Comte de Gabalis
was a popular little book in the
Spectators
time. I suppose I need not inform my readers that there never was a Rosicrucius or a Rosicrucian sect. The Rosicrucian pamphlets which appeared in Germany at the beginning of the 17th century, dating from the Discovery of the
Brotherhood of the Honourable Order of the Rosy Cross
, a pamphlet published in 1610, by a Lutheran clergyman, Valentine Andreä, were part of a hoax designed perhaps originally as means of establishing a sort of charitable masonic society of social reformers. Missing that aim, the Rosicrucian story lived to be adorned by superstitious fancy, with ideas of mystery and magic, which in the
Comte de Gabalis
were methodized into a consistent romance. It was from this romance that Pope got what he called the Rosicrucian machinery of his
Rape of the Lock
. The Abbé de Villars, professing to give very full particulars, had told how the Rosicrucians assigned sylphs to the air, gnomes to the earth, nymphs to the water, salamanders to the fire.