6. The Rosy Cross

Kali Yuga

The Zohar, the most important medieval Kabbalistic text, opens by stating that the rose and the alternate symbol of the lily symbolize Knesset Yisrael, “the Collective soul roots of Israel… Just as a rose, which is found amidst the thorns, has within it the colors red and white, also Knesset Yisrael has within her both judgment and loving kindness.”[1] In the Song of Solomon, also known as the Song of Songs, according to King James Version of the Bible, which first appears in English in 1611, the beloved—speaking for the mystical Shekhinah—says “I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.” The rose is a yonic symbol while the lily is phallic, together symbolizing mystical sexual union.[2] Interestingly, the rose and the lily became the heraldic symbols of those families descended from the Princes’ Crusade, while their descendants, who were very conscious of the historical and mystical significance of their ancestry, tracing themselves to both the Melusine legend and the Knight Swan, emerged as the key personalities in the preservation of the various manifestations of the Kabbalah in its Christian forms.

In the city of Toledo in Spain, the Kabbalah was championed by Todros ben Joseph HaLevi Abulafia (1225 – c. 1285), a rabbi recognized by the Jewish community as their Nasi. According to the famous Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz:

 

The recognition of the secret doctrine by a person of so high a position could not but produce some effect. His sons, Levi and Joseph, likewise plunged headlong into its study. Two of the four Kabbalists of his3 time, who developed the Kabbala, and extended its influence, ranged themselves under the banner of Todros Abulafia, and dedicated their compositions to him. These four Kabbalists of the first rank, who established new theories with more or less success, were Isaac Ibn-Latif, Abraham Abulafia, Joseph Jikatilla, and Moses de Leon, all Spaniards. They obscured the mental light, with which men of intellect, from Saadiah to Maimuni [Maimonides], had illumined Judaism, and substituted for a refined religious belief, fantastic and even blasphemous chimeras. The intellectual degradation of the Jews in the following centuries is to a large extent their work. They led astray both their own times and posterity through designed or unintentional imposition, and the injuries which they inflicted on Judaism are felt even at the present day.[3]

 

The pupils of the early Kabbalists coming from Spain to study in the Talmudic academies of southern France were the principal agents of the Kabbalah’s transplantation to that country, where they were responsible for the production of a text that drew on the Bahir, the Zohar, or Book of Light, which mystical tradition also purports was based on an earlier “Arabic Kabbalah” of the Ismaili secret society, the Brethren of Sincerity.[4] The tradition of this “Arabic Kabbalah” contributed to the movement of the Rosicrucians, or the Order of the Rosy Cross, which, in league with the Sabbatean adherents in England, led to the formation of the Invisible College, later known as the Royal Society, and ultimately the foundation of Scottish Rite Freemasonry.

According to Raphael Patai, in addition to the Arabs, the Jews of Spain could have learned about Hinduism directly, such as the Jewish merchant travelers known as Radanites.[5] Thus the anonymous author of the Hebrew Book of Life, written about 1200 AD, mentions that “magicians in India and the Arab countries still make animals of men” by giving them a magic potion to drink. As Patai concludes:

 

Beyond such direct mentions of Hindu sources, several Kabbalistic doctrines, as we have seen, bear a remarkable resemblance to Hindu features. The androgyneity of the deity; the splitting of the traditionally one and only God into ten mystical emanations, several of whom are spoken of in terms of male and female divine personages; the eroticization of the relationships between these complementary Sephirot of the godhead; the discernment of the realm and the forces of evil as the “husk, ” the “other side/’ or the “left side” of the Divine; the concept and details of metempsychosis or transmigration of souls; the divinization of human sexuality— this and much more is so vividly reminiscent of Hindu mythology, theosophy, and anthropology that one simply must rule out the possibility of mere coincidence.[6]

 

Benjamin of Tudela in 1167-73, and the Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia a century later, traveled to the East. Gershom Scholem remarked that the techniques used by Abulafia “to aid the ascent of the soul, such as breathing exercises, the repetition of the Divine Names, and meditations on colors, bear a marked resemblance to those of both Indian Yoga and Muslim Sufism.”[7] Moses de Leon (c. 1240 – 1305), the author of the Zohar, was influenced by the prophetic Kabbalism of Joseph Gikatila, a pupil of Abulafia.[8] As noted by Patai in The Hebrew Goddess:

 

If Yoga could influence Abulafia, one is permitted to assume that Indian mythology may have been known to, and reflected in, the thinking of Moses de Leon. A knowledge of Indian theosophy could have reached 13-century Spain, just as knowledge of Yoga practices, through the intermediary of the Arabs… the Zohar’s tetrad shows greater similarity to the Indian than to any other tetrad. The idea that, if not united with the goddess, the God is powerless, found in almost identical phrasing in both the Zohar and Indian mythology, is an especially striking instance.[9]

 

Marvin H. Pope, in his commentary to the Song of Songs, called attention to the similarities between Tantric hymns to the black and beautiful Hindu goddess Kali and certain passages in the Song of Songs.[10] Also called Kalika, Kali is a major goddess in Hinduism, primarily associated with time, death and destruction. Kali is understood as “she who is the ruler of time,” or “she who is black.”[11] According to the Song of Songs, the woman, who according to Kabbalistic interpretation is equated with the Shekhinah, states “I am black and beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem.” As Patai noted, just as Kali is depicted as black, to emphasize her frightening character, so the Shekhinah also, explains the Zohar, “at time tastes the other, bitter side, and then her face is dark.”[12] Raphael also cites a Jewish a magic ritual which lists Kali among the alternative names of female demon Lilith, who is identified in the Zohar as the black harlot.[13]

Isaac Albalag, the thirteenth-century Spanish Kabbalist who translated al Ghazali’s well-known Tendencies of the Philosophers, wrote in detail about the Hindu doctrine of the repeated destruction and recreation of the world, corresponding to the prevalent Hindu idea that at the beginning of each Yuga (“world age”) the sun, moon, and planets stand in the initial point of the ecliptic and return to the same point at the end of the age.[14] According to the Surya Siddhanta, a Sanskrit treatise in Indian astronomy dated to fourth to fifth century AD, the age of the Kali Yuga—which literally means the “Age of Kali” and is frequently referred as the “black age”—began in 3102 BCE, a date also considered by many Hindus to be the day that Krishna left Earth to return to his abode. According to the Surya Siddhanta, its contents were revealed to Maya an “Asura,” which in all probability, according to Prabodh Chandra Sengupta, the author of the introduction to the English translation, was an Assyrian or rather a Babylonian.[15] The duration of the Kali Yuga, 432,000 years, according to David Pingree, is a Babylonian number. It is the span of time given to the Babylonian kingdom before the Flood in the histories of Berossus​, a third-century BC Babylonian writer and a priest of Bel Marduk, and of Abydenus, a Greek historian who wrote a history of Assyria and Babylonia entitled On the Assyrians, most likely from the second and third centuries AD. Although of ultimately Babylonian origin, explains Pingree, the Yuga system was combined by Indian astronomers of the late fourth or early fifth centuries with Greek epicyclic theory, developed primarily by Apollonius of Perga, Hipparchus, and Ptolemy, as a model used to explain the apparent motion of the Sun, Moon, and planets in different circles around the Earth.[16]

