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1^ I i i NINETEENTH
CENTURY SENSE: I i BEING THE PARADOX OF SPIR- ITUS SANCTUS AND OF ROSI- CRUCIANISM. 1^ 1^ BY J. E. '
SECOND EDITION.
PHILADELPHIA:
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY.
1893.
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Copyright, 1887, by J. B. Lippincott Company.
Copyright, 1892, by J. B. I^ippincott Company.
Printed by J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia.
'* A man that looks on glass On it may stay his eye, Or, if he pleaseth, through it pass, And the heavens espy.'*
PARADOXES.
Mention of paradoxes affords both definition of the book and idea of its contents.
Judgment and Understanding existing with Nine- teenth-Century Sense are entirely one with inductions reached by Rosicrucian speculations.
Freedom from doubt is one with Spiritus Sanctus.
Nothing is what it seems to be.
Common Sense is little better than No Sense.
Now is one with Eternity.
To-day is identical with all days.
Supernatural is not different from natural.
Heaven and hell are a common location.
* ' Hie jacet * ' is not fact.
A buried man is an unburied one.
Death is the same as life.
The Soul of man is one with God.
Man is girl, boy^ bushj bird, and fish, yet is neither of these.
Dedication is to the Garretsonian Society.
SPIRITUS SANCTUS,
I.
" Men do not know themselves, and therefore they do not under- stand the things that are in their inner world. Each man has the essence of God, and all the wisdom and power of the world (ger- minally) in himself; he possesses one kind of knowledge as much as another, and he who does not find that which is in him cannot truly say that he does not possess it, but only that he was not capable of successfully seeking it."
Sight of ships by him who cultivates ships, sight of poems by him who cultivates poetry, sight of scores by him who cultivates music, sight of the Divinity by him who cultivates the divine, — sight of none of these by him who cultivates none of them.
Striving after understanding of the universal and of
man's relation with it. Seeking a sanctuary where
higher dominates lower. Reaching comprehension
that for a beast, whether man or brute, there is the grass under its nose, nothing else; that for an '^ al- chemist" there is gold ; that for the '^ immortal" there are cosmetics, if not indeed a liquor adolescentiae and
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8 SPIRITUS SANCTUS,
an elixir vitse; that an "Illuminate" may reach and eat of the fruit that grows in the " midst of the gar- den;" eating of this fruit, and growing through the eating, until growth reaches whither growth leads.
Recognizing, with Paracelsus, that the beginning of wisdom is the beginning of supernatural power ; and with Ovid, that things alter, that nothing dies ; and with Empedocles, that man is in truth one with bird, beast, and fish; and with Plato, that he is one with none of these things. Able to read the paradox of '*hic jacet" in understanding that here he who lies is not he who lies but he who lies not.
Above all things recognizing oneness in Now and Eternity.
Freed of all confusion in understanding that duty and responsibility rest and relate with the Now, and with the Now alone.
Comprehending, out of understanding, with Zoro- aster, that for a man to know himself is to know all things necessary for him to know in himself.
Recognizing, with Socratists, that correspondence between analysis and synthesis corrects imperfections as to judgments existing in defects of senses and reason.
Accepting, with Epicurus, that pursuit of pleasure is the highest wisdom.
Considering man in his relation to himself and to the universal. God, the devil, celestial and terrestrial. Occult and open. The bigness of littleness and the littleness of bigness. The strength and the weakness, the mortality and the immortality of man.
Being brought into a state of profound content,
ROSICRUCIAN EXCLUSIONS. 9
through comprehension. Recognizing self as a part of a universal whole, yet as a something forever sep- arate and individual. Recognizing the import of universal.
Getting hold of the meaning of things; rejoicing ever with appreciation, enduring never without con- solation. Understanding that pleasure and suffering are conditions of proper and improper relation.
Finding truth to be entirely apprehensible. Seeing that the real does not conceal nor obscure itself. Learning that life is a circle where there are no dark corners. Doubting never any more as to the purpose of being. Expert as to the office of feet and hands, mind and soul.
Cognizable to the confusions of philosophers in their confounding of things. Separating clothes and body and body and person. Appreciable of environment. Come to understanding that self is one thing and that soul is another thing. Having gotten hold of the mean- ing of an unpardonable sin in discovering it to be self- explaining and self-proving. Satisfied as to the exist- ence of God in coming to a sight of Him upon the outside and the inside of men. Proving to one's self that one's self is God.
Able to grasp the meaning of an infinite eternity in an infinite now. Making nothing at all of the idea of an hereafter, knowing the present to be all that has been or that can be.
Comprehending, with Alexandrians, that recognition of the infinite means necessarily that the recognizer has himself become the infinite.
Coming, in highest wisdom, to care for nothing or
lO SPIRITUS SANCTUS.
to think of nothing but the hour that is ; having learned that there is nothing else to care for or to think about.
Recognizing that an end reached is according to a way taken.
. Accepting that conformity to law, not violation, in- sures most against mishaps.
Appreciating that good and bad are not things of themselves but things of relation.
