"The Fratres RC: live about Strasburg :
7 miles from thence in a mon[a]st[e]ry."

In fact, there were no fratres R.C. anywhere, but for nearly a decade after the printing of the Fama Fraternitatis, the first `Rosicrucian Manifesto’, by Wilhelm Wessel in 1614, a ‘battle of the books’ convinced thousands of European scholars that there were.
    Alerted to the Fama’s follow-up, the Confessio Fraternitatis (1615) and, later, The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz (1616), bound tomes and hurried pamphlets flew in all directions. Some sparked remarkable jousts, such as the controversy on the place of soul in science, others just begged admittance to the fratres R.C. Some claimed to know who the fratres R.C. were, others claimed spurious membership. Where some found rare allegorical meaning, others were shocked to reveal the world’s first full-blown multinational conspiracy story.

The Collegium Fraternitatis, "College of the Rosicrucian Fraternity (or Brotherhood)", freely moves about the world under Divine guidance. Its wings and wheels reveal it moves in time and space. Noah’s Ark sits upon a hill to the left: suggesting that knowledge, also now contained in the "College", is impervious to change from the vicissitudes of humanity, like the Truth it carries. The College is the home to the seeker; it draws forth the seeker from the prison of the world ( an allusion to Andreae’s Chemical Wedding) symbolised by the figure being drawn out of a well at bottom left of the illustration. Above the door is written "the worthy may approach"; on the left is a rose, on the right a cross. From Theophilus Schweighardt (pseud. of Daniel Mögling), Speculum Sophicum Rhodo-Stauroticum (1618).

The Invisible Brotherhood

As we saw in Part One, in the case of Adam Haslmayr who was sentenced to slavery on the Mediterranean galleys, the stakes could be high. The nephew of the printer of the Fama Fraternitatis, Philipp Homagius, was tried by Marburg University in 1620 and incarcerated for life for his intemperate love of things Rosicrucian. But there was neither faggot nor fire for the Rosicrucians themselves. The otherworldly fratres R.C. were nowhere to be seen – then, concluded their enemies, the infernal brethren must be invisible! As the Thirty Years War exploded across the 1620’s, philosopher Descartes himself was accused in Catholic Paris of being a Rosicrucian. ‘How could this be?’ responded the founder of the mechanistic philosophy, ‘all the world knows they are invisible’.
    Even in the comparative safety of Lutheran Tübingen, Andreae and his friends came under scrutiny. Caspar Bücher, professor of oratory, smelled subversion.
    In a sense, the bellicose Bücher was right. Andreae’s amazing satire Menippus (1617) revealed his political acuity. Andreae anonymously advocated the full confessional freedom denied to the world by Lutherans, Calvinists and Catholics. Scanning the Lutheran states of 1617, 100 years after Luther’s break with Rome, Andreae heard an uncritical glee, hoarse with self-congratulation, wallowing in a centenary of spurious ‘freedom’.
    Andreae, himself a Lutheran deacon, declared this Protestant excitement a fraud. The true Reformation had hardly begun. He recalled that Luther had condemned anyone who didn’t agree with him. His followers persecuted those who read Franck, Schwenckfeld, Weigel and the religious works of Paracelsus – not to mention the ‘Rosicrucians’ whose only ‘sins’ were "to heal the sick, gratis", and to wish for a universal science and education within a loving Christian society.
    Professor Bücher called Menippus "an alchemical abortion" and successfully sought the work’s suppression in Tübingen. Andreae tried another tack. His Invitatio Fraternitatis Christi (1617) invited his readers to join the Fraternitas Christi, the fraternity of Christ – undoubtedly an ‘invisible’ society since few had the ability to recognise its existence. Andreae warned that true Christian discipleship could involve some very hard labour indeed, for its alchemical gold was the practise of sacred love.
    Very few grasped Andreae’s proffered hand, preferring the fantastical fratres R.C., with their promise of "more gold than both the Indies bring to the King of Spain" to the disciplines of alchemical soul-cleansing. Andreae dubbed the gamut of mystery-mongers (‘gold’ makers, self-styled initiates) the "little curiosity brothers" or simply the curiosi, who obscure, rather than reveal, the simple truth. In such naïve hands, Andreae doubted if his Fama Fraternitatis could accomplish the mighty works he had hoped to precipitate.
    Not everything went sour. In spite of youthful disappointment at the ‘failure’ of the fratres R.C. to declare themselves, the Czech, Comenius (1592-1671), founder of the concept of universal education, said of Andreae, "he has given us the torch". Comenius’ hope in what he called "the Way of Light" would go on to inspire lasting educational and social reform in England, Sweden and Holland.
    To minds that were already expansive, the Fama Fraternitatis opened them still further, revealing an unclaimed empire of mind in nature and "mind over matter". In 1960, historian Hugh Trevor-Roper singled out Comenius, together with the Pole, Samuel Hartlib – who, arriving in exile, founded a school in Chichester - and the Scot, John Dury as "the real philosophers, and the only philosophers, of the English Revolution". Their spirit and work - together with the persistent image of the fratres R.C. - supported the foundation in 1661 of the Royal Society, an epoch-marking event in the history of knowledge. A Rosicrucian Enlightenment really did occur.

