Under the reign of Abu Said Othman, in the city of six hundred fresh water fountains, which was then in its full splendor, there was a school of astrology and magic. It had become secret since the persecutions of Abu Yussuf. It was there that Rosenkreutz learned divination by the stars and certain laws that regulate the hidden forces of nature.
But he was now in haste to return to his homeland. He left Fez and embarked for Spain. That was the moment when he had to take the name Rosenkreutz, which summarized the essence of his beliefs. He entered into communication with the Alumbrados. In Spain they formed a secret society born under the influence of the Arabs, in which the sciences were studied and a mysticism was practiced derived from that of the neoplatonists. They also sought the philosopher’s stone, according to the writings of Artephius.36 The secret society in question was later to be annihilated completely by the Inquisition.
The Fama Fraternitatis reports an echo of the disappointment experienced by Christian Rosenkreutz. He hastened to make known the novelties that he was bringing into the realm of science and philosophy. He was counting on correcting errors and imparting lovingly what he had learned. He was greeted with laughter and scorn. At all times, partial knowledge has enveloped false scholars with an illusion of certainty that does not permit them to receive any new idea. It requires a habituation for a mediocre mind to perceive a verity that is not familiar, even if it is as luminous as the sun.
It was then that Christian Rosenkreutz understood how slowness is necessary for wisdom to penetrate into the human heart. He had to remember the persecutions that had struck excessively precocious possessors of the truth. And, while being astonished at the time necessary for the spirit to develop when it only requires a single day for a flower to bloom and a single century for a tree to grow very tall, he resigned himself to leave the acorns to the swine while retaining the pearls for the elect, while sometimes mingling with the acorns an infinitesimal dust of pearl.
He meditated on subtle philters, on the formidable secret sieves by which thought would reach the men of his race in rare and microscopic drops, in order that they would not be burned by them. He counted those he could initiate and saw that their number was scarcely greater than eight. He laid the foundations of an occult group so secret, whose members were linked by such a terrible oath, that the group could act subsequently in the way that he had prescribed, pursuing and attaining its goals without anyone knowing of its existence, for three hundred years, except for vague whispers.
The curiosity of superficial men who love anecdotes has suffered from that. But who could sustain that it was the egotism of a superior minority disdaining to enlighten its peers and enabling them to share its knowledge? How many men are there presently in Europe sufficiently devoid of intellectual pride to welcome an absolutely new idea? Is not that pride a barrier that forbids the new idea even from reaching them? If Christian Rosenkreutz disembarked from Fez today, would not all the academies in the world laugh if he attempted to explain that the great work, the problem of the unity of matter, is linked to the development of love in human beings? Would he not encounter, if he tried to teach, the same inaptitude to receive on the part of those he wished to inform? To aid him, without hope of recompense, would he find now, as he did then, seven faithful monks?
Christian Rosenkreutz traversed France without his passage leaving any traces there. That must have been the moment at which the mystic Marguerite Porete had just been burned in Paris, and he hastened to regain Germany.37
Long years had passed. Germany was penetrated by all sorts of mystical currents issued from the Albigensian heresy. There were the Brothers of the Free Spirit, who proclaimed the vanity of exterior cults and sacraments, and denied Purgatory and Hell, saying that humans are fragments of God that must, through a long series of existences, finally return to the divine essence. There were the Friends of God, who pursued liberation from desire, devoting themselves to practices analogous to those of the yoga system, and whose philosophy was copied exactly from Hindu philosophy. But the persecution of the Church was organized with a force far greater than those sects employed in their propagation.
Before the number of imprisonments and burnings, Christian Rosenkreutz had to measure the danger that spiritual enlightenment was still causing those among whom it was spread to run. He went to find in Thuringia the three monks that had been his companions in his initial studies. They formed a fraternity of four members whose number was subsequently expanded to eight. It was at that moment that the Brotherhood of the Rose-Cross had its greatest expansion, and brought together a number of true initiates that was never to be attained subsequently.
Al the members of the fraternity were German. Only the member that the Fama Fraternitatis designates by the initials I.A. originated from another country, probably from Languedoc.
First, Christian Rosenkreutz taught his disciples the secret writing and the symbols by means of which the adepts corresponded with one another. He wrote a book for their usage that was the synthesis of his philosophy and contained a summary of his scientific and medical knowledge. The role of the community seems to have been to act on the few men of the Occident then given to science, in order that the science in question could develop in the direction of disinterest. That time was perhaps the great turning point of our civilization. If the goal of the Rosicrucians had been attained, science, instead of being organized for material ends, might have been the source of an unlimited development of the spirit. We have seen that that was not the case.
Those who were designated by the symbol of the rose and the cross traveled the world, each having a mission to fulfill, but nothing more has ever been known of any of them. According to the Fama, Brother I.A. returned to the south of France, where it was perhaps incumbent on him to reignite the antique Albigensian flame. But he must have been very old. Did he succeed in rendering life to a sect in a fashion as secret as that of the Rose-Cross? Tradition only reports his death in the Narbonnaise region.
