Chapter Five
The Hermetic Background to the first Rosicrucians
While Lazzarelli contemplated his signal rebirth, printed books on alchemy continued to proliferate about the centres of learning in Europe. The theories and promise of what would later be termed “magical panvitalism” vouchsafed in translations from Arabic alchemical texts would profoundly affect the thought of Renaissance philosophers and contribute greatly to the impetus for scientific development in the seventeenth century, when a major revival of alchemy co-incided and interpenetrated with movements which would culminate not least in the founding of the Royal Society in 1661. Elias Ashmole, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton - to name but a few - were fascinated and inspired by the alchemical enterprise, an enterprise which quietly gained in strength and sophistication throughout the middle ages. Nor should it be forgotten that Pico della Mirandola's famous Oratio on the Dignity of Man (1486) - the “manifesto of the Renaissance” according to Ernesto Garin66- begins with the words :
I have read in the records of the Arabians, reverend fathers, that there is nothing to be seen more wonderful than man. In agreement with this opinion are the words of Hermes Trismegistus : ‘A great miracle, O Asclepius, is man.’
141 years later, one of the geniuses behind the Rosicrucian Fraternity, Johann Valentin Andreae, the inventor of the hero Christian Rozenkreuz, will put the following words into the mouth of his dramatic figure, Christianus, in a dialogue featured in his attack on the decline and corruption of learning, Menippus (1617) :
There is no limit to my amazement when I see that in our age - although it will forever be known as a very happy and erudite one - there are so few people who investigate our creator's wisdom in his creations and the structure of his wonderful machine, - as only a few generations ago men like Pico della Mirandola, Reuchlin, Cardanus and others pioneered in this field.
In many respects, the Rosicrucian enterprise, as conceived by its initiators, was an attempt to re-instate the kind of open-ended, open-minded, and, above all, spiritually uplifting approach to nature as shown by the oriental and Alexandrian alchemists. The Islamic sciences had declined in the twelth century due to the same kind of intolerance for authority-challenging investigation which the learning institutions of Europe were suffering from, following the initial strides forward characterised as the Renaissance. The ‘Rosicrucians’ wished to rekindle the true spirit of this movement and institute a second Reformation: a reformation of learning and, more importantly given the fissures which were splitting Europe apart, a reformation of the heart as well. Alchemy, with its ample exposition of such themes as the soul regenerated from its blackened state, the purification of the ‘metal’ through the fire of devotion and suffering, the central significance of meditation (dialogue with God within), combined with the mighty power of the creative imagination and culminating in the ecstatic release of the spirit, provided the essential imagery and formulae for this gigantic undertaking.
The Light is the true Light of nature, which illuminates all the God-loving Philosophers who come into this world. It is in the World and the whole edifice of the World is beautifully adorned and will be naturally preserved by it until the last and great day of the Lord, but the World knows it not. Above all it is the subject of the Catholic and Great Stone of the Philosophers, which the whole world has before its eyes yet knows not. (Von hylealischen Chaos. pp 71ff. Heinrich Khunrath. (1520-1605).
Imagination is the star in man, the celestial or supercelestial body. (Martin Ruland's Lexicon alchemiae. 14th cent.)
Because men do not perfectly believe and imagine, the result is that arts are uncertain when they might be wholly certain. Resolute imagination is the beginning of all magical operations. (Paracelsus*)
The key document of the first ‘Rosicrucians’, the Fama Fraternitatis67 has been called the “Gospel according to Paracelsus” by the French scholar Roland Edighoffer68. Indeed the consonance of the Fama with so many of the ideas cherished by Paracelsus’ intricate underground of continental disciples accounts for much of the amazingly widespread influence of the Fama's magical message. Paracelsus was an alchemist - with a difference. Not content with healing himself, he sought to heal the whole world.
Paracelsus (1483-1541)
God is in everything from the angel to the spider. (Meister Eckhart c.1260-1328)
Aureolus Philippus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim was born near Zurich in 1483. Fortunately he shortened his name - while simultaneously increasing its power - to Paracelsus, meaning, greater than Celsus, Celsus (c.20BC-c.35AD) being an ancient medical authority. This kind of contempt for authority, combined with a big -and generous - personality, made Paracelsus' life a constant struggle, but it also ensured that he stuck to his path : don't believe what you read in books just because they're old; get out there and experiment for yourself! This was his message.