By the early centuries AD, Indo-Greek influence on Indian astronomy is apparent, with texts such as the Yavanajataka and Romaka Siddhanta. Later astronomers mention the existence of various siddhantas during this period, among them a text known as the Surya Siddhanta.[17] The text was translated into Arabic and was influential in medieval Islamic geography.[18] The most important of the transmitters of Indo-Iranian astrology was Abu Ma’shar (787 –  886), who is thought to be the greatest astrologer of the Abbasid court in Baghdad.[19] In his Book of the Thousands,​ he presented a Yuga system of astronomy which he called the Thousands of the Persians. The mean motions of the planets in this system are preserved in al Biruni’s Book of Instruction in the Elements of the Art of Astrology.​ The period used is 360,000 years, in the middle of which, in -3101, occurred the mean conjunction of the planets at Aries, which, for the Indians, marked the beginning of Kali Yuga, and which Abu Ma’shar interprets it as indicating the occurrence of the Flood This was recognized by his predecessor, Mashallah ibn Athari (c. 740 – 815), the Persian Jewish astrologer, who dated the Flood the same date because in that year occurred a conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter—known as a Great Conjunction—in Cancer, the first sign of the watery triplicity.[20] The Zodiac is divided into four triplicities, which are connected with the four elements. The first consists of Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius, which is fiery; the second of Taurus, Virgo, and Capricorn, is earthy; the third of Gemini, Libra, and Aquarius, is airy; and the last of Cancer, Scorpio, and Pisces, is watery. A great conjunction occurred every twenty years when the two planets conjoined in a new sign within a given triplicity. A greater conjunction, which recurred every 200 or 240 years occurred when they moved into a new triplicity. A greatest conjunction came at the end of the complete cycle of all four triplicities after 800 or 960 years.[21]

 

Order of the Dragon 

The rose has held esoteric significance as a symbol of the yoni.[22] In ancient Greece, the rose was closely associated with the goddess Aphrodite, or the Roman Venus.[23] Rosa Mystica or “Mystical Rose” is a poetic title of the Virgin Mary. One form of Marian devotion is invoking Mary’s prayers by calling upon her using a litany of diverse titles, and the title “Mystical Rose” is found in the Litany of Loreto. Bernard of Clairvaux said, “Eve was a thorn, wounding, bringing death to all; in Mary we see a rose, soothing everybody's hurts, giving the destiny of salvation back to all.” Numerous alchemical manuscripts are called Rosarium, Latin for “Rose Garden,” all dealing with the alchemical relationship between the King and Queen.

Along with the rose, the dragon is also an important symbol in alchemy. The rose would become an important dynastic symbol of the descendants of the leaders of the First Crusade, and ultimately the Rosicrucians. Theobald III, Count of Champagne, the son of Henry I of Champagne and Marie of France, married Blanche of Champagne, the sister of Berengaria of Navarre, the wife of Richard Lionheart. Blanche of Navarre, who had good relations with Cluny and the Cistercians, would also play a leading role in the Champagne Fairs, in a region closely associated with the Templars. Their son was Theobald I of Navarre (1201 – 1253), also called the Troubadour. According to local legends, souvenirs that Theobald IV brought back to Europe in 1240 from the Barons’ Crusade included the rose called “Provins” from Damascus. His son, Henri III, Count of Champagne, married Blanche of Artois, granddaughter of Henry II, Duke of Brabant, of the legendary Knight Swan ancestry, from his first wife, Maria of Swabia. When Henri III died, Blanche married Edmund Crouchback, Earl of Lancaster (1245 – 1296), the son of Henry III of England. Edmund’s brother, King Edward I of England (1239 – 1307), took the rose as his emblem, becoming known as the red rose of Lancaster, which featured in the famous Wars of the Roses.[24]

Henri III and Blanche’s daughter, Joan I of Navarre, married Philip IV “le Bel” (1268 – 1314), King of France, who had ordered the arrests of the Templars. In 1221, the Order of Calatrava was merged into that of Monfragüe, by order of the grandson of Ferdinand II of Leon, Ferdinand III of Castile (1199/1201 – 1252), who was the father of Alfonso X.[25] An illustration in the book of chess produced for Alfonso X shows two Templars playing the game, indicating their familiarity with the Castilian court.[26] From the beginning of his reign, Alfonso X, sometimes nicknamed el Astrólogo (the Astrologer), employed Jewish, Christian and Muslim scholars at his court from the Toledo School of Translators primarily for the purpose of translating books from Arabic and Hebrew into Latin and Castilian, although he always insisted in supervising personally the translations. Under Alfonso X’s leadership, Sephardic Jewish scientists and translators acquired a prominent role in the School.[27] It was during the time of Alfonso X that the Zohar was written in the Kingdom of Leon by Moses de Leon. Yehuda Liebes has presented substantial evidence in support for his hypothesis that Shimon bar Yohai, the central figure of the Zohar, was modeled after a leading Jewish scholar at the court of Alfonso X, Todros ben Joseph HaLevi Abulafia, whose son Joseph was a friend of de Leon.[28]

Despite the fact that his grandfather Philip IV le Bel ordered the arrest of the Templars in 1312, Edward III founded the neo-Templar Order of the Garter, inspired by King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Edward III, who was king of England from 1327 to 1377, led England into the Hundred Years’ War with France, and the descendants of his seven sons and five daughters contested the throne for generations, climaxing in a series of civil wars known as the Wars of the Roses (1455–85). The name “Wars of the Roses” refers to the heraldic badges associated with the two rival cadet branches of the royal House of Plantagenet who fought for control of the English crown: the White Rose of York and the Red Rose of Lancaster.

