Rise of the Secret Societies - august/29/2023

The year is 1610. You are an aspirant occultist. John Dee is dead. Shakespeare is soon for the grave. Europe has spent the last century and a half embroiled in bloody religious wars at the behest of kings and priests. Faith in the old institutions is strong, but there are whispers. Dangerous ideas like science, democracy, rationalism, and the rights of man, are taking root in the coffee shops and reading groups of Europe. The broth of the enlightenment simmers on the backburner of history.

This is a strange era for magic. Where the renaissance was dominated by a chain of individual thinkers, all in conversation with one another, the 1600s saw a new element in the mix: The Secret Society.

Despite what you might imagine, Secret Societies like the Freemasons were actually quite common. Though, they were less mystical order, more trade guild meets labor union meets excuse to get out and drink with your buddies. The Freemasons specifically were essentially a trade guild made of middle class professionals. Masons, carpenters, plumbers, etc, would all regularly meet to share professional knowledge and generally get out of the house. Membership offered access to knowledgeable professionals, discounts at mason-affiliated stores, and burial services. The structure of organizations like the Freemasons would provide a blueprint for would-be occult societies going forward.

Putting an exact date on the beginning of Freemasonry is difficult. Records are blended with mythologized history —

NOTES

Rosicrucians have three big manifestos:

Fama Fraternalis: https://www.crcsite.org/rosicrucian-library/fama-fraternitatis/

Confessio Fraternitas: https://www.crcsite.org/rosicrucian-library/confessio-fraternitatis/

Chymical Wedding: https://www.crcsite.org/rosicrucian-library/chymical-wedding1/

Decidedly protestant lol

“Hereby was that high and noble spirit of Brother C.R.C. so stirred up, that Jerusalem was not so much now in his mind as Damasco; also he could not bridle his desires any longer, but made a bargain with the Arabians, that they should carry him for a certain sum of money to Damcar.

He was but of the age of sixteen years when he came thither, yet of a strong Dutch constitution. There the Wise Men received him not as a stranger (as he himself witnesseth), but as one whom they had long expected; they called him by his name, and shewed him other secrets out of his cloyster, whereat he could not but mightily wonder.”

Ah, I see where we get the Templar connection lol

CHAPTER 9 OF THE CONFESSIO FRATERNITAS

“These characters and letters, as God hath here and there incorporated them in the Sacred Scriptures, so hath He imprinted them most manifestly on the wonderful work of creation, on the heavens, on the earth, and on all beasts, so that as the mathematician predicts eclipses, so we prognosticate the obscurations of the church, and how long they shall last. From these letters we have borrowed our magic writing, and thence made for ourselves a new language, in which the nature of things is expressed, so that it is no wonder that we are not so eloquent in other tongues, least of all in this Latin, which we know to be by no means in agreement with that of Adam and Enoch, but to have been contaminated by the confusion of Babel.”

I dont think they realize how many theological doors that opens.

“Chapter XII.

For conclusion of our Confession we must earnestly admonish you, that you cast away, if not all yet most of the worthless books of pseudo chymists, to whom it is a jest to apply the Most Holy Trinity to vain things, or to deceive men with monstrous symbols and enigmas, or to profit by the curiosity of the credulous; our age doth produce many such, one of the greatest being a stage-player, a man with sufficient ingenuity for imposition; such doth the enemy of human welfare mingle among the good seed, thereby to make the truth more difficult to be believed, which in herself is simple and naked, while falsehood is proud, haughty, and coloured with a lustre of seeming godly and human wisdom.”

GIRL THATS YOU. YOU DO THAT.

Michael Maier seemed to write a lot of commentaries on the rosicrucians? Specifically we are gonna look at a text called Silentium Post Clamores, Paul Dupont, MD, FRC

Michael Maier[1] (Latin: Michael Maierus; 1568–1622) was a German physician and counsellor to Rudolf II Habsburg. He was a learned alchemist, epigramist, and amateur composer. Oh like John Dee Rudolph II.

We gotta talk about Maier.

TEHRE hes on fucking page 747 of the Haanegraf dictionary.

MAIER (1669 - 1622)

• Known mainly for Atalanta Fugiens
• And his position in the Rosicrucian Affair
• Lutheran
• Extensively studied, seemed to be into egyptology
• Maier first developed an interest in → alchemy in 1599 whilst in Königsberg, where he witnessed the healing of a chronically ill man through the application of an English iatrochemical remedy. (haanegraf, 748)
• at some time in 1608 he moved to Prague, where he became personal physician to Rudolf II and entered the hereditary peerage on September 29, 1609.
• Maier’s varied corpus displays an admixture of late Renaissance humanist learn- ing, pre-Paracelsian iatrochemical conceptions and a heterodox Lutheran → mysticism; a pervasive motif is his alchemical interpretation of the symbolism of Egyptian and Greek mythology, which was definitively formulated in the Arcana Arcanissima (1614)
• 
  

Maier’s involvement with the early Rosicrucian phenomenon has been the subject of a great deal of unfounded speculation through the centuries. Contrary to the thesis of Frances Yates (The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, 1972)

ROSICRUCIANISM (Hanegraaff, 1009)(fucking finally)

• The phenomenon known as “Rosicrucianism” has its origin in 1614, with a volume that appeared in Kassel, Germany, containing three texts: Allgemeine und General Reformation der gantzen weiten Welt (Universal and General Reformation of the Whole Wide World), Fama Fraternitatis, Deß Löblichen Ordens des Rosenkreutzes, an alle Gelehrte und Häupter Europae geschrieben (The Fame of the Fraternity of the Praiseworthy Order of the Rose-Cross, Written to all the Learned and Rulers of Europe), and Auch einer kurtzen Responsion (Also a Short Reponse) signed by → Adam Haslmayr.
• Chymical Wedding was published the following year, and did pretty well in Europe, but generated a lot of polemics. Others tried to identify the ideological sources
• Basically, it was a proposed solution to three big problems for european intellectuals at the time: A crisis of Religion, politics, and epistemology.
• The manifestoes originated in the “Learned and Christian Society” established by → Johann Valentin Andreae in Tübingen in 1610. (YAY FINALLY SOME GOOD HISTORY)
• Andreae probably wrote Chymical wedding by himself, and collaborated on the other manifestos
• Basically, he wanted christians to stop squabbling, and reconcile with science and learning already.
• The rose is the symbol of spiritualized matter, of God unfolding into reality.
• “ Paracelsus, in his Liber de resurrectione et corporum glorificatione (Book of the Resurrection and Glorification of Bodies, circa 1533), explains that man, regenerated by the Cross, thereafter receives a spiritual body whose glorification is symbolized by the rose; it is Christ, the Man-God, who transfigures us, just as the philosophers’ stone transmutes metallic matter. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Fama Fraternitatis mentions the name of Paracelsus with respect and admiration,”
• In the same way, the Confessio states that the time has come to speak, to reveal the mysteries of the Adamic language, i.e. the primordial idiom, transparent as light, which the animals in Paradise understood and which allowed Enoch to converse with angels. Because the Rosicrucians already possess the knowledge of this language, they claim to be able to go beyond the exoteric meaning of the Bible and give it a spiritual reading, so as to discover that the Holy Scriptures are the quintessence of the entire world, and so as to decipher the characters of the liber Naturae. (How John dee of them)
•