“It evinces.”
“Rosencreutz was born in 1378 and died in 1484, at the ripe old age of a hundred and six. And it’s not hard to guess that the secret confraternity made a considerable contribution to the Reformation that celebrated its centenary in 1615. In fact, Luther’s coat of arms includes a rose and a cross.”
“Some imagination.”
“You expect Luther to use a burning giraffe or a limp watch? We’re all children of our own time. I’ve found out whose child I am, so shut up and let me go on. Around 1604 the brethren of the Rosy Cross were rebuilding a part of their palace or secret castle, and they came across a plaque with a big nail driven into it. When they pulled out the nail, part of the wall collapsed, and they saw a door with something written on it in big letters: POST CXX ANNOS PATEBO…”
I had already learned this from Belbo’s letter, but still couldn’t help reacting. “My God…”
“What is it?”
“It’s like a Templar document that … A story I never told you, about a colonel who—”
“What of it? The Templars must have copied from the Rosicrucians.”
“But the Templars came first.”
“Then the Rosicrucians copied from the Templars.”
“What would I do without you, darling?”
“That Agliè’s ruined you. You’re looking everywhere for revelation.”
“Me? I’m not looking for anything.”
“And a good thing, too. Watch out for the opiate of the masses.”
“El pueblo unido jamás será vencido.”
“Go ahead, laugh. So what did those idiots say?”
“Those idiots learned everything they knew in Africa, weren’t you listening?”
“And while they were in Africa, they started packing us up and sending us here.”
“Thank God. Otherwise you might have been born in Pretoria.” I kissed her. “Beyond the door,” I went on, “they found a sepulcher with seven sides and seven corners, miraculously illuminated by an artificial sun. In the middle was a circular altar decorated with various mottoes or emblems, on the order of nequaquam vacuum….”
“Quack quack what? Signed, Donald Duck?”
“It’s Latin. It means ‘the void does not exist.’”
“That’s good to know. Otherwise, think of the horror—”
“Do me a favor and turn on the fan, animula vagula blandula.”
“But it’s winter.”
“Only for you people of the wrong hemisphere, darling. For me it’s July. Please, the fan. It’s not because you’re a woman; just that it’s on your side of the bed. Thanks. Anyway, under the altar they found Rosencreutz’s body, intact. In his hand was a copy of Book I, crammed with infinite knowledge. Too bad the world can’t read it—the manifesto says—otherwise, gulp, wow, brr, squisssh!”
“Ouch.”
“As I was saying, the manifesto ends by promising that a huge treasure remains to be discovered, along with stupendous revelations about the ties between the macrocosm and the microcosm. And don’t think that these were a bunch of tacky alchemists offering to show us how to make gold. No, that was small potatoes. They were aiming higher, in every sense of the word. The manifesto announced that the Fama was being distributed in five languages, and, soon to appear on this screen, the Confessio. The brothers awaited replies and reviews from learned and ignorant alike. Write, telephone, send in your names, and we’ll see if you’re worthy to share our secrets, of which we have given you only the faintest notion. Sub umbra alarum tuarum Iehova.”
“Which means?”
“It’s a formula of conclusion. Over and out. It sounds as if the Rosicrucians were dying to tell what they had learned, and were anxiously waiting for the right listener. But not one word about what it was they knew.”
“Like that fellow whose picture was in the ad we saw on the plane: Send me ten dollars, and I’ll tell you how to become a millionaire.”
“And it’s no lie. He has discovered the secret. And so have I.”
“Listen, you better read on. You’re acting as if we just met tonight.”
“With you, it’s always like the first time.”
“Ah, but I don’t get too familiar with the first one who comes along. Anyway, you have quite a collection now. First Templars, then Rosicrucians. You haven’t read Plekhanov by any chance?”
“No. I’m waiting to discover his sepulcher a hundred and twenty years from now. Unless Stalin buried him with tractors.”
“Idiot. I’m taking a bath.”
And the famous confraternity of the Rosy Cross declares even now that throughout the universe delirious prophecies circulate. In fact, the moment the ghost appeared (though Fama and Confessio prove that this was a mere invention of idle minds), it produced a hope of universal reform, and generated things partly ridiculous and absurd, partly incredible. Thus upright and honest men of various countries exposed themselves to contempt and derision in order to lend open support, or to reveal themselves to these brothers … through the Mirror of Solomon or in some other occult way.
