Johan Valentin Andrea

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The date is May 10th, 1983. This is the 11th lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir on the subject of origins of Hermetic science. Tonight's lecture is entitled Johann Valentin Andrea: Cristianopolis, Chemical Marriage, and Vitae.

Speaking on Duke Augustus I'm going to have to insert John Amos Comenius. The reason for that is that the way that I was taught to develop a course of instruction was to always complete a cycle of learning. That even though there may not even be one person who would conscientiously think of it in terms of a cycle, one should complete that cycle of learning because we receive - as you all know - very deep impressions reverberations and a shape of understanding can surface years later, decades later. And when it surfaces, it surfaces in its fullness and completeness. So that's why it's the responsibility of those who can be artists in their lives and in what they do and complete the forms as much as possible. So that when they do surface, they will surface complete, and be useful. So in looking over what I've done so far I think that we could not complete the cycle without inserting Comenius. So I will try to catch up Augustus a little bit tonight with Andrea, which is not inappropriate. In the fourth chapter of the book that I just finished for Mr. Hall I took Johann Arndt, Johann Valentin Andrea, and Duke Augustus of Brunswick and put them together in the fourth chapter of that book. The book called Hermetic Roots of America. So they do go together. So next week we'll have John Amos Comenius. And with Comenius several of you will be interested. We'll see how Rembrandt comes into the Hermetic tradition.

The tacking up of the theses, the 95 theses by Luther was like the shot heard round the world at Concord. Its implications seemed to grow with every passing year. And there were two very lively lineages that came out of that act. One of the lineages, which we would call a sort of an orthodox Lutheran objectivity, would run something like this: from Luther to Melanchthon through Jacob Andrea and Hafenreffer to Johann Gerhard. Gerhard would be active around 1620, 1630. The other development which bore a very similar kind of a fruit, and yet different in purpose, was what has been called pietistic subjectivism. So that you have the Orthodox and you have the Pietist. And in the Pietist the major figure was Johann Arndt who dies about 1621. Arndt took his roots as having predated Luther by at least a hundred years, perhaps even more, 150 years. And he took his mystical roots from the 14th century German mystic community. And I will do that German mystic community along with the English mystic community the next quarter when we do the Mystic Century, the 14th century. But in that composite of mystical figures, which Arndt took as his basis, Johan Tauler - T-A-U-L-E-R. Johan Tauler was the major figure supplemented by Meister Eckhart and supplemented by the great mystic Thomas a Kempis. And a Kempis, even though he belongs to the mystics and the mystic century, lives all the way to 1471. So his life he lived to be 96 or 97 years old. So Thomas a Kempis whose great religious classic The Imitation of Christ lived on into the 15th century on into the time when Ficino was working. On into the time when Johannes Reuchlin was beginning to work. So that although it sounds on the surface as if the sources for art were way back several hundred years back they actually were very close to him.

Arndt produced in 1605, a book which is still read today called True Christianity. It was written in German and the emphasis of that book is that Christianity is not an external religion but an interior experience, and that the Christian is one who is transformed. That if someone believes himself to be a member of a church, with the emphasis on member, he is not a Christian. And later on in European history one of the great existentialists who struggled with Arndt's conception of Christianity, Soren Kierkegaard, wrote “I would like very very much to be a Christian but it is so hard.” And the reason that it was so hard for Kierkegaard is that he admitted he could not make that leap of faith which Christianity required of oneself. To leap inside of one's confidence, unarmed, expecting no landing place, and no aid to come to him.

Arndt's True Christianity was the second most favorite book brought to the United States by the early German Pietists and Rosicrucians. If they had any other book 300 years ago in Philadelphia it would - other than the Bible - it would have been Johann Arndt’s True Christianity. True Christianity was published the same year almost the same month as Bacon's Advancement of Learning. The two publications were related. It was a concerted salvo between England and Germany to establish a watershed, a threshold hoping that whatever would develop in the consciousness of the European experience from then on would flow from the other side of the mountain peaks established by these texts. Rather than referring back to the past it would refer increasingly to a future as yet undetermined. So they expected that this would create a watershed. And it did.

What they did not understand fully at that time were the long reaching transformative changes that would occur in the European psyche. They did not understand fully what happens when you effectively cut off the psychic past. They were correct in realizing that you can draw a line of realization in a generation. But they were incorrect in supposing that the past is dead, and incorrect in supposing that future history is synonymous with interior vision. It is psychologically not so. And the crux of the issue, to use an apt adjective, is that if we are constantly looking for a future paradisiacal culmination which is a goal of a process rather than hoping to experience the center of the entirety of a process where the past and the present and the future are all part of a similar fabric we give ourselves a false vision. We think that the end is out there or down there, rather than in the median realization, the Unio Mystica, of the entirety of the process. Very easy to mistake, and leading of course to enormous travails.

