What it is
Two currents rose together in the Protestant lands of early seventeenth-century Germany, and they have been read together ever since. The first is Rosicrucianism. Between 1614 and 1616 three anonymous publications announced a secret brotherhood founded two centuries before by one Christian Rosenkreutz, which now invited the learned of Europe to join it in a general reformation of knowledge. Hundreds of pamphlets answered, pleading for admission, defending the brothers, or denouncing them. Nobody ever produced a member.
The second is Christian theosophy, in the older sense of the word: wisdom about God gained not by argument but by illumination. Its founder was Jacob Boehme, a shoemaker of Gorlitz, and its heirs were scattered pastors, physicians, and visionaries in Germany, the Netherlands, England, and France. Both currents drew on Paracelsian medicine, alchemy, Christian Kabbalah, and the expectation that the last age of the world was near. Both were suspected by the Lutheran authorities. And both supplied the occult revival of the nineteenth century with much of its language.
"Theosophy" in this guide does not mean the modern movement founded in 1875, which borrowed the word. For that, see The Occult Revival.
Where to begin
Read the Fama Fraternitatis, which takes twenty minutes, and then the Chymical Wedding, which takes an evening and repays it. For Boehme, begin with The Way to Christ, the only one of his books printed in his lifetime, before attempting the Aurora. Our essay Reading Jacob Boehme offers some advice.
Forerunners
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The works of Valentin Weigel German. Written about 1570 to 1588. Printed from 1609. D 4
A Lutheran pastor of Saxony who quietly wrote mystical and Paracelsian treatises on self-knowledge and the inner word, and kept them to himself. They were printed twenty years after his death, and "Weigelian" became a term of abuse for every kind of enthusiasm.
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Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae Heinrich Khunrath. Latin. Hamburg, 1595. Enlarged edition, Hanau, 1609. D 4
Christian Kabbalah, alchemy, and prayer joined in a series of large engraved plates. The best known shows the author kneeling in a chamber that is half oratory and half laboratory. A vivid picture of the world into which the manifestos were born.
For Paracelsus himself, see the guide to Alchemy.
The Rosicrucian manifestos
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Fama Fraternitatis German. Printed at Kassel, 1614. Circulated in manuscript from about 1610. D 4
The story of the brother C. R. C., born in 1378, who learned the secrets of nature from the sages of Damcar and Fez, returned to Germany, and founded a fraternity of eight with six simple rules: to heal the sick without payment, to wear the dress of the country, to meet once a year, to choose a successor, to use the letters R. C. as their seal, and to keep the fraternity secret for a hundred years. His tomb, lit by an inner sun and full of books and mirrors, was opened after one hundred and twenty years. It was first printed together with a satire on the reform of the world translated from the Italian.
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Confessio Fraternitatis Latin. Kassel, 1615. D 4
The second manifesto: more learned, more fiercely anti-papal, and more apocalyptic. It reads the new stars that appeared in 1604 as signs of the coming reformation and offers the brothers' wisdom to those who are worthy.
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Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosencreutz anno 1459 (The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz) Johann Valentin Andreae. German. Strasbourg, 1616. D 4
An aged Christian Rosenkreutz is summoned to a royal wedding at a mysterious castle, where over seven days the guests are weighed, the king and queen are beheaded, and their bodies are taken through an alchemical work to life again. Andreae, a young Lutheran theologian, later called it a ludibrium, a jest. It is also one of the most haunting allegories in German literature.
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The Fame and Confession of the Fraternity of R: C: Translated by Thomas Vaughan, writing as Eugenius Philalethes. English. London, 1652. D 4
The first English printing of the first two manifestos, from a translation that had already been circulating in manuscript. Vaughan's preface is a manifesto of his own for a Christian magic of nature.
The Rosicrucian furor
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Apologia Compendiaria and Utriusque Cosmi Historia Robert Fludd. Latin. 1616, and Oppenheim, 1617 to 1621. D 4
An English physician's defense of the brotherhood, followed by his vast engraved history of the two worlds, the macrocosm and the microcosm. Kepler and Mersenne both wrote against him, and his plates have been reproduced ever since as the very image of the Hermetic universe.
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Silentium post Clamores and Themis Aurea Michael Maier. Latin. 1617 and 1618. D 4
The alchemist of Atalanta Fugiens explains why the brothers have not answered the many letters addressed to them, and sets out the laws they were said to keep. Maier wrote as though the fraternity were real and never claimed to belong to it.
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Analysis Confessionis Fraternitatis de Rosea Cruce Andreas Libavius. Latin. 1615 and 1616. D 4
The leading chemist of the day attacks the manifestos as Paracelsian magic and religious subversion. The critics belong on the same shelf as the believers.
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Instruction a la France sur la verite de l'histoire des Freres de la Roze-Croix Gabriel Naude. French. Paris, 1623. D 4
Written after placards appeared on the walls of Paris announcing that the brothers had arrived, invisible, in the city. A young scholar's dry dismissal of the whole affair. Two years later Naude published a defense of the great men of the past who had been falsely accused of magic.
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Reipublicae Christianopolitanae Descriptio (Christianopolis) Johann Valentin Andreae. Latin. 1619. D 4
A utopia of learning and piety, an island city of laboratories, gardens, and schools. Andreae's sober answer to the dream the manifestos had set loose.
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Le Comte de Gabalis Nicolas-Pierre-Henri de Montfaucon de Villars. French. Paris, 1670. D 4
A comic dialogue in which a Rosicrucian count reveals that the four elements are peopled by sylphs, gnomes, nymphs, and salamanders, who long to marry humans and so gain immortal souls. It was written as satire and has been read as doctrine ever since. Alexander Pope took the sylphs of The Rape of the Lock from it.