The Tomb of Truth

Andreae had begun the process with a joke. The ‘Fame’ of the Fraternity was of course nothing of the kind. Those who seek truth for truth’s sake are generally invisible to the blind eyes of the world. Andreae, in his Christian Mythologies (1619) hoped to bring the curtain down on the Rosicrucian furore by turning the joke on its head.
    Andreae envisions a scene where a number of his contemporaries discover a secret vault. In an almost sick parody of the Fama Fraternitatis the explorers break down a wall. Torches in hand they enter to discover a sarcophagus with an inscription: mea tempora - ‘my times’. Inside the sarcophagus lies a cadaver, horribly mutilated, the flesh consumed. After great effort they succeed in uncovering a beautiful bronze plaque by the cadaver’s rotting head :

I, THE TRUTH
DAUGHTER OF GOD
ASSASSINATED
BY THE DUPLICITY OF SATAN
BY THE CORRUPTION OF
THE WORLD
BY THE FEEBLENESS OF
THE FLESH
BY THE DESPOTISM OF TYRANNY
BY THE INDOLENCE OF
THE PRIESTS
BY THE MALIGNITY OF POLITICS
BY THE SUPERFICIALITY
OF HISTORIANS
BY THE FOLLY OF THE WISE
BY THE STUPIDITY OF THE PEOPLE

I REST HERE
WITHIN THE MUD OF THE LIE
IN ONE HUNDRED YEARS
THE SUN WILL SEE ME AGAIN
GREETINGS O POSTERITY!

This is the tomb of Truth. In a startling image Andreae has succeeded in condensing his entire outlook and the real substance of the Fama as well. It is a sign of the perversity of the world that while his Rosenkreuz fantasy is remembered, this devastatingly truthful work lies rotting in obscure libraries. The Truth is assassinated...

Back in Britain

Alas, Britannia was unaware of all this. Her greatest Rosicrucian advocate, Dr Robert Fludd (beginning in 1616), was always an outsider. This position would characterise British Rosicrucianism even up to the studies of Dame Frances Yates in the 1970’s. She advocated the now redundant view that the movement had its origins in the alchemico-spiritual adventures of the great John Dee who had travelled to Poland and Bohemia in the 1580’s with a message of angelically guided apocalyptic reform. Yates’ hypothesis, together with that linking the genesis of the Fama Fraternitatis to the political dreams of Frederick of the Palatinate has been exploded1. The Rosicrucian ‘movement’ was bred in Germany, albeit for export.
    The `Fraternity’ that turned up in England was a conception almost totally severed from its authentic political and religious context. In spite – or because - of this, its mystique proved no less fecund, however mutely its trumpet sounded.

The Cornerstones

We have referred to one institution which owes much to the Fama Fraternitatis’ inspiration – certainly Comenius thought so when dedicating his Via Lucis to the "illuminati" of the Royal Society in 1668 (Ashmole and Sir Robert Moray – both Freemasons and both enthused by the fratres R.C. - were founder members).
    In an issue of the London Magazine (1824), Thomas de Quincey (the ‘Opium Eater’) concluded from his studies of the German historian Bühle, that Rosicrucianism gave life to ‘Speculative’ Freemasonry. He named Dr Robert Fludd, – with his copious continental contacts - as the progenitor of a transformation accomplished between 1630 and 1640.
    Limited space forbids entry into the world of 18th and 19th century neo-Rosicrucianism. Suffice to say that Andreae and his friends never wished to see their conception devolve into some kind of esoteric sect, or assembly of éminences grises behind any exclusive society whatever.
    To all that would listen, they said,
    “do the spiritual work, and God will reveal his (natural) secrets to those who seek”.
    The Vault of the Adept is open to all that see it.

1 Yates, Frances A, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, London, 1972.

Text © Tobias Churton, 2001

Tobias Churton, MA , specialises in Gnostic and related traditions. Author of The Gnostics, 1987 (republished 1997), and The True Story of the Rosicrucians. Creator of The Gnostics for Channel Four Television.