Alias Artista

The Oxford scholar Richard Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) documented that the early Rosicrucians expected the coming of the master alchemist Elias Artista (Elijah the Artist), advanced by Kabbalist Guillaume Postel (ca. 1510 – 1581), who like his acquaintance John Dee, was strongly influenced by Francesco Giorgi. The Rosicrucians announced themselves with the publication of their Manifestos, which claimed to represent a combination of “Magia, Cabala, and Alchymia,” and purported to issue from a secret, “invisible” fraternity of “initiates” in Germany and France. In fact, it is known that later German Rosicrucian authors associated the Faerie Queene—Spenser’s poem dedicated to Elizabeth and featuring the Redcrosse Knight—with their movement.[1] Christian Rosencreutz is not only a Red Cross knight, but also a knight of the Golden Fleece.[2] The alchemical symbolism of the dragon and the Golden Fleece was alluded to by Ben Johnson in The Alchemist (1610), a satiric play where Sir Epicure Mammon utters the following lines:

I have a piece of Jason's fleece, too,
Which was no other than a book of alchemy,
Writ in large sheep-skin, a good fat ram-vellum.
Such was Pythagoras' thigh, Pandora's tub,
And, all that fable of Medea's charms,
The manner of our work; the bulls, our furnace,
Still breathing fire; our argent-vive, the dragon:
The dragon's teeth, mercury sublimate,
That keeps the whiteness, hardness, and the biting;
And they are gathered into Jason's helm,
The alembic, and then sow'd in Mars his field,
And thence sublimed so often, till they're fixed.
Both this, the Hesperian garden, Cadmus' story,
Jove's shower, the boon of Midas, Argus' eyes,
Boccace his Demogorgon, thousands more,
All abstract riddles of our stone.[3]

The first of these 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”), published a year later.

Yates noted that the term “ludibrium,” a word derived from Latin ludus meaning a plaything or a trivial game, was used frequently by Andreae, most notably in his Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, to suggest the Rosicrucian Order was fictitious, a comedy or a “joke.” According to Yates, “though the framers of the manifestos did not intend the story of Christian Rosencreutz to be taken as literally true, it might yet have been true in some other sense, might have been a divine comedy, or some allegorical presentation of a complex religious and philosophical movement having a direct bearing upon the times.”[4]

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 the master alchemist Elias Arista (Elijah the Artist), a precursor of the Messiah. 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.[5] Paracelsus recounted:

…the Sign and Harbinger of the approaching revolution. … It is true there is nothing concealed which shall not be revealed, for which cause a marvellous Being [Elias the Artist] shall come after me, who as yet lives not, and who shall reveal many things.[6]

Guillaume Postel identified himself with the prophet Elijah, or Elias Artista.[7] 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.[8] 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.[9] 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.[10]

In 1536, when Francis I of France—descendant of the House of Savoy and knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece—sought a Franco-Ottoman alliance with the Ottoman Empire, he sent Guillaume Postel as the official interpreter of the French embassy to the Turkish sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in Istanbul. By his father, Charles, Count of Angoulême, Francis I was descended from Charles V of France, son of John II, King of France and Bonne of Luxembourg, and brother of Philip the Bold, John Duke of Berry and Marie of Valois of the legend of Melusine. Francis I’ mother was Louise of Savoy, the granddaughter of Philip II of Savoy and Margaret of Bourbon, the niece of Philip the Bold’s grandson, Philip the Good, who founded the Order of the Golden Fleece. Francis I’s son, Henry II of France, married Catherine de Medici, who taught the black arts to her son Henry III. Francis I’s sister was Marguerite de Navarre, author of the erotic Mirror of the Sinful Soul. Her grandson became Henry IV of France, the first King of France from the House of Bourbon, and married Marie de Medici. A prodigious patron of the arts, Francis I promoted the emergent French Renaissance by attracting many Italian artists to work for him, including Leonardo da Vinci—another purported Grand Master of the Priory of Sion—who brought the Mona Lisa with him, which Francis had acquired.

Catherine de Medici was a sponsor of Postel’s contemporary Nostradamus, and notorious practitioner with her son Henry III of the Black Mass. As noted by Christopher McIntosh, in The Rosicrucians: The History, Mythology, and Rituals of an Esoteric Order, Nostradamus prophesied:

A new sect of Philosophers shall rise,
Despising death, gold, honors and riches,
They shall be near the mountains of Germany,
They shall have abundance of others to support and follow them.[11]

Claude of France, the daughter of Henry II of France and Catherine de Medici, married Charles III, Duke of Lorraine, the great-grandson of René II, Duke of Lorraine, Grand Master of the Order of the Fleur de Lys, founded by his grandfather, René of Anjou, purported Grand Master of the Priory of Sion. René II was also the grandfather of Marie de Guise, married James V, King of Scotland, also a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece, who became grandparents of King James I of England. James’s son and successor Charles I of England married Henrietta Maria, the daughter of Henry IV of France and Marie de Medici. The Rosicrucian manifestos appeared around the same time that the German prince Frederick V of the Palatinate (1574 – 1610) married King James I’s daughter, Elizabeth Stuart. The perceived occult importance of their marriage was enshrined in a Rosicrucian tract called The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, published in 1616, and time around the expectation of the Great Conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter expected to appear in 1623.

