Esoteric Coffeehouse

Since I am currently researching on the topic of early Rosicrucianism, I have taken a closer look at the Rosicrucian Manifestos: Fama Fraternitatis and Confessio. My reading of the documents made me decide to provide a modern English version, as the 1652 version is slightly hard to read. While the Chymical Wedding benefited from such a modern English updating, the Manifestos didn’t. I will soon publish my version under a new envisioned section of the website called Downloads.

It is important to know that, although lumped together as the ‘Manifestos’, the Fama and Confessio were not published simultaneously. The Fama was published in Kassel, Germany in 1614 as an appendix to a section of a Italian work by Trajano Boccalini. It was republished, together with the Confessio, in 1615. Hence, the Fama can be considered as the more original and important of the two treatises (in fact, the Confessio constantly refers to the Fama as authority).

To make things easier, I have set what I consider to be the main ideas of the Manifestos in a numbered list below.

1. Secret Medieval Tradition from the East. The works affirm that the Rosy Cross society was established in the 1300s by a legendary friar called Christian Rosenkreutz. He was supposed to have traveled widely in the Eastern lands and to have acquired secret knowledge from Islamic initiates. It was a peculiar aspect of Rosicrucian belief that secret knowledge could be obtained from Moslem thinkers in the Middle East. Needless to say, at the time, many anti-Rosicrucian writers attacked them for upholding non-Christian beliefs. Yet, as shown below, the Rosicrucian manifestos portray a mystical and ardent form of Christianity. Nevertheless, the composers of the Fama and Confessio must have been aware of the historical truth that esoteric knowledge came through the intermediation of Islam.

2. Paracelsianism. The Manifestos refer to Theophrastus Paracelsus as an important precursor of the Rosicrucian revelation; however, they say, he did not belong to the Rosicrucian lineage. Paracelsian language and ideas pervade both Fama and Confessio: they talk about universal medicine, the religious value of knowledge, the inferior nature of gold-making and other ideas traceable to Paracelsian followers. The Paracelsians, it must be remembered, were interested in medical alchemy rather than gold-making and often disparaged the latter as an inferior pursuit. They were also fervent knowledge-seekers, both in nature and in the Bible.

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All Rosicrucian or Rosicrucian-based orders in existence today hark back to the 1614 publication of the famous manifests, the Fama Fraternitatis and the Confessio. These anonymously published works claimed that the Rosicrucians were a hidden order of initiates established by an unknown mystic named Christian Rosenkreutz in the 14th century. The publication of the two manifestos caused an intense excitement on the European intellectual scene, an event which is now referred to as the Rosicrucian furor. Thousands of intellectuals from all over the continent sent letters demanding to become members of the obscure organization. No letter was ever answered.

Today, scholars still wonder: did the Rosicrucians really exist? There are many views on these. On one extreme, there are those that claim that there was indeed an organization of the Rose and Cross, whether or not founded by the mythical Rosenkreutz. At the other extreme, there are those that maintain that Rosicrucianism was a big hoax perpetrated by pranksters. At the middle of the scholarly discourse, there are those who believe that Rosicrucianism was a name comprising a heterogeneous group of reformers that had a common goal, but not a common creed.

At the end of the 16th century, there was expectation in the air. The 1500s had been a period of upheaval and questioning, which had resulted in the split of the Catholic Church and the birth of the Protestant Churches. To us today the 16th century was a period of innovation that opened avenues of inquiry previously deemed impossible. However, for the people actually living during those times the change must have been painful and not necessarily positive. There were wars amongst Christians previously unheard of; witch hunts; plagues; persecutions. Within this unstable environment, many intellectuals spent a lot of time thinking how to reform the European society and mend its religious and social fractures. Many offered solutions, but there was a current of thought that was primarily dedicated to religious concord: the Hermetic one. This heterogenous ‘group’ comprised philosophers, Christian Kabbalists, magicians, and especially, alchemists. The latter, devoted followers of Paracelsus, were particularly active at the end of the 16th century and were spreading their beliefs in the philosopher’s stone and the Universal Medicine.

