They were joined by four more brothers, before all eight set out to the far corners of the earth in order to reform and transform it.
The extraordinary supernatural gifts attributed to the Rosicrucians made them one of the great romantic legends of European history. They had the gift of great longevity — Rosencrantz died in 1485 at the age of 107. Because they knew ‘the secrets of nature’ and could command disembodied beings, they could exert their will magically, which they did mostly for the sake of performing healing miracles. They could read minds, understand all languages, even project living images of themselves over great distances and communicate over great distances. They could also make themselves invisible.
The great Cabalist Robert Fludd was, according to esoteric tradition, one of the scholars employed by James I to work on the Authorized Version of the Bible. Often thought to have been a Rosicrucian himself, he was at the least a well-informed and sympathetic fellow traveller. Fludd came to the defence of the Brotherhood in print, repudiating accusations of black magic. He argued that the supernatural gifts of the Rosicrucians were the gifts of the Holy Spirit laid out by St Paul in the Epistle to the Corinthians — prophecy, performing miracles, possession of languages, visions, healings, expelling demons. That the local parish priest could no longer do these things helps to account for Europe’s growing fascination with the shadowy Rosicrucians.
By all accounts the priests of antiquity had been able to summon gods to appear in the inner sanctum of the temple, but, following the Church’s abolition of the distinction between soul and spirit in 869, the understanding of how to reach the spirit worlds had gradually been lost. By the eleventh century priests were no longer capable of summoning even visions of the spirit worlds during Mass. Now in the fifteenth century the spirit worlds began to flood back via the portal of the Rosicrucians.
But there is something else. Eckhart and Tauler had talked of the material transformation of the body by spiritual practice. Eckhart had left intriguing hints at alchemy — ‘Copper’, he had said, ‘is restless until it becomes Mercury.’ But a more systematic account only began to emerge with Rosicrucianism.
NO OTHER ARTIST OF THE FIRST RANK HAS alchemical ideas quite so close to the surface of his work as Hieronymus Bosch.
Little is known about the Dutch magus except that he was married, owned a horse and is said to have contributed altarpieces and designs for stained-glass windows in the cathedral of his native city of Aachen. Bosch died in 1516, so he must have been painting while Christian Rosencrantz was still alive.
In the 1960s Professor William Fraenger published a monumental study of Bosch in terms of the esoteric thought of the times in which the artist lived. Fraenger made sense of paintings which had otherwise just seemed baffling and weird.
Many Bosch paintings have been labelled Heaven, Hell or Apocalypse, sometimes perhaps in a rather perfunctory way, just because they contain strange visionary elements not part of conventional Christian iconography and theology. But in fact Bosch’s paintings are really deeply esoteric — and contrary to Church dogma. For example, it was not Bosch’s view that unrepentant wrongdoers go to Hell — that’s it and serve them right for eternity. He believed that after death the spirit journeys through the sphere of the moon, then ascends through the planetary spheres to the highest heavens — then descends again into the next incarnation. The detail below from a panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights, conventionally labelled Hell, in fact shows a spirit about to descend from one sphere to another.
According to Fraenger, Bosch’s paintings, for example the famous Table of Wisdom also in the Prado in Madrid, shows that he knew of a technique for achieving altered states practised in different esoteric schools around the world. According to Indian esoteric teaching, the golden lord of the cosmic powers — the Purusha — is at work both in the sun and in the pupil of the eye. In the Upinashads it is written, ‘The Purusha in the mirror, on him I meditate.’ By staring at one’s reflection mirrored in the right eye, you can expand your consciousness from contemplation of your limited ego-self to contemplation of the sun-like god-self at the heart of everything. This method was also practised by the Dutch mystic Jan van Ruysbroek, who described how self-forgetting and world-forgetting leads at first to sensations of vacuity and chaos. Then the field of vision becomes charged with a cosmic energy. Images which at first appear dream-like and chaotic suddenly move together in a meaningful way.
This eye-to-eye method of meditation can also be practised in a sexual context.
An earlier mystic, Mechthild of Magdeburg, had had visions of a time when the life of sensuality would be fully integrated into the spiritual order of things. This impulse, she believed, would grow and take root in Northern Europe where something very different from the asceticism of Ramón Lull emerged. Esoteric groups like the Brothers and Sisters of the Free Spirit, influential during Bosch’s lifetime, were guided by a vision of communities held together not by law but by love. Wisely controlled, love is the way to divine perfection.
Sex, as Fraenger puts it, is the knife blade.
THE AUTHOR MOST CLOSELY ASSOCIATED with the Rosicrucian brotherhood, not least because some of his writings were said to have been buried with its founder, was Paracelsus.
‘I am a rough man,’ said Paracelsus ‘born into a rough country.’ More specifically he was born in a village near Zurich in 1493. A strange, aggressive character, he seems never to have grown a beard and to have retained a youthful appearance into old age.
He went to study under Trithemius, Abbot of St Jacob at Würzburg. Trithemius was one of the greatest adepts of the day and teacher, too, of Cornelius Agrippa. Trithemius claimed to know how to send his thoughts on the wings of angels over hundreds of miles. He was asked by the Emperor Maximilian I to summon up the ghost of his dead wife, and when Trithemius obliged, the Emperor was able to be sure that this phantom really was her by the mole on the back of her neck.
Paracelsus’s fellow pupil Cornelius Agrippa became an itinerant intellectual vagabond, surrounded by rumours of magic. His great black dog, Monsieur, was said to be demonic, keeping his master informed of events in a hundred-mile radius. De Occulta Philosophia was his attempt to write an encyclopaedic account of practical Christianized Cabala, including a massive grimoire of magic spells still used by occultists today.
However, Paracelsus does not seem to have been very impressed by Trithemius. It seems he did not want to study in a library but learn from experience. He went to live among miners in order to learn about minerals for himself. He also travelled widely from Ireland to the crocodile-infested swamps of Africa, learning folk remedies and cures. In one way he can be seen as anticipating the Brothers Grimm, collecting ancient, esoteric knowledge before it disappeared. He knew that consciousness was changing and that, as the intellect developed, humanity would lose the instinctive knowledge of herbs that heal — a knowledge that up till then it had shared with the higher animals. On the cusp of that change, he wrote as systematic an account of these things as he could.
In 1527 he set up as a doctor in Basle in Switzerland and soon became famous for his miraculous cures. Naturally he made enemies of doctors already working in the region. Paracelsus was scornful of the conventional medicine of the day. In a typical piece of bombast he wrote of Galen, author of the standard medical textbooks of the day: ‘If only your artists knew that their prince Galen — they call none like him — was sticky in Hell from where he has sent letters to me, they would make the sign of the cross upon themselves with a fox’s tail.’