The Secret History of the World

Heavenly Spirites — that Schools and Professors of this noble Art had been frequent in all Parts of the World, and still were so in Spain at Toledo, Cordova, Grenada and other Places that they had also been formerly celebrated in Germany, but for the most part had failed since Luther had sown the seeds of his Heresy, and began to have so many Followers: that in France and in England it was still secretly preserved, as it were by Tradition, in the families of certain Gentlemen; but that only the initiated were admitted into the Sacred Rites; to the exclusion of profane Persons.’

Then, less than thirty years later, a series of short pamphlets began to appear which purported to give the inside story.

Published anonymously in Kessel in Germany in between 1614 and 1616, the first was called the Fama Fraternitatis (or ‘Rumour of the Brotherhood’) and it called for a spiritual revolution.

The second, the Confessio Fraternitatis, told the story of CRC (Christian Rosenkreuz), the founder of the brotherhood, gave an account of the rules he instituted and also revealed that his tomb had been discovered in 1604.

A door had been uncovered underneath an altar leading down to a crypt. The door carried an inscription: After one hundred and twenty years I shall be opened. Down below was a seven-sided mausoleum, each side being eight feet high with an artificial sun suspended in the middle above a circular table. Underneath this table lay the uncorrupted body of CRC, surrounded by books, including the Bible and a text by Paracelsus, and the body was clutching a rolled scroll, which bore the words: ‘Out of God we are born, We die in Jesus, We will be reborn through the Holy Spirit.’

An observant literary detective might have noticed that the title page of the first folio of this second pamphlet featured the unique and unmistakable shape of Dr Dee’s occult emblem of evolved consciousness, the Monas Hieroglyphica.

The third pamphlet, The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz, was an allegorical account of initiation, a sex-magical Chemical Marriage in the tradition of the Hypnerotomachia .

These publications caused a sensation across Europe.

Who were the Rosicrucian brothers and who was the author?

Then it gradually emerged that the author was a young Lutheran pastor called John Valentine Andrae. His spiritual mentor had been a famous mystic, Jean Arndt, the disciple of John Tauler, disciple in his turn of Meister Eckhart.

ANYONE WHO CONSIDERS THE CLAIMS of esoteric history is frustrated by the sparse nature of the evidence. Almost by definition the operations of secret societies leave scant traces. If they are successful, they leave little to go on. Yet the claims are very grand indeed: that these societies are representatives of an ancient and universal philosophy, that this is a coherent, consistent philosophy that explains the universe more adequately than any other, and that many if not most of the great men and women of history are guided by it.

Anyone considering this dichotomy naturally asks, Can these societies really involve a secret coalition of the greatest geniuses — or it is really just the fantasy of a few, isolated and marginal people who are really a bit dim?

This is perhaps a good juncture to confront this question because for the past few pages we have been following two traditions running very closely parallel, the largely exoteric tradition of great mystics, passing from one generation to another and a largely esoteric tradition, an apparently loose association of magicians and occultists, the mystical force behind the Reformation, a chain of initiates that connects Eckhart, Tauler and Arndt with the network of magi that includes Rosencrantz, Paracelsus and Dee.

We have just seen how in 1614 these two traditions finally become inextricably intertwined in the person of Valentine Andrae.

THE HIDDEN HAND OF THE SECRET SOCIETIES does not often show itself, and as we saw in the case of Dr Dee’s Lear-like disgrace, when it does, it puts itself in danger. It changes its very nature, risking losing its power as soon as it emerges into the light of day.

In the years following the publication of the Fama, the Rosicrucians would come out of the shadows to the sound of canons and muskets. They would fight a bloody and hopeless battle against the Jesuits for the spirit of Europe.

In conventional histories, sceptical of the Rosicrucian Manifestoes and suspecting them to be just a fantasy, their publication marked the beginning of the Rosicrucian phenomenon. In this secret history the manifestoes marked the end of true Rosicrucians — or at least the beginning of the end.

The publication of these manifestoes at the beginning of the seventeenth century also marked the founding of another secret society that would dominate world affairs up until the present day.

The institution of the Holy Roman Emperor, founded by Charlemagne in 800, was built on the ideal of a world leader who with the Pope’s blessing held Christendom together and defended the faith. This ideal was shining less brightly by the beginning of the seventeenth century. No Holy Roman Emperor had been crowned between 1530 and Rudolf II’s coronation in 1576, and many of the small kingdoms and princedoms of Germany had become Protestant, which naturally undermined any notion of a Europe united under a Roman Emperor.

Following the death of Rudolf, the tolerant, intellectually curious and occult-minded Emperor whom Dr Dee had failed to impress, a dispute over his succession drew the Rosicrucian brotherhood into a plot. If Frederick V, a Rhineland prince and Rosicrucian fellow traveller, could be placed on the Bohemian throne, then Europe might be seized for Protestantism.

The Rosicrucians had been cultivating James I of England. Michael Maier, whose alchemical prints are among the most explicit ever printed, sent him a Rosicrucian greeting card. In 1617 Robert Fludd dedicated his work of esoteric cosmology Utriusque cosmi historia to James, saluting him with an epithet sacred to Hermes Trismegistus. In 1612 James’s daughter, Elizabeth, married Frederick. The Tempest was given a special performance at court to celebrate the wedding day, with the masque scene newly inserted. We may say with a small degree of literary artifice that Dee was there in spirit.

The plan was that when in 1619 Frederick travelled from Heidelberg to Prague to be crowned, James would move to defend his romantic teenage son-in-law and his young bride from Catholic attack.

In the event James did nothing when Frederick’s forces were decisively defeated at the Battle of White Mountain. Frederick and Elizabeth had to flee Prague, and because they had reigned for such a laughably short time, they were known forever after as the Winter King and Queen.

The Thirty Years War was waged by Ferdinand of the great Catholic dynasty of the Hapsburgs, whose intellectual outriders were the Jesuits. The aim of the Hapsburgs was to re-establish Catholic supremacy in Europe. During this time five out of six German towns and villages were destroyed and the population reduced from some nine million to four million. The Rosicrucian dream was destroyed in a carnival of bigotry, torture and mass slaughter. Central Europe was a desert.

Yet the Church’s victory was a phyrric one. If the Church really saw itself as engaged in warfare with the secret societies, fighting black magic, then perhaps it was making the mistake of believing its own propaganda.

The real enemy was the oldest enemy of all in a new disguise.

23. THE OCCULT ROOTS OF SCIENCE Isaac Newton • The Secret Mission of Freemasonry • Elias Ashmole and the Chain of Transmission • What Really Happens in Alchemy

IN 1543 NICHOLAS COPERNICUS published On the Revolution of the Celestial Bodies. His thesis was that the earth goes round the sun.

In 1590 Galileo Galilei performed experiments to show that the speed of falling objects is proportional to their density not their weight.