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THE extraordinary philosophy of the Rosicrucians (and of the Rosicrucian system) is best explained (though it is all erroneous as to the true meanings of the Brothers of the 'R. C.') through the following, charges which were brought forward to the disparagement of these famous men. Petri Gassendi Theologi Epistolica Exercitatio. In qua Principia Philosophiæ Roberti. Fluddi Medici reteguntur. Parisiis, apud Sebastianum Cramoisy, via Jacobæa sub Ciconiis, M.DC.XXX.
'Primo. Totam scripturam sacram referri ad alchymiam, et principia alchymistica. Sensum scripturæ mysticum non esse alium, quàm explicatum per alchymiam, et philosophicum lapidem. Non interesse ad ilium habendum cujus religionis sis, Romanæ, Lutheranæ, aut alterius. Catholicum ilium solum esse, qui credit in Lapidem Catholicum, hoc est Philosophicum, cujus ope homines Dæmonia ejiciant, linguis loquantur novis, etc.
'Second. Cum Deus sit quædam Lux per totum mundum diffusa, illum tamen non ingredi in ullam rem, nisi privs assumpserit quasi vestem spiritum quendam æthereum, qualis opera alchymiæ extrahitur, et quinta essentia vocatur. Facere proinde Deum compositionem cum hoc spiritu æthereo. Residere cum illo præsertim in sole, unde evibretur ad generationem, et vivificationem omnium rerum. Deum hoc modo esse formam omnium rerum, et ita agere omnia, ut causæ secundæ per se nihil agant.
'Tertio. Compositum ex Deo, et Spiritu isto Æthereo esse animam mundi. Purissimam partem hujus animæ esse naturam angelicam, et cœlum empyreum, quod intelligatur permistum esse omnibus rebus. Dæmones etiam particulas esse ejusdem essentiæ, sed malignæ materiæ alligatas. Omnes animas tam hominum, quam
brutorum, nihil esse aliud, quam particulas ejusdem animæ. Eandem animam esse Angelum Michaelem, seu Mitattron.
'Quarto. Quod est amplios, eandem mundi animam esse verum Messiam, Salvatorem, Christum, Lapidem Angularem, et Petram universalem, supra quam Ecclesia, et tota salus fundata sit. Hanc nempe esse præcipuam partem Philosophici Lapidis, quæcum addensata rubescat, exinde dicatur esse sanguis Christi, quo emundati, et redempti sumus. Neque enim nos emundari sanguine Christi humano, sed hoc divino, et mystico.
'Quinto. Hominem justum esse alchymistam, qui Philosophico Lapide invento, illius usu immortalis fiat. Mori tamen dici, cum partes corruptibiles abijicit; Resurgere, cum fit incorruptibilis; Glorificari, cum proinde easdem dotes assequitur, quæ tribuuntur corporibus gloriosis. Hommes quihuc evaserint "FRATRES CRUCIS ROSEÆ" dictos, scire omnia, posse omnia, non arbitrari rapinam esse se equales Deo, cum eadem in illis sit mens, quæ in Christo Jesu.
'Sexto. Creationem none esse productionem rei ex nihilo, ut nos vulgo intelligimus nihil. Materiam (quam sæpissime tenebras vocant) esse id, quod proprie appelletur nihil; ac proinde cum Deus dicitur creare, aut facere aliquid ex nihilo, intelligi creare, aut facere ex materia. Moysen, cum Creationem Mundi descripsit, fuisse alchymistam, itemque Davidem, Salomonem, Jacob, Job, et omnes alios; adeo ut etiam yeti Cabbalistæ nihil aliud quam alchymistæ sint; itemque Magi, sapientes, philosophi, sacerdotes, et alii.' Marinus Mersennus significantly adds: 'Quæso autem, nisi ista sunt impia, quid potest esse impium?'
In the first place, the whole of the Sacred Scriptures are a grand mystical puzzle referring to ALCHEMY, and to the universal alchemic process. The mystical sense of the Old and the New Testaments is none other than the HISTORY OF ALCHEMY--originated in the Cabala (with the secrets contained therein), and the rationale of that called 'The Philosophers’ Stone'. It matters not to the question of these secrets fixed what religions be professed; whether Christian, whether those of the 'Sects', whether infidel and heathen. That only is 'Catholic' which lies in the 'Stone'--otherwise practical magic; whereby Demons are commanded, good spirits evoked, and the innermost
hidden resources of nature, and the Spirits of Nature, laid bare and availed-of.