Enlarging being by increasing knowledge. Deter- mining through the seen the existence of unseen. Understanding that the blackness of night is by reason of earth turning her back to the sun. Seeing the meaning of shadow to lie with light, and that to face about is to find the real. Perceiving what is involved in the fact that a beast is at its best when living power- fully and aggressively for self, and that a man is at his worst when so living. Understanding as fact that faith can remove mountains : smiling in derision at the idea of faith being able to remove anything : learning what faith is. Opening an enigma that both teaches and denies the existence of an overruling Providence. Finding out what alone will hold up when one leans against it.
Deriding the doctrine of a resurrection while being able to prove it true. Seeing a cocoon and a coffin to be alike; that the way to a butterfly is through a worm. Apprehending what is meant by a body terrestrial and a body celestial. Getting out of experimentation the differentiations of materializations and dematerializa- tions. Smiling at the embalming of Egyptians and at the burying of Christians ; knowing the law of matter.
ROSICRUCIAN EXCLUSIONS. n
Not at all confused in accepting self to be the same self forever, holding at the same time with Pythagoras that he was Euphorbus of the Trojan war, and that, with Empedocles, he had lived as boy, girl, beast, bird, and fish.
Listening to complaints of unanswered prayers; as- tonished at the profundity of an ignorance which wastes time in prayer. Seeing a nation turned idiots asking for life of king or president. Hearing the preacher begging for rain and the preacher pleading for drouth. Regarding generals who, in opposite places, entreat for success to side in sectional and fraternal strife. Compelled to rebuke prayer, yet yourself hourly praying and never failing to receive answer to prayer.
Rosicrucianism, standing in the light of the nine- teenth century, possessed of the immortal elixir, re- peating, mockingly, ** O Grave ! where is thy victory? O Death ! where is thy sting ?' * Standing by the bedside of one who struggles to break the environment, seeing nothing different from a locust casting its shell, the wakeful going into a dream, or a birth of higher evolving itself from one of lower signification ; know- ing as simple change of association what others call death.
A door shut and fast locked against the confusion of outside things \ yourself seated in meditative mood, listening to an inner voice and working at the opening of paradoxes; yourself profoundly content in what you have learned yourself to be, yet full of commiseration for afflictions endured by others. Asking yourself as
12 SPIRITUS SANCTUS.
to why and wherefore and as to distinctions and differ- ences. Knowing what is the province and what is not the province of senses and reason. Awake to a light shining out of spiritual illumination. Having learned the source of instruction and where to apply for under- standing.
Rich in absence of possessions. Healthy when weighed down by disease. Alive in death.
A believer in ghosts and demons ; yourself a maker and dispeller of things occult and mysterious. Your- self knowing yourself as maker of heaven and hell; yourself your own god and your own devil, and a god or devil to other people. Yourself brute beast or divine uplifter. Yourself able to reach to the antipo- des or bound to a spot. Yourself having learned that there is neither forward nor backward, looking at that which alone is. Yourself overwhelmed in considera- tion of the dead ear of Christ. Yourself finding a horn in your hand to call Christ to his office. Your- self alive to the existence of a wall that separates prayer and answer. Yourself having discovered self to be Christ. Yourself the resurrected Christ.
Coming at last to understand the oneness of pro- found and simple. Coming at last to rest in absolute tranquillity.
THE ROSICRUCIANS.
II.
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ABOUT SPIRITUS SANCTUS AND THE ROSICRUCIANS.
"The philosophy of one generation becomes the common sense of the next."
A RosiCRUCiAN is nothing more uncommon than that the word Inquirer stands as his synonyme.
Spiritus Sanctus means to a Rosicrucian Refuge from Doubt as refuge lies with understanding. It means also to him Sacred Spirit as final refuge.
Using the word Rosicrucian, a word somewhat un- familiar to modern ears, instead of philosopher, or inquirer, in connection with the dissections and exam- inations of the present pages is assumed as justified and commendable in introduction afforded by it to a class of thinkers who evolved clearness out of obscurity and highest out of lowest. Any name implying people that think for themselves and who want to find out about things may be put, if preferred, in the place of Rosicrucian ; the name is to imply, however, a closer than the ordinary observer.
History. — Appreciation of Rosicrucianism is en- trance, and the only entrance, upon the way of devel- opment j this is one with saying that cultivation of what a man finds to be his capability constitutes the glory and success of the man.
Rosicrucianism is questioning life. Christian Ro-
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senkreuz, whose name finds association with a large class of such questioners, was a German noble, who, as he grew into years, developed wonderful inclina- tion toward meditative and speculative studies. He is to be pronounced a born metaphysician. To appreciate the character of this representative indi- vidual, and through him that which is represented as a guild which has the peculiar reputation of being every- where and yet nowhere, is to start with an assumption that his philosophical career commenced at the basis of the Ionian school, which basis is understood as ac- cepting the composition of all things as lying with one or with a combination of four elementary bodies: the particular one, according to the teachings of the founder of the school, Thales, being water; according to Anaximenes, a close successor, air; according to Heraclitus, fire; according to Empedocles, things at large being existent in a mingling and then a separa- tion of the mingled ; this flux lying with earth.