And the history of Europe in the 17th century is increasingly the expression of the fallout and the history of the realization in this fallout that man had come close to destroying himself by taking away the true focus of his life and positing, in its place, a willed expectant focus. And yet paradoxically they used, consistently, an enlightened language which had they realized what they were saying, in truth they would not have made this mistake.

The greatest expression of the shredding of the European psyche from 1605 on was that within 13 years - 12 or 13 years - of these publications Europe was embroiled in the 30 Years War. And the 30 Years War reminds one from the outside of the experience that the European psyche went through in the Second World War. Now there are two great histories of the 30 Years War written at two distinct epochal decision marks, benchmarks of European history. The first of them was written when the so-called romantic rebellion reached its apex, and it was written by Goethe's great friend Schiller. And Schiller's History of the 30 Years War, translated into English in the 19th century, is a piece of great historical writing and perception. And Schiller understood that what had happened at that time to the European psyche was happening again because the European mind was caught in a spinning cycle and he was repeating again what had happened. The second Great History of the 30 Years War was written in 1947, 48 by a woman Caroline Wedgwood, the great Wedgwood family in England, because she realized that the European psyche had gone through the same thing again and needed to have that perspective to break some kind of a magic charmed incantational type history that was working almost like black magic upon the European mind and hypnotizing it into expecting that it was looking forward to ever increasing progress when all it was doing was hastening around and a dead end cycle heading for another apocalypse. There were at the beginning of this complication individuals who understood in their feeling tones what was going on and struggled mightily with a way of perceptual description to give their version, their observation, of what was happening.

But it was not until the end of the 17th century that some enormous, magnificent intellect came along finally and understood the play of history that had happened in his time and had led up to the conditions of his lifetime and found resolutions to those problems. Unfortunately the resolutions were couched in such a sophisticated language that only a very few ever learned it. And they learned it thinking that they were simply learning higher mathematics. And that individual was Leibniz. Because the history of the 17th century is almost incomprehensible without some kind of a core thread, almost family by family, lineage by lineage, to carry you through the welter of information and facts. And tonight we'll see, with just two sample documents from the hundreds that came out at this time, what the vertigo of the intellect was being experienced at that time. And we'll see with the two documents which I will review for us all this evening in some detail: the Fama Fraternitatis R. C. and The Chemical Marriage of Christian Rosenkreutz. These two documents illustrate very aptly what kind of momentous subject matter was being toyed with and how they were convinced that they had found a “just” decision about the purposes of man.

John Dee's European contacts included a man named Otto who was the Duke of Brunswick. Now Brunswick is the Braunschweig-Lüneburg in northern Germany, Lüneburg quite far north, Braunschweig a little further south. They were called the Dukes of Brunswick. And the Dukes of Brunswick always from the 1540s on, were the patrons, the people who used their monetary resources and their cultural influence to patronize the intelligent development of civilization. One of the first anatomy books, medical texts, was sponsored by the Dukes of Brunswick. John Dee was partly financed by one of the Dukes of Brunswick. In this crucial period the Duke of Brunswick was a man named Augustus and he lived on until 1660. So that in this one individual - he lived to be 80 some years old - and it was he who as a young man supported the reprinting of Trithemius’s great cipher manual the Steganographia. And it was on the title page of this edition 1624 of the Steganographia that there's an illustration of Francis Bacon holding a type of a crown over the head of this individual sitting at his desk writing, who was the Duke of Brunswick.

Augustus who was known in the arcane literature of the time as Gustav Selini, or the man in the moon. Selene, moon. The man in the moon was the European center of the mystical brotherhoods and he was the one who kept control of the moving contacts because no other individual had the perspective which he had. The long family history, the enormous contacts through family and position through every kingdom in Europe including England and the tremendous kind of cultured civilized learning to be able to patiently decade after decade see that the contacts were maintained that the right people got in the right spot and that if it was a question of money that that would be provided. If it was a question of individuals meeting that would be provided and so on.

The importance of the family of the Dukes of Brunswick is that all three major branches came together at the end of the 17th century and the line of the Dukes of Brunswick that absorbed all the other lines through deaths of heirs and so forth. The line that survived were those located in Hanover. And the Dukes of Brunswick became the Kings of England with George the First. So that this whole occult lineage, from the 15th century, reached a culmination at about the same time that the United States was becoming a viable political and economic and spiritual entity in the family of nations. But in order to understand this enormous development, and it’s much more enormous than even occurs at this particular point. For instance, the family genealogist for the Dukes of Brunswick for the last 40 years of his life was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the man who invented universal calculus, the man who put science in a spiritual universal mode. He was for the last 40 years of his life the family biographer.

