INTRODUCTION

What Is a Rosicrucian?

A scattered dynasty of solitary men has changed the face of

the world. Their task continues.

Jorge Luis Borges

The many years of research that led to this book began when Manly Palmer Hall generously gave me his own copy of A. E. Waite’s The Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross. Reading it while working at the Philosophical Research Society meant I had access to artifacts of the history Waite wrote about. After I read his chapters on the Rosicrucian manifestos, in the PRS library vault I held in my hands the earliest editions. When Waite wrote about the alchemist Bacstrom, whose ocean voyages spanned the globe from Iceland to South Africa, I read Bacstrom’s handwritten journals, and studied his own copy of his Rosicrucian diploma. When Waite wrote about Robert Fludd, I gazed at the famous drawing of Fludd’s monochord in a book by him published during his lifetime. I was moved by the courage and creativity of these independent thinkers.

I’m not a PhD, I’m a storyteller. The stories in this book have been gathered from scholarly sources spanning the centuries, but especially from academic works from the last twenty years because they have revised our understanding of the Rosicrucian counterculture. After the publication of the Rosicrucian manifestos in the early seventeenth century, Europe trembled with anticipation but also fear at the possibility of a hermetic Holy Roman emperor and a universal reformation. A new mythology was born then that continues to influence Western culture, showing up in unexpected places even in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

In his classic shtick “Father Flotski’s Triumph” (1960), comedian Lenny Bruce has Dutch, his convict character, dismiss Flotski by accusing him of trying “to give me all that Rosicrucian jazz and all that other non-scheduled theologies there.”

The hit comedy show Second City Television (SCTV) in 1985 aired an episode of the old black-and-white western series The Cisco Kid. The comedians dubbed their own voices over the original dialogue. In one scene Cisco and his sidekick Pancho earnestly debated Rosicrucian ideas about the individuality of the soul.

In 2015, James Ellis wrote an article called “Shadows in the Shadows: The Rosicrucians, a Fake Secret Society, Had a Real Impact on the World” for the Newsweek special edition he curated: “Secret Societies: Infiltrating the Inner Circle” (Ellis 2015).

In her book Provocations: Collected Essays on Art, Feminism, Politics, Sex, and Education, Camille Paglia offered this definition: “The Rosicrucians, called Illuminati, claimed their esoteric order was founded in ancient Egypt and was brought to Europe by knightly crusaders; however, it probably dates from the seventeenth century. Its cabalistic and Hermetic imagery includes the Rose” (Paglia 2019, 450).

What does the rose cross symbolize? A question with many answers. Some scholars have written that the rosy color is the blood of Christ. Others that Jesus is the Rose of Sharon. Some have pointed out that the Rose of Sharon is the congregation, together and individually, tended by the Lord like roses in a garden. Another perspective tells us that the alchemists wrote about collecting a mysterious substance they used the Latin word ros (dew) to describe. Some called it celestial sweat, and the first matter, a distillation of cosmic energy. The purifying and healing power of the first matter was said to be the key to the philosopher’s stone. Others say it is the symbol of the purity every alchemist must attain before achieving the Great Work. The New Age interpretation equated the rose on the cross with the Hindu symbol of the jewel in the lotus. The rose and the jewel represent the soul; the cross and the lotus represent the body. It has been suggested more recently that the rosgathering Rosicrucians were practicing what might be called a tantric sexual discipline.

Rosicrucian is one of the most romanticized proper nouns in the esoteric world. A sometimes specifically defined creature but also a mirror in which many different reactions have been revealed—from the widespread panic of the French when they found posters put up overnight declaring the arrival of the Rosicrucians (probably a prank) to the admiration of English and colonial intellectuals, such as the celestial intelligencers of the seventeenth century, among whom the Rosicrucian ideal was synonymous with free medicine, protection of the oppressed, alchemy, early science, and a dedication to the betterment of society. Inspired by the Rosicrucians, people here and there lived exceptional lives; for example, John Winthrop the Younger, the alchemist who was a founding father of Connecticut.

The Rosicrucians have been described as Protestant Jesuits, but also the devil’s Jesuits, and even a trick of the Jesuits. They’ve also been revered as the ultimate example of Christian spiritual evolution. They have been blamed for throwing fuel on the fires that started the bloody Thirty Years’ War between Protestants and Catholics. That war, along with the plague and starvation it caused, killed roughly one out of ten Europeans. Some areas lost half their population. But what does any of that have to do with the relatively more recent public Rosicrucian groups that, alongside their esoteric studies, have practiced good citizenship through public service?

Our subject is complex. We’ll explore many lives and events before we are able to gain some understanding of context. Our protagonists will appear, disappear, and appear again, each time revealing more about themselves and history. We will move forward and backward in time, tracing the intricate patterns of many tributaries as though we were viewing them all from above and glancing where our curiosity leads us.

Inspired by recent research, the result of a significant evolution in esoteric studies in academia, the intent of this book is to provide historical context for the emergence of the Rosicrucians. Where did it happen? Who is most likely to have been behind it? What events inspired them to take such a radical stance? We will let them define themselves, and we will see how others defined them. More questions will be raised than answered.

This book is the third of a trilogy on counterculture. The first, American Metaphysical Religion: Esoteric and Mystical Traditions of the New World, presented a neglected lineage of spiritual pioneers, some fraudulent, some sincere, but frequently a combination of both—an important and constant influence on four hundred years of American history.

The second in the counterculture trilogy, The Magic of the Orphic Hymns: A New Translation for the Modern Mystic, coauthored with Tamra Lucid, examines a uniquely important source for not only esoteric but also literary, musical, and artistic countercultures throughout Western history, including connections with Rosicrucianism.

This, the third book in the series, explores the lives of three of the most influential people of their time: Holy Roman emperor, art collector, and occultist Rudolf II (1552–1612) and the often-romanticized royal couple Frederick V (1596–1632) , Elector Palatine, and his wife, Elizabeth Stuart (1596–1662), briefly the king and queen of Bohemia. She was also known as the Queen of Hearts. Many books have been written about her, but almost every author copied sources that were little more than propaganda, not to mention the sins of omission of generations of scholars who considered the letters of women unworthy of study or publication.

Beginning the research that became this book, I expected to share a romance between two esotericists who happened to be monarchs. I imagined them fostering the Rosicrucian movement. Twenty years of scholarship by Nadine Akkerman provides a richly detailed new vision of Elizabeth that contradicts the romantic ideal exemplified in a wonderful but sometimes inaccurate book by Frances Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment.

Yates argued that it’s unlikely that either Father CRC (Christian Rosy Cross) or his secret Rosicrucian society ever existed. Instead, the movement was born from a loose-knit group of esotericists who were also social critics. But Yates sometimes proposed connections and organizations where they have not been found. A colleague of hers said she squared every circle. Yates did not have the benefit of the letters and other papers associated with Elizabeth that we now have thanks to the scholarship of Dr. Akkerman.

Some of the visions of the Rosicrucians have been realized. For example, the Invisible College—their ideal school that could be anywhere at any time without being physically present—has been achieved somewhat online. When all the knowledge in the world is online, we will have the realization of the Rosicrucian book M, which holds the keys of the world; M for mundi, Latin for “of the universe.” The Book of the Universe was found with other secret holy books in the vault where the founder of Rosicrucianism’s body was supposed to have been discovered perfectly preserved. Every aspect of the vault including its measurements symbolized cosmic harmony and truth.