Here, where the studies of Rosenkreuz commenced, begin, necessarily, the investigations of every man who is to find out the meaning of himself and his re- lation with the universal. Rosicrucianism, in its high- est and best sense, signifies material, soulistic, and in- tellectual evolution ; and evolution, after this manner, implies the student life. A Rosicrucian, come to the order of what is called an illuminatus, or an illuminated man, means one who has himself become, in a sense, God. Such a man comes naturally and necessarily to be esteemed singular by his fellows, and it is strange if this singularity possess him not with the reputation of laboring under hallucination. Rosicrucians are divided
THE ROSICRUCIANS. 1 5
into alchemists, immortales, and the class illurainati just alluded to.
Rosicrucianism, individualized, differs nothing, as far as the fourteenth century is concerned, from what it is found to be in the nineteenth. Alchemy is in a sense the start-point. Alchemy proposes to itself the trans- muting of lead into gold and the crystallization of morning dew into diamonds.
Riches, in the shape of precious metal and jewels, is the ultima thule of young manhood, just as cleared ground upon which to grow bread is that of a young and pioneer colony. Rosenkreuz, while almost a boy, conceived the possibility of acting on the premise of Empedocles in compelling gold and diamonds to show what they are through analysis, arguing that as they are neither earth, fire, air, nor water, the composition must lie in some union of these supposed elements, there being nothing else in which it could lie. It was an intrinsic deduction that analysis might be dupli- cated, or conversed, by synthesis; hence, to find out what is the composition of a thing is to possess one's self with the power to make the thing.
Here is inauguration of the day of alembics and of the occult of the alchemists. It will be felt as nat- ural, and as akin with the selfishness of men, that crucibles should be set up in hidden places, and that experimenters, in pursuit of a great secret, should grow recluse and mystic. This mars a page in the history of the master.
Failing in his own laboratory, Rosenkreuz passed from the environments of his home to live with the traditions of Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Gymnoso-
1 6 SFIRITUS SANCTUS.
phists, and it is averred that here, aided by his own analytical genius, he did in truth learn how to make sun-gold and dew-diamonds. Out of this developed, in turn, the "Fratres Roris Coctus," brothers of con- cocted dew.
Succeeding naturally the alchemists come the im- mortales. Bread is nothing without time and appetite to eat it; much less are gold and diamonds to him who finds no days left him in which to spend. The al- chemist grew quickly into the most unenviable of men. Lacking one thing, all else was counted as nothing. Gold was had, but Fate had the alchemist. The need was time, — time and eternal youth. Metamorphosis was absolute. Alchemy revived under a new name and with a new aim. Again the fires of laboratories in hidden places were lighted. Men, old and bowed with anxiety, were to be met searching beneath the trees and carrying from the fields bundles of exogens too heavy for their bent backs to bear up. The waters of springs were analyzed. Journeys long and formid- able were endured, not unlike the search recorded of Ponce de Leon, or that infinitely more dangerous one, the expedition of Jason to Colchis for the recovery of the "Golden Fleece." The search was for an Elixir Vitse ; at first for more than this, for a Liquor Ado- lescentise. Exhaustion begotten of effort was succeeded by renewed eff*ort and further exhaustion. Always on the verge of a grand discovery, the immortales one by one fell palsied and fainting into their boiling cal- drons, or were overcome by fumes which poisoned them 5 this, or they lay down by the waysides ; other- wise, as is recorded by the vulgar, were caught up and
THE ROSICRUCIANS. 17
carried away by devils and genii. The story is simply one of history repeating itself; Menedemus trying to revive his failing body by inhaling the breath of chil- dren \ David courting to his enervated frame the lusti- ness living with the vigorous youth of Abishag.
After all, an elixir of life and a liquor of youth were found. Avaricious in the pursuit of knowledge, Rosen- kreuz acquainted himself with the sublimities of the Vedanta philosophy and made himself familiar with the Greek schools of Plato and the Alexandrians. Here body differentiated itself to his understanding as a thing of little significance ; a mere shield-bearer to a principal standing within or behind. Ego, Eros-like, had arisen, an intangible tangibility; not to be doubted as the real existence ; seen and understood as not ca- pable of being lessened or heightened or deepened or broadened by elixirs ; a something carrying no purse, neither possessed of neck nor finger for ornamentation. The life and meaning of man were seen to lie with Ego. Body was recognized to be external.
Few of the misunderstandings of men are more curious and unexplainable than misconceptions con- cerning the Rosicrucians. In a worm-eaten encyclo- paedia, which has descended in the writer's family through the generations of two hundred yfears, Rosi- crucians are described as an hermetical cabal, who appeared, or at least were first taken notice of, in the beginning of the sixteenth century ; professors of se- crets whose principal idea was a philosopher's stone, a sect of fanatics at whose head, in England, stood Robertus de Fluctibus, and, in Germany, Jacob Behmen