In the early seventeenth century, a series of anonymous pamphlets werepublished in Germany, announcing the existence of the Fraternity of

the Rosy Cross, a fellowship of mystics and alchemists who, it was

Reimagining aShadowy MedievalBrotherhood ThatProbably Didn’t ExistBy Peter Bebergal October 26, 2016

The novelist and screenwriter John Crowley believes that “The Chemical Wedding,” the thirdmajor Rosicrucian text, is not an occult allegory but the first novel of science fiction or fantasy.

claimed, were working in secret to transform European politics andreligion. The first of the pamphlets, which were later called theRosicrucian manifestos, was the “Fama Fraternitatis Rosae Crucis,” and itdescribed a figure called C.R., who learned of magic and alchemy as hetravelled through the Orient, two hundred years earlier, and then returnedto Europe to share his new knowledge. A second pamphlet, “ConfessioFraternitatis,” appeared not long afterward, laying out the purpose andintentions of the fellowship and inviting others into the brotherhood,where they would “find more wonderful secrets by us then heretofore theydid attain.” (This quote is taken from Thomas Vaughan’s translation of themanifestos, republished by Ouroboros Press in 2012.) These secrets wouldbe revealed, the pamphlet explains, but only to a few, at first; in themeantime, they would be “declared in figures and pictures” that would oneday become more widely understood. In 1616, a third document, “TheChymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz,” appeared. “Rosenkreutz” isa German play on “Rosy Cross,” and seemed to be the mysterious C.R. ofthe “Fama.”

In her landmark book “The Rosicrucian Enlightenment,” published in1972, the historian Frances Yates concluded that the Fraternity of theRosy Cross did not actually exist—but she also argued that the documentshad helped to prompt a new way of thinking about the world, one that notonly attempted to “penetrate to deep levels of religious experience” butinspired investigations in science and math as well.* This legacy had beenobscured, she wrote, because “the advancing scientific revolution” was“eager to cast off the chrysalis out of which it [was] emerging.” Over thecenturies, the Rosicrucian myth became the ur-legend for tales of shadowygroups using magic to alter the course of history. It influenced a number ofnineteenth- and twentieth-century magical and mystical Christian orders,some of which claimed to have a direct lineage with the Rosicrucians.(Even Freemasons have claimed an early link to the group.) And the

I

central idea of the manifestos—that through the application of magic andalchemy we might learn that we are a microcosm of the divine—helped toshape, along with Hermeticism, the occult imagination.

In the centuries since, that tradition has informed the work of many artistsand writers, among them the novelist and screenwriter John Crowley, nowseventy-three. Crowley is perhaps best known for “Little, Big,” his 1981novel about a family’s long and intimate history with the fairy world, andfor the “Aegypt” tetralogy, which delves into the lives of key Renaissanceoccultists. Crowley has just published an annotated reworking of the thirdRosicrucian text, titled “The Chemical Wedding by ChristianRosencreutz: A Romance in Eight Days by Johann Valentin Andreae.”Because he doesn’t know German, Crowley pieced together the book bycomparing various English translations, deciding on the most readable andsensible interpretation of a given passage and then putting all of it in a newvoice. Over the phone from his house in Conway, Massachusetts, Crowleytold me that, in so doing, he hoped to strip away some of the culturalmystery surrounding the text. He believes that “The Chemical Wedding”is not an occult allegory, as many modern readers assume. Rather, he says,it is the first novel of science fiction or fantasy—a speculation about thefuture as well as a comment on its own time.

s Crowley right? The answer to that question starts with JohannValentin Andreae, a Lutheran theologian who claimed in his

autobiography, “Vita Ab Ipso Conscripta,” to have written “The ChemicalWedding” as a ludibrium, “a sort of youthful prank,” as Crowley puts it in

Get the best of The New Yorker every day, in your in-box.

Enter your e-mail Sign me up

his introduction. Much has been made of Andreae seeming to dismiss hisown work, but, as Yates notes in “The Rosicrucian Enlightenment,”Andreae is specifically referring to an early version of “The ChemicalWedding,” written in 1603, well before the Rosicrucian manifestos madetheir appearance. When he revised the work, years later, he was clearlyresponding to the manifestos—though just what he meant by his responseremains difficult to say.

In the version of “The Chemical Wedding” that is available today,Christian Rosencreutz is visited by an angelic being, adorned with wings“full of eyes like a peacock’s,” who presents him with an invitation to thewedding of a king and queen. Becoming a guest will not be simple:Christian is put through a series of tests, and his virtues are weighed on ascale. Those who don’t pass these tests are executed. Christian passes, andis then led through a series of strange experiences: standing inside a giantglobe emblazoned with the constellations, encountering a collection ofsinging statues, witnessing the distillation of fluids from corpses. The bookculminates with Christian’s involvement in complex laboratorypreparations, including the creation of a bird that is then killed; its ashesare used to make two homunculi, which, in the laboratory, grow to becomethe bridal couple.