After the Templar’s suppression by Pope Clement in 1312, some Templars fled to Scotland, and sought refuge with the excommunicated the king of Scotland, Robert the Bruce (1274 – 1329). However, the majority of the Templars joined their compatriots in Portugal. By papal decree, the property of the Templars was transferred to the Hospitallers, except in the Kingdoms of Castile, Aragon, and Portugal.[29] With the protection of King Denis I of Portugal (1261 – 1325), who refused to pursue and persecute them, they were reconstituted the Order of Christ.[30] Denis’ father Afonso III of Portugal was the great-grandson of Henry of Burgundy, and the grandson of Alfonso VIII of Castile. Denis’ mother was the daughter of Alfonso X of Castile. Denis’ wife, Elizabeth, the sister of James II of Aragon and Frederick III of Sicily, more commonly known as Saint Elizabeth of Portugal, was the great-niece of Elizabeth of Hungary, and was also featured in her own version of the “miracle of the roses.” Like others at the time, the Order of Santiago also took in Templars after 1312.[31] In 1357, the Order of Christ was moved to the town of Tomar, former seat of the Templars in Portugal.

In 1326, Charles I of Hungary (1288 – 1342), who gave importance to the cults of Saint Elizabeth,[32] founded the Order of Saint George, which like the Order of the Garter and the Order of the Dragon, was based on the legend of Saint George and his slaying of the Dragon, an adaptation of the ancient motif of Middle Eastern pagan dying-gods, like Baal, performing the same feat. Emperor Sigismund of Luxembourg (1368 – 1437), who was first married to Charles’ granddaughter Mary of Hungary, and modelled his own Order of the Dragon on Charles’ Order of Saint George. Emperor Sigismund appears in a grimoire titled The Book of Abramelin, which gained significant popularity amongst occult groups of the eighteenth century, in particular the influential Golden Dawn. The introduction to an alchemical book attributed to Nicolas Flamel (c. 1330 – 1418) claims that Flamel purchased the book in 1357. The book tells the story of an Egyptian mage named Abramelin, who taught a system of magical and Kabbalistic secrets to Abraham of Worms, a Jew in Worms, Germany, presumed to have lived from approximately 1362 to 1458. After concluding his studies with Abramelin, Abraham recounts that he travelled to Hungary and employed his skills to give the Emperor Sigismund a “Familiar Spirit of the Second Hierarchy, even as he commanded me, and he availed himself of its services with prudence.” Abraham of Worms also confesses to have used magical means to bring about Sigismund’s marriage with his second wife, Barbara of Cilli (1392 – 1451), with whom he co-founded the Order of the Dragon in 1408.

 

Renaissance

The theory of conjunctions reached the West through the work of Arab astrologers, in particular Abu Ma’shar’s De magnis, which, closely following the exposition of his master al Kindi (c. 801 – 873 AD), profoundly influenced Christian astrology centuries later.[33] Eugenio Garin declares, “In reality the Latin version of the Picatrix is as indispensable as the Corpus Hermeticum or the writings of Albumasar [Abu Ma’shar] for understanding a conspicuous part of the production of the Renaissance, including the figurative arts.”[34] It was during the Renaissance that Hermeticism and Kabbalah exercised its first important influence, and provide the decisive esoteric contribution to the establishment of eighteenth-century Freemasonry.[35] The Renaissance began during the de facto rule of Florence by Cosimo de Medici (1389 – 1464), the influential Italian banker and politician and the first member of the Medici family. Eleonora of Toledo, the wife of Cosimo I de Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany (1519 – 1574), great-grandson of Cosimo the Elder and a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece, was brought up in Naples at the household of Don Samuel Abarbanel (1473 – 1551), the son of the famous Kabbalist, Don Isaac Abarbanel (1437 – 1508), and his daughter-in-law Benvenida.[36] Both Eleanora and Cosimo I had their portraits painted gesturing the secret hand-sign of the Jewish converts to Christianity known as Marranos, and also as Conversos, a deliberate positioning of the hand where the index and the fourth finger are touching together, while the second and fifth fingers are spread apart.[37]

Thomas of Torquemada (1420 – 1498), despite that fact that, like the “Catholic Monarchs” Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain as well, was as of Marrano origin, and was nevertheless one of the chief supporters of the Alhambra Decree which enforced the expulsion of the Jews from the Crowns of Castile and Aragon in 1492.[38] On August 2, 1492, on Tisha B’Av (“the Ninth of Av”)—a day commemorated in Judaism as involving great disasters, primarily the destruction of both Solomon’s Temple, Don Isaac Abarbanel, famously led 300,000 fellow Jews out of Spain carrying a Torah. Growing persecution in other parts of Europe had led many Kabbalists to find their way to Italy, which during the Renaissance became one of the most intense areas of Kabbalistic study, second only to Palestine. The key representative of the Italian Kabbalists was Leone Ebreo (c. 1465 – c. 1523), the son of Don Isaac Abarbanel.[39] Following medieval Jewish sources, Ebreo saw Plato as dependent on the revelation of Moses, and even as a disciple of the ancient Kabbalists. Laying the basis for the rediscovery of the occult tradition of classical philosophy was, as noted by Moshe Idel, has pointed out, that “Kabbalah was conceived by both Jewish and Christian Renaissance figures as an ancient theology, similar to and, according to the Jews, the source of such later philosophical developments as Platonism, Aristotelianism, Pythagoreanism, and atomism.”[40]

About 1460, Cosimo de Medici the Elder commissioned the translation of the Corpus Hermeticum by Italian philosopher Marisilio Ficino (1433 – 1499), an Italian scholar, astrologer and Catholic priest, who become one of the most influential humanist philosophers of the Renaissance. Ficino was succeeded in the leadership of his academy by Pico della Mrandola (1463 – 1494), one of the first exponents of Christian Kabbalah. Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man, which is taken as a characteristic example of Renaissance humanism, begins by quoting Hermes Trismegistus, “what a great miracle is man.” Renaissance humanism, however, did not help to diffuse interest in the “irrational.” “On the contrary,” noted Jean Seznec, in The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art, “the first effect of humanism was to encourage astrology.”[41] According to Seznec, Ficino was inspired by the Picatrix, an astrological book of the Sabians, which focused particularly on what it called “talismans,” which it compared explicitly to the alchemical elixir.[42]

Ficino’s mission was to revive the ancient pagan mystery teachings of the “Chaldeans, Egyptians and Platonists,” characterized as representing the Prisca Theologia, or Ancient Wisdom. The Christian-Kabbalists of the Renaissance and later centuries viewed the Zohar in the same light as they did the Hermetica, the Sibylline Prophecies, the Orphica, and other such writings as prisca theologia, as far older than they actually were. They were believed to preserve vestiges of the “ancient wisdom” of the ancient Kabbalah, which God had revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai and which had been passed down from generation to generation.[43]

