The Golden Builders

by Tobias Churton

  The next morning, a small band of brothers open the door. Their efforts reveal an extraordinary vault of seven sides: five feet broad and eight feet high. The vault is illuminated by an inner sun “situated in the upper part of the centre of the ceiling”. In the middle is a round altar covered with a brass plate declaring, “This compendium of the universe I made in my lifetime to be my tomb.” In a circle is written : Jesus mihi omnia : Jesus, all things to me. In the middle of the plate, four figures in circles are inscribed with the words:

  A Vacuum exists nowhere.

  The Yoke of the Law.

  The Liberty of the Gospel.

  The Whole Glory of God.

  The whole design is a quite stunning array of geometrical symmetry of mystical import whose exact nature will be revealed only to those found worthy of joining the society. The floor, for example, is divided into triangles which describe the powers of the “inferior governors” (the stars). Against each wall is a chest containing books, the first of which to be mentioned is the Vocabular of Paracelsus5. Another chest contains looking-glasses, bells, burning lamps and sufficient things by which the principles of the Order might be reconstructed, should the Order's labour come to nothing.

  Removing the altar, the brothers find the body of Christian Rosenkreuz “whole and unconsumed”, grasping to his chest the Book I, and a Bible: “our greatest treasure.” They read in Latin a concise eulogium of R.C.'s life :

  A grain buried in the breast of Jesus. C. Ros. C. sprung from the noble and renowned German family of R.C.; a man admitted into the mysteries and secrets of heaven and earth through the divine revelations, subtle cogitations and unwearied toil of his life. In his journey through Arabia and Africa he collected a treasure surpassing that of Kings and Emperors; but finding it not suitable for his times, he kept it guarded for posterity to uncover, and appointed loyal and faithful heirs of his arts and also of his name. He constructed a microcosm corresponding in all motions to the macrocosm and finally drew up this compendium of things past, present and to come.

  After a list of the first and second “circles” of brethren, come the words, We are born of God, we die in Jesus, we live again through the Holy Spirit.

  And so we do expect the answer and judgement of the learned, or unlearned. Howbeit, we know after a time there will now be a general reformation, both of divine and human things, according to our desire, and the expectation of others. For it is fitting, that before the rising of the sun, there should appear and break forth Aurora, or some clearness, or divine light in the sky.

  This must be a reference to the appearance of new stars in the constellations of Serpentarius and Cygnus in the year 1604, written about by the astronomer Kepler in the year in which the exhumation of C.R. is said to have taken place: a definitive sign that the New Age had at last come.

  The Fama is concluded by a series of exhortations concerning the unity and agreement of genuine knowledge, as well as warnings against “the ungodly and accursed gold-making” (materialist alchemy) which has become so popular, and which the author or authors regard as a perversion of the real thing. The making of gold, the ‘purest’ metal, incorruptible and analagous to the divine is, according to the Fama, merely a parergon: a by-product of the main work that is spiritual transformation. Readers are warned against false books of alchemy which promise what they cannot deliver and lead men6 to dismal fates.

  At last comes the final invitation for outsiders to join the Fraternity. It is clearly stated that the Brothers will inwardly and spiritually know which enquirers are genuine or not, however they might try to make contact with the Order. The false cannot hurt the Order: “our building (although one hundred thousand people had very near seen and beheld the same) shall for ever remain untouched, undestroyed, and hidden to the wicked world.” The Fraternity lives under the protection of Jehova's wings : SUB UMBRA TUARUM JEHOVA. This is a spiritual Order. Those who share its aims and spirit are, in a sense already part of it, but the spiritual body must begin to manifest its works and illuminations in the material world.

  Haslmayr and Paracelsus

  So this was that Fama which made such a fateful impression upon Adam Haslmayr. What particularly struck him was its consistency with the ideas of his idol Paracelsus (1493-1541), the “German Trismegistus”, greatest and most controversial medical doctor of the age. Although, according to the Fama, Paracelsus was “none of our fraternity,” he did look over the Book M (which most likely stands for mundus since Paracelsus is famous for taking his ideas directly from the natural world), and while the Fama's author was well aware of Paracelsus' subversive reputation as a vulgar critic of his opponents, the author takes a sympathetic view: “in his writing he rather mocked these busybodies, and doth not show them altogether what he was.”