Nothing is known historically of the activity of Rosenkreutz in the last part of his life—which is to say, at the commencement of the fourteenth century. It can nevertheless be supposed, without any great fear of error, that he inspired Jean de Mechlin,38 who preached in northern Germany and was the source of truth in Brussels on which the mystic Bloemert drew. That inspired woman achieved miraculous cures and published writings in which she advocated the liberation of the being by love. Her disciples affirmed that they saw two seraphim to her right and left, which advised her.
In all probability, Christian Rosenkreutz was the mysterious visitor of Jean Tauler, on the personality of whom there was so much discussion.39 Jean Tauler was the most celebrated doctor of theology of his time. The scientific world of Europe came to listen to his preaching in Strasbourg. One day he was visited by a layman whose name he never revealed, and who converted him to a mystical philosophy whose ideal was the absorption of human being by the divine essence. He maintained silence for two years and joined the sect of the Friends of God. That sect had the same characteristics as he Albigensians. It rejected as an expression of evil the cruel God of the Old Testament. It condemned marriage. It advocated poverty as a practical means of divine realization.
Nothing is known about the death of Christian Rosenkreutz. As with Apollonius of Tyana, no location can be fixed for his tomb. It was a rule for adepts to keep their birth secret as well as their death. Was that only to avoid the violation of the sepulcher and the profanation of the body to which the Church made heretics subject? Was it to permit some of them the translation of their spirit into a new human form and in order that a secret so astonishing for the common run of men should not even be suspected?
All that has reached us is a puerile legend relating to Rosenkreutz’s tomb. Two and a half centuries after his death, at the moment when the story of his existence was beginning to spread, his disciples—or, rather, some of those who would have liked to be—claimed to have found a grotto of geometric proportions in wh
ich the body of the master, still intact, reposed in the light of an artificial sun.
At all times, people have desired that those they esteem to be greater than themselves should not perish in their flesh. They attach less importance to the duration of their thought, which is, however, the sole form of their eternity. Thus, the Catholic or Muslim saints emit a sweet odor when their remains are found. The veritable sweet odor that the bodies of sages emit in the silence of the earth and the ambience of putrescence is not made of any quintessential material atom or any odorous volatilization. The subtle radiation of their soul floats in the places where they repose and impregnate them, when their body has ceased even to be dust. But it is necessary to be a sage oneself to make contact with that posthumous subsistence of being, and that perception, in enabling you to glimpse that the best do not escape the law, enables you to sense more profoundly the irremediable sadness of transformations.
True and False Rosicrucians
It was at the beginning of the seventeenth century that a sort of Rosicrucian folly burst forth. Two anonymous documents, the Fama fraternitatis and the Confessio published, in a naïve form, what the vulgar knew of the sect of the Rose-Cross, which was very little. A large number of philosophers and scholars, and also many impostors, seduced by the elevated philosophy of the Rose-Cross, claimed to be its inheritors. Secret societies were formed that rapidly ceased to be secret because of the vanity of their members, who were proud of being part of them. The majority of those groups, when they were not Lutherans, bowed down to the authority of the Church. All the alchemists said that they were Rosicrucians. Descartes attempted to make contact with the veritable fraternity of the Rose-Cross. He searched for them in the Low Countries and Germany, but he declared on his return to France that he had not been able to learn anything certain in their regard.
It has been said that Paracelsus, Francis Bacon and Spinoza were Rosicrucians, but there does not seem to be any proof. In the eighteenth century, a new grade, that of Rose-Cross, was introduced into freemasonry by the Jesuits, who had penetrated it, and Christian groups of that order were formed by them in many places. The vivacious liberty of the thirteenth-century heresies had disappeared. Those so-called Rosicrucians recognized the sacraments, studied the Old Testament as a source of all truth, and bowed down before the power of the Church and the infallibility of the Pope. That is the habitual evolution of all spiritual currents. The tree from which an excessively beautiful flower or an excessively perfect fruit emerges becomes prey to an obscure force that communicates a spoiled sap to it and causes its death.
But the true Rosicrucians continued their work. Their association had not ceased to remain hidden. Because of the voluntary obscurity of each member, no one ever knew the identity of those who were part of it. Merely by the fact that certain men declared that they were Rosicrucians, it is recognizable that they were not affiliated to the sect founded by Christian Rosenkreutz. The influence of that free spirit made itself felt in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in all those who struggled against the Calvinist and Lutheran tyranny, as intolerant as that of the Inquisition, and against the intransigence of the universities, which wanted to curb all minds under the intellectual discipline of Aristotle. But the messengers remained faithful to the oath not to make themselves known. The message arrived, but it was not known who had brought it.
Certain features of the life of certain men can sometimes make one think that they were the true possessors of the Rosicrucian tradition. Paracelsus practiced medicine gratuitously; his philosophy was neoplatonist; he only wore modest garments and he glorified poverty; appointed professor of surgery by the senate of Basle he burned in the amphitheater before his students the books of the old physicians that were followed blindly and which, under the pretext of respect, were an obstacle to research. Philalethes,40 who possessed the secret of the philosopher’s stone, traveled the world to care for the sick; his incessant preoccupation as to avoid the celebrity that his cures attracted. Although the Comte de Saint-Germain had a liking for precious jewels, he can be ranked, for other reasons, among the true Rosicrucians.41 But the same conclusion cannot be drawn for Spinoza, from the fact that his seal represented a rose and he did not sign any of his works. Certain overly passionate writers have enrolled among the Rosicrucians all the remarkable minds of the last few centuries.