According to Rabbi Abraham ben Eliezer Halevi (c. 1460 - after 1528), a Sephardic rabbi and Kabbalist affiliated with Abraham Zacuto and Isaac Abarbanel, the Reformation was a crisis through which the world must pass before the arrival of the messiah, where Martin Luther was God’s agent sent to destroy corrupt Rome before the end of the world.[44] Luther admitted that his “justification by faith alone,” one of his most controversial doctrines, was the “true Cabala” in his Commentary on Galatians.[45] Luther’s interest in the subject, related Louis I. Newman, likely derived from the works of the Christian Kabbalist Johann Reuchlin (1455 – 1522), whose nephew was Luther’s friend and collaborator, Philipp Melanchthon (1497 – 1560). During his second visit to Rome in 1490, Reuchlin became acquainted with Pico della Mirandola at Florence, and, learning from him about the Kabbalah, he became interested in Hebrew.[46]

 

Jesuits

The Rosicrucians were suspected by some of being Jesuits.[47] Ignatius of Loyola (1491 – 1556), who founded the religious order of the Society of Jesus, better known as the Jesuits, had been a member of a heretical sect known as the Alumbrados, meaning “Illuminated,” which was composed mainly of Conversos.[48] Although there is no direct evidence that Loyola himself was a Marrano, according to “Lo Judeo Conversos en Espna Y America” (Jewish Conversos in Spain and America), Loyola is a typical Converso name.[49] As revealed by Robert Maryks, in The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews, Loyola’s successor Diego Laynez was a Marrano, as were many Jesuit leaders who came after him.[50] By his own admission, Loyola, who was a nobleman who had a military background, modeled his new order on the Templars, resurrecting the ideals of the warrior-monk.[51] Seven years after papal approbation of the Society, the Inquisitor of Rome was still accusing Jesuits of being Illuminati, sodomites, heretics, and abusers of the confessional.[52] He expressed his hope that Loyola “unless worldly considerations interfered with a righteous judgment” would be burned at the stake.[53]

In 1554, Loyola named Francis Borgia (1510 – 1572) commissary general of the Spanish provinces, who was also eventually chosen general of the society in 1565, and canonized in 1670 by Pope Clement X. The House of Borgia, for example, an Italo-Spanish noble family from Aragon, which rose to prominence during the Italian Renaissance, was widely rumored to be of Jewish origin.[54] Several rumors have persisted throughout the years, primarily speculating as to the nature of the extravagant parties thrown by the Borgia family. One example is the Banquet of Chestnuts, a supper purportedly held in the Papal Palace by former Cardinal, Lucrezia’s brother, Cesare Borgia (1433 – 1499), who was a major inspiration for Machiavelli’s The Prince.

Borgia became a caballero (“knight”) of the Order of Santiago in 1540, while some of his brothers were caballeros of Santiago and of the Valencian Order of Montesa, who regarded themselves as Templars.[55] Francis Borgia’s brother, Don Pedro Luis Galceran de Borgia, who was arrested on charges of sodomy in 1572, was a Grand Master of the Order of Montesa, whose members considered themselves Templars.[56] Francis’ successes during the period 1565-1572 were such that he has been called the society’s second founder.[57]

In 1565, Borgia, as the newly elected Superior General, sent a group of Jesuits with the army that was put together to relieve Malta from the Great Siege. As Emanuel Buttigieg indicated, the Jesuits and the military-religious Order of Malta, held “a relationship characterized by shared aims and extensive co-operation, as well as by highly critical voices from within the Order of Malta at the perceived over-bearing influence.”[58] Originally known as the Order of Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem, or Knights Hospitaller, they were a medieval Catholic military order, who inherited the wealth and properties of the Templars after that order was disbanded. It was headquartered variously in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Rhodes and Malta, until it became known by its current name. After seven years of moving from place to place in Europe, the knights gained fixed quarters in 1530 when Charles I of Spain, as King of Sicily, gave them Malta.

 

Elias Artista

The anticipation generated by the publication of the Rosicrucian manifestos peaked with the “Rosicrucianism furore,” when two mysterious posters appeared on the walls of Paris in 1622, timed with the Great Conjunction expected the following year. The Rosicrucian movement, which was influenced by the occult philosophies of John Dee and Francis Bacon, emerged between 1610 and 1615, when Johann Valentin Andreae (1586 – 1654) published his Rosicrucian manifestos, based on a combination of “Magia, Cabala, and Alchymia.” The first of the manifestos was the Fama Frateritatis Rosae Crucis (“The Famous Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross”), which appeared in 1614, recounted the story of a mystic named Christian Rosenkreutz supposedly founded the Rosy Cross brotherhood as early as the 1300s after studying in the Middle East under various masters. The Fama Fraternitatis was part of a larger Protestant treatise titled, The Universal and General Reformation of the Whole Wide World; together with the Fama Fraternatis of the Laudable Fraternity of the Rosy Cross, Written to All the Learned and the Rulers of Europe. The Confessio Fraternitatis (“The Confession of the Brotherhood of Rosy Cross”), was published a year later.

Both manifestos were published by an official printer to Maurice of Hesse-Kassel (1572 – 1632), the great-grandson of Philip I, Landgrave of Hesse (1504 – 1567), who claimed descent from Elizabeth of Hungary. Philip I, Landgrave of Hesse, was one of the main supporters of Martin Luther, along with John Frederick I, Elector of Saxony (1503 – 1554), who commissioned the Luther Rose, which became Luther’s personal seal. Luther admitted that his “justification by faith alone,” one of his most controversial doctrines, was the “true Cabala” in his Commentary on Galatians.[59] John Frederick I was married to Sibylle of Cleves, from a family who like the houses of Brabant and Brandenburg, also laid particular claims as the descendants of the Knight Swan.[60] The symbol of the swan, which became associated with Luther, derives from a prophecy reportedly made by the heretic Jan Hus, the founder of the Hussite movement—who was supported by Barbara of Cilli, who founded the Order of the Dragon with her husband, Emperor Sigismund—whose teachings had a strong influence on Luther.[61]

Frederick I son, and Anna of Cleves’ cousin, was Albert, Duke of Prussia (1490 – 1568), Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, founder of the Duchy of Prussia. In 1522, Albert journeyed to Wittenberg, where he was advised by Martin Luther to abandon the rules of his order, to marry, and to convert Prussia into a hereditary duchy for himself. Luther worked to spread his teaching among the Prussians, while Albert's brother George presented the plan to their uncle, Sigismund I the Old (1467 – 1548), the grandson of Sigismund of Luxembourg.[62] Albert converted to Lutheranism and, with the consent of Sigismund, turned the State of the Teutonic Order into the first protestant state, Duchy of Prussia, according to the Treaty of Kraków, which was sealed by the Prussian Homage in Kraków in 1525. When Albert died in 1568, his teenage son Albert Frederick (1553 – 1618) inherited the duchy. This Order of the Swan disappeared when the house of Brandenburg adopted Protestantism in 1525, but the marriage of Albert Frederick to Mary Eleanor, sister and heir of John William, duke of Cleves, who died in 1609, introduced the Hohenzollerns a new and more prestigious descent from the Swan Knight, from whom would descend the later famous Kings of Prussia.[63]