Guillaume Postel

Postel came to the attention of Francis I, and especially to his sister Marguerite of Navarre, also an important sponsor of the French Renaissance, and author of the erotic Miroir de l'âme pécheresse (“Mirror of the Sinful Soul”), later translated into English by the eleven-year-old and future Queen Elizabeth of England. Postel was introduced to Marguerite and to the French court by the famous Byzantine scholar John Lascaris (1445 – 1535) who had escaped the fall of Constantinople as a child in 1453.[12] When still quite young he came to Venice, where Bessarion (1403 – 1472), the titular Latin Patriarch of Constantinople, became his patron, and sent him to learn Latin at the University of Padua. Before becoming a cardinal, Bessarion was educated by Gemistus Pletho, who had inspired Cosimo de Medici to found the Platonic Academy in Florence headed by Marsilio Ficino, whose interest in Hermeticism helped launch the Renaissance. As revealed in the Nomoi or Book of Laws, which he only circulated among close friends, Pletho rejected Christianity in favor of a return to the worship of the pagan gods of Ancient Greece, mixed with wisdom based on Zoroaster and the Magi.[13]

Pletho taught Bessarion Neoplatonic philosophy, which stayed with him his entire life, even as a cardinal. Under Pletho, Bessarion “went through the liberal arts curriculum…, with a special emphasis on mathematics…including the study of astronomy and geography” that would have related “philosophy to physics… cosmology and astrology” and Pletho’s “mathematics would include Pythagorean number-mysticism, Plato’s cosmological geometry and the Neoplatonic arithmetic which connected the material world with the world of Plato’s Forms. Possibly it also included astrology…”[14] It was thanks to Bessarion that the Bibliotheca, an important compendium of Greek mythology, has survived to the present. Plethon's own summary of the Nómoi also survived, amongst manuscripts held by Bessarion, titled Summary of the Doctrines of Zoroaster and Plato.

Bessarion, who served at the Medici court, went back to the Orient in 1489-1492 as a librarian of Lorenzo de Medici in search of oriental and Greek manuscripts. On the death of Bessarion, Lorenzo welcomed Lascaris to Florence, where he gave lectures on Greek Anthology. Lorenzo sent Lascaris twice to Greece in quest of manuscripts. When he returned the second time in 1492, he brought back about two hundred from Mount Athos.[15] After Lorenzo died, Lascaris entered the service of the Kingdom of France and was ambassador at Venice from 1503 to 1508, at which time he became a member of the New Academy of Aldus Manutius (1449/1452 – 1515), a friend of Pico della Mirandola. Manutius was the founder of Aldine Press which issued the celebrated Aldine editions Plato, Aristotle, and other Greek and Latin classics. The first edition of Plato’s works was dedicated to Pope Leo X. Erasmus sought out Manutius to publish his translations of Iphigenia in Aulis. Lascaris assisted Louis XII in forming the library of Blois, and when Francis I had it removed to Fontainebleau, he and Guillaume Budé (1467 – 1540) were in charge of its organization.[16]

It was Lascaris who brought Postel to the attention of his student Jean de la Foret who in 1536 was sent as an ambassador of Francis I to the Ottoman court of Suleiman the Magnificent (1494 – 1566)) and who welcomed Postel’s company on account of his knowledge of oriental languages. While La Faret’s mission was to secure an alliance with the Turks in the on-going conflicts that were raging between Francis I and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, Postel’s was to collect oriental manuscripts to enrich the library al Fontainebleau. In February 1536, de la Forêt obtained the signature of a commercial treaty called Capitulations, which was the foundation for French influence in the Ottoman Empire and the Levant until the nineteenth century. Once the treaty was secured, Francis I invaded Italy against Emperor Charles V, starting the Italian War of 1536–1538.

France became the first country in Europe to establish formal relations with the Ottoman Empire and to set up instruction in the Arabic language under the guidance of Guillaume Postel at the Collège de France.[17] 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.[18] Daniel befriended Felix Pratensis (Felice da Prato), an Augustinian friar who had converted from Judaism, who encouraged Bomberg to print Hebrew books.[19] Probably Bomberg’s most impressive accomplishment is his publication of the first printed edition of the complete Babylonian Talmud, with the Talmud text in the middle of the page and the commentaries of Rashi and Tosfot surrounding it. Published with the approval of the Medici Pope, Leo X with editing was overseen by Pratensis, this edition became the standard format, which all later editions have followed.[20] Rashi’s commentary has been included in every edition of the Talmud ever since.

After his trip to the Holy Land, Postel was appointed Professor of Mathematics and Oriental Languages at the Collège Royal by Emperor Ferdinand I, grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. After several years, however, Postel resigned his professorship and traveled all over Central Europe, including Austria and Italy, returning to France after each trip, often by way of Venice. 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.[21]

Postel’s mission was the harmonization of Jewish, Christian and Islamic thought, which would ultimately create a single universal religion under a single universal French monarchy.[22] Postel subscribed to a belief that Christianity must return to its origins in the Mosaic law. Professor Kuntz, Postel’s biographer, says that “Postel constantly speaks of the Jewishness of all men. He speaks of Christian-Jews, rather than Jewish Christians, and the distinction is significant.”[23] Having studied Hebrew and Aramaic, Postel eventually became an actual convert to Judaism, though he remained a “Christian Jew.”[24]

