Our sovereignty extends over the three Indias: from the greater India, where rests the body of the apostle Thomas, our domains extend into the desert and press the confines of the Orient, then turn toward the Occident as far as Babylonia Deserta, by the tower of Babel. … In our domains live elephants, dromedaries, camels, hippopotami, crocodiles, metagallinari, cametennus, tinsirete, panthers, onagers, red and white lions, white bears and blackbirds, mute cicadas, gryphos, tigers, jackals, hyenas, wild oxen, centaurs, wild men, horned men, fauns, centaurs and women of the same species, pygmies, men with dogs’ heads, giants forty cubits tall, monocles, cyclops, a bird called the phoenix, and almost every kind of animal that lives beneath the vault of the heavens. … In one of our provinces the river known as Indus flows. … This river, whose source is in Paradise, winds its way along various branches through the entire province and in it are found natural stones, emeralds, sapphires, carbuncles, topazes, chrysolytes, onyx, beryl, amethyst, sardonics, and many other precious stones. …
In the extreme regions of the land … we possess an island … where throughout the year, twice a week, God causes an abundant rain of manna to fall, which the people gather and eat, nor do they subsist on any other food save this. In fact, they do not plow, do not sow, do not reap, nor stir the earth in any way to extract its richest fruit from it. … All of them, who are fed only on celestial food, live five hundred years. Still, on reaching the age of one hundred, they are rejuvenated and regain strength, drinking three times the water of a spring that rises at the root of a tree that is found in that place. … Amongst us no one lies. … Amongst us none is an adulterer. No vice has power in our midst.5
In the course of the following centuries—until the seventeenth—translated and paraphrased many times into various languages and versions, the letter had a decisive importance in the expansion of the Christian West toward the Orient. The idea that beyond the Moslem territories there could be a Christian kingdom justified all ventures of expansion and exploration. Prester John was discussed by Pian del Carpine, William of Rubruck, and Marco Polo. Around the middle of the fourteenth century the kingdom of Prester John shifted from a vague Orient toward Ethiopia, as the Portuguese navigators began their African explorations. Attempts to communicate with John were made in the fifteenth century by Henry IV of England, by the duc de Berry, by Pope Eugene IV. In Bologna, at the time of the coronation of Charles V, there was still talk of Prester John as a possible ally in the reconquest of the Holy Sepulcher.
Where did Prester John’s letter come from? What was its purpose? Perhaps it was a document of anti-Byzantine propaganda, produced in the scriptoria of Frederick I. But the problem is not so much its origin (fakes of every description were abundant at that time) as its reception. The geographical fantasy gradually generated a political project. In other words, the phantom called up by some scribe with a knack for counterfeiting documents (a highly respected literary activity of the period) served as an alibi for the expansion of the Christian world toward Africa and Asia, a welcome argument favoring the white man’s burden.6
From the Rosicrucians to the Protocols
Another invention also rich in historic results was the Confraternity of the Rosy Cross. Many writers have depicted the atmosphere of extraordinary spiritual renewal that developed at the beginning of the seventeenth century, when the idea of the beginning of a Golden Age emerged. This climate of expectancy pervades in various forms (in a play of mutual influences) both the Catholic world and the Protestant: plans of ideal republics were elaborated, from Campanella’s City of the Sun to the Christianopolis of Johann Valentin Andrae, aspirations to a universal monarchy, to a general renovation of behavior and of religious sensibility, just when Europe, in the period around the Thirty Years’ War, was ablaze with national conflicts, religious hatreds, and the assertion of the raison d’état.
In 1614 a manifesto appeared, entitled Fama Fraternitatis R.C. and written in German, in which the mysterious confraternity of the Rosy Cross reveals its own existence and affords some information on its history and on its mythical founder, Christian Rosencreutz, who supposedly lived in the fifteenth century and learned secret revelations from Arab and Jewish scholars in the course of his wanderings in the Orient. In 1615, a second manifesto appeared, in Latin, the Confessio fraternitatis Roseae crucis, Ad eruditos Europae. The first manifesto expressed the hope that in Europe a society could arise that would possess gold, silver, and precious stones in abundance and distribute them among kings to satisfy their needs and legitimate aspirations, a society that would educate rulers, teaching them everything God permits mankind to know and supporting them with wise counsel.