Sigismund II Augustus, the son of Sigismund I the Old, married Barbara Radziwill who was accused of promiscuity and witchcraft. Sigismund II’s sister, Anna Jagiellon, married Stephen Bathory (1533 – 1586), a sponsor of the famous English sorcerer John Dee, and uncle of Elizabeth Bathory, known as the “Blood Countess,” and the worst female serial killer in history, who bathed in the blood of virgins. It was thanks to their acquaintance with famous alchemist Michael Sendivogius (1566 – 1636) that Stephen Bathory agreed to finance the experiments of John Dee (1527 – 1608 or 1609) and his assistant Edward Kelley.[64] Sendivogius was a friend of the Scottish alchemist Alexander Seton (1555 – 1622), who was closely associated with William Schaw (c. 1550 – 1602), a founding figure in the development of Freemasonry in Scotland as the author of the Schaw Statutes of the Mother Lodge of Kilwinning. King James VI of Scotland (1566 – 1625, later famous as King James I of England, appointed Schaw as King’s Master of Works, and he worked closely with him in architectural, political, and diplomatic affairs.[65]

In 1599, two lodges, Aitchison’s Haven and Edinburgh were incepted and the Lodge of Haddington appears on records. In the same year, a second code of statues by Schaw was issued partly addressed to the Kilwinning Lodge and mentioning also the lodges of Edinburgh and Stirling. In 1600 or 1601, Schaw and representatives of the five lodges confirmed the position of William Sinclair of Roslin as hereditary patron of the craft. After presiding over the order for many years, William Sinclair went to Ireland, and in 1630 a second charter was issued, granting to his son, Sir William Sinclair, the same power with which his father had been invested. James VI was initiated in the lodge at Perth around 1600, and brought Scottish Masonic interests to London.[66]

The chief tutor of the young James VI was George Buchanan (1506 – 1582), who would subsequently influence the Judaizing trend of James’ studies and religious practices.[67] Arthur H. Williamson argues that Buchanan was influenced by his Parisian contacts with Iberian Marranos.[68] Buchanan’s teacher, Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (c. 1450 – 1536), had met in Italy with Pico della Mirandola.[69] When Buchanan urged the king to eat “the paschal lamb,” critics charged that he wanted James “to become a Jew and live as Jews do.”[70] Buchanan’s Judaized drama of Jephtes and his paraphrases of the Hebrew psalms was published in 1566 by Plantin Press. Guillaume Postel was also associated with the press of Christophe Plantin (1568 - 1571), one of the focal centers of the fine printed book in the sixteenth century. Many historians have argued that Plantin Press operated as a front for a kind of “pre-Freemasonry.”[71] Plantin’s most important work is considered to be the Biblia Regia (“King’s Bible”), also known as the Plantin Polyglot. For printing the Hebrew text, Plantin used among others Hebrew type of Daniel Bomberg (c. 1483 – c. 1549), which he had received from his friends, Bomberg’s two grand-nephews.[72] Bomberg, the famous printer of Hebrew books, employed rabbis, scholars and apostates in his Venice publishing house, and had sponsored Postel’s travels to the Holy Land.[73]

While studying at the Collège Sainte-Barbe, Postel became acquainted with Ignatius of Loyola, and held a lifelong affiliation with the Jesuits. Postel is believed to have spent the years 1548 to 1551 on a trip to the East, traveling to the Holy Land—during the period when Isaac Luria was still a young man living in Jerusalem—and Syria to collect manuscripts. Postel’s trip was sponsored by Daniel Bomberg (c. 1483 – c. 1549), the famous printer of Hebrew books who employed rabbis, scholars and apostates in his Venice publishing house.[74] Through his efforts, he brought many Greek, Hebrew and Arabic texts into European intellectual discourse in the Late Renaissance and Early Modern periods. Among them were Euclid’s Elements, Astronomical works by al-Tusi and other Arabic astronomers, and Latin translations of the Zohar, the Sefer Yetzirah, and the Sefer ha-Bahir, even before they had been printed in the original, and accompanied his translations with a lengthy theosophic exposition of his own views.[75]

In 1591, Joseph Scaliger (1540 – 1609) took a position at the University of Leiden and utilized Plantin Press.[76] In 1531, Nostradamus was invited by Joseph’s father, Italian scholar and physician Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484 – 1558), to come to Agen, France.[77] Scaliger was inspired by his meeting with Postel to learn Hebrew and discussed mystical topics with various rabbis. Scaliger considered Postel the most learned man in Europe.[78] Scaliger owned a copy of the Sefer Hasidim, the foundation work of the Ashkenazi Hasidim.[79] The “Hasideans” of the Bible, also known as Kasideans, are identified by the Freemasons with the Essenes, who hold a particular place of importance in the order. Scaliger asserted that the ancient Hasidaeans (Hasidim) became the Essenes.[80] Scaliger paid an influential visit to Scotland, in which he reinforced the interests in Jewish learning of George Buchanan, with whom he had formed a lasting friendship in France, and other courtiers.[81]

Joseph Scaliger’s subsequent studies of ancient Jewish mystical fraternities and masonic guilds, explains Schuchard, would have a significant influence on James VI when he undertook the revival of royalist masonry.[82] After becoming king, James proclaimed himself “Great Britain’s Solomon.” James VI read French editions of the Book of Maccabees, Philo, Josephus, and Leone Ebreo.[83] James VI invited to Scottland Guillaume de Salluste, Sieur de Bartas (1544 – 1590), a French Protestant, whose Semaines (“Weeks”) drew on the Sefer Yetzirah to describe the number mysticism which could produce great architecture.[84] James was a knowledgeable scholar in his own right, being the author of works such as Daemonologie (1597), The True Law of Free Monarchies (1598), and Basilikon Doron (1599). Daemonologie is a philosophical dissertation on contemporary necromancy and the historical relationships between the various methods of divination used from ancient black magic.