Jacob Boehme and the Christian theosophers
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The Way to Christ (Der Weg zu Christo) Jacob Boehme. German. Gorlitz, 1624. D 4
Short treatises on repentance, prayer, and the new birth, and the only work of Boehme's printed in his lifetime. Its publication brought a fresh attack from the chief pastor of Gorlitz, and Boehme died later the same year. For his first book, the Aurora of 1612, see Mystical Classics.
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Mysterium Magnum Jacob Boehme. German. Written 1623. D 4
A long commentary on Genesis that sets out Boehme's whole system: God's self-birth out of the Ungrund, the groundless, the seven qualities or source-spirits of nature, the fall of Lucifer and of Adam, and the signature by which every creature shows its inner nature.
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The Works of Jacob Behmen English. Translated by John Sparrow and others, 1645 to 1662. Reissued in four volumes, 1764 to 1781. D 4
English readers knew him as Behmen. The seventeenth-century translations were made in the years of the Civil War and the Commonwealth, when his readers included radicals and royalists alike. The reissue, usually called the William Law edition, added the elaborate figures of Dionysius Andreas Freher.
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Theologia Mystica John Pordage. English. Published after his death, 1683. D 4
An English physician and clergyman, ejected from his living for visions and familiar spirits, sets out a theology of the invisible worlds in Boehme's terms.
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A Fountain of Gardens Jane Lead. English. Four volumes, 1696 to 1701. D 4
The spiritual diary of a widow of London who recorded her visions of Sophia, the divine Wisdom, from 1670 onward. A small circle gathered round her, and her books were soon translated into German.
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The letters of Johann Georg Gichtel German. Collected after his death as Theosophia Practica. D 4
Gichtel edited the first collected edition of Boehme at Amsterdam in 1682 and lived there at the center of a small celibate circle. His letters are the best record of Boehmist practice as a way of life. Later editions add engraved figures of the inner man.
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The Spirit of Prayer and The Way to Divine Knowledge William Law. English. 1749 to 1752. D 4
The author of A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, the most admired devotional writer of his age, became a disciple of Boehme in middle life and wrote these late books in his spirit, to the dismay of many admirers.
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Des erreurs et de la verite Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin. French. 1775. D 4
Published as by "an unknown philosopher", with a false Edinburgh imprint. Saint-Martin had been a pupil of the theurgist Martines de Pasqually, whose own treatise on the reintegration of beings was not printed until 1899. He later turned from ritual to an inward way, translated Boehme into French, and gave his name to Martinism.
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Die Wolke uber dem Heiligtum (The Cloud upon the Sanctuary) Karl von Eckartshausen. German. 1802. English translation 1896. D 4
Letters on an interior church of the elect that has existed in every age, hidden within the outward church. Much loved by the occultists of the 1890s, who found in it a charter for their own inner orders.
Swedenborg and his critics
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Arcana Coelestia Emanuel Swedenborg. Latin. London, 1749 to 1756. D 4
Eight volumes on the inner meaning of Genesis and Exodus, written after the visionary crisis of 1744 and 1745 that turned a respected mining official and anatomist into a reporter of heaven and hell. The doctrine of correspondences between natural and spiritual things, set out here, passed into Romantic poetry and into Spiritualism. For Heaven and Hell, see Mystical Classics.
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Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (Traume eines Geistersehers) Immanuel Kant. German. 1766. D 4
The philosopher examines Swedenborg's claims with irony and some unease, and uses them to ask what metaphysics can know at all. Shelved beside the books it answers.
The later Rosicrucian literature
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Geheime Figuren der Rosenkreuzer (Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians) German. Altona, 1785 to 1788. D 4
Large colored plates of alchemical and theosophical diagrams, published from the circle of the high-degree Rosicrucian lodges of eighteenth-century Germany. Those lodges practiced alchemy, counted a king of Prussia among their members, and gave later esoteric orders their system of graded initiation.
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The Rosicrucians, Their Rites and Mysteries Hargrave Jennings. 1870. D 4
A Victorian romance of fire-worship, phallic symbolism, and secret tradition, presented as history. Influential, entertaining, and unreliable on almost every page.
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The Real History of the Rosicrucians and The Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross Arthur Edward Waite. 1887 and 1924. D 4
Waite printed the manifestos in English and followed the claims of every later body to Rosicrucian descent, finding none that would bear examination. The second book is the fuller and wiser.
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The Rosicrucian Enlightenment Frances A. Yates. 1972. D 4
Connects the manifestos with the court of Frederick V of the Palatinate and the brief hopes of the years before the Thirty Years' War. Historians have since doubted much of the political argument, but the book brought the subject back into mainstream history.
Things to watch for
- No brotherhood. No evidence has ever been found that the fraternity of the manifestos existed. Every later order that claims descent from it is stating a belief, or telling a story about itself.
- Two theosophies. The Christian theosophy of Boehme and the modern Theosophy of 1875 share a word and little else. Catalogs and booksellers confuse them constantly.
- Boehme's vocabulary. Words like Ungrund, Qualities, Salitter, and Mercurius have private meanings in Boehme. Read him with a glossary, or at least with patience.
- Andreae's jest. Andreae said the Chymical Wedding was a joke. He may have meant it, or he may have been protecting himself. A satire can still carry a serious hope.
- Plates without texts. The engravings of Fludd, Khunrath, and the Secret Symbols are reproduced everywhere without their explanations. Find the page they came from.
On the shelves
The manifestos, the furor, Boehme and his readers, and Swedenborg are shelved at the North Gate in class D 4. The esoteric orders of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and their published rituals are in D 6, and Maier's alchemical books stand at the South Gate in L 4. Related guides: Alchemy, Kabbalah, Mystical Classics, and The Occult Revival.