VI. The Fraternity should remain secret one hundred years.

To these six articles the brethren bound themselves, and then
separated into several countries.

“The first of the Fraternity which dyed, and that in Eng¬
land,” continues the narrative, “was I. O., who was very expert.
In England he is spoken of much, chiefly because he cured a
young Earl of Norfolk of the leprosie.”

Mention is made in Fama Fraternitatis of

the ungodly and accursed gold-making which hath gotten so much
the upper hand whereby under colour of it many renegades and
roguish people do use great villainies and cozen and abuse the
credit which is given them. Yea, nowadays men of discretion do
hold the transmutation of metals to be the highest point of philo¬
sophy, but the true philosophers are of far another mind, esteem¬
ing little the making of gold which is but a paragon, for besides
that they have a thousand better things.

The Brethren are earnestly admonished

to cast away most of the worthless books of pseudo-chemists to
whom it is a jest to apply the Most Holy Trinity to vain things or
to deceive men with monstrous symbols and enigmas or to profit
by the curiosity of the credulous.

From this it will be seen that the Rosicrucian doctrine only
touched the spiritual side of alchemy, and most of the tenets
were adapted from the works of Paracelsus, who was the first to
develop the idea of the macrocosm and the microcosm being one.
The fraternity acknowledged the idea of transmutation and
called it “ a great gift of God,” but they condemned it as a purely
physical process and allude to it as the “ungodly and accursed
gold-making.”

It is thought by some that prior to the end of the sixteenth
206

THE ROSICRUCIANS AND ALCHEMY

century there may have been an association of learned persons
drawn from all classes, the members of which were engaged in
healing, alchemy, philosophy, and good works, and that such
a brotherhood gave Andrea the idea which he propounds in
Fama Fraternitatis .

Michael Maier, the German alchemist, who was the first to
transplant the Rosicrucian mystery into England, which he did
when he came to see Robert Fludd, asserts that from “very
ancient times philosophical colleges have existed among various
nations for the study of medicine and natural secrets, and that
the discoveries which they made were perpetuated from genera¬
tion to generation by the initiation of new members.”

The Rosicrucian legend was continued and fostered by a
small band of men who looked upon it as a form of alchemical
mysticism. In England Robert Fludd and Thomas Vaughan
are regarded as its chief exponents, and afterward it was ex¬
ploited by several pseudo-alchemists or quacks such as John
Heydon and George Starkey.

So-called Rosicrucian societies arose in the eighteenth
century claiming descent from the original fraternity, but they
gradually died out. After 1750 the idea began to be propagated
by the Freemasons, and in the system of high degrees in Scottish
Freemasonry, especially in the Rosenkreuz degree, the symbols
were retained with Masonic interpretations. Since 1 866 colleges
of a Masonic Rosicrucian Society have been formed in England,
Scotland, and the United States, with the aim, it is said, of
affording mutual aid and encouragement in working out the
great problems of life and in searching out the secrets of Nature.
Their objects, we are told, “are to facilitate the study of philo¬
sophy founded upon the Kabbala and the doctrines of Hermes
Trismegistus, who was incalculated by the original Fratres
Roseae Crucis of Germany in 1450.”

It would be interesting to know the results of such studies, and
if they have yet succeeded in solving the mystery of the Emerald
Table. But, in spite of its perpetuation, it cannot be said that

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LURE & ROMANCE OF ALCHEMY

Rosicrucianism had any permanent influence on alchemy. The
movement arose when the art, as practised until the seventeenth
century, was on its decline, and its members were chiefly
visionary theorists who did no practical work in laying the
foundations of chemical science.

208