The quasi-Masonic “Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross”, born in the early fifteenth century, claims to have been vastly influential in spurring the Enlightenment and various political revolutions (including the French and American). But non-members, and other outcasts, proclaim the Rosicrucians never even existed.
Three works published anonymously in Germany between 1614 and 1616 delineate the life of the medieval knight Christian Rosenkreutz (German for “rose cross”). Rosenkreutz was a renaissance man who traveled widely in the Middle East, acquiring great wisdom. He returned home and formed a secret organization of eight fellow seekers in 1408. They were interested in philosophy; alchemy and magic; healing the sick; intellectual inquiry that might end all war; and the hidden forces of nature and the harnessing of natural power. Rosenkreutz died in 1484 and was buried in a vault. When the vault was opened in 1604, a parchment delineating the life and times of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood was found in the skeletal hand of Rosenkreutz’s uncorrupted corpse.
The tripartite Rosicrucian history, and Rosicrucian Manifestos, followed a little more than a decade after the vault was opened. They created a great stir in popular and intellectual circles in post-Reformation Europe. Great freethinkers were intrigued by this quest for bending nature to mankind’s will and among the new Rosicrucians were several members, in good standing, of the Western intellectual elite.
The famous Quaker William Penn, when a young man in England, was fascinated by mysticism and the Rosicrucians, and once called Jakob Böhme “his master in the art and law of divine wisdom.” Benjamin Franklin, John Dee, Robert Fludd, Johann Valentin Andreä and Joséphin Péladan were Rosicrucians.
Rosicrucian and neo-Rosicrucian societies have been formed over time in every country in the Western world, including the United States of America. Natural magic remains at the heart of modern Rosicrucianism, but in the last few centuries many things such as self-improvement, Egyptology, the abolition of slavery, occultism, and magick have attached themselves to the radical movement. Today there remain many people who say they are Rosicrucians.
“James Eagan Holmes regularly attended Christian worship services,” said Jerry Borgie, senior pastor at Penasquitos Lutheran Church in San Diego, California. “James Eagan Holmes was heavily involved in his local Presbyterian church,” said Holmes’ neighbor in Aurora, Colorado. The serial killer James Holmes was a Christian; Holmes was not a Darwinist, occultist, Satanist or Rosicrucian.
Contact the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum & Planetarium in San Jose, California for more authoritative data on Rosicrucianism. Read the great article The Occult Roots of the American Revolution by Examiner George Sieg too. The United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion (The Treaty of Tripoli, 1797 – Signed unanimously by Congress). THE END