Secondly.--When Deity is said to be 'Light', pervading and vivifying all nature, He enters not in anything unless a mask of the object is adopted as the medium in which He fixes. This aura (or the deliquescence of the uproused light) is the infinite Ethereal Spirit. The spring or the moving spirits, or the means, of alchemy evolve out of it. They are fivefold in their exercise or delimitation. God is indeed identical with this supreme spirit. And the radiant or intense material-nucleus is the lucid conflux-spot or the SUN stored (by its spirits) with vigour, sensitiveness, and intelligence. From this Intense Centre or Fiery Blaze of Power (the Sun), agitations and life vibrate in masterdom from the middle-point to circumference. God, thus, in producing, is said to be identified with Matter, and He so fills (and IS) that there are not (nor can there be) secondary causes, except to Man; who can only know second causes. This, be it noted, is 'Berkeleyism' on the one side, and its opposite, or 'Spinozism', on the other--both being the same thing in reality; looked at from either side; or from before and from behind.
Thirdly.--Composed of this 'mask', and of this infinite medium or Divine Movement, is the general investment (or spirit) called the 'Soul of the World'. The purer part of this sensitive, responsive soul is, in its own nature, of the breath of the angels (for 'the Angels were made'). The anima mundi is the Flaming Spiritual Region, in which all things live. Even the devils are portions of this efflux, which is the general life. But the Rebellious Spirits (the vis inertiæ, or the laziness, so to speak), of matter--dense, contradictory, inaccessible--are buried or lost--and were afterwards chained--in inapprehensive matter. All particular
[paragraph continues] 'sentiences'--whether of the brutes or man--are nothing other than parts of the whole lucid spirit. Of the same soul (in essence) is the Archangel Michael, or Mitattron. Also all the Angels in their Sevenfold Regions; both of the Bad, and of the Good; of the Dexter and of the Sinister Sides of Creation.
Fourthly.--Which is still more dreadful (in appearance), the same anima mundi, or Soul of the World, is the real Messiah, Saviour, Christ, the 'Corner-Stone of the Temple', the 'Temple' itself (the universe) the 'STONE' (Petram Universalem), or 'ROCK' (Peter--St. Peter), upon which the Church, and Salvation, is founded. This is the mystical end and scope of that longed-for Beatitude--or Magical Transfiguration--the 'Philosophers’ Stone', or 'Foundation'. Which (being to be obtained 'out of the material' by 'supernatural' means) when contracted into itself, and concentrated and intensified, glows (or martyrises) into flaming red, or possession, or Glorified Agony (made Heaven). From thence it is said to be the 'Blood' of Christ (and the 'Gross' of Christ), which 'blood' was shed for the redemption of the world from the penalties of the (First?) FALL (by Which We Are). By means of the 'Great Sacrifice' mortality is purged into purity back into the celestial fire, and redeemed from Hell or Matter. However, we are not redeemed by the blood of a 'Human' Christ, but by the atoning blood in a divine and mystical sense. (See corresponding plates.)
Fire is contention--whether holy or unholy. Heat, intensified in the struggle, agitates furiously to FIRE. Fire, triumphing and mastering the matter which lends it its material and strength, when passing into victory brandishes into the calm and the glory of victory, and becomes yellow in its flaming precious. gold, and quiet LIGHT intense as the grandest phenomenon--
sprung up skywards; or against gravity; therefore reversing nature's principal law. The intenser the darkness, or the mass of matter (the Rosicrucians’ 'other side' of Spirit, and of Light), the greater the Light, and the greater the spirit and vivacity and force in the Liberation into Light (and into Spirit) of the Darkness and the Matter; when its farthest-winnowed atoms are forced asunder in the darts of the fire, and turned 'inside-outwards'. See preceding pages. This is the 'Holy Grail', or 'Sangreal', or 'Sang-Reale' or Fire', or 'Mighty Redeeming Magic', sought by the Champions, or the Knights, of King Arthur's Round Table. See Supplementary Explanations.
Fifthly.--The 'Just Man made Perfect' is the Alchemist (or rather, Rosicrucian) who, having found the Philosophers’ Stone (San Graal, or Holy Grail, or 'Sang Reale' or 'Holy Rapture' or Magic Birth into the Celestial Fire, or flame of Self-Extinguishment, or of 'Ecstasy'), becomes immortal (and disappears, or 'dies' to the world). His 'chariot of fire' being that of Enoch, or 'Translation'. To die is simply the falling asunder and disintegration of the mechanism of the senses, which have contracted inwards and formed (in life) the prison of the soul--a prison of pains and penalties; from between the bars of the windows of which (or out of the eyes) the suffering, languishing SPIRIT looks for the often long-coming releasing GREAT SPIRIT-DEATH. The flitting is of the flickering flame (consciousness) out of the urn. To 'Rise'--is to cast off the chains of mortality. To become 'Glorified' is to discover in one's own identity the glorious, godlike gifts or MAGIC--which are the wings upon which to rise. Those men who have passed (as through a door) in their lifetime from the 'hither' side (or world) to the 'thither' side (or the
world invisible)--following into the LIGHT the divine beckon to Paradise of the ANGELS of LIGHT, are the BROTHERS of the ROSY CROSS, or the ROSICRUCIANS, as they have been called; who 'know everything', can 'do anything', and have even arrogated to themselves, when in them should be set up the same angelical-magical spirit which was in the Christ-Jesus, to be of the 'COUNCIL of GOD'. Though, in the world, they were the humblest of the servants of the Almighty.