While working on his translations of the Zohar and the Bahir in Venice in 1547, Postel became the confessor of “Mother” Joanna, an elderly woman who confessed to experiencing divine visions. Postel recognized her as the divine Shekhinah and called her “mater Mundi” and the “New Eve.”[25] Postel was inspired to believe that she was a prophet, that he was her spiritual son, and that he was destined to be the unifier of the world’s religions. Joana died in 1549, and Postel described how two years later, on Christmas Day, she appeared to him again, announcing that she would possess his body: “I shall send you two beautiful gifts in our garments, and you shall be our first born, who shall case to be understood by Intellect and Reason the truth of our mysteries.”[26] In 1564, Postel was imprisoned in Paris on the grounds of heresy and madness. His continuing affiliation to the Order of St. John of Jerusalem and his services to the houses of Habsburg, Medici, and Navarre likely spared him from more severe punishment.

Plantin Press

In 1531, Nostradamus, was invited by Italian scholar and physician Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484 – 1558), to come to Agen.[27] George Buchanan, chief tutor of the young King James, formed a lasting friendship with Scaliger and in later life he won the admiration of his son Joseph Scaliger (1540 – 1609). Julius is best known for his Exotericarum (1557), which had an influence Francis Bacon, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Johannes Kepler. His son Joseph is known for expanding the notion of classical history from Greek and ancient Roman history to include Persian, Babylonian, Jewish and ancient Egyptian history. In 1591, Joseph took a position at the University of Leiden and utilized the press of Christophe Plantin (1568 - 1571), an influential French Renaissance humanist and book printer and publisher living and working in Antwerp.[28] While Plantin published many heretical works, including Kabbalistic treatises, he was also protected by a network of wealthy Marranos and Calvinists.[29] Plantin published works by the Family of Love, an international secret society that included Protestants, Catholics, and Marranos, and which maintained strong Lullist interests.[30] Many historians have argued that Plantin Press operated as a front for a kind of “pre-Freemasonry.”[31] Plantin named the press “The Golden Compasses,” and his publications featured the motto Labore e Constantia, represented by a compass. Plantin works were read in Scotland, and were found in the libraries of the Stuart monarchs and courtiers.

Plantin’s most important work is considered to be the Biblia Regia (“King’s Bible”), also known as the Plantin Polyglot. Having faced increasing pressure in the Netherlands, Plantin needed to find a patron who would not be at risk of accusations of heresy or being a Protestant sympathizer. In spite of opposition from clerics, Plantin received the support of Philip II of Spain, who sent him the learned Benito Arias Montano (1527 – 1598), a member of the Order of Santiago, to lead the editorship.

Later Plantins were friends of the Dutch painter Peter Paul Rubens (1577 – 1640) who did drawings for illustrations and also some portraits of the Plantin-Moretus family. Margaretha Plantin married Franciscus Raphelengius, who led the Leiden branch of the house. They stayed printers in Leiden for two more generations of Van Ravelinge, until 1619. A great-granddaughter of the last Van Ravelinge printer married in 1685 Jordaen Luchtmans, founder of what would become later the still existing Brill Publishers. Christophe’s daughter Margaretha married Franciscus Raphelengius, who led the Leiden branch of the house. They stayed printers in Leiden for two more generations of Van Ravelinge, until 1619. A great-granddaughter of the last Van Ravelinge printer married in 1685 Jordaen Luchtmans, founder of what would become later the still existing Brill Publishers.

Also associated with Plantin Press was Guillaume Postel. While studying at the Collège Sainte-Barbe, Postel became acquainted with Ignatius of Loyola, and held a lifelong affiliation with the Jesuits. One of Postel’s disciples, Guy Lefèvre de La Boderie (1541 – 1598) translated Giorgi’s De Harmonia Mundi into French. Guy was one of the three La Boderie brothers, all Hebrew scholars and involved in the intense Hebrew studies then being conducted in France. A discourse added by Guy’s brother Nicolas emphasizes the importance of Giorgi’s work for understanding the Scriptures.[32] It has been said that Pope Clement VIII wished to make de La Boderie a cardinal in his last days, but that he declined.[33] Dee also met with Postel when he visited Paris in early 1551.[34]

Boderie participated in the publication of Plantin’s most important work, the Biblia Regia (King’s Bible), also known as the Plantin Polyglot Bible. Plantin had been encouraged by King Philip II of Spain, Grand Master of the Order of Santiago, who sent him the learned Benito Arias Montano to lead the editorship. Boderie helped to develop the Hebrew and Syriac characters and provided his Latin translation of the Syriac New Testament in Syriac which he had produced from a manuscript brought back from the Middle East by Postel in 1550.[35] For printing the Hebrew text, Plantin used among others Daniel Bomberg’s Hebrew type, which he had received from his friends, Bomberg’s two grand-nephews.[36] Postel’s role in the publication of the Bible was kept secret due to his reputation as a revolutionary Kabbalist.[37]

Plantin also published Buchanan’s Judaized drama of Jephtes and his paraphrases of the Hebrew psalms in 1566. In “British Israel and Roman Britain,” Arthur H. Williamson argues that Buchanan was influenced by his Parisian contacts with Iberian Marranos. As Williamson observed, Buchanan experienced a “significantly crypto-Jewish” environment, which appeared publicly as “faultlessly Catholic” but was privately “informed by elements of Jewish religion and identity.”[38] 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.”[39]

