The name of the founder seemed as mystical as the secret order, the Rose and the Cross.[1] The rose, with the Germans, which was placed in the centre of their ceiling, was the emblem of domestic confidence, whence we have our phrase “under the rose;” and the cross, the consecrated symbol of Christianity, described the order’s holy end; such notions might suit a mystical divine.[2] In the legend, the visionary founder was said to have brought from Palestine all the secrets of nature and of art, the elixir of longevity, and the stone so vainly called philosophical.[3]
If to some the society had a problematical existence, others were convinced of its reality; learned men became its disciples, its defenders; and one eminent person published its laws and its customs. Michael Maier, the physician of the Emperor Rodolph, who had ennobled him for his services, having become initiated by some adepts, travelled over all Germany seeking every brother, and from their confidential instruction collected their laws and customs. At the same time, Robert Fludd, a learned physician of our own country, distinguished for his science and his mysticism, introduced Rosacrusianism into England; its fervent disciple, he furnished an apology for the mystical brotherhood when it seemed to require one.
The arcane tomes of Fludd often spread, and still with “the Elect” may yet spread, an inebriating banquet of “the occult sciences”—all the reveries of the ancient Cabalists, the abstractions of the lower Platonists, and the fancies of the modern Paracelsians, all that is mysterious and incomprehensible, with the rich condiment of science. There are some eyes which would still pierce into truths muffled in jargon and rhapsody, and dwell on the images of realities in the delirious dreams of the learned.
Two worlds, “The Macrocosm,” or the great visible world of nature, and “the Microcosm,” or the little world of man, form the comprehensive view, designed, to use Fludd’s own terms, as “an Encyclophy, or Epitome of all arts and sciences.”[4] This Rosacrusian philosopher seeks for man in nature herself, and watches that creative power in her little mortal miniatures. In his Mosaic philosophy, founded on the first chapter of Genesis, our seer, standing in the midst of Chaos, separates the three principles of the creation: the palpable darkness—the movement of the waters—at length the divine light! The corporeity of angels and devils is distinguished on the principle of rarum et densum, thin or thick. Angelic beings, through their transparency, reflect the luminous Creator; but, externally formed of the most spiritual part of water or air, by contracting their vaporous subtilty, may “visibly and organically talk with man.” The devils are of a heavy gross air; so Satan, the apostle called “the prince of air;” but in touch they are excessive cold, because the spirit by which they live—as this philosopher proceeds to demonstrate—drawn and contracted into the centre, the circumference of dilated air remains icy cold. From angels and demons, the Rosacrusian would approach even to the Divinity; calculating the infinity by his geometry, he reveals the nature of the Divine Being, as “a pure monad, including in itself all numbers.” A paradoxical expression, lying more in the words than the idea, which called down an anathema on the impiety of our Theosophist, for ascribing “composition unto God.” The occult philosopher warded off this perilous stroke. “If I have said that God is in composition, I mean it not as a part compounding, but as the sole compounder, in the apostolic style, ‘He is over all, and in all.’” He detects the origin of evil in the union of the sexes; the sensual organs of the mother of mankind were first opened by the fruit which blasted the future human race. He broods over the mystery of life—production and corruption—regeneration and resurrection! On the lighter topics of mortal studies he displays ingenious conceptions. The title of one of his treatises is “De Naturæ Simia,” or “The Ape of Nature,”—that is, Art! a single image, but a fertile principle.
Sympathies and antipathies, divine and human, are among the mysteries of our nature. By two universal principles, the boreal, or condensing power of cold, and the austral, or the rarefaction of heat, impulsion and repulsion, our physician explains the active operations in the human frame—notions not wholly fanciful; but, at once medical and magical, this doctrine led him into one of the most extraordinary conceptions of mystical invention, yet which long survived the inventor; so seductive were the first follies of science.
Man exists in the perpetual opposition of sympathies and antipathies; and the Cabalist in the human frame beheld the contests of spirits, benevolent or malign, trooping on the four viewless winds which were to be submitted to his occult potentiality. Nor was the physician unsuccessful, for in the sweetness of his elocution, pleasant fancies and elevated conceptions operated on the charmed faith of his imaginative patients.
The mysterious qualities of the magnet were held by Fludd as nothing less than an angelical effluvia. In his “Mystic Anatomy,” to heal the wounds of a person miraculously, at any distance, he prescribed a Cabalistical, Astrological, and Magnetic Unguent. A drop of blood obtained from the wound mixed with this unguent, and the unguent applied to the identical instrument which inflicted the wound, would, however distant the patient resided, act and heal by the virtue of sympathy. This singular operation was ludicrously named “the weapon-salve.”
Fludd not only produces the attestations of eminent persons, who, in charity we may believe, imagined that they had perfectly succeeded in practising his “mystic anatomy,” but he also alleges for its authority the practice of Paul, who cured diseases by only requiring that the handkerchiefs and aprons of patients should be brought to him. Hardly a single extravagance of the Paracelsian fancy of Fludd but rests on some scriptural authority,—on some fictitious statement,—or some credulous imagination. Fludd, indeed, as our plain Oxford antiquary shrewdly opineth, was “strangely profound in obscure matters.”[5] A curious tract was published by Fludd, to clear himself from the odium of magical dealings, in reply to a fiery parson, one Foster, who took an extraordinary mode of getting his book read, by nailing it at the door of the Rosacrusian at night, that it might be turned over in the morning by the whole parish! This was “A Sponge to Wipe away the Weapon-Salve,” showing, that “to cure by applying the salve to the weapon, is magical and unlawful.” The parson evidently supposed that it did cure! Fludd replied by “The Squeezing of Parson Foster’s Sponge. 1631, 4to.”—“to crush and squeeze his sponge, and make it by force to vomit up again the truth which it hath devoured.” Our sage throughout displays the most tempered disposition, and the most fervent genius; but the nonsense is equally curious.
We smile at the sympathy of “the weapon-salve;” but we must not forget that this occult power was the received philosophy of the days of our Rosacrusian. Who has not heard of “the sympathetic powder” of Sir Kenelm Digby, by which the bloody garter of James Howell was cured, and consequently its pleasant owner, without his own knowledge? or of the “sympathetic needles” of the great author of “Vulgar Errors,” by which, though somewhat perplexed, he concluded that two lovers might correspond invisibly? and, above all others, the warts of the illustrious Verulam, by sympathy with the lard which had rubbed them, wasting away as the lard rotted when nailed on the chamber window? Lord Bacon acquaints us that “It is constantly received and avouched, that the anointing of the weapon that maketh the wound will heal the wound itself.”[6] Indeed, Lord Bacon himself had discovered as magical a sympathy, for he presented Prince Henry, as “the first fruits of his philosophy, a sympathising stone, made of several mixtures, to know the heart of man,” whose “operative gravity, magnetic and magical, would show by the hand that held it whether the heart was warm and affectionate.” The philosophy of that day was infinitely more amusing than our own “exact” sciences!