The Rosicrucians

The first instance of the consequence of Luria’s thought was the formation of the Order of the Rosy Cross, or the Rosicrucians. The theme behind the formation of this secret society was the union of the Guelph and Stuart bloodlines. The ancestors of Dubrawka of Bohemia, through intermarriage with the line from Guillaume de Gellone, bifurcated into two important directions. One was the Scottish line headed by the Stuarts. Another was a German line, headed by the House of Guelph. The two lines had closely intemarried amongst themselves for several centuries, that is, until the advent of the Rosicrucians, who attempted the alliances of these two diverged families. That union was to take place between the daughter of King James, Elizabeth Stuart, and Frederick V, Elector of the Palatinate of the Rhine.

Ultimately, the Rosicrucians declared themselves to the world through the notorious Rosicrucian Manifestos. The first of the Rosicrucian manifestos was the Fama Frateritatis, appearing in 1614, part of a larger Protestant treatise titled, The Universal and General Reformation of the Whole Wide World, an allegorical history of the Rosicrucians, which was followed by a second tract a year later. The Manifestos purported to issue from a secret, “invisible” fraternity of “initiates” in Germany and France, and vehemently attacked the Catholic Church and the old Holy Roman Empire.

The Rosicrucians derived their name from Christian Rosenkreuz, who, according to the Manifestos, founded the order a century earlier, a poor descendent of nobility, who was cloistered at an early age with a Jesuit order, before travelling to the Middle East to learn magic, alchemy and Kabbalah from the Sufis and other mystics of the Islamic world. Rosenkreuz is German for “rose cross”, referring both to the symbol of the Rosicrucians, which is a cross superimposed over the five-petaled rose of the Kabbalah.

In the Rosicrucian Enlightenment, Frances Yates suggests that a component of the new Lurianic Kabbalah would be considered as figuring in the Manifestoes. Jacob Boehme, born in near Bohemia in 1575, the man who came to articulate Lurianic Kabbalah for the Christian audiences of Europe, became active in around the same time. The man to whom that influence is attributed was Boehme’s disciple and mentor, Balthasar Walther. In 1598-1599, Walther undertook a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in order to learn about the intricacies of the Kabbalah from groups in Safed and elsewhere, including amongst the followers of Isaac Luria.

A further Rosicrucian tract appeared in 1616, titled the Chemycal Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz. The wedding refers to the important dynastic alliance of Frederick and Elizabeth. In it, Christian Rosenkreuz is associated with an order of chivalry. This was in reference to the Order of the Garter. As Frances Yates has pointed out, as a necessary component of his marriage to Elizabeth, Frederick was invested with the Order of the Garter. The “rose cross” of the Rosicrucians, therefore, was derived from the dual symbolism of the Order of the Garter, but also being the “red cross” or “rose cross” of St. George, and the Knights Templar.

In 1619, Frederick V was offered the throne of Bohemia by rebellious Protestants, after which he moved to Prague with his family. This was seen as an intolerable affront to the Catholic Church, and thus precipitated the Thirty Years War, as a result of which the movement ended in utter defeat.