 

Rosicrucians

Guillaume Postel identified himself with the prophet Elijah, or Elias Artista.[85] Like, the medieval millenarian Joachim di Fiore, Postel believed in the coming of the third Elijah mentioned in the Talmud and its exposition of Daniel 12:7, the times, time, and half a time before the end.[86] According to scripture, Enoch was joined in Paradise by another figure prominent in the angel conversations: the prophet Elias (also known as Elijah), whose story was told in 1 Kings 17-19. Elias, like Enoch, was transported to heaven prior to death.[87] He was especially revered in the Jewish tradition, because references in Malachi 4:5-6 suggested that Elias would return from heaven before the Final Judgment to bring the Israelites to repentance.[88]

Drawing on medieval Jewish and Christian traditions dealing with the expected return of Elijah, Paracelsus made a famous prophecy based upon his knowledge of the special planetary conjunctions that were due to occur in 1603, marking the advent of Elias Artista, who possessed all nature’s secrets and heralded a future realm of equality and justice.[89] The basis of Paracelsus’ prophecy was an astronomical calculation that indicated there would be in 1603-4 a Great Conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars in the sign of Sagittarius. In rabbinic and Kabbalistic tradition it is said that such a conjunction indicates an appearance of some kind of messiah.[90]

The Confessio contains a section entitled “A Brief Consideration of the More Secret Philosophy” which quotes verbatim from the first thirteen theorems of John Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica, and a reproduction of the Monad, which symbolizes a Great Conjunction of Saturn in Jupiter in the fiery trigon, believed to herald the coming Elias Arista. The Monas hieroglyphica is a primer of the mysteries of a symbol he invented, the Monad, whose meaning he explained as representing the moon, the sun, the elements and fire. According to Dee, “The very ancient wise men and Magi have transmitted to us five hieroglyphical signs of the planets, all of which are composed out of the signs used for the Moon and the Sun, together with the sign of the Elements and the hieroglyphical sign of Aries, the Ram.”[91] The Fiery Trigon is the pattern of passage of the planets in the zodiacal signs of Aries in 1583, Sagittarius in 1603/4, the year of the reopening of Christian Rosenkreutz’s grave, and that of Leo in 1623, the year of the Rosicrucian Furore.

That the new star that heralded Elijah the prophet was to become a dominant cultural factor for the Rosicrucian millenarians.[92] As Åkerman explained, all the evidence indicates that it was a comet in the cross-shaped constellation of the Swan (Cygno) in 1602 and supernova in Serpentario in 1603/04 that triggered the Rosicrucian movement.[93] Thus the Confessio states:

 

As we now willingly confess, that many principal men by their writings will be a great furtherance unto this Reformation which is to come; the Lord God hath already sent before certain messengers, which should testify his will, to wit, some new stars, which do appear and are seen in the firmament in Serpentario and Cygno, which signify and give themselves known to everyone, that they are powerful Signacula of great weighty matters.[94]

 

The Rosicrucian movement was centered around the perceived importance of the marriage of Maurice’s friend Frederick V of the Palatinate (1574 – 1610)  and Elizabeth Stuart, the daughter of the “Mason King,” James I of England, celebrated in Andreae’s work, the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, published in 1616. The word “chymical” is an old form of “chemical’ and refers to alchemy, for which the “Sacred Marriage” was the goal. Andreae, the author of the Manifestos, admitted that among the sources for his sources for the Rosicrucian fable was the former Jesuit, Guillaume Postel.[95]

The Rosicrucian Raphael Eglinus’ Disquisitio de Helia Artista (1615) affirmed that the order was a Catholic Fraternity.[96] As Frances Yates explained, in accordance with their usual missionary policies, the Jesuits seemed to have planned to appropriate the symbolism of the Rosicrucians for their work of re-Catholicizing the conquered areas and establishing in them the Counter Reformation. A certain J.P.D. a S. published at Brussels in 1619 a work which was reprinted in Prague in 1620, entitled Rosa Jesuitica, oder Jesuitische Rotgesellen, which adapts rose symbolism to Catholic uses as a symbol of the Virgin, and enquires whether the two orders were not in reality one and the same, the one having been driven into concealment to emerge later as the other.[97] According to Theophraste Renaudot, who held conferences in Paris later published in 1639, another meaning of the cross symbol of the order, whose alternative symbol to F.R.C. is F.R.+, “is that in this + the word LVX [Latin word for “Light”] can be found, and because of this one believes that these brothers in Spain have taken the name Illuminez [Allumbrados].”[98]

The legend of Rosenkreutz may have been inspired by Balthasar Walther (1558 – c. 1631) who served as personal physician to Christian of Anhalt’s brother, Prince August of Anhalt-Plötzkau (1575 – 1653), whose court was a center for occult, alchemical and Rosicrucian thought during the opening decades of the seventeenth century. Walther’s travels to the Middle transmitted the knowledge of the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria to his pupil Jacob Boehme.[99] Walther composed a Latin language biography of Prince Michael “the Brave” of Walachia (1558 – 1601), who was of the Draculesti branch of the House of Basarab, which began with Vlad II Dracul, father of Vlad the Impaler, lather popularized as Dracula, who was made a member of the Order of the Dragon by Emperor Sigismund. Walther’s collaborator Paul Nagel transcribed a copy of the Fama, which also contains Kabbalistic explications of the Book of Revelation and Daniel. In 1611, Prince August of Anhalt-Plötzkau proposed publishing the two Rosicrucian manifestos together, but was unable to locate a copy of Confessio.[100]

 


[1] Zohar I, Introduction, p. 1.

[2] Manly P. Hall. Collected works. The Lost Keys Of Freemasonry. The Secret Teachings of All Ages; On the fleur de lys as phallic symbol see Leslie Tuttle Conceiving the Old Regime: Pronatalism and the Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern France (Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 23.

[3] Heinrich Greatz. History of the Jews, Vol. IV (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1894). Retrieved from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/43900/43900-h/43900-h.htm

[4] Block. “Towards an Understanding of the Jewish/Sufi.”

[5] Raphael Patai. The Hebrew Mind (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1977), p. 147.

[6] Ibid., p. 148.

[7] Scholem. Kabbalah, p. 180.

[8] Raphael Patai. The Hebrew Mind (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1977), p. 136.

[9] Raphael Patai. The Hebrew Goddess (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967), p. 133.

[10] Marvin H. Pope. Song of Songs: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (Anchor Bible series), Garden City N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977), p. 167; cited in Raphael Patai. The Hebrew Goddess (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967), p. 150.

[11] Constance Jones & James D. Ryan. Encyclopedia of Hinduism. Encyclopedia of World Religions (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2007). pp. 220–221.

[12] Patai. The Hebrew Goddess, p. 150.

[13] Ibid., p. 227; Zohar, III: 69a. Cited in Schwartz. Lilith’s Cave, p. 19 n. 12.

[14] Ibid., p. 147.