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As mentioned last time, I will now talk about the identity of the Navi and their religion from a Paracelsian perspective. Just as a reminder, Paracelsus was a revolutionary philosopher, alchemist and physician living in the 16th century (I already touched upon some elements of his life and philosophy here and here). Now, I’m not saying that Cameron was necessarily acquainted with Paracelsian speculation, but it must be kept in mind that the ideas of Paracelsus had a strong impact on the development of Western culture, though the extent of his influence still awaits research.

One of the first things that you notice about the Navi people is their size. They are approximately twice as big as the ordinary humans. They live in the thick forest, in brotherhood with all animals and plants. They are able to ‘fly’ by becoming one with their dragons and have developed a keen ability of falling from huge heights without really getting hurt.

All these characteristics made me think straight away of the mythology of the sylphs, originating in Paracelsus’ speculations. Paracelsus wrote a strange little work called ‘The Book of Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies and Salamanders and the Other Spirits’. According to the Book of Sylphs, there are spirits in nature which live in each of the four elements: water, fire, air and earth.

The water creatures are called undines (or nymphs), the fire ones salamanders, the air ones sylphs (or sylvesters) and the earth ones gnomes (aka pygmies). Each has its own characteristics and rapport with humans. Of all of these, the sylphs appear most humanly; Paracelsus informs us that they are ‘like men’ except they live in the forest, and are ‘cruder, coarser, longer and stronger’ than the human beings. They have intercourse with men, except, Paracelsus maintains in Renaissance vein, they have no soul since soul is reserved to human beings only. Otherwise, they don’t seem to differ very much from men: they work, eat, converse in similar ways to humans.

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Today I want to talk about Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535), the most famous (or infamous) Renaissance magician. He is the author of one of the well-known compendium of Renaissance esotericism, On the Occult Philosophy (or De Occulta Philosophia), which is still admired by people interested in magic today.

Agrippa was a German wanderer, much like his contemporary, Paracelsus. He traveled almost all his life between Germany, France and Italy, and switched professions just as easily as he switched countries. He was a theologian, a lawyer, a physician and a hired soldier. He claimed to have acquired both a law and medicine degree In the meantime, he wrote revolutionary treatises on Renaissance magic, the vanity of knowledge, the status of women in society and Virgin Mary. Most of these he refrained to publish until late in his life.

Agrippa was an unconventional scholar; for instance, in an era when women were seen as inferior and even instruments of the devil, he affirmed that they were in fact superior to men and more spiritual than them. His defense of the female sex caused quite a sensation in the period. In his De Vanitate Scientiarium, On the Vanity of all Sciences, he rejected all forms of knowledge as empty and purposeless. Even today scholars of Agrippa’s works are baffled by his universal rejection of knowledge. He was certainly an unusual iconoclast, an unique character that built and destroyed all at once.

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Not many people liked Paracelsus during his lifetime, and even after his death his somewhat shady reputation followed him into the modern era. He was not a shy Copernicus who only published his discoveries after his death, or a reluctant Galileo who admitted his faults in front of the Inquisition. It was only too lucky for him that the Inquisition was not in full force then. As it was, he lived his life as a perpetual gypsy, until he found his untimely and somewhat mysterious death in Salzburg, now Austria.

Nowadays, when chemistry, biology or medicine look back at him, they find themselves at odds on how to integrate this pivotal figure in their textbooks. It is clear that Paracelsus was instrumental in changing the nature of medicine and ‘chemistry’ (then it was simply alchemy), but he did so in his idiosyncratic ways. Paracelsus was not a scientist, nor could he have been in that age; science as we now call it dates from the late 17th or even the 18th century. His methods and intentions were far too different to those of the later science, and no attempt at ‘recuperating’ Paracelsus for science would actually work. Hence, most scientific textbooks either avoid him or mention him for having destroyed the Galenic-Aristotelian worldview.

This was no mean feat in itself, and only Paracelsus’ ambiguous image probably prevented him from being hailed as a revolutionary of the likes of Copernicus, Galileo or Newton. Surely, the astronomical revolution was spectacular through its change of the paradigm of the earth as the centre of the universe. However, Paracelsus’ efforts of challenging the view of the composition and structure of the universe were also grandiose projects.

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