potsdam. This object in the garden of Goethe’s garden house in the park, the so-called stone of good fortune, a very simple piece of symbolism, is simply a sphere and a cube, the sphere representing heaven and the cube representing earth or the two representing the movable and the fixed principles.

Now looking at the further transmission of Rosicrucianism, we find Rosicrucian influences in the Romantic movement, which began around the end of the 18th century and, like the Golden and Rosy Cross, was a reaction against the rationalism of the Enlightenment. We find Romantic writers like Novalis and Romantic painters like Friedrich Otto Runge using Rosicrucian and alchemical motifs. Now here is a painting by Runge called “Morning.” Runge belonged very much to the sort of world view we’ve been talking about and he was very much influenced by writers like Jacob Boehme, and one can see this clearly in this painting. What we have here really is a depiction of the divine world, the world of the spirit and the world of matter. There are two ways to reach the divine spiritual world, either one can go directly through the spiritual path—through this Sophia figure in the middle, who is surrounded by a sort of ring of cherubs—or you can go through the physical realm. What you see underneath there is a sun obscured by a moon. This reminds me of an image we saw yesterday of the sun rising in the depths of the earth, and this is what really lies at the heart of the mystique of mining and metallurgy and alchemy. It’s the idea that the divine spark is present in the depths of matter, in the form of gold, and what the alchemist and the metallurgist is trying to do is to extract that divine spark by extracting the gold ore from the rock. So one can go down into the depths of matter and find the divine gold, the divine sun in the earth, and then this light is transmitted through the plant and animal kingdoms and reaches the divine source that way. This painting hangs in the Kunsthalle in Hamburg and we have a reproduction of it on our wall at home.

Let me move on now to France and to Paris where we find a colorful Rosicrucian movement taking place in the late 19th century, under the leadership of two eccentric characters, the poet Stanislas de Guaita and the novelist and occultist Joséphin Péladan, or “Sâr Péladan,” as he called himself. These were two rather eccentric characters. They founded an order called the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose Cross, but they soon quarreled and Péladan broke off to form his own order called the Order of the Catholic Rose Cross, the Temple and the Grail, to use its full title.

Now Péladan’s order was not just an esoteric order but it was a whole cultural and artistic organization which had its own theater and orchestra and ran a series of art exhibitions—the Salons de Rose Croix, which were actually quite influential at the time and played quite a significant role the French Symbolist movement in painting. I’ve written about this in my book Eliphas Lévi and the French Occult Revival.

At roughly the same time in London there was the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, using a structure, as I said, based on the Golden and Rosy Cross. The Golden Dawn consisted of two orders, an outer and an inner one, and the inner one was Rosicrucian. You were admitted to it by going through an initiation ceremony which was essentially an extremely dramatic re-enactment of the discovery of the vault of Christian Rosenkreutz. Here you see the Rose Cross symbol used by the Golden Dawn and it reflects the very eclectic nature of the Golden Dawn. As you can see, they put on this cross Hebrew characters, planetary symbols and alchemical symbols.

Coming to the 20th century, an important name to mention is that of Rudolf Steiner (who you see here in this picture), the founder of Anthroposophy, which he saw as incorporating the Rosicrucian stream. Now Steiner, in my view, is one of the modern figures who came closest to realizing that holistic vision of the earlier Rosicrucians that I was talking about. In Steiner’s view, spiritual knowledge was of no use unless you applied it in the real world. As Steiner put it, “Rosicrucian wisdom must stream not only into the head, nor only into the heart, but also into the hands, into our manual capacities, into our daily actions.” So Anthroposophy became a movement that attempted to act in a practical way in many areas of life, including architecture, education, medicine, agriculture and the arts. Steiner was a great admirer of Goethe, so when he came to build the Anthroposophical headquarters in at Dornach in Switzerland, he called it the “Goetheanum”. Here you see a picture of the first Goetheanum, built of wood, which was sadly destroyed by fire in the 1920s and was replaced by a concrete building.

I’d just like to end by saying a bit about how I see this whole phenomenon of Rosicrucianism. When I began studying this subject, I thought that one could understand it simply by doing careful historical research, and then gradually I began to understand that there’s something here that one can’t understand if one looks at it simply through the eyes of the historian. Rosicrucianism is like a story that keeps reinventing itself and retelling itself, and perhaps that’s the reason why writers of fiction have often understood Rosicrucianism better than historians.

To give you one example, I would like to quote a story from the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges, in which he brilliantly creates his own fictional version of the Rosicrucian phenomenon. This story deals with a group of people who decide to create an imaginary world and to present this world as though it really existed. So they compile an encyclopedia all about this world, containing minutely detailed descriptions of its geography, its history, its customs, its religions and so on, and then they carefully leak out parts of this encyclopedia so that they begin to be quoted. They also plant in various places mysterious little artifacts from this world, like a tiny little cone made of some metal so heavy you can hardly lift it up. Gradually this mysterious world starts to fascinate people to such an extent that the real world starts to imitate it.

Now it’s quite clear that when Borges wrote this story, he had the Rosicrucian movement in mind, because he attributes one of the books about the imaginary world to Johann Valentin Andreae. In Borges’ story, the movement, the fraternity is called “Orbis Tertius,” the Third Sphere, and here is his account of its history. He writes, “One night in Lucerne or London in the early 17th century, the splendid history had its beginning. A secret and benevolent society arose to invent a country. Its vague initial program included hermetic studies, philanthropy and the Kabbalah. From the first period dates the curious book of Andreae. After a few years of secret conclaves and premature syntheses, it was understood that one generation was not sufficient to give articulate form to a country. They resolved that each of the masters should elect a disciple who would continue his work. This hereditary arrangement prevailed.”

The story then goes on to relate how the movement spread to America, where it was supported by an eccentric millionaire who persuaded the brethren that, instead of just inventing a country, they should invent an entire planet. Towards of the end of the story Borges writes, “a scattered dynasty of solitary men have changed the face of the world, their task continues.” The story has an unpronounceable title, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.

If, for a moment, we accept Borges’ scenario of this group of people who invented this imaginary world and surreptitiously leaked information about it into the real world so that the real world starts to imitate it—if we accept that for a moment—it’s extremely likely that this group of people would have continued in secret, surreptitiously, to influence our world, and maybe we’re living in a Rosicrucian world without realizing it.

Just to give one example of what I mean, in the story of the vault of Christian Rosenkreutz, as I mentioned earlier, there’s this object that is discovered called the Minutus Mundus, the miniature world. Perhaps the Internet is this Minutus Mundus. I’ll leave you with that thought.