In the Sixth Place,--Creation is not the making of things out of nothing, which we understand commonly (or vulgarly) of God’s work in the beginning of the universe or of Creation. Matter, which the Rosicrucians frequently refer to as Darkness, is that only which is properly, to be called 'Nothing'. Thus when God is said to create, or make something out of nothing (to do which is impossible), it is to be understood that He worked with material, or with DARKNESS, which is the 'Blank side' or the 'Other Side of Light; turned away'. These profound metaphysical distinctions are the key of all the Theologies. Moses, when he describes the Creation of the World, is the Alchemist, relating in parable the generation of the solids, and the flowing-over into the border-country (out of the flesh) of the Invisible--WHERE EVERYTHING ULTIMATELY IS. The history of David, Solomon (of the 'Temple'), Jacob (of the 'Ladder; or Staircase from Earth to Heaven, and from Heaven to Earth', etc.), Job; the accounts of the Heroes of the stories of the Apocrypha (the most concealed or recondite of the 'things hidden'--thence its name), etc., are cabalistic and alchemical, similarly to all the mythologies, which are, in their fanciful and mystic range of supposed facts, cabalistic and alchemical. The true Cabalistæ are none other than Alchemists and Rosicrucians. Likewise the Magi, Wise Men, Philosophers, Priests, and
[paragraph continues] Heroes; from Jason and the 'Three Kings' to King Arthur, and from Adam, Noah, Abraham, and Moses, to Numa, Paracelsus, Borrichius, Robertus de Fluctibus (nearer our own time), AND OTHERS.
The Rosicrucian system took the following forms:--These Philosophers believed that there were Two Principles in the Beginning--Light and Darkness, or Form and the Material out of which the Form was. That before the Creation (distinctively so called), the Light Itself was as 'Divinity Latent' or 'At Rest'. In the Creation, or in the production of things, Divinity became active, aroused, and inventive. By whatever name distinguished, or by whatever style identified, Moses’ description of Creation is to be taken as the process of alchemy, as worked by Nature itself, being her Form; to which head are referred the kingdoms of darkness, or chaos, and the Light emerging out of its own bosom or DARKNESS.
After the active movement from the centre, or evolvement, or Creation, the radiation and counter-working or interchange of Light and Darkness in crossing and encountering irritated mutually, naturally; became expansive and contractive angularly--thence pyramidal and starry. And in the relative counterbalancing contemperation, the diversity of things arose at the points of the masterdom into form or Light. The medium in which the elements were (and the elements themselves) now grew 'in their natures'. From these various rudiments of being--(in the vehicle Light) the archetypical scheme arranged itself; which, 'One' in essence, was 'Triple' in procession or 'parade'. Hence the TRINITY.
But it is Incomprehensible, obviously, without the means to comprehend it--which is CHRIST. Christ the 'PENALTY'--Christ the 'SACRIFICE'. Christ the 'Glass' of the 'Universe', in which 'God' saw
[paragraph continues] 'Himself'. But 'Christ' is not 'God' any more than the 'Glass' is the 'Seer'. From the TRINITY and the vivifying substratum in the mathematical four corners of the world, comes the ineffable name--'Tetragrammaton'. The archetypical 'Idea' is also called Reflective--Intelligible--Informed--Superessential--Endless in resource.
Object--Subject--Result: or the Three 'Persons' of the Trinity. The reflection of God is in the Archetype which is the Second Principle, or 'Macrocosmos' (created worlds), exhibiting 'Either Side', or 'Will' in 'Action'. This is displayed in Three Divisions, or Spheres--called (1st) the 'Empyræum' (God). (2nd) The 'Etheræum' (the 'Saviour'). (3rd) The 'Elements' (the Virgin Mary). Light emanates in the Sephiroth ('CABALA') or 'Seven-fold' rotation--hence the 'production of phenomena'. In uniting with the Ethereal Spirit, it becomes the Soul, or 'Responsive Sentience of the World'. The further elucidation of the Rosicrucian theological system, in its general features--so far as in hint or parable submitted to unenlightened comprehension--will be found prestated in previous pages, and elsewhere.
