In the second half of the twelfth century a letter arrived in the West telling how in the Far East, beyond the areas occupied by the Muslims, beyond the lands that the Crusaders had tried to remove from the dominion of the infidels, but which had come back under Saracen control, there flourished a Christian kingdom, governed by the fabled Prester John, or Presbyter Johannes, ” rex potentia et virtute dei et domini nostri Iesu Christi” (a king by the power and virtue of our lord Jesus Christ). The letter began by saying:
You must know and firmly believe that I, Prester John, am the lord of lords, and in all riches that exist under the heavens, in virtue and in power I outdo all the kings of the earth. Seventy-two kings pay us tribute. I am a devout Christian and I protect and support with alms everywhere true Christians governed by the sovereignty of my Clemency […].
Our sovereignty extends to the three Indias: from India Major, where rests the body of Thomas the Apostle, our dominions extend toward the desert, pushing toward the borders of the
Orient before bending back toward the West as far as deserted Babylon, beside the Tower of Babel […] In our dominions there are born and live elephants, dromedaries, camels, hippopotamuses, crocodiles, […] panthers, wild asses, white and red lions, bears, and white blackbirds, deaf cicadas, griffins, tigers, jackals, hyenas, wild bulls, centaurs, wild men, horned men, fauns, satyrs and their female equivalents, pygmies, cynocephali, giants forty cubits tall, one-eyed men, cyclops, a bird called the phoenix, and almost every kind of animal that lives under heavens vault […] In one of our provinces there is a river called the Indus. This river, which flows from Paradise, extends its meandering course through different channels throughout the whole province and in it are found natural stones, emeralds, sapphires, carbuncles, topazes, chrysolites, onyxes, beryls, amethysts, sardonyxes, and many other precious gems […].
In the furthermost regions of our land […] we have an island […] where all year round, twice a week, God rains manna in great abundance, which is gathered and eaten by the peoples who live on no other food but this. For they do not plow, nor sow, nor reap, nor move the earth in any way to extract its richest fruit […]. All these people, who live only on divine food, live for five hundred years. Yet when they reach the age of a hundred, they are rejuvenated and regain their strength by drinking thrice the water from a fountain which springs up at the root of a tree that grows in that place […] None of those among us are liars […] Among us there is no one who is an adulterer. No vice has any power with us.*
Translated and paraphrased several times in the course of the following centuries (up until the seventeenth century), and existing in various languages and versions, the letter played a decisive role in the expansion of the Christian West toward the Orient. The notion that there could be a Christian kingdom beyond the Muslim territories legitimized all their expansionist and exploratory undertakings. Prester John would be spoken about by Giovanni Pian del Carpine, William of Rubrouck, and Marco Polo. Halfway through the fourteenth century Prester John’s kingdom would move from a vague Orient to Ethiopia when Portuguese navigators began their African adventure. Contacts with Prester John would be attempted by Henry IV of England, the due du Berry, and Pope Eugenius IV. At Bologna, when Charles V was crowned, there would still be discussion of Prester John as a possible ally for the reconquest of the Holy Sepulchre.
How did Prester John’s letter come about, and what was its aim? Perhaps it was a document of anti-Byzantine propaganda, produced in Frederick I’s scriptoria, but the problem concerns not so much its origins (this period abounded in forgeries of all types)* as its reception. This geographical fantasy served to bolster a political project. In other words, the ghost evoked by some scribe with a flair for forgeries (a highly prized literary genre at the time) acted as an alibi for the expansion of the Christian world toward Africa and Asia, and friendly support for the white man’s burden.
Another invention that was rich in historical implications was that of the Rosicrucian confraternity. Many scholars have discussed the climate of extraordinary spiritual renewal that emerged at the dawn of the seventeenth century, when the idea of a Golden Century gathered pace. This climate of expectation pervaded both Catholic and Protestant areas in different forms (in an interplay of mutual influences): plans for ideal republics come forward—from Campanella’s Città del sole to Johann Valentin Andrea es Christianopolis, as well as hopes of a universal monarchy and a general renewal of morals and religious sensibility—at the very time when Europe, in the period around the Thirty Years’ War, was raging with national conflicts, religious hatreds, and the rise of raison d’état.