  Paracelsus had introduced chemistry to medicine, believed in the virtue of experiment, had more faith in the ‘book of nature’ than received paper authority, got his hands dirty and tirelessly fulminated against those who could spout but could not cure. Such is well known. What is far less known is that Paracelsus, inspired by the Hermetic tradition, wrote reams on the subject of religion. Kept secret in his lifetime these writings would become time-bombs after his death.

  Paracelsus held to a gnostic cosmogony: Man was a microcosm of the universe, but the spirit that giveth life was generally trapped in gross matter. The result: spiritual and bodily sickness. This prognosis applied as much to the churches as to the body. Paracelsus had no time for the “mauerkirche”, the external church of stone, but believed in the church of spirit, the inner Word. As his follower Haslmayr put it, God does not need bishops or professors to tell him where to go, what to do, or to whom He should speak. Paracelsus regarded Catholic and Protestant disputants alike as liars. Paracelsus’ own middle name, Theophrastus, means God-speaker or God-expounder, and he lived up to it. Followers such as Haslmayr took it as the name for a ‘new’ religion, the Theophrastia Sancta or religion of the two lights: the light of grace and the light of nature.

  Follow the ‘divine signatures’ in Nature and a harmony invisible to the disharmonious mind would appear. The priest was doctor; the doctor scientist; the scientist priest. Paracelsus prophesied the coming Golden Age of Grace. The magi were returning.

  What Haslmayr read in the Fama chimed in with the Paracelsian bell, and in his printed Antwort of March 1612 he thanked the Brethren of the Rose Cross for their divine gift and Theophrastiam. Haslmayr's open letter to the Brotherhood also refers to a number of apocalyptic prophecies.

  In 1605 a French prophecy, falsely attributed to Paracelsus7, appeared in Germany. A double catastrophe of political and religious import was predicted. The prophecy spoke of a hidden treasure that a group of initiates would discover and use for the benefit of humanity. A group of faithful elect would appear: men who had resisted the lies of the world, led by a messenger and mystagogue who would destroy the Antichrist and give good things to all.

  Three treasures were mentioned in the prophecy, one of which was hidden in Germany. The German treasure would provide enough funds to feed a dozen kingdoms. Furthermore, rare books would reveal the Great Art of alchemical transmutation to make a drinkable gold according to the virtue of the philosopher's stone and the procedures of Paracelsus. When the treasure was found, a yellow lion would oppose the eagle, resulting in war and revolution.

  Haslmayr begs for help for the renovation of the world, for “a new heaven and a new earth”. The treasures within the vault of Christian Rosenkreuz are linked by Haslmayr to the three treasures of the “Lion of septentrion”, waiting until the arrival of “Elias the Artist” (Elijah the prophet, whose coming was predicted by magus Tommaso Campanella for 1604) to be opened; when everything hidden would come to light and, according to Paracelsus' De Tinctura physicorum, the Golden Age of Grace would commence.

  For the Adam Haslmayr of 1612, the end of time was approaching. The Judges would appear in 1613 and the Great Judgement would take place in 1614. Spurred on by
his enthusiasm and sense of imminent expectation, Haslmayr compared the Brotherhood of the Rose-Cross to the Jesuits and asserted that it was the Fraternity of Christian Rosenkreuz that was the true Society of Jesus. He wrote to his employer, the Archduke Maximilian (for whom Haslmayr was a notary) for permission to go to Montpellier to search for the Rosicrucian Brotherhood. The choice of Montpellier was presumably the result of seeing the reference in the Fama to Brother N.N (“the architect”) from Gallia Narbonensis.

  Unfortunately for Adam Haslmayr, Haslmayr's intentions came to the attention of Inquisitor Hippolyt Guarinoni. Guarinoni was a Jesuit and fervently anti-Paracelsian8. Haslmayr was tricked into an arrest at Innsbruck, force-marched to Genoa and made a galley slave between that port and Messina9.

