ABSTRACT

The name given to the reformist ideas of a supposed secret society called the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, which professed to derive its new philosophy from an itinerant German called Christian Rosencreutz, who was born in 1378 and died at the age of 106 after learning of “Magia and Cabala” from travels in the East and restoring them in accordance with Christianity to make them “agreeable with the harmony of the whole world.” It was claimed that Rosencreutz’s tomb had been newly discovered in 1604 and provided the occasion for the brotherhood to announce its reformist intentions. First recounted in two manifestos, the Fama fraternitatis, published in 1614 but circulating in manuscript from at least 1610, and the Confessio fraternitatis R.C. (1615), Rosicrucianism advocated a radical reformation of knowledge. Partly inspired by alchemy and Paracelsian iatrochemistry and partly by the more cryptographic magic of writers like Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486-1535) and John Dee (1527-1608), the manifestos hint at a new method of directing and ordering studies according to “sound and sure foundations.” The result of applying this new method will be to increase knowledge, to improve the art of medicine, to ease the burden of labor, and to reveal more clearly the “wonderful works of God.”