[15] P.O. Senqupta. “Introduction.” In: Rev. Ebenezer Burgess. Translation of the Surya-Sddhanta (University of Calcutta, 1935), p. viii.

[16] David Pingree. “Astronomy and Astrology in India and Iran.” Isis, 54: 3 (June 1963), p. 239. Retrieved from https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Journals/ISIS/54/2/Astronomy_and_Astrology_in_India_and_Iran*.html

[17] Alan Cromer. Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature of Science (Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 111-112.

[18] Alan Cromer. Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature of Science (Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 111-112.

[19] Keiji Yamamoto. “Abū Maʿshar Jaʿfar ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿUmar al-Balkhi.” In: Thomas Hockey, et al. (eds.). The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers (New York: Springer, 2007), p. 11.

[20] David Pingree. “Astronomy and Astrology in India and Iran.” Isis, 54: 3 (June 1963), p. 239. Retrieved from https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Journals/ISIS/54/2/Astronomy_and_Astrology_in_India_and_Iran*.html

[21] Margaret Aston. “The Fiery Trigon Conjunction: An Elizabethan Astrological Prediction.” Isis, Vol. 61, No. 2 (Summer, 1970), p. 162.

[22] Manly Palmer Hall. The Secret Teachings of All Ages: The Fraternity of The Rose Cross (1928).

[23] Monica S. Cyrino. Aphrodite. Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World (New York City, New York and London, England: Routledge 2010), pp. 63, 96.

[24] RHS A-Z encyclopedia of garden plants (United Kingdom: Dorling Kindersley, 2008), p. 1136; “La Rose de Proving.” Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20110705234127/http://www.provins.net/index.php/artisanat-et-produits-du-terroir/la-rose-de-provins.html

[25] Enrique Rodríguez-Picavea Matilla. “Documentos para el estudio de la Orden de Calatrava en la Meseta meridional castellana (1102-1302).” Cuadernos de Historia Medieval Secc. Colecciones Documentales (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 1999), 2.

[26] Helen Nicholson. A Brief History of the Knights Templar (London: Constable & Robinson, 2001).

[27] José Muñoz Sendino. La escala de Mahoma (Madrid: Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, 1949), p. 15.

[28] Yehuda Liebes. Studies in the Zohar (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), pp. 135-138; cited in Mark Verman. “Kabbalah and Jewish Empowerment.” H-Judaic (April, 2015). Retrieved from https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=43555; Heinrich Graetz. History of ‘he Jews, Vol. IV. From the Rise of the Kabbala (1270 C. E.) to the Permanent Settlement of the Marranos in Holland (1618 C. E.) (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1894).

[29] Charles Moeller. “Knights Templar.” In Charles Herbermann (ed.). Catholic Encyclopedia, 14 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912).

[30] Jean Bécarud. The Catholic Church today: Western Europe (University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), p. 159; Helen J. Nicholson. The Crusades (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004). p. 98.

[31] Ralls. The Templars and the Grail, p. 178.

[32] Gabor Klanniczay. “The Great Royal Trio: Charles IV, Louis I of Anjou and Casimir the Great,” in Kaiser Karl IV – Die böhmischen Länder und Europa - Emperor Charles IV, Lands of the Bohemian Crown and Europe, eds. Daniela Břízová, Jiří Kuthan, Jana Peroutková, Stefan Scholz (Prague: Kalsuniversität, 2017), p. 265.

[33] Margaret Aston. “The Fiery Trigon Conjunction: An Elizabethan Astrological Prediction.” Isis, Vol. 61, No. 2 (Summer, 1970), p. 162.

[34] Eugenio Garin. Astrology in the Renaissance: The Zodiac of Life (Routledge, 1983), p. 47

[35] De Poli. Freemansonry and the Orient, p. 33.

[36] Stefanie Beth Siegmund. The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence: The Construction of an Early Modern Jewish Community (Stanford University Press, 2006), p. 446 n. 37.

[37] Ralph Oppenhejm. Spain in the looking-glass, trans. K. John (McBride: New York, 1956) p. 54; cited in D. Lazzeri, F. Nicoli, Y. Zhang. “Secret hand gestures in paintings.” Acta Biomed (December, 2019). Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7233791/

[38] Ezer Kahanoff. “On Marranos and Sabbateans: A Reexamination of Charismatic Religiosity – Its Roots, Its Place and Its Significance in the Life of the Western Sephardi Diaspora.” כתב עת לעיון ומחקר (Journal for Research and Research), vol. 8.

[39] Ziyyur. quoted from Moshe Idel. “Jewish Kabbalah and Platonism in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.” Neoplatonism and Jewish though, p. 333

[40] Moshe Idel. Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven: Yale UP, 1988).

[41] Jean Seznec. The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 57.

[42] Michael Baigent & Richard Leigh. The Elixir and the Stone: The Traditions of Magic and Alchemy (Middlesex, England: Viking, 1997), p. 38-39.

[43] Allison Coudert. “A Cambridge Platonist’s Kabbalist Nightmare,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1975), p. 635.

[44] H.H. Ben-Sasson. “The Reformation in Contemporary Jewish Eyes,” in: PIASH, 4 (1970); S.W. Baron, in: Diogenes, 16, no. 61 (1968), 32–51; “Reformation,” Jewish Virtual Library.

[45] Cis van Heertum. Philosophia Symbolica: Johann Reuchlin and the Kabbalah (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, 2005).

[46] Gotthard Deutsch & Frederick T. Haneman. “Reuchlin, Johann von.” Jewish Encyclopedia, (1906).

[47] France A. Yates. The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ark Books, 1972), p. 137.

[48] Kahanoff. “On Marranos and Sabbateans.”

[49] Antonio Domingues Ortiz (Ediciones ISTMOS: Madrid). Retrieved from http://www.amijewish.info/crypto-names2.html

[50] Robert A. Maryks. The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews (Leiden: Brill, 2009).

[51] Baigent & Leigh. The Temple and the Lodge (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1989).

[52] Pietro Tacchi Venturi. Storia della Compagnia di Gesù in Italia, 5 vols (Rome: La Cività Cattolica, 1950), I.2:278–81; cited in Barton T. Geger, S.J. The First First Companions: The Continuing Impact of the Men Who Left Ignatius. Seminar on Jesuit Spirituality, 44/2, Summer 2012, p. 18.

[53] Paul Van Dyke. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits (C. Scribner’s Sons, 1926), p. 128.

[54] The Menorah, Volumes 20-23 (Intercollegiate Menorah Association, 1932), p. 163; Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. The Borgias: or, At the feet of Venus (P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1930), p. 242, 313; Sarah Bradford. Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy.

