The Rosicrucian Origins of Masonic Ritual

[magusmasonica]

A conversation some time ago with Bro. Peter Clatworthy has always sat with me. In that conversation Bro.Clatworthy stated that "Modern" Freemasonry and it's Rites and Rituals (1717 and beyond) was really just thinly veiled Rosicrucianism.

I must admit that up untill that time I knew very little specifics of Rosicrucianism. I had rashly filed the art as simply "esoteric Christianity" and I had lost any interest in the subject. I know realize how wrong I was, it does happen on occasion.

Sometime after the conversation with Bro.Clatworthy I had a long conversation about Rosicruciainism with WGH Ripel. This lead to my own personal investigation of the art.

I jumped right in and I read the Rosicrucian Manifesto's. I found them very inspiring and anyone familiar with the basics of Freemasonry will find them accessable. But then the whopper happend.

The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz

Wow! What a whole other ballgame this work is. I love this, just as in Masonic ritual, the language of the Chemical Wedding is designed to conceal. The vibrational and rhythm of the work very intense. I began to feel just what Bro.Clatworthy was talking about.

The occult cosmology of this text seems to be the same as the foundation found in every Masonic rite I have worked and or studied. Incerdible.

Now, I am not saying that this is the "missing link" but I feel that it is a very big part of the whole equation.

I am deeply interested in others opinions about this link.

Love and Light,

[Tamrin]

Jul 3, 2009 12:02:28 GMT 10 magusmasonica said:

A conversation some time ago with Bro. Peter Clatworthy has always sat with me. In that conversation Bro.Clatworthy stated that "Modern" Freemasonry and it's Rites and Rituals (1717 and beyond) was really just thinly veiled Rosicrucianism.

Despite his being a Freemason by virtue of his former affiliation with UGLE, I think Bro. Clatworthy would now admit to being a hostile witness with respect to "Modern" Freemasonry. As with other hostile witnesses, his testimony is especially credible where it is of value to the other side.

The point is, the system before the trigradal system appears to have only been of interest to actual, operative stonemasons and to a few gentlemen antiquarians, such as Ashmole. It was the trigradal system which captured the public imagination and lent itself to the burgeoning spirit of the Age of Enlightenment. Bro. Clatworthy is almost certainly correct when he says it was "just" thinly veiled "Rosicrucianism." However, this was not a weakness but rather its strength and appeal.

The question is whether or not Rosicrucianism gave rise to trigradal Freemasonry or did they both arise from a common root—mystical Protestantism? Given the ethereal, even problematic, nature of early Rosicrucianism and given the composition and dynamics of the early grand lodge membership, I suspect the latter. Of interest here is Martin Luther's seal, which featured a rose and a cross. Also, early protestants were intrigued by the possibility of the Judaic mysteries (Kabbalah—?), spoken of by Jesus and featured in the early, Jerusalem church of the apostles, having been preserved among pre-Reformation groups.

[Tamrin]

Not being a tyled Lodged, one cannot go into much detail. However, Consider the added portions of the Antient Penalties (how the remains are to be treated): As well as being significant in terms of the Asherah theme, they feature the elements of water; earth and air; and fire. Consider also, the steps in the 3° and compare them to the lightning path among the sephiroth, followed by the four elements. Then too, there is the broken pillar theme which may refer to the disjunction of the central pillar of the tree of life, associated with Da'ath. There is also the lost word theme (formally Mason's were confident they had received the Mason Word, not a substitute). Plus, there are parallels with the legendary internment and discovery of the body of Christian Rosenkreutz (what is important is what the people concerned thought at the time). We might also speculate as to our raisings and Jesus' raising of Lazareth (a widow's son)—akin to Elijah's raising of a widow's son, and wonder if this was thought to be a pesher mystery of Primitive Christianity.

[magusmasonica]

Brother Philip, I must confess I have not seen the seal of Maryin Luther since being a young Theological student years ago. What a flaseback.

Your theory is interesting, but I am not sure that "mystical protestentism" exists. If anything Protestantism is about literal
interpitation of the Bible and enforcement of rules. Protestantism
if anything has fought the mystical in both the ceremonial magick
associated with the Roman Catholics as well as the Gnostics.

Now , Rosicrucianism seems to have a surface affinity with Gnostic "Christianity" but I would argue that under it's surface it is deeply Hermetic/theurgic/Quabbalistic in practice.

Love and Light,

[Tamrin]

Jul 4, 2009 14:47:07 GMT 10 magusmasonica said:

Now , Rosicrucianism seems to have a surface affinity with Gnostic "Christianity" but I would argue that under it's surface it is deeply Hermetic/theurgic/Quabbalistic in practice.