Joseph Scaliger paid an influential visit to Scotland, in which he reinforced the interests in Jewish learning of Buchanan and other courtiers. 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. Scaliger was a classical scholar and philologist, who is regarded by many of his time as the most learned man in Europe.[40] 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.[41]

Great Conjunction

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.[40] The conjunctions between Saturn and Jupiter were of momentous importance to the esoteric followers of Arabic astrology, being signified by Aries the Ram in John Dee’s Monas.[41]

Many astrologers, remarked Pico della Mirandola in his criticism of astrology, believed that nothing remarkable ever happened in human affairs without being preceded by a major planetary conjunction.[42] 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, expounded a theory of conjunctions which profoundly influenced Christian astrology centuries later.[43] Abu Ma’shar argued that a great prophet who would supersede Mohammed would appear when the conjunction meets in Scorpio, as they did in 1484.[44] Eugenio Garin declares, “In reality the Latin version of the Picatrix is as indispensable as the Corpus Hermeticum or the writings of Albumasar for understanding a conspicuous part of the production of the Renaissance, including the figurative arts.”[45] Among those who discussed Albumasar’s theory was Roger Bacon, who went into the question of conjunctions in the mathematical section of his Opus majus.

Astrologers recognized that conjunctions of the superior planets of Saturn and Jupiter took place approximately every twenty years in a cycle, to which they attributed varying degrees of significance of great, greater and greatest. This cycle depended upon the four trigons or triplicities, into which the signs of the zodiac were divided. A trigon represents a set of three signs, each 120º distant from the other, thus forming an equilateral triangle, each corresponding to one of the four elements. 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.[46]

Astrologers agreed that there had been six “greatest” conjunctions since the creation: during the life of the prophet Enoch; Noah’s Flood; Moses’s reception of the Ten Commandments; during the dispersal of the Ten Tribes of Israel; the birth of Christ; and the sixth coinciding with the reign of Charlemagne.[49] Few doubted that the next “greatest conjunction” due to occur in 1583 would be the harbinger monumental event. Brahe suggested that the potential effects of the entry of Jupiter and Saturn into the fiery trigon would be magnified by a supernova he observed in Cassiopeia in 1572. Bohemian astrologer Cyprian Leowitz (1514? – 1574) concurred and discussed the significance of the conjunction in his De coniunctionibus magnis insignioribus superiorum planetarum (1564).[50] Leowitz was sure that the upcoming conjunction announced “undoubtedly . . . the second coming of the son of God and man in the majesty of his glory.”[51] Leowitz’ predictions were studied in 1564 by Dee, who in 1562, had presented a now lost millenarian chart, Cabbalisticae Haebrerorum compendiosa Tabella.[52]

Postel wrote about the new star that appeared in 1572, a supernova that formed a cross with the stars in Cassiopeia, a cross shining there brightly and remaining visible to everyone for more than sixteen consecutive months. The supernova is often called “Tycho’s supernova,” because of Brahe’s extensive work De nova et nullius aevi memoria prius visa stella (“Concerning the Star, new and never before seen in the life or memory of anyone”), published in 1573 with reprints overseen by Kepler in 1602 and 1610. Although Tycho was probably the most accurate observer of the phenomenon, almost as accurate were his European colleagues, such as Wolfgang Schuler, Thomas Digges, John Dee, Francesco Maurolico, Jerónimo Muñoz, Tadeáš Hájek, or Bartholomäus Reisacher. In England, Queen Elizabeth summoned the mathematician and astrologer Thomas Allen, “to have his advice about the new Star that appeared in the Cassiopeia to which he gave his Judgment very learnedly,” as the antiquary John Aubrey recorded in his memoranda a century later.[53] Thomas Allen, one of the seventeenth century’s great collectors, came into possession of at least twelve Dee manuscripts and may have employed Edward Kelly before he entered Dee’s service. Allen owned a sixteenth-century manuscript that described how to invoke and bind simple spirits.[54]

While he was reading Leowitz, Dee completed his Kabbalah-inspired Monas hieroglyphica (1564). Dee expressly credited Trithemius, following a chance discovery of a manuscript copy of the Steganographia while on a diplomatic assignment to Antwerp in 1563, with stimulating the composition of his Monad. Susana Åkerman has shown that the work of Trithemius involved a scheme taken from the observations on the great conjunctions by Abu Ma’shar.[55] Dee’s study of number was related to astrology and alchemy, and in his Monas he reported that he had discovered a formula for a combined Kabbalist, alchemical, and mathematical science which would enable its possessor to move up and down the scale of being from the lowest to the highest spheres.

