Rosicrucians

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Rosicrucians

The term Rosicrucian refers to a set of related esoteric groups that originated from a story of the arrival of ancient wisdom teachings into the West now believed to have originated with the German Lutheran minister John Valentin Andrae (1586–1654). Andrae reportedly authored and anonymously published three documents, "The Fama Fraternitas of the Meritorious Order of the Rosy Cross" (1614), "The Confession of the Rosicrucian Fraternity" (1615), and "The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosencreuz" (1616), that announced the existence of the Rosicrucian Order, revealed its basic teachings, and invited seekers to contact it. According to these documents, the order began with Christian Rosencreuz (1378–1484), who as a young man left his native Germany to study occultism with masters in Muslim lands. He returned in 1407 and began the order, which existed quietly until the public announcement in 1614.

When they were unable to contact the order, occultists across Europe began to create Rosicrucian groups using the three documents and other occult materials, and by the end of the seventeenth century, such orders could be found in England, France, and other European urban centers. Rosicrucian symbology was integrated into speculative Freemasonry, and French Rosicrucianism contributed to the antimonarchical ethos that led to the French Revolution. In the decades after the revolution, the movement suffered from the general attack upon supernaturalism from Enlightenment thinking and all but disappeared. Before its disappearance, however, one small German Rosicrucian group, the Chapter of Perfection, migrated to America in 1684 and settled in Germantown, Pennsylvania. The teachings of this short-lived group contributed greatly to the magical folklore of the region.

Occultism began its modern revival in the nineteenth century. The French magician Eliphas Levi and other thinkers constructed new occult systems that were quite compatible with the new science. Rosicrucianism emerged as one of those scientific occult systems in the 1850s when Pascal Beverly Randolph (1825–1875), an African-American spiritualist, developed a new set of occult teachings and practices (including sex magic) for the Rosicrucian Fraternity. Randolph was the first of several American practitioners to began a Rosicrucian group claiming authority from older Rosicrucian groups in Europe, groups not otherwise known to exist. By far the most successful of these was H. Spencer Lewis, who in 1915 launched the Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis, now headquartered in San Jose, California. Through its broad advertising program and its use of a correspondence course, AMORC has become the largest Rosicrucian group in the world, with lodges and study groups on every continent.

Rosicrucian ideas were revived in England in 1866, when Robert Wentworth Little (1840–1878) and several Masonic colleagues formed the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglica. Out of it would come the Societas Rosicruciana in Civitatibus Foederatis, formed by Charles E. Mayer and fellow Freemasons who received their authority from England. Like the parent body, the SRCF membership was limited to Masons. However, one of the SRCF members, Sylvester C. Gould, would form an open membership version of SRCF as the Societas Rosicruciana in America in 1907. This later order would thrive for a generation under the leadership of Gould's talented successor, George Winslow Plummer.

A second strain of Rosicrucian thought began in 1907 with Carl Louis Von Grasshoff, best known by his pen name, Max Heindel (1865–1919). In Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, he was taught by an unnamed teacher, believed to be the German theosophist Rudolf Steiner. Steiner was articulating a more Christ-centered form of theosophy that would in 1914 cause him to leave the Theosophical Society. Heindel absorbed this Christocentric occultism and moved to America to found the Rosicrucian Fellowship, now headquartered in Oceanside, California. The fellowship would in turn lead to the founding of several additional Rosicrucian orders, the most successful being the Lectorium Rosicrucianum. From its base in Holland, the Lectorium Rosicrucianum has spread across Europe and North America, in spite of its having almost been destroyed by the Nazis.

Despite the lack of support for the account of Christian Rosencreuz, the idea of a Christian occult mystical order has continued to draw people, and Rosicrucianism has thrived as an established element in the twentieth-century occult revival. These new Rosicrucian groups share a name, story, and symbol, the rose cross being derived from the crest of the Protestant reformer Martin Luther. But while Rosicrucians share a few basic occult beliefs, each group teaches quite a distinct form of occult thought and emphasizes its own distinctive practices.