I read nothing here that is incompatible with the notion of "mystical Protestantism." The point is that for centuries there had survived groups of what Luther called the "Friends of God;" a milieu of faiths considered heretical by Rome. These included the Waldenses, Lollards, Hussites, etc. They had Albigensian roots, but had modified the original precepts over time. They had found refuge in the Alps of northern Italy, where their ministers were know as the Alpine Barbes, and also in Germany and Spain. They influenced pre-Reformation thought throughout Christendom; impressed Martin Luther, sponsored the translation of the Bible directly from its original languages to vernacular tongues; and they sheltered and inspired John Calvin, who thought he found among them remnants of the mysteries of Primitive Christianity, neglected by Rome.

In their literal translations and interpretations, they appear, from their fudging of the text, to have found a number of passages in the Bible which were considered "unsuitable" for the general congregations. One approach appears to have been to open the church to all and to reserve the "Hermetic / theurgic / Quabbalistic" mysteries for a select few (akin to the Ancient Mysteries and to the reservation of some of Jesus' teachings to his Apostles). These aspects of early Protestantism appear to have gone their seperate ways, making the concept of a "mystical Protestantism" hard to imagine looking at "Protestantism" today.

Some preliminary thoughts have been posted elsewhere on the forum.

[Tamrin]

Dec 27, 2008 15:14:01 GMT 10 Tamrin said:

The Essenes

[Excerpt - www.essortment.com - Linked Above]

There is a credible theory that the figure of Jesus was depicted as having been an Essene, that the "mysteries" of the early church are derived from this sect and that these were preserved among the Albigensians until the Reformation. We read (link above) of the Essenes:

[/size]

How did someone become an Essene? A man who wanted to join the order had to give them everything he owned. He had to make a promise, called a “terrible oath”, in which he swore to be loyal to the brethren and keep the doctrines of the order secret. Excommunication was the punishment for breaking the oath. The novice Essene was given three articles: a pickax, an apron, and a white garment. Everything else in the order was common property. After one year of probation, during which he was carefully observed, he could be promoted to the next level. Another two years of successful tests would entitle the successful candidate to full membership in the Essene brotherhood. At this point he would be permitted to join other members for the common meals...

Many of the Essene writings, especially the Manual of Discipline, contain statements, which are strikingly similar to the teachings of Jesus and early Christianity. This has led to speculation that Christianity may have had its beginnings with the Essene movement. Some even suggest that Jesus and John the Baptist were Essenes, or at least well acquainted with their teaching.

[/quote]

[Tamrin]

What may seem ridiculous to us, occupied some of the best minds of the day and ties in with theories of both Rosicrucian and Royal Society origins of the Craft. Consider James Gleick's book about Sir isaac Newton: Last of the Magicians (review below):

"He of all people was no Newtonian," declares James Gleick in the introduction to his new biography, Isaac Newton. Paradoxical but true. Sixty years ago, John Maynard Keynes scandalised the scientific establishment by announcing that Newton was not the world's first great scientist but was "the last of the magicians."

These days, Newton's alternative interests have been made respectable. Scholars have overturned older prejudices by showing how Newton's apparently arcane obsessions-alchemy, Solomon's temple, early Christian heresies-were far from being eccentric sidetracks but fed directly into his cosmological theories. Now Gleick, one of America's most successful popularisers of science, has transformed mainstream academic research into an exciting story about this revised Newton, a thinker more akin to Aristotle than to Einstein.

Newton himself would have been horrified by modern Newtonian physics, especially the innovations it owes to Pierre Laplace, the "French Newton" who introduced the deterministic, godless interpretation we now associate with Newtonianism. For the real Newton, God...

Blake's depiction of Newton

[Tamrin]

Jul 4, 2009 14:47:07 GMT 10 magusmasonica said:

Your theory is interesting, but I am not sure that "mystical protestentism" exists. If anything Protestantism is about literal interpitation of the Bible and enforcement of rules. Protestantism if anything has fought the mystical in both the ceremonial magick associated with the Roman Catholics as well as the Gnostics.

A closer look reveals a more complex pattern. With the following comments in mind, consider the disproportionate number of Huguenots (including Desaguliers) and other Calvinists (including Anderson) involved with the premier grand lodge when the trigradal system was introduced.

