“Belinda still her downy pillow prest,
Her guardian sylph prolonged the balmy rest.”
in Pope’s Rape of the Lock, Warburton thus comments:—
“When Mr. Pope had projected to give the Rape of the Lock its present form of a mock-heroic poem, he was obliged to find it with its machinery. For, as the subject of the Epic consists of two parts, the metaphysical and the civil; so this mock epic, which is of the satiric kind, and receives its grace from a ludicrous mimicry of other’s pomp and solemnity, was to have the like compounded nature. And as the civil part is intentionally debased by the choice of a trifling action; so should the metaphysical by the application of some very extravagant system. A rule which, though neither Boileau nor Garth had been careful enough to attend to, our author’s good sense would not suffer him to overlook. And that sort of machinery which his judgment informed him was only fit for use, his admirable invention soon supplied. There was but one systematic extravagance in all nature which was to his purpose, the Rosicrucian Philosophy; and this by the effort of a well-directed imagination, he presently seized. The fanatic Alchemists, in the search after the great secret, had invented a means altogether to their end: it was a kind of Theological Philosophy, made up in a mixture of almost equal parts of Pagan Platonism, Christian Quietism and the Jewish Cabbala; a mixture monstrous enough to frighten reason from human commerce. This system, he tells us, he took as he found it in a little French tract called, La Comte de Gabalis. This book is written in dialogue, and is a delicate and very ingenious piece of raillery on that invisible sect by the Abbé Villiers; the strange stories that went about of the feats and adventures of their adepts making, at that time, a great deal of noise at Paris. But, as in this satirical dialogue, Mr. P. found several whimsies of a very high mysterious nature, told of their elementary beings, which were unfit to come into the machinery of such a sort of poem, he has, in their stead, with great judgment, substituted the legendary stories of Guardian Angels, and the nursery tales of the Fairies, and dexterously accommodated them to the rest of the Rosicrucian System. And to this artful address (unless we will be so uncharitable to think he intended to give a needless scandal) we must suppose he referred in these two lines,
“If e’er one Vision touch’d thy infant thought,
Of all the nurse and all the priest have taught.”
Thus, by the most beautiful invention imaginable, he has contrived that (as in the serious Epic, the popular belief supports the machinery) in his mock Epic the machinery (taken from a circumstance the most humbling to reason in all philosophical fanaticism) should serve to dismount learned pride and arrogance.”
On verse 45, canto 1, he remarks:—“The Poet here forsakes his Rosicrucian system; which, in this part, is too extravagant even for ludicrous poetry.”
On verse 68, canto 1, he continues:—“Here, again, the author resumes the Rosicrucian system. But this tenet, peculiar to that wild philosophy, was founded on a principle very unfit to be employed in such a sort of poem, and, therefore suppressed, though a less judicious writer would have been tempted to expatiate upon it.”
Swift, in the “Tale of a Tub,” says:—“Night being the universal mother of things, wise philosophers hold all writings to be fruitful, in the proportion they are dark; and therefore the true illuminated (that is to say, the darkest of all) have met with such numberless commentators, whose scholastic midwifery has delivered them of meanings, that the authors themselves perhaps never conceived, and yet may very justly be allowed the lawful parents of them; the words of such writers being like seed, which, however scattered, at random, when they light upon a fruitful ground, will multiply far beyond either the hopes or imagination of the sower. And, therefore, in order to promote so useful a work, I will here take leave to glance a few inuendos, that may be of great assistance to those sublime spirits, who shall be appointed to labour in a universal comment upon this wonderful discourse. And, first, I have couched a very profound mystery in the number of O’s multiplied by seven and divided by nine. Also, if a devout brother of the rosy cross will pray fervently for sixty-three mornings, with a lively faith, and then transpose certain letters and syllables, according to prescription, in the second and fifth section, they will certainly reveal into a full receipt of the opus magnum. Lastly, whoever will be at the pains to calculate the whole number of each letter in this treatise, and sum up the difference exactly between the several numbers, assigning the true natural cause for every such difference, the discoveries in the product will plentifully reward his labour.”
“For Mystic Learning, wondrous able
In magic Talisman and Cabal,
Whose primitive tradition reaches
As far as Adam’s first green breeches;
Deep sighted in Intelligences,
Ideas, Atoms, Influences;
And much of Terra-Incognita,
Th’ intelligible world, could say;
A deep Occult Philosopher,
As learned as the wild Irish are,
Or Sir Agrippa, for profound
And solid lying much renowned.
He Anthroposophus and Fludd,
And Jacob Behmen understood;
Knew many an amulet and charm,
That would do neither good nor harm;
In Rosy-Crusian lore as learned
As he that verè adeptus earned.”
—Hudibras, Part I, Canto I.
The Globe Encyclopædia, under article Rosicrucians, says:—“A mystic brotherhood revealed to the outer world in the Fama Fraternitatis R. C. (1614), the Confessio Fraternitatis R. C. (1615), and the Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosenkreuz (1616), which last was acknowledged by, as the two former works were commonly ascribed to, Johann Valentin Andreæ. From them we learn that a German noble of the 14th century, one Christian Rosenkreuz, after long travel in the East, founded on his return a brotherhood of seven adepts, the R., and dying at the age of 106 was buried in their temple—the ‘House of the Holy Spirit,’ with the inscription on his grave—‘Post CXX. annos patebo.’ The laws of the order, thus made known in the fulness of time, were that its members should heal the sick gratis, should meet once every year in a certain secret place, should adopt as their symbol R. C. (i.e. Rosea Crux), or a rose springing from a cross (the device, be it observed, of Luther’s seal), and should assume the habit and manners of whatsoever country they might journey to. It is now supposed that Andreæ simply intended a hoax upon the credulity of the age, and that Christian Rosenkreuz and all the attendant mysteries were wholly the coinage of his fertile brain. However, the hoax, if hoax there were, was taken seriously, and as early as 1622, societies of alchemists at the Hague and elsewhere assumed the title R., while Rosicrucian tenets powerfully influenced Cabalists, Freemasons, and Illuminati, and were professed by Cagliostro and similar impostors. Even to-day a Rosicrucian lodge is said to exist in London, whose members claim by asceticism to live beyond the allotted age of man, and to which the late Lord Lytton sought entrance vainly.”