In 1888 Stanislas de Guaita and Papus founded a cabalistic Order of the Rose-Cross, with a ceremony, grade, and perhaps costumes. That, and the publicity made around that foundation, indicates sufficiently that the new order was not inspired by the tradition of its first founder. One can say the same about the Catholic Order of the Rose-Cross that Joséphin Péladan founded at the same time. Those orders only had an ephemeral life. Groups can still be found today, almost all Christian, that call themselves Rosicrucian, without that corresponding to any initiatory reality whatsoever.
The only true Rosicrucians, the eight heirs, incessantly renewed, of the Albigensian Christian von Germelshausen, have not ceased to pursue their secret endeavor. It has been said that at the end of the seventeenth century, confronted by the increasing materialism of Europe, and as they judged the game lost, they quit the races uniquely thirsty for physical wellbeing and retired to the inaccessible solitudes of the Himalayan mountains. But a game in which the stake is divine is never lost. Perhaps they quit Europe for a time and returned. Their legend, after having fueled the conversations of all the intellectual societies of Europe, was effaced after the Revolution. At present it only interests a small number of the curious. The eight sages have resumed their task in all liberty. It is true that the task has become enormous. By what means are they attempting to accomplish it?
Sometimes, little is necessary to orientate the human soul in a new direction, better and more elevated. It happens that the reading of a book suffices, or a word that is head, even a benevolent face that is glimpsed one evening and recalls the fact that goodness exists. Any of us can encounter, when the moment comes or when he requests it forcefully, one of the eight wandering sages. Let him not be in a bad mood that day, or distracted by fatigue. Wisdom is not capricious, like fortune, but it passes by less frequently.
The Rose and the Cross
The Rosicrucians adopted the union of the rose and the cross as a symbol because that union summarizes the direction of their effort, and the effort in question ought to be that of all humans. Since time immemorial, the wisest among us have discovered that the goal of humankind on earth is to reach divine wisdom. Two routes lead to divine wisdom: knowledge and love.
The cross is the most ancient symbol that exists. As soon as the first civilizations appeared, it signified the spirit, the spirit in motion toward perfection. The rose has the meaning of amour because it is, by virtue of its perfume, color and delicacy, the masterpiece of the beauty of nature, and beauty animates love, in the same way that love transforms into beauty the elements over which it spreads. By the rose that blooms in the middle of the cross, the meaning of the universe is explained, the unique doctrine is summarized and the truth shines brightly. Humans, in order to realize themselves and become perfect, must develop their power of love to the point of loving all beings and all the forms perceptible to the senses, must extend their faculty of knowledge and understanding to the point of possessing the laws that regulate the world, and must be able to reconnect, by means of intelligence, all effects to all causes.
The person who respires the rose and savors its beauty, the person who sees the branches of the cross open toward the four cardinal points of the spirit, can be mistaken, can go backwards, and be momentarily buried by ignorance, but he holds on to the buoy in the tempest, sees the lamp on the hill, and, sooner or later, recovers the right path. Glory to the messenger who finds that salutary signal, who fixes it in the wood or on the stone in order that it is transmitted! Glory to the messenger who, by the virtue of the image, permits the truth not to be lost! He has put the number and the letter on the milestone; he has been the
comfort of the traveler and the salvation of the man gone astray.
Christian Rosenkreutz had fixed the rules for the life of his disciples. The first of those rules was disinterest. Disinterest will always remain the most difficult virtue to practice. Men of whom it is said that they are disinterested and who pass among us with a vague aureole of generosity are merely those who are less avid than others. No one is disinterested. There is no example in our modern society of a man great enough to break the formidable chain of money and pass with ease and without ostentation from wealth to poverty or even from poverty to a greater poverty. As soon as the spirit has attained a certain elevation, a man understands that it is in that direction that the first step ought to be accomplished, but he does not take that step. One of the most courageous and most convinced of the virtue of poverty, Tolstoy, only decided a few hours before his death to practice the estate of the mendicant monk. That is very late.
Another essential rule was the absence of pride. The Rosicrucian must pass unperceived, must not flatter himself on his knowledge, and must remain as anonymous as possible. Modesty is as impracticable as poverty for the ordinary man. One can even observe that a stupid vanity, proud of itself, always accompanies great intellectual faculties. And that stupid vanity is considered favorably as a sign of genius.
The third rule of the Rosicrucians was chastity. At all times, sages have attached great importance to chastity. However, neither Pythagoras, nor Socrates, nor Plato, nor the philosophers of the Alexandrian school, practiced it in a rigorous fashion. Perhaps it is only a preventative measure against the excess of desires and the violence they engender.
The Angel of Lust Page 34