Craft Secrets Religiously Kept:
Neil Kamil’s Fortress of the Soul

[Excerpts - Review by Mary Henninger-Voss -
Technology and Culture (emphasis added) - Linked Above]

It is through intensive examination of material artifacts that Kamil builds out the artisanal networks that created them and reconstructs the mental, spiritual worldview they were meant to convey. At the outset, Kamil claims that “Material things were silent extensions of an entire cosmos of Huguenot artisanal discourse, mediating, like the refugees themselves, among different Protestant groups, as well as vis-à-vis their intractable enemies” (p. xix). Palissy’s pottery, Hogarth’s art, Long Island furniture: all have been seen in terms of their popularity as commodities, but all are connected to Huguenot communities and a sinuous aesthetic that according to Kamil must be followed through winding paths. Kamil takes his readers on just such winding journeys. He traces Palissian figures to “rustic” motifs, alchemical symbology, and Jean de Léry’s history of Brazil; he connects the signs of a Hogarth painting to Huguenot artisans in London, Robert Fludd’s magical arts, and popular stories of biblical characters; he draws the similarities between the front stretcher of a chair turned in Long Island, the architecture of a French Protestant church, and the printer’s device in a Protestant reader.

Kamil argues that these sinuous connections are necessary to a community that learned to dissimulate in order to avoid assimilation, or even annihilation. If safety for Huguenots was to be found in dissimulation, assimilation in appearance only, then resistance and identity could be maintained by alternative modes of apprehending appearances. The cosmic significance of a platter or an armchair would be clear to co-religionists, if not to the average consumer—or for that matter to the average historian.

It is perhaps Kamil’s use of the alchemical tradition that will raise the most concern on the part of historians of science and technology. Fortress is not about alchemy. Rather it uses alchemical literature as a kind of Rosetta stone that decodes meanings lying in the shadows of Huguenot artifacts. However, Kamil draws a very straight, almost unmediated line between Renaissance Neoplatonism, Paracelsian alchemy, and Robert Fludd’s work (on the one hand), and his reading of a large variety of Protestant artisanal experience and production (on the other). In its bold connections among texts, events, and objects, Fortress is reminiscent of the work of Dame Frances Yates, which in fact Kamil employs unproblematically. For Kamil, interest in Paracelsian alchemy leads not to questions of epistemology or approach to nature (questions we are now so comfortable with), but rather to the deciphering of a covert language of spirituality and politics (a project with a checkered past). His use of alchemical literature as a code for political and millenarian Protestant hopes will no doubt raise flags...

Many will object to specifics of Kamil’s interpretation, perhaps even to his underlying insistence that an alchemical-German spiritual-Neoplatonic worldview holds the key to the meanings embedded secretively into Huguenot arts. However, all this will only point up the core assumption of this work: true power is found in the control over meaning, and, as successive administrative authorities found, “private messages could not be controlled” (p. 921). Kamil has made it his herculean task to discover and make public a great number of the private and collective messages from the Huguenot past; he draws them into a compelling story of survival and hope among a community torn by violence and persecution.

[Tamrin]

Jul 3, 2009 12:02:28 GMT 10 magusmasonica said:

A conversation some time ago with Bro. Peter Clatworthy has always sat with me. In that conversation Bro.Clatworthy stated that "Modern" Freemasonry and it's Rites and Rituals (1717 and beyond) was really just thinly veiled Rosicrucianism.

Albert Mackey matured as a masonic scholar. While still entertaining speculative ideas, he became less credulous. In his unfinished and posthumously published, The History of Freemasonry, he devoted a chapter to each of the usual suspects, exploring various theories of masonic origins; except for the Rosicrucian theory, to which he devoted two. In the first (XXXV, pp.329/351), he began by asserting:

Of all the theories which have been advanced in relation to the origin of Freemasonry from some one of the secret sects, either of antiquity or of the Middle Ages, there is none more interesting than that which seeks to connect it with the Hermetic philosophy, because there is none which presents more plausible claims to our consideration.

He concluded this chapter, deciding that:

I have said that while the hypothesis that Freemasonry was originally derived from Rosicrucianism, and that its founders were the English Rosicrucians in the 17th century, is wholly untenable, there is no doubt that at a later period, a century after this, its supposed origin, a Rosicrucian element, was very largely diffused in the Hautes Grades or High Degrees which were invented on the continent of Europe about the middle of the 18th century.

This subject belongs more appropriately to the domain of history than to that of legend, but its consideration will bring us so closely into connection with the Rosicrucian or Hermetic philosophy that I have thought that it would be more convenient not to dissever the two topics, but to make it the subject of the next chapter. [XXXVI, pp.352/359]

The theory that masonry's "...founders were the English Rosicrucians in the 17th century...," Mackey shows to be an anachronism and thus untenable. However, if we apply Zanelli's Razor, and look only for the source of those changes introduced with the trigradal system in the 1720's, that objection collapses.

[Tamrin]

Free-Masonry is neither more nor less than Rosicrucianism
as modified by those who transplanted it to England

Thomas de Quincey
(Born this day 1785)

(Historico-critical Inquiry into the Origin of the Rosicrucians and the Free-masons)