These doctrines not unnaturally brought on the Rosicrucians the suspicion of being an anti-Christian body. The writer of a contemporary pamphlet published in 1624, declares that "this fraternity is a stratagem of the Jews and Cabalistic Hebrews, in whose philosophy, says Pic de la Mirandole, all things are ... as if hidden in the majesty of truth or as ... in very sacred Mysteries."[257]
Another work, Examination of the Unknown and Novel Cabala of the Brethren of the Rose-Cross, agrees with the assertion that the chief of this "execrable college is Satan, that its first rule is denial of God, blasphemy against the most simple and undivided Trinity, trampling on the mysteries of the redemption, spitting in the face of the mother of God and of all the saints." The sect is further accused of compacts with the devil, sacrifices of children, of cherishing toads, making poisonous powders, dancing with fiends, etc.
Now, although all this would appear to be quite incompatible with the character of the Rosicrucians as far as it is known, we have already seen that the practices here described were by no means imaginary; in this same seventeenth century, when the fame of the Rosicrucians was first noised abroad, black magic was still, as in the days of Gilles de Rais, a horrible reality, not only in France but in England, Scotland, and Germany, where sorcerers of both sexes were continually put to death.[258] However much we may deplore the methods employed against these people or question the supernatural origin of their cult, it would be idle to deny that the cult itself existed.
Moreover, towards the end of the century it assumed in France a very tangible form in the series of mysterious dramas known as the "Affaire des Poisons," of which the first act took place in 1666, when the celebrated Marquise de Brinvilliers embarked on her amazing career of crime in collaboration with her lover Sainte-Croix. This extraordinary woman, who for ten years made a hobby of trying the effects of various slow poisons on her nearest relations, thereby causing the death of her father and brothers, might appear to have been merely an isolated criminal of the abnormal type but for the sequel to her exploits in the epidemic of poisoning which followed and during twenty years kept Paris in a state of terror. The investigations of the police finally led to the discovery of a whole band of magicians and alchemists--"a vast ramification of malefactors covering all France"--who specialized in the art of poisoning without fear of detection.
Concerning all these sorcerers, alchemists, compounders of magical powders and philtres, frightful rumours circulated, "pacts with the devil were talked of, sacrifices of new-born babies, incantations, sacrilegious Masses and other practices as disquieting as they were lugubrious."[259] Even the King's mistress, Madame de Montespan, is said to have had recourse to black Masses in order to retain the royal favour through the agency of the celebrated sorceress La Voisin, with whom she was later implicated in an accusation of having attempted the life of the King.
All the extraordinary details of these events have recently been described in the book of Madame Latour, where the intimate connexion between the poisoners and the magicians is shown. In the opinion of contemporaries, these were not isolated individuals:
"Their methods were too certain, their execution of crime too skilful and too easy for them not to have belonged, either directly or indirectly, to a whole organization of criminals who prepared the way, and studied the method of giving to crime the appearance of illness, of forming, in a word, a school."[260]
The author of the work here quoted draws an interesting parallel between this organization and the modern traffic in cocaine, and goes on to describe the three degrees into which it was divided: firstly, the Heads, cultivated and intelligent men, who understood chemistry, physics, and nearly all useful sciences, "invisible counsellors but supreme, without whom the sorcerers and diviners would have been powerless"; secondly, the visible magicians employing mysterious processes, complicated rites and terrifying ceremonies; and thirdly, the crowd of nobles and plebeians who flocked to the doors of the sorcerers and filled their pockets in return for magic potions, philtres, and, in certain cases, insidious poisons. Thus La Voisin must be placed in the second category; "in spite of her luxury, her profits, and her fame," she "is only a subaltern agent in this vast organization of criminals. She depends entirely for her great enterprises on the intellectual chiefs of the corporation...."[261]
Who were these intellectual chiefs? The man who first initiated Madame de Brinvilliers' lover Sainte-Croix into the art of poisoning was an Italian named Exili or Eggidi; but the real initiate from whom Eggidi and another Italian poisoner had learnt their secrets is said to have been Glaser, variously described as a German or a Swiss chemist, who followed the principles of Paracelsus and occupied the post of physician to the King and the Duc d'Orléans.[262] This man, about whose history little is known, might thus have been a kind of Rosicrucian. For since, as has been said, the intellectual chiefs from whom the poisoners derived their inspiration were men versed in chemistry, in science, in physics, and the treatment of diseases, and since, further, they included alchemists and people professing to be in possession of the Philosopher's Stone, their resemblance with the Rosicrucians is at once apparent. Indeed, in turning back to the branches of magic enumerated by the Rosicrucian Robert Fludd, we find not only Natural Magic, "that most occult and secret department of physics by which the mystical properties of natural substances are extracted," but also Venefic Magic, which "is familiar with potions, philtres, and with various preparations of poisons."
The art of poisoning was therefore known to the Rosicrucians, and, although there is no reason to suppose it was ever practised by the heads of the Fraternity, it is possible that the inspirers of the poisoners may have been perverted Rosicrucians, that is to say, students of those portions of the Cabala relating to magic both of the necromantic and venefic varieties, who turned the scientific knowledge which the Fraternity of the Rosy Cross used for healing to a precisely opposite and deadly purpose. This would explain the fact that contemporaries like the author of the Examination of the Unknown and Novel Cabala of the Brethren of the Rose-Cross should identify these brethren with the magicians and believe them to be guilty of practices deriving from the same source as Rosicrucian knowledge--the Cabala of the Jews. Their modern admirers would, of course, declare that they were the poles asunder, the difference being between white and black magic. Huysmans, however, scoffs at this distinction and says the use of the term "white magic" was a ruse of the Rose-Croix.