Paracelsus lived a life of perpetual challenge to all academic authority. He also lived his life to the full, trying everything for himself and travelling widely. It is said that he toured the East, but while this is disputed, his reputation is certainly one model ingredient in the composite make-up of Christian Rosenkreuz, the ideal hero of the Fama Fraternitatis. Wherever it was that Paracelsus had travelled to, we know that he returned home to Switzerland in 1524, settling in Basle and opening his career with a fracas at the university. We are speaking of a time when it was customary for an academic physician to stand at a comfortable distance from a sick person's bed, reading from some ancient tome while the assistant did as he was told. Paracelsus preferred the hands-on approach. It gave him a thousand insights, including the first diagnosis of an industrial disease. Paracelsus is also credited as the father of modern medicine, being the first man to introduce chemistry into his practice, happy to employ drugs such as laudanum which he discovered, and anything else he found useful from herbal lore or well-tried rustic practices. He held diagnosis to be central to the practice of the physician. He liked to roll up his sleeves and get involved with the patient : “There can be no physician who is not also a surgeon. Where the physician is not also a surgeon, he is an idol that is nothing but a painted monkey.” This is the kind of ‘excessive’ language which got him into trouble with the authorities, ever anxious for their status and pockets. In 1527, he threw a copy of Avicenna's vast Canon onto a traditional student bonfire and created a storm. He was kicked out of Basle, as he was out of many towns, notwithstanding his amazingly successful record in healing people - a small matter for the medical authorities.
I considered with myself, that if there were no teacher of medicine in the world, how would I set about to learn the art? No otherwise than in the great open Book of Nature, written with the finger of God.
The “Book of Nature” is an expression which appears in the Fama Fraternitatis, and alerts us at once to the Hermetic character of many of Paracelsus’ medical theories. For the Hermetist, the world is the image of God (mundus imago dei). God's ‘hand’ is to be found all over it, or rather within it, in what Paracelsus calls the divine signatures. It is the task of the physician to trace them and to see where they lead. Strong Gnostic characteristics can be discerned throughout his writings69. For Paracelsus, the soul which invigorates the physical body is the expression of an astral body which is the ‘frame’ in which the life of the organism takes place. The astral body is effectively the bridge or link between spirit and matter, according to a whole range of traditional correspondences between the stars, plants, minerals, and the individual organs of the body. The root of the soul is the timeless pneuma, the spirit. Healing, in principle, consists of clearing obstructions between pneuma and soul, by opening up the channels from spirit to body. In gnostic terms, this means tracing the soul back to its source, its divine origin, thus freeing it from that which binds it to earth. This is also the type for the alchemical operation, and in Paracelsus’ thought, alchemical, spiritual and medical terminology cohere freely.
Paracelsus followed Pico's fr
iend Marsilio Ficino's ‘natural magic’70 in his tripartition of the human microcosm. Paracelsus' elementary body, astral body and heavenly body correspond to Ficino's corpus, spiritus and mens (mind or nous=divine intelligence : the gnostic faculty). This triad is also expressed in alchemical terms in Paracelsus' salt (matter), sulphur (soul) and mercury (spirit). It is in fact the descendent of the classic Gnostic division of consciousness into the hylic (material), psychic (soul), and pneumatic (spiritual). Another classic Gnostic term, that of the archon or cosmic ruler, and related to the intermediary position of medium between divine and material, appears in Paracelsus' system as the Archeus : the creative principle implicate in Nature, defining individuality, and responding to the spirit - or in Paracelsus' terminology the mercurius : the essence of transformation, or resurrection. The Archeus can both join the sparks of divine light with matter and it can separate them from matter. Hence Paracelsus calls the archeus, the “inner alchemist” (cf : DNA control systems).