The Rosicrucians contend that music, or melody--which is enchantment--pervades all nature in its prosperous or intended progress, although it is only the wail, or plaint, of the instinctive soul on its 'wounded', or 'sacrificed', or 'Ruined Side'. It mourns for its 'Original Lost Paradise'. The music of the spheres is no unreal thing, but real as is the atmosphere of the spirits; for 'music is the atmosphere of the spirits', and discords (though the necessity, support, and balance of Creation) are a medium for the coarse and low spirits, who inundate, as it were, the lees and the settlings of nature. In discords, or in the inharmonious strife amidst the sounds, the
rabble of the spirits (so to term them) are stimulated to their envious and spiteful, or malific or freakish and blundering, bad life. Beauty is not, however, necessarily beauty--it may be seduction. For the higher grades of the recusant or rebellious spirits who find their power in the original permission that there 'might be phenomena' are beautiful in their assumption--or usurpation--of the lovely forms of spirit-life and of nature. And they will prevail, sometimes, even against the best efforts of the Angels of Light. The Cabalists whisper that God 'made the world' by the 'means of music'--that music, as man knows music, is essentially a power; that it is the faint, much-changed, much-enfeebled, sole relic, and tradition, and reminder of Man’s Lost Paradise; that (through it originally) everything was possible, as the gift of God; which explains the classic fables of Orpheus, Amphion, and the mythological wonder-workers in music; that music is modulated in the movements of the planets according to the rearrangement of the post-diluvian world, and in conformity with the readjustment of the solar-system after mysterious aberration or cataclysm; that mortality cannot hear, and that the human soul is so debased that it only catches intermittently the faint echo of the continuous universal music which in other--now material--senses is the life and growth and splendour of everything.
Music is magic, is sacred, and a power--as all harmony must be;--the nerves of the world--the aspiration
of living things--the spell which breaks up and extols--into super-added, super-natural life--the 'Real' into the 'Ideal'. Harmony--or the mysterious solace and satisfaction and happiness at heroism which we feel--is found in the beauty of the human figure, the glories and graces of all growing objects and moving or unmoving natures. Success in nature, and in life, with their changes--as man knows 'nature' and 'life'--arise from the interstarry, mechanical modifications, and the incidents (and, the apparent interference and intertangle) through the restless movement of the planets. All the glorious seeming mechanism of the starry sky shows so as mechanism only to the measuring senses of man; but in reality it may be the play of Infinite Spirit. (See accompanying Charts, A, B, C.) The planets of our own system may be directed in their 'continual-speaking' changes by their several crowds of governing spirits. Spirits being everywhere the directors of matter, its solids are only to be separated by soul or energy--as the wedge (directed by the will) cleaves inert or resistant solids. Music is always in the air. Man has no ears for it, unless it is enlivened to, or finds access to, his senses. But his heart is its home--if he has a heart, and not an 'animal’s mechanic throbbing-machine' only. Air is the breathing of nature. Music is always in the air--more particularly at night, for Nature (being born of it) is necessarily more nervously sensitive at night, whether for the 'beautiful' or the 'dreadful'; because both are equally exciting and fascinating--basilisks both--as they are mysterious. We obtain by pulsation, or scientific commotion of the air, by musical instruments, the music out of it; and our fine nerves are the fine sensitives (born of God), as the harp played upon to receive it. Otherwise there is no sense in music. Otherwise our passions could not be stirred by it.
[paragraph continues] These are storms and convulsions (rendered beautiful) certainly not born of God’s original 'REST'. Rather they come of the stirring ambitions of Lucifer--uprising--'Son of the Morning', 'Son of the Awakening'--'Son' of the 'Sun'. Music and its success depend upon the prosperous progress of the Planets which make it, as (in Astrology) they prearrange, order and fix the fates of men. It is no inconsistent thing to say that, in the Rosicrucian sense, every stone, flower, and tree has its horoscope (we know that there are no two leaves alike), and that they are produced and flourish in the mechanical resources of the mysterious necessities of astrology--every object bearing its history in its lines and marks (sigillated magnetism), as inspired by the Great Soul of the World; which is all continual changing purpose, urging restlessly towards 'REST'.
'Nullam esse herbam, aut plantain inferius, cujus non sit stella in firmamento, quæ eam percutiat, et dicat ei, cresce.' Exercitatio in Fluddanam Philosophiam, p. 228. Parisiis, 1630.
Or back again to that from which it came. Moving in the arc of the pendulum between the two points--Life and Death (as we know Life and Death)--beyond which the 'swing' of this world’s 'Creation' points, cannot pass--OR BE.