  Plötzkau

  Haslmayr was not alone in his enthusiasm for Paracelsus. During the 1980s, Spanish scholar Dr Carlos Gilly discovered correspondence between Prince Augustus of Anhalt and the Augsburg city physician Carl Widemann. For many years Widemann had been collecting the red-hot theological writings of Paracelsus as well as those of the sympathetic radical reformers Caspar Schwenckfeld (1489-1561), Sebastian Franck (1499-1542) and Valentin Weigel (1533-1588). These works of alchemico-spiritual Christosophy scandalised the closed worlds of all the proponents of authoritarian religion in the 16th century.

  Widemann had also been secretary to English alchemist Edward Kelley in Prague 1587-88, during the tail end of the latter's engagement as seer to British Magus John Dee. This experience was doubtless of interest to Augustus von Anhalt, a man in search of the philosopher's stone10.

  In 1611 Widemann became acquainted with Haslmayr, sharing Haslmayr's understanding of the Theophrastia Sancta as “a sort of perpetual religion, which since the days of the apostles had been practised in concealment until the time when the German Trismegistus, Philippus Theophrastus [Paracelsus] began publicly to expound its meaning.” (Gilly). He had no hesitation in recommending Haslmayr's alchemical and compositional prowess to Augustus.

  In December 1611 the officially Calvinist Prince Augustus von Anhalt, based at Schloss Plötzkau near Magdeburg, received a new year's present from Haslmayr – copies of both the Fama and his response to it. Prince Augustus “read it [the Fama] and re-read it again” (letter of Augustus-Widemann, January 1612). Deeply hooked, he asked Widemann how he might obtain the Fama's promised follow-up, the Confessio.

  Widemann was aware that the manuscript of the Fama had been disseminated from the house of one Tobias Hess in Tübingen, Württemburg. Enquiries, however, yielded nothing.

  In the summer of that year, Augustus gave Haslmayr the task of assembling ‘Theophrastian’ texts for his secret printing press at Plötzkau, a plan which came to a halt after Haslmayr wrote to the Archduke Maximilian of the Tyrol in August 1612, asking for permission to go to Montpellier to search for the Fratres R.C. Thanks to the inquisitor Guarinoni, Halsmayr's stony path would take him not to Languedoc, but to the galleys of the Habsburgs, wherein he would languish for five terrible years.

  Meanwhile, Haslmayr's manuscripts - including a copy of the Fama - had been entrusted to the Paracelsian alchemist Benedictus Figulus. Figulus was soon made subject to an arrest-warrant in Freiburg and left that city to travel 150 miles north to friends in the city of Marburg in Hesse-Cassel.

  Hesse-Cassel was governed by the Landgrave Moritz von Hessen, alchemically minded Calvinist and friend of Augustus von Anhalt (they would later establish their own Societas Hermetica). In Marburg lived Raphael Eglin and Johann Hartmann, two alchemists patronised by Moritz von Hessen. Arriving in Marburg, Figulus deposited Haslmayr's manuscripts11 at the home of Raphael Eglin. Eglin's manuscripts, including those formerly belonging to Adam Haslmayr are now in Cassel, formerly the home of Moritz von Hessen. Cassel was also the base of the printer Wilhelm Wessel.

  In 1614 Eglin wrote a letter of complaint to his patron Moritz von Hessen. He complained that he had sent his work to Wessel two months before Wessel had received the Fama, but still his work had not been printed. Who could have given the Fama to the printer? Was it Eglin? Augustus? Moritz von Hessen? Could it have been Figulus? We do not know as yet. Somebody it seems wanted to bring the Fraternity of the Rose-Cross out into the open.

  Wilhelm Wessel of Cassel printed the Fama Fraternitatis in 1614, along with a piece called The general Reformation of the whole wide world: an extract from Trajano Boccalini's satirical News from Parnassus, hot from the liberal (and politically threatened) Republic of Venice. As a result, the Fama was immediately linked to an itinerary of worldwide Reformation. The Wessel edition also included Adam Haslmayr's Antwort, with an account of Haslmayr's unfortunate incarceration at the hands of the Jesuits - a highly political inclusion. The Reformation of the whole wide world…

  The timing was extraordinary. Publication of the Fama provided the proverbial spark in the powder-keg. What had begun as an imaginative experiment in communication was very soon to become one of the most virulent intellectual hurricanes ever to hit Europe. The “greatest publicity-stunt of all time”12 had begun.