The great alchemist, master of mercury - or Mercury in human (if mythic) form - is of course Hermes Trismegistos, the great mystagogue of the Hermetic Art. We find him not only in Paracelsus but in Johann Valentin Andreae's Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz71 the first version of which was written by Andreae as a teenager some time between 1603 and 1605. On the fourth day of Christian's voyage of alchemical self-discovery, he comes across a lion, holding an ancient tablet :
I, Hermes the Prince, After so much injury Done to the human race, Through Divine Council and the help of the arts Made into wholesome medicine Flow here. Drink from me who can : wash in me who likes : trouble me who dares Drink, brothers and live.
According to Paracelsus' mercury theory, should the ‘mercury’ (not the chemical of that name) or quinta-essentia be drawn from every animal, plant and mineral, the result would equal the anima mundi or Soul of the World, while a draught of the same, (the elixir) would renew vigour. Paracelsus obtained laudanum from the poppy as its quintessence. This came to him and his patients as an unequivocal gift of God.
I have shown in my book of ‘Elements’ that the quintessence is the same thing as mercury. There is in mercury whatever wise men seek. There are as many mercuries as there are things.
‘Mercury’ then is a metaphysical principle without which nature could not be sustained. It should then be no surpise to find that the dominant alchemical symbol of the British astrologer and Hermetic philosopher, John Dee's Monas Hieroglyphica (1564) is mercury, the very crux of the cosmos. ‘Mercury’ is diffused at every level of nature, enabling one aspect to be transformed into a higher aspect.
For Christian theologians with an interest in alchemy such as Johann Valentin Andreae (born in 1586), and for mystical alchemists, the highest product of alchemy was the ‘stone’ (lapis) : the Medicine of Medicines, cleansing the wounded world and purifying the soul so that higher spiritual evolution may take place. Nature is not to be despised; she is the first-matter. Alone she is sorrow, but transformed by the Stone, she gives pure joy. Paracelsus' alchemy suggests the on-going process of an implicate apocalypse : the old world burned away to reveal the spirit, or in the words of the apocryphal, and highly influential IIEsdras :
Then shall they be known, who are my chosen; and they shall be tried as the gold in the fire.
What could be more like the ‘coming of Christ’ (usually associated with the ‘Last Times’) than the appearance within the alchemist's psyche of the Stone?
The Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom
In 1598, the magus John Dee is reported to have met the aged German alchemist Heinrich Khunrath72 in Bremen. What may have passed between them is not recorded, but almost certainly conversation would have involved discussion of Khunrath's huge illustrated work, the Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae (Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom), published in that year by permission of the Emperor Rudolf II. Khunrath's extraordinarily vivid work offers ways for the adept to enter into a mystical brotherhood. The book contains an illustration of a cave entrance which opens into the earth - Nature - while within the cave are steps which lead upwards to the source of light : a neat paradox on the theme of the apparent darkness of matter. The door into the Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom reveals seven laws for those who would enter :
We are cleansed of the world. Be ye!
YHWH the one maker of all. Let the other powers be your ministers.
Make your vows and prayers to the First One, your hymns to those below.
Even if perchance your prayer has gone to the powers below, your purpose in so doing should only be to acquire help delegated from God.
Let reverence and fear be the messengers flitting to and fro between us and YHWH.
Following the customary trial be joyfully obedient towards them.
Let the holy matters, which you came here to engage upon, be upon the worthy and closed to the unworthy.