With these strange, seemingly symbolic episodes, Andreae was not, inCrowley’s view, trying to convey esoteric truths that could change theworld. Rather, he was creating a fantastical satire about serious things.“The Chemical Wedding” is full of outlandish set pieces—candles thatwalk on their own; a queen’s gown so beautiful it can’t be gazed upon—that might suggest an allegorical reading. But their imagery, as Crowleypoints out in his footnotes, is inconsistent: any allegory is defeated by thebook’s sheer incongruity. The openness of the Rosicrucian manifestos towildly varying interpretations caused something of a panic when they were

first published—Crowley told me that people wondered whether theyshould interpret them as part of a new movement for social reform or asthe sign of “a demonic force that’s sweeping through society, and that’sgoing to destroy all princes and throw kings off their thrones and plunge usall into who knows what.” It’s possible, Crowley writes, that Andreae waspoking fun of the very people who believed the Rosicrucians were real.

But what the purely allegorical reading really misses, Crowley says, is thatthese pamphlets were published at a time when actual physicalexperimentation was already taking place. Alchemists combined mysticalthinking with crude forms of natural science, or what was then called“natural magic.” They believed that their own spiritual condition was anintegral part of the success of their experiments, which they recorded incoded ways, using images of marriage, conception, and birth in order toocclude what they were doing with their molten metals and crushed herbs.They believed that the “Great Work,” as it was called, was part of anancient quest for immortality, and that the new form of gold wouldbecome a life-sustaining material. But trying to transmute lead and otherbase metals into gold required genuine knowledge of certain elements anda willingness to test ideas against physical experimentation. Eventually,chemistry became a separate and important part of the scientific venture.

If this early, science-driven alchemical vision is behind “The ChemicalWedding,” then the book starts to look like a novel of speculative fiction,or what Crowley calls, in the introduction, “a marvelous adventure ratherthan simply a parable”—a sort of seventeenth-century “Gulliver’s Travels,”perhaps. “The Chemical Wedding” imagines a future that involvesfantastic machines, like “statues or figures that moved by themselves just asif they were alive,” and a giant sphere that functions as a planetarium.

VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER

Lies and Truth in the Era of Trump

But Crowley’s attempt to frame the novel as science fiction is, I think, onlyhalf right. While the text arises out of a backdrop of “new and unfoldingscience,” the Rosicrucian myth is crucial to the shape that it took.Whether a hoax or a deliberate appeal for spiritual revolution, themanifestos were not an attempt to laud reason and science as the world’ssalvation: the first Rosicrucian texts point backward, to a golden age ofmagic and arcane wisdom that, the texts suggest, could once againenlighten the world if we only would return to them.

There are people who still believe this. Despite Andreae’s claim that “TheChemical Wedding” was a youthful fancy_,_ contemporary Rosicrucian-influenced organizations hold up the document as an important symbolicwork. They do not necessarily believe that the Rosicrucian order itselfexisted—a member of Societas Rosicruciana in Civitatibus Foederatis, aMasonic Christian organization, explained to me in an e-mail that manyof his fellow-members are quick to accept “The Chemical Wedding” andother Rosicrucian texts as hoaxes. They nonetheless regard these works as“useful,” and “carriers of truth.” The Ancient Mystical Order Rosae

Crucis, founded in 1909 by H. Spencer Lewis, calls itself the “the mostprominent modern representative” of Rosicrucianism. The organization’sWeb site describes “The Chemical Wedding” as a text that “leads ustoward the vision of a better world through an alchemical dream.”

Crowley has an immunity to such “occult thinking,” he told me—but he’snonetheless sympathetic to those sorts of interpretations. “I am entrancedand intrigued with these modes of thought and ways of investing theworld with wonder and astonishing qualities,” he said. Fundamentally, inhis view, the “mythic realms of thought and feeling” described in theRosicrucian pamphlets offered to Andreae “a magical system that could beused in what is sort of, in effect, a fantasy novel.” And so he sees inAndreae’s work something not unlike his own creative process—that is, ause of the alchemical and the occult imagination in service to a story.

To illustrate this point, Crowley related an incident from the life ofWilliam Butler Yeats, who was deeply immersed in the occult revival ofthe late nineteenth century. In the introduction to his strange andobsessive book “A Vision,” Yeats writes about how, shortly after he wasmarried, his wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees, suggested that they try automaticwriting, in an attempt to channel communications from a spirit guide. The“disjointed sentences” that resulted so excited Yeats that he proposed to the“unknown writer” who was guiding him that he devote his life todeciphering these apparently coded messages. “No,” the spiritual voiceapparently answered. “We have come to bring you metaphors for poetry.”The point, in other words, is not adhering to occult ritual but stretchingone’s imagination. “I’m with Yeats,” Crowley said.

*An earlier version of this sentence misspelled the name Frances Yates.

Peter Bebergal is the author of “Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rockand Roll.” Read more »

© 2018 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of and/or registration on any portion of this siteconstitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated 5/25/18) and Privacy Policy and CookieStatement (updated 5/25/18). Your California Privacy Rights. The material on this site may not be

reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior writtenpermission of Condé Nast. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products and services that

are purchased through links on our site as part of our affiliate partnerships with retailers. Ad Choices