THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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cites a Rosicrucian lodge in Basle in 1530, not wholly unequivocal manuscripts from the beginning of the twelfth century tell of lodges of this name in Germany. Not
content with this, Rosicrucians from the time of Andreae, and even from that of the Magic Flute, claimed to have preserved that ‘veram sapientiam’ for thousands of
years ‘quae olim ab Aegyptiis et Persiis magia, hodie vero a venerabili fraternitate Roseae Crucis Pansophia recte vocatur’.* But however old the name Rosicrucian is
and however far the emblem may go back into utopianizing or utopianized myths: only Andreae with his ‘Chemical Wedding’ gave it the sense, claimed to be rising or
humane, of ‘higher alchemy’. We must continue even further, into the peculiar connection which exists, through Andreae's link of a ‘general reformation’, between
something as superstitious as alchemy and something as sunlike and crystal­clear as the — Enlightenment, this battle of light against superstition. For the pathos of light
itself, as the ‘birth’, as the advancing ‘process’ of light (gold), comes from alchemy: ‘Enlightenment’ itself is originally an alchemical concept, just like ‘process’ and its
‘result’. Conversely the strange connection of freemasonry, and even the Enlightenment with occultism arises from this, of course; even Andreae mixed his fraternities
with magic rites. The golden dream of a societas humana thus found its philanthropic alchemical conventicles in Germany, but also in the strangely theosophical England
throughout the whole of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. There was a secret society called Antilia, another called Makaria, a ‘brotherhood of the celestial wheel
for the restoration of hermetic medicine and philosophy’. There was, with a mixed social­cosmological dream, the collegium lucis which was founded by no less a
person than Comenius, the disciple of Andreae; and all these sections set up the Rosy Cross or the ‘higher alchemy’. They all wanted to turn the course of society and
of nature towards the original state of paradise, where social equality and unfallen or golden nature were one and the same. The dream of these alchemical sects thus
remained general reformation throughout, in the sense of the restoration of the original state of paradise, and above all of leading the fallen world over to Christ; which is
why the Rosicrucians were also continually compared with the Anabaptists by their enemies at the time. Gold­cooking became chiliastic or, as a hostile tract denounced
it at the time: ‘Turning the whole world upside down before the Day of Judgement into an earthly paradise such as Adam occupied before the Fall, and the restitution of
all the arts and wisdom possessed
* ‘which was rightly called ‘magia’ in former times by the Egyptians and Persians, today ‘pansophia’ by the true and venerable fraternity of the Rosy Cross’.