This work undoubtedly helped to frame the way onlookers would regard the claims of the Brotherhood of the Rosy-Cross as revealed in the Fama Fraternitatis, published sixteen years later. Indeed, Khunrath's work would come to be seen as a work issuing from the same mysterious source73. The reason for this is quite obvious. Notwithstanding the fact that the Paracelsian Benedictus Figulus helped Khunrath prepare the second edition of the Amphitheatrum, (a man who would later have advance access to the manuscript Fama74), the book itself is full of suggestions that Khunrath had attained to an inner brotherhood of Christo-Cabalistic Divine Magic, (the phrase is Khunrath's), seeing himself as a being apart from the mass of humanity, communing directly with the Truth :
..when ye my contemporaries were idly dozing, I was watching and at work, meditating earnestly day and night on what I had seen and learned, sitting, standing, recumbent, by sunshine, by moonshine, by banks, in meadows, streams, woods and mountains. (From Khunrath's Confessio in the Amphitheatrum)
“Do not think yourself successful unless the masses laugh at you.” he wrote in his Confessio. While the masses jeered, Khunrath came to what was for him a conclusion of tremendous import. For Khunrath, “the Perfect Stone is attained through Christ.” He is made ‘flesh’ in the womb of the outer world. The “College of the Mysteries” is Nature. The universe in its inward aspect is a perpetual apocalypse of the coming of God. Long hinted at through generations of alchemical literature, Khunrath's identification of the Stone with Christ had tremendous ramifications for those who followed him. Meditation and science had become a single path to God. Put purely intellectual theology aside : seek the revelation of God in Nature - reconcile man to the cosmos, man to himself, man to his fellow, and man to God. Seek the Stone! is the essence of Khunrath's message.
In his laying out of the inner process and path to the Philosopher's Stone, Khunrath depends on a mystical Christian and quite radical interpretation of the micro-macrocosmic theory, revealing a gnostic sense of man's capacity to know God.
Purification of the personal part, that we may come to see God.
Closing of the avenues of sense, stillness of soul, sanctification, illumination, tincture by the divine fire.
Here is the path of attainment for the Stone of the Philosophers,
which stone is the living spirit of the Elohim, and
the entreating of Jehovah the divine power, the Word of God in nature.
That Word is made flesh, so to speak in the virginal womb of the greater world and
is manifested in Jesus, in the virginal womb of Mary, but also
in the soul of man in a light super-added to that of Nature; hereby the knowledge of God and His Christ is communicated.
And then, in 1614, Wilhelm Wessel of Cassel in Hessen printed a mysterious document. The document's anonymous authors announced themselves as members of a secret Brotherhood, a holy Fraternity with knowledge of the Philosopher's Stone at their daily disposal, and who called for new brothers to share in the mighty task initiated by their founder, Christian Rosenkreuz75. Here, it was declared, lay the golden key to Europe's rebirth fro
m the ashes of religious strife.
*Quotations from Paracelsus (pp. 63, 65, 66) taken from his magnum opus, Archidoxa Medicinae (Johann Huser, 1589). English translations appear in Spence, Lewis, The Encyclopaedia of Occultism (US, 1920).
Notes to Part One
1 According to Garth Fowden (The Egyptian Hermes. Cambridge University Press. 1986) the first unambiguous testimony to literary ‘Hermetica’ probably comes from the first century BC Antiochus of Athens who, according to Gundel (Weltbild und Astrologie in den griechischen Zauberpapyri. Munich. 1968), probably spent some time in Alexandria. Antiochus refers to an earlier interpreter of Hermes called Timaeus, though this could be a reference to Plato's work of that name. Plato twice refers to the Egyptian god Thoth, without equating him with Hermes. Festugière (La Révélation d'Hermès Trismegiste (4 vols. 1944-54) was convinced that some astrological Hermetica were of Ptolemaic origin. Astrological and iatromathematical (astrological medicine) Hermetica were widely read by the first century AD.
2 Jean Pierre Mahé, Hermès en Haute-Égypte. Les Presses de l'Université Laval, Québec, Canada. Tomes I-II. 1978.1982.
3 See Libellus I.6. (Scott translation) : “‘That Light,’ he [Poimandres] said, ‘is I, even Mind, the first God, who was before the watery substance which appeared out of the darkness; and the Word [logos] which came forth from the Light is son of God. …They are not separate from one another; for life is the union of word and mind.” Speculation on the nature of the divine Logos had been a feature of Alexandrian intellectual life since at least the time of the Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria (c.25BC-c.50AD), a contemporary of Jesus. Indeed, Philonic logos speculation breathes through much of the first book, commonly called Poimandres, of the Corpus Hermeticum. For example, Philo calls the Logos “first-begotten Son of the uncreated Father”, “second God” - and even “the man of God” (de confusione linguarum 41; 62; 146).
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