The Rosicrucian manifestos: Fama, Confessio, Chemical Wedding (1614-1616)

In 1614, in Kassel, the printer Wilhelm Wessel issued a short text in German that would shake learned Europe: the Fama Fraternitatis, the announcement of the existence of a secret brotherhood, the Order of the Rosy Cross. The following year the Confessio Fraternitatis appeared in Latin, and in 1616, in Strasbourg, the Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosencreutz, the «Chemical Wedding». None of the three texts bore an author's name, and this very mystery fuelled one of the liveliest controversies of the seventeenth century.

The legend of Christian Rosenkreutz

The Fama tells the life of a founder called only by the initials C. R., identified in later texts as Christian Rosenkreutz. According to the story, the young German travelled in the East, to Damascus, to an Arab city called Damcar and to Fez, learning mathematics, physics and magic from the local sages. Back in Germany, he founded with a few companions a brotherhood devoted to healing the sick free of charge and to the reform of knowledge.

The text adds that the founder's tomb, hidden for a hundred and twenty years, had been found intact, lit by an artificial light and full of books and instruments. It was the sign that the time of revelation had come. The Confessio, published in 1615, placed the founder's birth in 1378 and insisted on the Christian and anti-papal character of the brotherhood.

A climate of expectation

The manifestos arose in a Protestant Europe marked by apocalyptic expectations, by hopes of general reform and by a strong interest in the natural philosophy of Paracelsus, whom the Fama cites with respect. Manuscripts of the texts were already circulating before publication: the Tyrolean Adam Haslmayr had published a reply to the Fama in 1612, and for his religious views he was condemned to the galleys.

The language of the manifestos is that of the Hermetic and Kabbalistic tradition that Agrippa had helped to systematise: the harmony between macrocosm and microcosm, the book of nature to be read as a divine text, magic as pious wisdom. There are, however, no direct quotations from De occulta philosophia, and the link should be understood as belonging to the same culture, not as derivation.

The Rosicrucian furore

After 1614 hundreds of pamphlets appeared: open letters from people asking to be admitted to the brotherhood, enthusiastic defences, fierce attacks. No one, as far as we know, ever received a reply. In France, in 1623, posters were put up in Paris announcing the presence of the Rosicrucians in the city, provoking curiosity and alarm. Philosophers such as Descartes were suspected of sympathy for the brotherhood and had to defend themselves.

Almost all historians today believe that the brotherhood, as a real organisation, never existed in the form described. The manifestos were probably the work of a circle of young Lutheran intellectuals in Tübingen, including Johann Valentin Andreae and the jurist Tobias Hess. This does not mean they had no real consequences: they inspired Rosicrucian societies and orders in the following centuries.

In the history of Agrippa's legacy, the manifestos represent the moment when occult philosophy became a collective programme. Secret knowledge, which in De occulta philosophia was reserved for a few capable and prudent readers, was now presented as the foundation of a universal reform of humanity, religion and the sciences, announced to everyone through print and discussed in the squares, universities and courts of Europe.