Hargrave Jennings was a nineteenth century English writer and occultist.
His vision of the inner knowledge of the Rosicrucians in this book
is, at its core, very similar to that of
the left-hand Tantric path.
In some ways he was very reactionary;
for instance, he rejects the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs and the
atomic theory of the elements.
In other ways, he was far in advance of his time in his concepts
of the roles of gender and sexuality in the quest for spiritual perfection.
You won't find much in the way of historical description of the Rosicrucians
here.
Key Rosicrucian documents such as the
Fama Fraternatis,
Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkrueutz and
Confessio Fraternatis
(see Waite's The Real History of the Rosicrucians)
are not even mentioned.
Nor will you find any disclosure of inner secrets.
Jennings constantly drops hints that he knows more than he is letting on,
but states up-front that he is not an initiate.
Jennings believed that the doctrines of the Rosicrucians
were derived from ancient phallic worship, and to a lesser extent
fire and serpent worship.
In this book, Jennings constructs elaborate
and constantly shifting sets of correspondences.
He tries to interrelate huge sets of symbols and objects in his search for the
elusive Rosicrucians.
This is not a mainstream concept of the Rosicrucian doctrine,
and contemporaries such as A.E. Waite summarily dismissed Jennings' theories.
The book makes frustrating reading at times.
Like his friend Bulwer-Lytton, Jennings piles clause upon clause.
Often he seems on the verge of
stream-of-consciousness automatic writing, walking the thin boundaries
between illumination, synesthesia and psychosis.
Because of Victorian sensibilities, he is unable to
discuss aspects of sacred sexuality without elaborate circumlocutions,
resorting to French and Latin when he needs to spell things out.
Uncharacteristically for a book of this vintage,
there are almost no footnotes, and very little other scholarly apparatus
(although he occasionally gives elaborate bibliographic
citations in the body of the text).
He goes on about hats, flags, and heraldry,
with digressions and out-of-context asides.
For instance, in Part I, Chapter 18,
he starts out with the
color spectrum and its correspondence to the vowels,
suddenly veers into the question of
evil, and ties the chapter up with a note on the Filioque.
He proposes bizarre etymologies, e.g. Iona == Yoni,
that even in the 19th century would have been dismissed
as bunk (perhaps he is actually using esoteric phonetic resonances).
And he is definitely obsessed with spotting phallic symbols, both
male and female, everywhere.
This book dovetails with Hall's
Secret Teachings of All Ages,
although Hall is a lot more coherent and organized.
The two books cover a lot of the same ground such as eternal flames,
Alchemy, the Kabbalah, and so on.
Jennings also wrote a number of other books, primarily on phallic worship,
including The Masculine Cross
and Ancient Sex Worship, (also at online sacred-texts),
under odd pseudonyms such as 'Sha Rocco' and Abisha S. Hudson.
Production Notes:
Due to the huge number of small illustrations,
where multiple figures occurred on a page, I merged them
into one image file.
This text uses Unicode for Greek, Hebrew and astrological
signs; if you have trouble viewing them you should
refer to sacred-texts Unicode walkthrough.
![La Donna della Fiamma, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti [1870] (Public Domain Image)](img/donna.jpg)