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.”[56] The Monas is composed of the symbol for mercury. By placing a point in the center of the circle, it becomes a composite of the symbol for the sun, topped by a semicircle for the moon, forming figure of the Horns (Cornucopia). They are supported by a cross, of four points representing the four elements, forming the arms and the body. For feet, Dee adds the symbol of Aries, representing the Fiery Trigon. Therefore, Dee’s Monad represents the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the sign of Aries in 1583. As Åkerman concludes, “Dee’s influence on the Rosicrucians thus appears to be profound, since his sign was a compact invention, a new pictorial way of emphasizing the role of alchemy (mercury, sol, and luna) in the new age of the fiery trigon.”[57]

Tübigen Circle

John Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica and its symbol are mentioned and discussed or critiqued in numerous authors associated with the Rosicrucian movement, including Johann Valentin Andreae, Petrus Bongus, Gerard Dorn, Andreas Libavius, Heinrich Khunrath and Athanasius Kircher.[58] The Confessio Fraternitatis was originally published with an illustrated commentary on Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphua, called Secretions Philosophia Consideratio brevis a Phillippo a Gabella. Throughout, as Yates points out, Dee’s Monas symbol is consistently called a “Stella hieroglyphica,” alluding to the woman holding a star in her hand printed on the last page of the first edition of Dee’s Monas.

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. Rosenkreutz had supposedly undertaken a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, studied with the wise men of Damcar in Arabia, from whom he learned the ancient esoteric knowledge which included the study of physics, mathematics, magic and kabbalah. Damcar was Damar in Yemen. Leo Africanus had described the city as situated on the eastern shore of the Red Sea and told how the Sabeans there could pursue their planetary cult in peace. Members of the Sabean sect were active in Damar at the alleged time of Christian Rosencreutz. The Sabeans of Damar in Arabia Felix were purportedly followers of the Queen of Sheba of Ethiopia. The Sabians had identified themselves with these Sabeans, to qualify as protected “People of the Book” in Islamic law to escape persecution. While the relation of the Sabians to the Sabeans of Yemen are unclear, it is known that the Sabeans worshipped the Sun, Moon, and Venus.[59] In the seventeenth century it was believed that the Sabians were identical with the Mandaean Hebrew Christians of St. John, both sects having branches in the Baghdad area.[60] According to the Confessio, referring to Damcar, “for there do govern only wise and understanding men, who pursue by the king’s permission to make particular laws; according unto which example also the government shall be instituted in Europe.”[61]

Rosencreutz returned through Egypt and Fes and Spain, and upon his return to Europe, to have established a secret “House of the Holy Spirit,” modeled on the Ismaili “House of Wisdom” in Cairo.[62] A hundred and twenty years after Rosenkreutz’ burial, the text relates, his vault was discovered by one of the brethren, which they took as a signal for them to declare themselves and invite the learned of Europe to join. As Christopher McIntosh explained, the image of the vault occurs in a book called the Aim of the Sage, which was circulated among the Brethren of Sincerity, who would have been active around the time that Christian Rosenkreutz was supposed to have made his journey to that region.[63]

Johann Valentin Andreae (1586 – 1654), the author of the Chymical Wedding, was also purportedly the author of the Fama. Andreae belonged to the Tübingen Circle, who some scholars believe were the originators of all the Rosicrucian manifestos. The Tübingen Circle, which consisted of twelve members, was founded by Tobias Hess (1568 – 1614), a lawyer knowledgeable in Paracelsian medicine, alchemy and the Bible. According to Christopher McIntosh:

The Tübigen circle from which the manifestos emerged was composed of men who desired and anticipated the golden age foretold by Joachim of Fiore. They saw this golden age as being ushered in initially on German soil and under the banner of Protestantism, but a new and reinvigorated Protestantism. They also believed that the men who would prepare the new age would be men of learning, illuminated by the hidden light of Hermetic wisdom, but not deceived by false alchemists and other tricksters.[64]

Whoever wrote the Fama and Confessio, explains Donald R. Dickson, was familiar with Studion’s Naomatria, which was based prophecies of Ezekiel, Daniel and Revelation, and predicted the crucifixion of the last pope in 1612, the immanent destruction of the world, the beginning of the New Jerusalem, or Heliopolis or Civitas Solis. Studion’s subtitle promised knowledge of the claves or secret “key” of David, which the author of Revelation would have also received, and which could open and measure the Temple and the altar of God. It presented the inner and outer temple, symbolizing scripture and nature, the two books of revelation. Studion also attributed mythical and prophetic significance to the rose and the cross.[65]

Other members included Christoph Besold (1577 – 1638), who influenced the Confession, and a close friend of Andreae. Besold, who knew nine languages including Arabic and Hebrew, and was a Kabbalist and mystic. Besold studied jurisprudence, and in the early 1590s was a close friend of Kepler, who were students of the University of Tübigen together. When Kepler’s mother Katharina Kepler was accused of witchcraft in 1615, Besold was one of the jurists dealing with the case, which after six years, was dropped.[66] Some historians have speculated that Kepler may even have contributed to the rumors when he wrote an allegory called Somnium (“The Dream”). The work described a trip to the moon and speculation on what astronomy would be like if practiced on another planet. The characters include a fictional wise woman named Fiolxhilde who sells magic charms and communes with a demon on the moon, which strongly resembled Katharina.[67]

Besold also knew the work of Guillaume Postel and Paracelsian astronomer Helisaeus Roeslin (1545 – 1616) and.[68] In 1578, Roeslin openly used Postel’s millenarian scheme to interpret the significance of the new star and it was through Roeslin that the Wurtemberg prophet Simon Studion learned of Postel. Like Postel before him, Roeslin ties the new star to changes in the macrocosm and to historical events among the Ismaili Muslims, who like Protestants are waiting for Apocalyptic fulfillment.[69] Roeslin, a friend and rival of Kepler, recorded Postel’s observations on the supernova of 1572 and adopted Postel’s millenarian scheme on the “time, times, and half a time” of Daniel 12:7.