—Christoph von Besold (?), Appendix to Tommaso Campanella, Von der Spanischen Monarchy, 1623
The best came later, and when Amparo returned, I was able to give her a foretaste of wondrous events. “It’s an incredible story. The manifestoes appeared in an age teeming with texts of that sort. Everyone was seeking renewal, a golden century, a Cockaigne of the spirit. Some pored over magic texts, others labored at forges, melting metals, others sought to rule the stars, and still others invented secret alphabets and universal languages. In Prague, Rudolph II turned his court into an alchemistic laboratory, invited Comenius and John Dee, the English court astrologer who had revealed all the secrets of the cosmos in the few pages of his Monas Ierogliphica. Are you with me?”
“To the end of time.”
“Rudolph’s physician was a man named Michael Maier, who later wrote a book of visual and musical emblems, the Atalanta Fugiens, an orgy of philosopher’s eggs, dragons biting their tails, sphinxes. Nothing was more luminous than a secret cipher; everything was the hieroglyph of something else. Think about it. Galileo was dropping stones from the Tower of Pisa, Richelieu played Monopoly with half of Europe, and in the meantime they all had their eyes peeled to read the signs of the world.
Pull of gravity, indeed; something else lies beneath (or, rather, above) all this, something quite different. Would you like to know what? Abracadabra. Torricelli invented the barometer, but the rest of them were messing around with ballets, water games, and fireworks in the Hortus Palatinus in Heidelberg. And the Thirty Years’ War was about to break out.”
“Mutter Courage must have been delighted.”
“But even for them it wasn’t all fun and games. In 1619 the Palatine elector accepted the crown of Bohemia, probably because he was dying to rule Prague, the magic city. But the next year, the Hapsburgs nailed him to the White Mountain. In Prague the Protestants were slaughtered, Comenius’s house and library were burned, and his wife and son were killed. He fled from court to court, harping on how great and full of hope the idea of the Rosy Cross was.”
“Poor man, but what did you expect him to do? Console himself with the barometer? Wait a minute. Give a poor girl time to think. Who wrote these manifestoes?”
“That’s the whole point: we don’t know. Let’s try to figure it out…. How about scratching my rosy cross … no, between the shoulder blades, higher, to the left, there. Yes, there. Now then, there were some incredible characters in this German environment.
Like Simon Studion, author of Naometria, an occult treatise on the measurements of the Temple of Solomon; Heinrich Khunrath, who wrote Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae, full of allegories, with Hebrew alphabets and cabalistic labyrinths that must have inspired the authors of Fama, who were probably friends of one of the countless little utopian conventicles of Christian rebirth. One popular rumor is that the author was a man named Johann Valentin Andreae. A year later, he published The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz, but he had written that in his youth, so he must have been kicking the idea of the Rosy Cross around for quite some time.
There were other enthusiasts, in Tubingen, who dreamed of the republic of Christianopolis. Perhaps they all got together. But it sounds as if it was all in fun, a joke. They had no idea of the pandemonium they were unleashing. Andreae spent the rest of his life swearing he hadn’t written the manifestoes, which he claimed were a lusus, a ludibrium, a prank. It cost him his academic reputation.
He grew angry, said that the Rosicrucians, if indeed they existed, were all impostors. But that didn’t help. Once the manifestoes appeared, it was as if people had been waiting for them. Learned men from all over Europe actually wrote to the Rosicrucians, and since there was no address, they sent open letters, pamphlets, printed volumes. In that same year Maier published Arcana arcanissima, in which the brethren of the Rosy Cross were not mentioned explicitly, but everyone was sure he was talking about them and that there was more to his book than met the eye. Some people boasted that they had read Fama in manuscript.
It wasn’t so easy to prepare a book for publication in those days, especially if it had engravings, but in 1616, Robert Fludd—who wrote in England but printed in Leyden, so you have to figure in the time to ship the proofs—circulated Apologia compendiaria Fraternitatem de Rosea Cruce suspicionis et infamiis maculis aspersam, veritatem quasi Fluctibus abluens et abstergens, to defend the brethren and free them
