booknetsaWebster-secretSocietiesAndSubversiveMovements

everything of the nature of Cabalism, Theosophy, Alchemy, Astrology, and Mysticism was designated. For
this reason it has been said that they cannot be regarded as the descendants of the Templars. Mr. Waite, in
referring to " the alleged connexion between the Templars and the Brethren of the Rosy Cross," observes:
The Templars were not alchemists, they had no scientific pretensions, and their secret, so far as it can be ascertained,
was a religious secret of an anti-Christian kind. The Rosicrucians, on the other hand, were preeminently
a learned society and they were also a Christian sect.(41)
The fact that the Templars do not appear to have practised alchemy is beside the point; it is not pretended
that the Rosicrucians followed the Templars in every particular, but that they were the inheritors of a
secret tradition passed on to them by the earlier Order. Moreover, that they were a learned society, or even a
society at all, is not at all certain fir they would appear to have possessed no organization like the Templars
or the Freemasons, but to have consisted rather of isolated occultists bound together by some tie of secret
knowledge concerning natural phenomena. This secrecy was no doubt necessary at a period when scientific
research was able to be regarded as sorcery, but whether the Rosicrucians really accomplished anything is
extremely doubtful. They are said to have been alchemists; but did they ever succeed in transmuting metals?
They are described as learned, yet do the pamphlets emanating from the Fraternity betray any proof of superior
knowledge? " The Chymical Marriage of Christian Rosenkreutz," which appeared in 1616, certainly
appears to be the purest nonsense-magical imaginings the most puerile kind; and Mr. Waite himself observes
that the publication of the Fama and the Confessio Fraternitatis will not add new lustre to the Rosicrucian
reputations: We are accustomed to regard the adepts of the Rosy Cross as beings of sublime elevation and
preternatural physical powers, masters of Nature, monarchs of the intellectual world.... But here in their
own acknowledged manifestos they avow themselves a mere theosophical offshoot of the Lutheran heresy,
acknowledging the spiritual supremacy of a temporal prince, and calling the Pope anti-Christ.... We find
them intemperate in their language, rabid in their religious prejudices, and instead of towering giant-like
above the intellectual average of their age, we see them buffeted by the same passions and identified with all
opinions of the men by whom they were environed. The voice which addresses us behind the mystical mask
of the Rose-Croix does not come from an intellectual throne....
So much for the Rosicrucians as a " learned society."
What, then, of their claim to be a Christian body? The Rosicrucian student of the Cabala, Julius Sperber,
in his Echo of the Divinely Illuminated Fraternity of the Admirable Order of the R.C. (1615), has indicated
the place assigned to Christ by the Rosicrucians. In De Quincey's words: Having maintained the probability
of the Rosicrucian pretension on the ground that such magnalia Dei had from the creation downwards been
confided to the keeping of a few individuals-agreeably to which he affirms that Adam was the first Rosicrucian
of the Old Testament and Simeon the last-he goes on to ask whether the Gospel put an end to the secret
tradition? By no means, he answers: Christ established a new " college of magic " among His disciples and
the greater mysteries were revealed to St. John and St. Paul.
John Yarker, quoting this passage, adds: " This, Brother Findel points out, was a claim of the Carpocratian
Gnostics "; it was also, as we have seen, a part of the Johannite tradition which is said to have been imparted
to the Templars. We shall find the same idea of Christ as an " initiate " running all through the secret
societies up to the present day.
These doctrines not unnaturally brought on the Rosicrucians the suspicion of being an anti-Christian
body. The writ of a contemporary pamphlet published in 1624, declares that " this fraternity is a stratagem
of the Jews and Cabalistic Hebrews, in whose philosophy, says Pic de la Mirandole, all things are... as if
hidden in the majesty of truth or as... in very sacred Mysteries."(42)
Another work, Examination of the Unknown and Novel Cabala of the Brethren of the Rose-Cross, agrees
with the assertion that the chief of this " execrable college is Satan, that its first rule is denial of God, blasphemy
against the most simple and undivided Trinity, trampling on the mysteries of the redemption, spitting
in the face of the mother of God and of all the saints." The sect is further accused of compact with the devil,
sacrifices of children, of cherishing toads, making poisonous powders, dancing with fiends, etc.
Now, although all this would appear to be quite incompatible with the character of the Rosicrucians as
far as it is known, we have already seen that the practices here described were by no means imaginary; in
this same seventeenth century, when the fame of the Rosicrucians was first noised abroad, black magic was
still, as in the days of Gilles de Rais, a horrible reality not only in France but in England, Scotland, and Germany,
where sorcerers of both sexes were continually put to death.(43) However much we may deplore the
methods employed against these people or question the supernatural origin of their cult, it would be idle to
deny that the cult itself existed.
Nesta H. Webster — Secret Societies and Subversive Movements — Part I
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