[55] “Enique Garcia Hernan. The Borgia redeemed? The Life and work of St. Francis Borgia (1510-1572)” The Ninth Portsmouth. Ramon Perez de Ayala Lecture on Spanish Civilisation, p. 18.

[56] E. William Monter. Frontiers of Heresy: The Spanish Inquisition from the Basque Lands to Sicily (Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 134.

[57] “The Borgia who became a Jesuit in secret.” Catholic Herald (October 10, 2012).

[58] Emanuel Buttigieg. “Knights, Jesuits, Carnival and the Inquisition in Seventeenth-Century Malta.” The Historial Journal, 55:3 (September 2012), p. 572.

[59] Cis van Heertum. Philosophia Symbolica: Johann Reuchlin and the Kabbalah (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, 2005).

[60] Natalie Jayne Goodison. Introducing the Medieval Swan (University of Wales Press, 2022).

[61] Heiko Augustinus Oberman & Walliser-Schwarzbart. Luther: Man Between God and the Devil (Yale University Press, 2006).

[62] Hugh Chisholm, ed. “Albert.” Encyclopædia Britannica. 1 (11th ed.). (Cambridge University Press, 1911), p. 497.

[63] Anthony R. Wagner. “IV.—The Swan Badge and the Swan Knight.” Archaeologia, 97 (1959), p. 133.

[64] Andrzej Datko. “Praktyk i mistyk,” Wiedza i życie (June 12, 2012) (in Polish). Retrieved from https://www.wiz.pl/8,185.html

[65]. David Stevenson. The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland's century 1590 - 1710 (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 26-28.

[66] R.S. Mylne. The Master Masons to the Crown of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1893), pp. 128-30.

[67]. P. Hume Brown. George Buchanan: Humanist and Reformer (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1890), 18; I.D. Macfarlane, Buchanan (London: Duckworth, 1981), 4-5, 40-41; John Durkan, "Buchanan’s Judaizing Practices,” Innes Review, 15 (1964), 186-87.

[68]. Williamson. “British Israel and Roman Britain,” p. 101.

[69]. J.N. Hillgarth. Ramon Lull and Lullism in Fourteenth-Century France (Oxford: Clarendon, l971), 214-15; Anthony Bonner, Selected Works of Ramon Llull (Princeton: Princeton UP, l985), I, 292n.26.

[70] Keith Schuchard. “Judaized Scots, Jacobite Jews, and the Development of Cabalistic Freemasonry.” Revision of Paper Presented at Symposium on “Western Esotericism and Jewish Mysticism,” 18th International Congress of International Association for History of Religions (Durban, South Africa, August 2000).

[71] Schuchard. Restoring the Temple of Vision, p. 178-179.

[72] Albert van der Heide. Hebraica Verita. Christopher Plantin and the Christian Hebraists (Antwerp: Plantin-Moretus Museum, 2008, Exhibition catalogue), p. 155.

[73] Marion Leathers Kuntz. “Guillaume Postel and the Syriac Gospels of Athanasius Kircher.” Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 3, 1987, pp. 471.

[74] Marion Leathers Kuntz. “Guillaume Postel and the Syriac Gospels of Athanasius Kircher.” Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 3, 1987, pp. 471.

[75] Scholem. Kabbalah, p. 199.

[76] Ron Heisler. “The Forgotten English Roots of Rosicrucianism.” The Hermetic Journal (1992)..

[77] Edgar Leroy. Nostradamus: Ses origines, sa vie, son oeuvre (Jeanne Laffitte, 1993), pp. 60–91.

[78]. Anthony Grafton. Joseph Scaliger (Oxford: Oxford UP, l983), I, 104, 275; Jacob Bernays. Joseph Justus Scaliger (1855; rpt. New York: Burt Franklin, l965), p. 139.

[79] Anthony Grafton & Joanna Weinberg. I Have Always Loved the Holy Tongue: Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship (Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 289.

[80] G. Vermes. “Essenes and Therapeutia.” Revue de Qumrân, Vol. 3, No. 4 (12) (October 1962), p. 500.

[81]. P. Hume Brown. George Buchanan: Humanist and Reformer (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1890), 18; I.D. Macfarlane, Buchanan (London: Duckworth, 1981), 4-5, 40-41; John Durkan, "Buchanan's Judaizing Practices,” Innes Review, 15 (1964), 186-87.

[82] Keith Schuchard. “Judaized Scots, Jacobite Jews, and the Development of Cabalistic Freemasonry.”

[83]. George Warner. The Library of James VI, 1573-1583. Miscellany of Scottish Historical Society, XV (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1893), pp. xxvi, l-liii.

[84]. ibid., I, 117, 119, 218, 274-75, 295, 328; II, 431-37, 490, 673, 717.

[85] Andreae Christianopolis (Strasbourg, 1619). Ed. Richard van Dulmen (Stuttgart: Calw, 1972), 137-38; M.L. Kuntz. Guillaume Postel: Prophet of the Restitution of All Things His Life and Thought (Springer-Science+Business Media, 1981), p. 175.

[86] Åkerman. Rose Cross over the Baltic, p. 178.

[87] Harkness. John Dee’s Conversations with Angels, p. 147.

[88] Ibid., p. 148.

[89] Allison P. Coudert. “Kabbalistic Messianism versus Kabbalistic Enlightenment.” in M. Goldish, R.H. Popkin, Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture: Volume I: Jewish Messianism in the Early Modern World (Springer Science & Business Media, Mar. 9, 2013), p. 117.

[90] Peter Dawkins. “Elias the Artist.” Francis Bacon Research Trust.

[91] John Dee. Monas Hieroglyphica. trans. J.W. Hamilton Jones, 1947 (Antwerp: 1564).

[92] Åkerman. Rose Cross over the Baltic, p. 205.

[93] Ibid., p. 214.

[94] As cited in Yates. Rosicrucian Enlightenment, p. 318.

[95] Gyorgy E. Szonyi. John Dee's Occultism: Magical Exaltation through Powerful Signs (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), p. 149.

[96] A. E Waite. Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1993).

[97] Yates. Rosicrucian Enlightenment, p. 59.

[98] Renaudot. Recueil, IV, pp. 53–60, of a ‘‘Conference du Lundi 16e May 1639. N814. CENT LXXXIX,’’ entitled ‘‘Des Freres de la Rose-Croix”; cited in Susanna Åkerman. “Three phases of inventing Rosicrucian tradition in the seventeenth century.” p. 171.

[99] Penman. “A Second Christian Rosencreuz?” p. 162.

[100] Donald R. Dickson. “Johann Valentin Andreae's Utopian Brotherhoods.” Renaissance Quarterly Vol. 49, No. 4 (Winter, 1996), pp. 760-802.

Divide & Conquer