ROSACROCE. — Protestant sect, which originated from a historical novel, apparently invented by the Lutheran theologian Giovanni Valentino Andreà (1586–1654).
In 1614 there appeared anonymously: Professione di fede della Confraternita della R. In 1615: La Rivelazione della Confraternita del S.mo Ordine di R. Finally, in 1616: Die Chy-
mische Hochzeit Christiani Rosenkreutz. The first of these books contained violent attacks against the papacy; it narrated the adventures of a Christian Rosenkreutz (Rose-Cross), born in 1388, who, during journeys in Palestine and Egypt, was supposedly initiated into the occult sciences. On returning to his homeland, he was said to have chosen seven companions and founded with them the Confraternity of the r., whose members were to undertake great journeys and then assemble once a year. The league was to remain secret for 100 years. Its purpose was the general reform of the world, and it drew its inspiration from the seven sages of Greece and from certain Roman philosophers.
It seems that the author of these novels intended only to ridicule the contemporary mania for the marvellous. But the books were taken seriously; mystics and alchemists began searching for the Order of R., which proved impossible to find. Faced with such credulity, Andreà himself declared that the aforementioned memoirs of Rosenkreutz were nothing but fables; but in vain. The Lutherans accused the Calvinists of having attempted a manoeuvre against Lutheranism.
Despite all opposition, Germany was flooded with supposed manuscripts of Rosenkreutz; the movement also spread to France: in 1623, a manifesto announcing the arrival of the r., “saviours of the world,” was posted in Paris. The French bibliographer Gabriel Naudé (1600–53) wrote against them: Instruction à la France sur la vérité de l'histoire de la Rose-Croix, but he was unable to halt the movement.
The order of the r. developed above all by adopting the methods of Paracelsus. Henning Scheunemann, a physician from Bamberga; the Protestant preacher Giovanni Grabmann, who sold a mixture of cucumber and crushed roses as a remedy for every disease; Giulio Sperber, physician of Anhalt; Enrico Kunrath, physician of Amburgo; and Michele Maier, physician to the Emperor Rodolfo II and to the landgrave Maurizio of Hesse-Cassel, are remembered as Paracelsians and fervent r. The eighteenth century was thus inundated with charlatans, alchemical r., astrologers, and “wonder doctors” of every kind. The internal organization of the sect of the r. remained secret. It is believed that the brethren occupied themselves with cabbalism and alchemy, in search of the art of transmuting metals and prolonging human life. The r. said that the end of the world was near, but that the world would be renewed under their direction.
In the eighteenth century, the name r. was given to all the illuminati who claimed to have secret relations with the invisible world. The illuminati of the period were sometimes included in this category: Saint-Germain, Cagliostro, Mesmer, Saint-Martin; it has not, however, been proved that they belonged to the r., who by then, moreover, had fallen into decline. Freemasonry, on the other hand, had usurped the title of r., making it a degree of Masonic initiation, which is the seventh in the French rite and the eighteenth in the Scottish rite.
In the nineteenth century, the title of r. was reserved for the dignitaries of Freemasonry, when a group of young writers—Stanislao de Guaita, Barlet, Paolo Adamo Papus, Péladan—announced in 1888 their intention of renewing the cabbalistic order of the R. Shortly thereafter, Giuseppe Péladan separated from his friends because of their anticlericalism and founded the “Salon catholique de la Rose-Croix.” He called himself the sâr Péladan: born in Lione in 1858, died in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1918. In addition to several highly sensual novels and aesthetic works, he published, as an r.: Comment on devient un mage (1892); Comment on devient fée (1893); L'occulte catholique (1898); La règle de l'Ordre de Rose-Croix (1903). These are principally aesthetic and idealist investigations, often bizarre.