In 1614 a manifesto appeared, entitled Fama Fraternitatis R. C, in which the mysterious Rosicrucian confraternity revealed its existence, and gave notice of its own history and its mythical founder, Christian Rosencreutz—who had apparently lived in the fifteenth century and learned secret revelations from Arabic and Jewish sages in the course of his wanderings in the Orient. In 1615 there appeared, alongside the Fama, which was in German, a second manifesto, in Latin, Confessio Fraternitatis Roseae Crucis. Ad Eruditos Europae. The first manifesto hopes that there might arise in Europe too a society in possession of gold, silver, and jewels in abundance, which would distribute these to the kings to satisfy their needs and legitimate aims, a society that would teach the rulers to learn everything that God has allowed man to know and help them with their deliberations.
Amid alchemical metaphors and more or less messianic invocations, both manifestos insist on the secret nature of the confraternity and on the fact that their members cannot reveal its real nature (“our edifice—even though a hundred thousand people should see it—will be forever intangible, indestructible, and hidden from the sinful world”). Consequently, the final appeal of the Fama, to all the learned men of Europe, to make contact with those who had drawn up the manifesto, might appear even more ambiguous: “Even though we have not for the moment revealed our names, nor when we meet, nevertheless we will certainly get to know everyone’s opinion, in whatever language it is expressed; and whoever makes his name known to us can confer with one of us either viva voce or, should there be some impediment to that, in writing.”
Almost at once, people from all corners of Europe began to write appeals to the Rosicrucians. Nobody claimed to know them, no one said he was a Rosicrucian, everyone tried somehow to let it be understood that they were entirely in agreement with its program. Julius Sperber, Robert Fludd, and Michael Maier all speak to the invisible Rosicrucians: Maier, in his Themis Aurea (1618), maintains that the confraternity really does exist, even though he admits that he is too humble a person to have ever belonged to them. But as Frances Yates observed, the usual behavior of Rosicrucian writers was to claim not only that they were not Rosicrucians but that they had never even met a member of the confraternity.*
For a start, Johann Valentin Andreae and all his friends in the Tübingen circle, who were immediately suspected of being the authors of the manifestos, spent their lives either denying the fact or playing it down as a literary game, a youthful folly. Moreover, not only is there no historical evidence of the existence of the Rosicrucians, but by definition there cannot be. Still today, the official documents of the AMORC (“Anticus et Mysticus Ordo Rosae Crucis, “whose temple, rich in Egyptian iconography, can be visited in San José, California) state that the original texts legitimizing the order certainly do exist but for obvious reasons will remain secret and locked up in inaccessible archives.
We are interested not so much in todays Rosicrucians, however, who are just part of folklore, as in the historical ones. From the earliest appearance of the first two manifestos critical pamphlets began to be published, attacking the confraternity with accusations of various kinds, in particular those of being forgers and charlatans. In 1623 there appeared in Paris anonymous notices announcing the arrival of the Rosicrucians in the city, and this announcement unleashed fierce polemics, in both Catholic and libertine circles; the common rumor that the Rosicrucians were devil worshippers was expressed in an anonymous Effroyables Pactions faites entre le diable et les prétendus invisibles (Terrifying Pacts Made between the Devil and the So-Called Invisible Ones), also of 1623.
Even Descartes, who during a journey to Germany had tried—it is said—to contact them (unsuccessfully, of course), was suspected on his return to Paris of belonging to the confraternity, and he got out of the predicament with a masterstroke: since the common legend had it that the Rosicrucians were invisible, he made his appearance at many public occasions and thus defused the rumors that surrounded him, according to Baillet in his Vie de Monsieur Descartes.
A certain Neuhaus published, first in German, then in French in 1623, an Advertissement pieux et