  Chapter Seven

  The New Age

  The Fama was powerful stuff - all the more powerful because its dense contents succeeded in triggering off a set of highly charged associations. In order to understand fully the excitement generated by the Fama, it is necessary to look at those associations and their origins.

  First of all, the manuscript Fama and subsequently the (almost certainly unintended) printed version, were taken by many readers as a definitive sign for the inauguration of a New Age. The idea of the ‘New Age’ is nothing new. It is not uncommon for human-beings to believe they are living in the ‘last times’, or even the worst times; to look back to a golden age before the rot set in. The corollary of this outlook is to see a better world as imminent, if only one was endowed with the eyes to see the requisite signs. The idea is usually linked to the concept of judgement, of righting wrongs, punishing the guilty and rewarding the faithful with the fulfillment of their best dreams. The idea is also related to the acquisition of new knowledge and new liberties.

  Apocalyptic

  As far as we know, the literary roots of this belief lie in Jewish apocalyptic writings. Dire warnings of divine judgement to recompense the evils done among His Children go back at least to the eighth century BC, to the time of the prophets Amos and Hosea. Nevertheless, ‘apocalyptic’ as a specific type of literature did not emerge until after the return of the Jews from the Babylonian Exile in the sixth century BC, when in spite of attempts to rebuild the Temple after the edict of Cyrus, the king of Persia (559-530BC) which authorised this undertaking, the Jews who returned to their homeland continued to languish amid various miseries as a minor component of a Persian satrarpy. The glorious return and elevation of the Jewish people prophesied by men such as the prophet Isaiah failed to materialise, and in spite of attempts to rationalise the situation, faith was put under extreme challenge.

  The defeat of the Persians by Alexander the Great in 333 BC did nothing, as far as the Jews were concerned, to remedy the situation, and the challenges to faith grew in intensity. Furthermore, vital elements of the Jewish faith had undergone change. Whereas the pre-Exilic faith stressed the communal dimension of God's covenant with Israel, the development of a pan-oriental Wisdom movement in the sixth century BC (Gautama in India, Zarathushtra in Persia and the ‘pre-Socratics’ such as Heraklitos, in Greece) laid greater stress on the position, vis à vis eternity, of the individual. What of the individual's ‘right’ to a just reward for a life well lived? In the Jewish writings we find this question put directly in the Book of Job. Unfortunately, experience appeared to be indifferent to such a ‘right’, and a longing for divine intervention intensified. Suspicion of the world under the dominance of devouring Time lies at the roots of the development of Gnosis, the aim of which was to uncover the transcendent within the finite.

  While the full flowering of Gnosis would have to wait until the apocalyptic hope of the Maccaba
ean revolts of the second century BC and the Jewish Wars of the first and early second centuries AD had been exhausted, the seeds of Gnosis were already sown within the apocalyptic scheme.

  Apocalyptic literature linked the old prophetic format of eventual judgement and salvation to the personal access of the prophet to the very secrets of God's determinations for His People : timetables for deliverance, combined with explanations for the alleged delay in enacting them. The forth-telling of the early prophets had become the foretelling of apocalyptic. Elements of Persian astrology played a part along with the emphasis on signs : an interplay of heavenly deliberations with earthly and political changes, mediated through the correct interpretations of the stars, and the messages of angels, or messengers of God. The seer now had privileged access to the divine books in which human history was prefigured already. This knowledge of the divine intention and secret angelic activity was then inscribed in books such as the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament and the Apocalypse of S. John in the New, as well as the ubiquitous Book of Enoch. Books played a big rôle in apocalyptic theory.

  It was almost certainly the failure of hope in an external historical deliverance from the pressing contradictions and waywardness of earthly life that encouraged some of the earliest explicit Gnostics to internalise the apocalyptic process as a description of the destiny of the transmundane spirit. Certain features of apocalyptic nonetheless remained constant :

  The Coming of the Divine Child after a period of chastening and purification - only this time, (in the Gnostic scheme) as an inner experience in the revelation of the Divine Self to the mundane self-awareness.

  The belief in special books as vehicles of divine knowledge.

  The position of the stars as intermediaries between the material and spiritual worlds.