In December 1603, there was to be a Great Conjunction in Sagittarius, one of the points of the Fiery Trigon. In Autumn 1604, the conjunction was still in the Fiery Trigon, and not far apart, Mars was to come and be in conjunction with Saturn, thus forming the vertices of a fiery triangle in the Fiery Trigon, presaging great things. Some stargazers, reported Kepler, watched “to see if there would be a comet, as had been expressly predicted by the astrology of the Arabs.”[70] On October 9, 1603, Kepler’s fellow astronomers Wilhelm Fabry, Michael Maestlin and Helisaeus Roeslin made observations of a supernova that came to be known as Kepler’s Star. At the time, Kepler was working at the imperial court in Prague for Emperor Rudolf II. This star appeared in the constellation Ophiuchus, the Greek (Ophioukhos) “serpent-bearer,” commonly represented as a man grasping the snake that is represented by the constellation Serpens. In Greek mythology, Serpens represents a snake held by the healer Asclepius. Kepler published a book about the supernova in 1606, titled the Nova Stella in Pede Serpentarii. Kepler identified the star with the Star of Bethlehem, which led the Magi to the manger of Jesus. According to Kepler:

The Magi were of Chaldea, where was born astrology, of which this is a dictum: Great conjunctions of planets in cardinal points, especially in the equinoctial points of Aries and Libra, signify a universal change of affairs; and a cometary start appearing at the same time tells of the rise of a king.[71]

That the new star heralded Elijah the prophet was to become a dominant cultural factor for the Rosicrucian millenarians.[72] As Åkerman explained, all the evidence indicates that it was a comet in the cross-shaped Swan (Cygno) in 1602 and supernova in Serpentario in 1603/04 that triggered the Rosicrucian movement in Tübingen.[73] As revealed by the Roman investigation into Campanella’s heresy, he had highlighted the prophetic significance of the great conjunctions and believed that “the death of the world” was signified by the new star in the Swan.[74] 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.[75]

The Fama, it would appear, as declares Åkerman was likely to be understood only by readers knowledgeable of Arabic astrology. As Åkerman observes, Rosencreutz was born in 1378 and lived 106 years. In the Fama, we are told of the rediscovery of his grave, as Rosencreutz had predicted, 120 years after his death in 1484, in 1604, the year of the new star as related in the Confessio. Readers presumably supposed to aware that the birth of Rosencreutz coincided with the end of the Great Papal Schism in 1378, while his death concurs with the birth of Martin Luther in 1484, a year in which a conjunction between the planets Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars appeared in the zodiac sign of Scorpio.[76]

Rosy Dew

Andreae admitted that among the sources for his sources for the Rosicrucian fable was Guillaume Postel.[77] As Marion Leathers Kuntz has pointed out, it was Postel who used a Latin equivalent of the word rhodostauroticon (“Rorispergius”), for a rosy dew promised to be dispensed or scattered among the needy.[78] The reference derives from, de Rore caeli et pinguedine terrae, or ‘‘God give thee of the dew of heaven and the fatness of the earth,’’ after Isaac’s blessing of Jacob in Genesis 27:28. The Zohar, referring to the same verse, says, “the rosy dew distilled from the brain of the Ancient of Days—from his forehead, from his hair, and from his magnificent beard.”[79] The phrase is found on the title page of Dee’s Monas hieroglyphica, where he sets it out with the exhortation: ‘‘Let the water above the heavens fall and the earth will yield its fruit.’’

The dew symbolism, according to Åkerman, “is understood as an erotic psychosexual presence as the supercelestial watery fire flows in.”[80] According to the Zohar, the dew issues forth from the sky, symbolized by the sephirah Yesod, which is associated with the genitals of the Adam Kadmon.[81] As noted by Daniel Matt, “The dew conveyed by Yesod from the divine head to Shekhinah also represents sperm, which according to one ancient theory derives from the brain.”[82] According to a Medieval theory attributed to Pythagoras and taught by Alcmaeon of Croton, sperm derives from the brain.[83] According to the Zohar, the sky, “spring of the well, is the river issuing from Eden,” which draws the “crystalline dew” and “conducts, it in a current of love and desire, to saturate the entrance of the Sabbath with joy.”[84] In Pirqeide-Rabbi Eli’ezer 34:

Rabbi Yehudah said, “… In the time to come, the blessed Holy One will bring down a dew of revival, reviving the dead, as is said: Your dead will live… my corpses will arise… Awake and shout for joy, to dwellers in the dust!… For your due is a dew of lights… ad the earth will give birth to spirits of the dead (Isaiah 26:19)…” Rabbi Tanhum said, “… From where does it descend? From the head of the blessed Holy One. In the time to come, He will shake the hair of His head and brig down dew of revival, reviving the dead, as is said: I was asleep, but my heart was awake… For my head is drenched with dew (Song of Songs 5: 2).”[85]

The Danish alchemist Olaus Borrichius writes that he learned from alchemists in England that F.R.C. does not refer to the fratres Roseae Crucis, but rather Fratres roris cocti, “brothers of boiled dew.” Additionally, their sign is F.R.+, where + signifies LVX (“LUX,” Latin for “Light”) meaning they were illuminated by a special light or that they use light or air in their work.[86] The Kabbalistic method of deriving the anagram LVX from the cross+ explained in the sixteenth theorem of Dee’s Monas. Borrichius explains:

From the mouth of some Fr:R:C: Dew (ros) is in nature the most powerful solvent of the Sun. It is not corrosive, but its light ought to be made dense and rendered corporeal, by being artfully boiled in a proper vase for a convenient time, it truly is the menstruum of the red dragon, i.e. of the Sun, i.e. the true philosophical matter, by which F.R.C. shall be understood as Fratres roris cocti. Thus, in Genesis, Jacob’s blessing was but this: De rore caeli et pinguedine terrae det tibi Deus.[87]

Adam Haselmayer (1560 – c. 1630), the first commentator of the Rosicrucian Manifestoes, was a close friend of the Paracelsian Karl Widemann, secretary of the English alchemist Edward Kelley, at the court of Emperor Rudolf II.[88] Haselmayer was translator of one of Edward Kelley’s alchemical tracts on the first page of his manuscripts Philosophia Sagax (1613) and Novum lumen physicochemicum (1616), Haselmayer places Dee’s Monad topped by a star, Paracelsus’ spiritual “astrum.” The star can be taken to signify the little nova of 1604, set just above the great conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in Sagittarius. After Roeslin’s death in 1616, his unpublished astrology, theology and Kabbalistic work merged into Widemann’s manuscript collection.[89]

Though the earliest known printed edition of the first Rosicrucian manifesto, the Fama Fraternitatis, did not appear until 1614, the document had been circulating in manuscript before that date. In a reply to it included in the first printed edition of the Fama, Haselmayer states that he had seen a manuscript of it in the Tyrol in 1610. Haselmayer makes some strongly anti-Jesuit remarks, and alludes to the widespread expectation of radical changes after the death of the Emperor Rudolf II. A preface states that the Jesuits had seized Haselmayer because of his favorable reply to the Fama, and had caused him to be put into irons on a galley. As Frances Yates observed, “This preface suggests that the Rosicrucian manifesto is setting forth an alternative to the Jesuit Order, a brotherhood more truly based on the teaching of Jesus. Both the reply of Haselmayer and the preface about him are very obscure, and, as with so much Rosicrucian literature, one is not sure whether they are to be taken literally.”[90]

Yet, the Rosicrucians themselves were even suspected by some of being Jesuits. This impression, suggests Yates, may have been encouraged by Haselmayer’s reply, with its attachment to Jesus, as a kind of Jesuit Order, though with very different aims.[91] The Rosicrucian Raphael Eglinus’ Disquisitio de Helia Artista (1615) affirmed that the order was a Catholic Fraternity. The disquisition was written in answer to two Jesuit writers on the transmutation of metals.[92] As 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.[93] 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].”[94]

[1] Yates. The Occult Philosophy of the Elizabethan Age, pp. 198-199.

[2] Yates. Rosicrucian Enlightenment, p. 93.

[3] Ben Jonson. The Alchemist, II.i.89-104, edited by H. C. Hart (London: De La More Press, 1903).

[4] Yates. Rosicrucian Enlightenment, p. 68.

[5] 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.

[6] Paracelsus, De Mineralibus, ch.1, Vol. II, Opera Opera omnia medico-chemico-chirurgica, Geneva, 1658.

[7] 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.

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

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

[10] Ibid., p. 148.

[11] Christopher McIntosh. The Rosicrucians: The History, Mythology, and Rituals of an Esoteric Order.

[12] George Saliba. “Arabic Science in Sixteenth-Century Europe: Guillaume Postel (1510-1581) and Arabic Astronomy,” in Muzaffar Iqbal, New Perspectives on the History of Islamic Science, Volume 3 (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 127.

[13] Hanegraaff, Wouter. Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 38.

[14] C.M. Woodhouse, George Gemistos Plethon, the Last of the Hellenes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 33.

[15] Paul Lejay. “Janus Lascaris,” in Charles Herbermann, (ed.). Catholic Encyclopedia, 9 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910).

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ina Baghdianitz McCabe. Orientalism in early modern France, p. 25 ff.

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

[19] Marvin J Heller (2005). “Earliest Printings of the Talmud: From Bomberg to Schottenstein.” Yeshiva University Museum: 73.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Scholem. Kabbalah, p. 199.

[22] M. Goldish. “Patterns in Converso Messianism.” Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture Volume I (Springer-Science+Business Media, 1981), p. 57.

[23] Kuntz. Guillaume Postel, p. 130.

[24] Ibid., p. 133.

[25] Gyorgy E. Szonyi. John Dee’s Occultism: Magical Exaltation through Powerful Signs (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), p. 150.

[26] Ibid.

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

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

[29] Ibid.

[30]. I.D. Macfarlane, Buchanan, pp. 255, 259-60; Leon Voet, The Golden Compasses (Amsterdam: Vangendt, l969), I, v. 12-31; B. Rekers, Benito Arias Montano (1527-1598) (London: Warburg Institute, l972), 70-74, 126.

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

[32] Yates. The Occult Philosophy of the Elizabethan Age, p. 37.

[33] Charles Herbermann, ed. “Guy Lefevre de la Boderie.” Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton, 1913).

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

[35] Charles Herbermann, ed. “Guy Lefevre de la Boderie". Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton, 1913).

