ABSTRACT
Modern ‘Rosicrucians’ and the appeal to a ‘hidden transmission’ McIntosh (1987, 145) observes that ‘human beings love a mystery, and the Rosy Cross is a mystery par excellence’. The present study identifies the source of this ‘mystery’ with the appeal to a ‘hidden transmission’ made amongst three groups with ‘Rosicrucian’ affiliations of varying intensities with roots in the cultic milieu of the 1930s. These groups invoked the authority of ‘hidden transmission’ to address questions of plausibility and legitimation arising from their various ‘invented’ (Cusack 2010) or ‘fiction-based’ (Davidsen 2013) claims. In this paper, I make a heuristic distinction between ‘radical’ and ‘qualified’ invention of ‘tradition’ (Hobsbawm [1983] 2002), here represented by the appeal to a ‘hidden transmission’, where radical invention rejects evidence-based, falsifiable historiography in favour of entirely fictional narratives, while qualified invention amalgamates historical-empirical and fictional-imaginative sources. The resulting tension between two types of invention is induced in the first instance from examination of primary sources: chiefly archival material and published emic histories. But the distinction also has deductive capacity in predicting
greater longevity of ‘qualified inventions’, in which a significant detail of a formation remains nonfalsifiable and hence inferentially attractive at the same time as it incorporates evidence-based history, over ‘radical invention’ in which formations from the outset ‘are admitted to be the product of the human imagination’ and even deliberately ‘announce their invented status’ (Cusack 2010, 1). While historiographical strategy cannot be the sole criterion in the success of a new formation – social and economic variables clearly play an important role (Lewis 2003) – I argue here that the tension between radical and qualified invention constitutes a significant causal factor in the career differential between the long defunct ROCF, and the still vital Findhorn and Wicca.1
