An innocent trip from Heilegenkreuz in the Tyrol to Innsbruck in the autumn of 1612 brought a shock to Adam Haslmayr, musician, theosopher, medical celebrity and notary public to the Archduke Maximilian. On the orders of the Jesuit inquisitor Guarinoni, Haslmayr was arrested and sentenced to slavery on the Mediterranean galleys. Why?
    In March Haslmayr had published his answer to the Fama Fraternitatis – the Fame of the Fraternity – an extraordinary manuscript which had been privately distributed to persons with an interest in the advancement of science and religion in a corrupt society.

The Fama

The Fama Fraternitatis announced the existence of a discrete fraternity founded in the late middle ages by a German nobleman, brother C.R. Dissatisfied with monastic life, the youth had travelled to the east in search of wisdom. Finding himself welcomed "as one long expected" by the sages of ‘Damcar’ in Arabia, he translated their masterpiece on the mathematical and magical universe into Latin. Sojourning in Fez, he observed how the savants shared their knowledge without jealousy, hypocrisy or egoism.
    Hoping to share his discoveries with Europe, brother C.R. found only indifference. So he established a fraternity of sympathetic brethren, the Fratres R.C., who met annually in secret in their House of the Holy Spirit to further a total reformation of knowledge.
    So why communicate now?
    The Fratres R.C. claimed to have been stirred by the discovery of brother C.R.’s body - "whole and unconsumed" - in an extraordinary vault in Gallia Narbonensis (Languedoc). Constructed as a "compendium of the universe", an inscription on the vault’s door accurately predicted the time (120 years) between burial and discovery.
    Europe stood at the threshold of a golden age of divine revelation. Recent advances in geography, technology, cosmology and medicine were no accident. The Fraternity had been at work – and now wished to hear the responses of those who might wish to join it. The false need not apply.

Paracelsus

Adam Haslmayr loved the Fama and everything it stood for. He was particularly moved by its consistency with the ideas of Paracelsus (1483-1541), the "German Trismegistus" and the greatest and most controversial medical doctor of the age. 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 volumes on the subject of religion. Kept secret in his lifetime they would become time-bombs after his death.
    Paracelsus held to a gnostic cosmogony: Man was a microcosm of the universe, but the spirit that gives 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. He had no time for 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 (`Answer’) of March 1612 he thanked the Brethren of the Rose Cross for their divine gift and Theophrastiam. He went further. He declared that the Rose Cross Brothers constituted the real ‘Society of Jesus’. Jesuit inquisitor Guarinoni was unimpressed.

The Alchemist Prince at Plötzkau

In December 1611 Prince Augustus von Anhalt, based at Schloss Plötzkau near Magdeburg, became the first known person to try to contact the Fratres R.C. We know this thanks to the peerless work of Spanish scholar Carlos Gilly who, during the 1980’s, discovered correspondence between Prince Augustus and the Augsburg physician Carl Widemann. Augustus, dedicated to transmutation, respected Widemann’s alchemical skills. Widemann had been secretary to British alchemist (and long time seer for the famous John Dee) Edward Kelley, in Prague (1587-88).
    For years Widemann had been collecting the red-hot theological writings of Paracelsus, as well as those of the 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. Furthermore, Widemann shared 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).
    In summer 1611, Widemann encouraged Augustus to offer Haslmayr the task of assembling ‘Theophrastian’ texts for the prince’s secret printing press at Plötzkau. In December, Augustus 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, Jan. 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 August 1612, Haslmayr tried another approach, requesting permission from Archduke Maximilian of the Tyrol 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 port of Genoa – and the galleys of the Habsburgs. There he suffered for five terrible years.

Tübingen friendships

If ever there was a ‘real Rosicrucian Fraternity’, the nearest one might get to it would be to understand the common and complementary elements of mind subsisting between the following three brilliant friends of Tübingen : Dr Tobias Hess (1568-1614), the eldest of the three; Christoph Besold (1577-1649), who gained the Chair of Jurisprudence at Tübingen in 1610, and perhaps not only the youngest, but the greatest of the three - Johann Valentin Andreae (1586-1654).
    To their amazingly fertile relationship, Besold brought a thorough internal knowledge of medieval mysticism and Hermetic philosophy. Hess brought a profound knowledge of theology, Paracelsian medicine, astronomy/ astrology and apocalyptic symbolism. Andreae brought a genius soaked in classical literature, a dazzling knowledge of alchemical philosophy and practice, acute political sensitivity with full knowledge of the Renaissance Platonism of Pico della Mirandola, Giordano Bruno, Reuchlin, and deep acquaintance with the radical Christianity of Franck, Schwenckfeld, Weigel and Paracelsus. Andreae was also a highly gifted dramatist with a staggeringly explosive sense of humour.
    The Fama overflows with Andreae’s wizened irony and pristine spirituality while its soul breathes the air of the youthful idealist, crying out through a ludibrious allegory for a reform of the entire knowledge base of western Europe. He demands a place and people undivided
    by confessional differences, dedicated to pursuing the light of nature in the light of grace on the cornerstone of the Christ who says, "The truth will make you free."
    The trouble was that almost nobody knew that Andreae was the author. The text – as we have seen from the case of Augustus von Anhalt – was taken literally. Soon it would be too late to admit it.

Publication and publicity

After his arrest, Haslmayr’s manuscripts - including a copy of the Fama - had been entrusted to the ‘Theophrastian’ believer Benedictus Figulus. Having been made subject to an arrest-warrant in Freiburg, Figulus journeyed 150 miles north to Marburg in Hesse-Cassel. There he deposited Haslmayr’s manuscripts at the home of Raphael Eglin, an alchemist patronised by the Landgrave Moritz von Hessen (based at Cassel). Eglin’s manuscripts, including those of Adam Haslmayr, are now in Cassel. Cassel was the base of the printer Wilhelm Wessel.
    In March 1614 Wessel printed the Fama Fraternitatis. Significantly, the publication also included an extract from Trajano Boccalini’s satirical News from Parnassus. The general Reformation of the whole wide world, hot from the liberal (and politically threatened) Republic of Venice. This ensured that the Fama was immediately linked to an itinerary of global Reformation. The "greatest publicity-stunt of all time" (McIntosh) had begun.

The concluding part of this article will appear in the next issue.

Further Reading:
Cimelia Rhodostaurotica. Theophrastia Sancta – Paracelsianism as a religion in conflict with the established churches, Carlos Gilly (In de Pelikaan, 1995, 1999).
The Rosicrucians, Christopher McIntosh (Weiser, 1997).
The True Story of the Rosicrucians, Tobias Churton (Sabiot Trucohn Books, 1998).

Tobias Churton, MA , is a writer, poet, musician and film-maker who has specialised in the study of Gnostic and related traditions. He is author of The Gnostics, 1987 (republished Barnes & Noble, 1997), and The True Story of the Rosicrucians, the foremost study of the subject in English. Creator of the award-winning Channel Four production, The Gnostics.

Text © Tobias Churton 2001