Among their alchemical metaphors and more or less messianic invocations, both manifestos insist on the secret nature of the confraternity and on the anonymity of its members (“our edifice—if even one hundred thousand people had seen it close—will be forever intangible, indestructible, and hidden from the wicked world”). Whence the final appeal of the Fama may seem the more ambiguous, addressed to all the learned of Europe and urging them to communicate with the authors of the manifesto: “Even if for now we have not revealed our names, nor the occasion when we shall meet, still we shall come without doubt to know the opinion of all, in whatever language it be expressed; and anyone who sends us his name will be able to confer with one of us in person or, if there were some impediment, in writing.”
Almost immediately, from every part of Europe, appeals to the Rosicrucians began to be written. No one asserted a knowledge of the Rosicrucians, no one claimed to be a Rosicrucian; all sought somehow to suggest that they were in absolute agreement with the program. Though the Rosicrucians were not to be found, letters to them came from Julius Sperber, Robert Fludd, and Michael Maier, who in his Themis aurea (1618) insisted that the confraternity really did exist, even though the author admitted he was too humble a person ever to have been a member of it.
But, as Frances Yates observes in her Rosicrucian Enlightenment, the habitual behavior of the Rosicrucian writers is to affirm not only that they are not Rosicrucians but that they have never encountered a single member of the confraternity.7 Johann Valentin Andrae and all his Tübingen circle of friends, who were immediately suspected of being the authors of the manifestos, spent their lives either denying the fact or playing it down, passing it off as a literary game, a youthful error. For that matter, not only are there no historical proofs of the existence of the Rosicrucians, but by definition none can exist. Even today, the official documents of the AMORC (Anticus and Mysticus Ordo Rosae Crucis), whose temple, rich in Egyptian iconography, can be visited at San José, California, assert that the original texts legitimizing the order surely exist, but for obvious reasons they will remain secret, sealed in inaccessible archives.
But we are not interested so much in today’s Rosicrucians, who belong to folklore, as in those who belong to history. From the first appearance of the two manifestos, other pamphlets, in opposition, appeared, attacking the confraternity with various accusations, especially of falsehood and charlatanism. In 1623 anonymous manifestos circulated in Paris, announcing the arrival of the Rosicrucians in the French capital, and this announcement unleashed fierce polemics, in both Catholic and libertine circles. The same year an anonymous publication, Effroyables pactions faites entre le diable et les prétendus invisibles, expressed the common notion that the Rosicrucians were Satan worshipers.
Even Descartes, after having tried—according to rumor—to approach them (obviously without success) during a journey in Germany, was suspected on his return to Paris of belonging to the confraternity. He saved the situation with a stroke of genius: according to legend the Rosicrucians were invisible, so he displayed himself on many public occasions and thus quashed the rumor, as Baillet recounts in his Vie de Monsieur Descartes (1691). In 1623 a certain Neuhaus published, first in German and then in French, an Avertissement pieux et utile des frères de la Rosée-Croix, in which he pondered their existence and who they were and where they had found their name and to what purpose they came out in public. He concluded with the extraordinary argument that “inasmuch as they alter and anagram their names, and conceal their ages, and arrive without making themselves known, there is no Logic that can deny that they necessarily exist.” Apparently, any appeal to the spiritual reform of humanity was enough to prompt the most paradoxical reactions, as if all were waiting for a decisive event.
Jorge Luis Borges, in his “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” tells of an improbable country, described by an inaccessible encyclopedia. It emerges, from other vague evidence found in reciprocally plagiarized texts, that in fact an entire planet is involved, “with its architecture and its playing cards, its mythological terrors and the sound of its dialects, its emperors and its oceans, its minerals, its birds, and its fishes, its algebra and its fire, its theological and metaphysical arguments.” This planet is begotten by