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

[37] Schuchard. Restoring the Temple of Vision, p. 179.

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

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

[40]. 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.

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

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

[43] Åkerman. Rose Cross over the Baltic, p. 135.

[44] G. Pico della Mirandola. Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem, ed. E. Garin (Florence: Vallechi, 1946-1952), Vol. I, p. 520.

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

[46] Åkerman. Rose Cross over the Baltic, p. 74.

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

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

[49] Harkness. John Dee’s Conversations with Angels, p. 70.

[50] Aston. “The Fiery Trigon Conjunction,” pp. 164-165.

[51] Cyprian Leowitz. De coniunctionibus magnis (1564), sig. L3v; cited in Aston. “The Fiery Trigon Conjunction,” p. 166.

[52] Åkerman. Rose Cross over the Baltic, p. 157.

[53] “Thomas Allen.” Oliver Lawson Dick, ed., Aubrey’s Brief Lives. Edited from the Original Manuscripts, 1949, s.v. p. 5.

[54] Harkness. John Dee’s Conversations with Angels, p. 120.

[55] Åkerman. Rose Cross over the Baltic, p. 157.

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

[57] Susanna Åkerman. “Three phases of inventing Rosicrucian tradition in the seventeenth century.” In The Invention of Sacred Tradition, ed. James R. Lewis & Olav Hammer (Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 167.

[58] Stephen Clucas. John Dee: Interdisciplinary Studies in English Renaissance Thought (Springer Science & Business Media, 2006).

[59] Åkerman. Rose Cross over the Baltic, p. 43.

[60] Ibid, p. 42.

[61] Cited in Yates. Rosicrucian Enlightenment, p. 316.

[62] Life Science Fellowship. “Secret Tradition of Islam.” Retrieved from http://www.alpheus.

org/html/articles/esoteric_history/secret_islam.html]

[63] The Rosicrucians: The History, Mythology, and Rituals of an Esoteric Order, p. 25.

[64] Christopher Macintosh. The Rosicrucians: The History, Mythology, and Rituals of an Esoteric Order (Weiser Books, Sep 1, 1998) p. 27.

[65] Donald R. Dickson. “Johann Valentin Andreae’s Utopian Brotherhoods.” Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 4, 1996, pp. 769.

[66] Elizabeth A. Spiller. “‘To Depart from the Earth with Such Writing”: Johannes Kepler’s Dream of Reading Knowledge.” Renaissance & Reformation, XXIII, 2 (1999), p. 11.

[67] “This Month in Physics History: August 1620: Kepler’s Mother Imprisoned for Witchcraft.”August/September 2015 (Volume 24, Number 8). Retrieved from https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201508/physicshistory.cfm

[68] Åkerman. Rose Cross over the Baltic, p. 215.

[69] Ibid, p. 201.

[70] Kepleri opera amnia, vol. II, p. 617

[71] Ibid., p. 347.

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

[73] Ibid., p. 214.

[74] Ibid., p. 75.

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

[76] Åkerman. Rose Cross over the Baltic, p. 74.

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

[78] Kuntz. Guillaume Postel, p. 174.

[79] Andrew Michael Ramsey. The Traveh of Cyrus, Edinburgh, 1738, drawing upon Petrus Rittangel, De Mercabah vinone (Amsterdam, 1642).

[80] Susanna Åkerman. “Three phases of inventing Rosicrucian tradition in the seventeenth century.” In The Invention of Sacred Tradition, ed. James R. Lewis & Olav Hammer (Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 170.

[81] Norman Solomon. “Picturing God.” In Seth Daniel Kunin. Themes and Issues in Judaism (New York: Cassell, 2000). p. 150.

[82] Daniel C. Matt (trans.). The Zohar. Volume 5 (Stanford: Stanford University, 2009) pp. 260-261 n. 200.

[83] Ibid., p. 469 n. 795.

[84] 2:135b, cited in Daniel C. Matt (trans.). The Zohar. Volume 5 (Stanford: Stanford University, 2009) p. 260.

[85] Daniel C. Matt (trans.). The Zohar. Volume 5 (Stanford: Stanford University, 2009) pp. 260-261 n. 200.

[86] Åkerman. “Three phases of inventing Rosicrucian tradition in the seventeenth century.” pp. 168-69.

[87] Cited in Åkerman. “Three phases of inventing Rosicrucian tradition in the seventeenth century.” pp. 169.

[88] Carlos Gilly. Adam Haslmayr. Der erste Verkünder der Manifeste der Rosenkreuzer. (Amsterdam: Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, 1994), p. 106; Ole Peter Grell. Paracelsus (Leiden: Brill, 1998). p. 163.

[89] Ole Peter Grell. Paracelsus (Leiden: Brill, 1998). p. 163.

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

[91] Ibid., p. 137.

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

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

[94] 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.

Volume Two

1. The Elizabethan Age

2. The Great Conjunction

3. The Alchemical Wedding

4. The Rosicrucian Furore

5. The Invisible College

6. 1666

7. The Royal Society

8. America

9. Redemption Through Sin

10. Oriental Kabbalah

11. The Grand Lodge

12. The Illuminati

13. The Asiatic Brethren

14. The American Revolution

15. Haskalah

16. The Aryan Myth

17. The Carbonari

18. The American Civil War

19. God is Dead

20. Theosophy

21. Shambhala