And it was through Leibniz that two of the most pressing, complicated occult secrets of the documents that we're going to talk about were solved. The first one was the identity of the author the true author of the Fama Fraternitatis Rosae Cruci. And Leibniz found that the author was not Andrea, it was not Bacon but it was a man almost unknown to general objective history named Joachim Jungius who was a mathematician in Hamburg and who was a member of the Rosicrucian fraternity almost from its beginning. And it was through his researches that Leibniz was able to identify him as the author. Joaquim Jungius was born in 1587 and lived till 1657. He was born in Lübeck and Lübeck is where Thomas Mann was born and he died in Hamburg. And he established a Fraternitatis Rosae Caelestis at the University of Rostock in 1625 - the year after the publication of the Steganographia of Trithemius in the edition of Duke Augustus and Francis Bacon. And he was of course a professor of mathematics. But we are having to understand now that mathematics was not a distant objective vocabulary as we envision it today. In the 20th century it was the core of a universal language just developing and would find its development in two simultaneous developments in England and in Germany, with Newton and Leibniz. So that this individual, who I looked up in the great German biographical resource, Meyers Lexicon, and constantly in the biography of Jungius there they refer to him as being an opponent of scholastics by taking away the kind of false logic that scholasticism had employed and showing by the use of true mathematical insight that this form of thought led away from the phony objectivity of the scholastics into a very complex mentality that was in fact undistinguishable from higher mystical metaphysical thought. Higher mathematics correctly understood is a form of mystical contemplation. And of course we today in the late 20th century are just coming around now to realizing that this is so just now realizing that this is so.

Junius was a secretary in the court of Heidelberg - and we'll come to that increasingly. The court of Heidelberg about 1630 and there was a secretary there at the court of Heidelberg in a document who admitted in writing that Junius was the author of the sect of Rosicrucians and had written the Fama. Leibniz was the only individual up until our time who understood this, had established these facts, and had incorporated them in his writings. Unfortunately, these writings of Leibniz have never been dug out of the archives where they still remain today, in the archives of the Dukes of Brunswick in Germany. They are untranslated and they remain there. There are only a few esotericists who are able to read that material and they have not really recorded it sufficiently. The positioning of Joachim Jungius as the author of the Fama, was the first of the two mysteries solved by Leibniz in his researches. And remember now he had all the material at his command plus his enormous intellect. Leibniz is really far and away one of the greatest intellects of all time. The second mystery that he solved was the mathematical puzzle that is encased in The Chemical Marriage of Christian Rosenkreutz. And the solution to that mathematical puzzle was the name of the mysterious Virgin of the world whose name was that of the primordial materia out of which man's realization of the unity of all comes. And Leibniz correctly solved the mathematical puzzle and disclosed that her name was Alchemica - Alchemica.

All of these enormous realizations and the thrust of history at that time become visible when we review the life of Johann Valentin Andrea. He was in the center of this confusion and for the last 350 years has been singled out as the mysterious person behind these events, when in fact he is not so much the mysterious person behind the events but really the mysterious mask placed behind the events so that those looking at a purely objective history would discover him and leave well enough alone. Well it's time, high time, that we see our history as it really should be seen in order to free ourselves up for the tasks at hand which are by now apparent to everyone.

Andrea was born in 1586 and he was born in southern Germany. His grandfather had been one styled as the second Luther of Württemberg - Jacob Andrea. So he came from a long line of distinguished Lutheran pastors and theologians. He was raised in a household where this, everyone in the household who was a male, was involved in this type of a life. He was very early sent to the great University of Tübingen. Now the University of Tübingen had been founded by the early patron of Johannes Reuchlin and it was through Reuchlin’s original designs that a lot of the curricula for the University of Tubingen actually developed. So there was a kind of a ahead of its time freedom in academic matters and in collegiate lifestyle. So that the University of Tübingen, by the time that Andrea got there about 1601, was not at all the kind of university that we imagine existing in 1601 but more like the kind of university that we envision existing in 1961. And Andrea had the kind of collegiate career which we would recognize as coming from one of the great Midwestern universities in the late 1950s. He played around. He attended extracurricular activities. He was thrown out, put on probation as they would say today, until he regained his senses and matured. And at this time in his playing around he was very much enchanted by the traveling troupes of English actors that were coming over from England at that time and traveling around the German continent.

Now who was doing this in 1601, 1602? It were the groups that were assigned to the Shakespearean Globe theater groups. And what they were traveling with was literally cultural dynamite opening up all the possibilities through sacred theater disguised as secular blockbusters. And they were infecting an entire generation with the urge to emulate them. And Andrea at 16 was writing comedies on the very template and design of the Elizabethan comedies of Shakespeare. In fact if you look at The Merry Wives of Windsor and at Andrea's early comedies you find so much similarity in style and purpose that one is almost, but not quite, willing to say that they had been co-authored by whoever was producing the Shakespearean comedies at that time. It was at this time - age 16, age 17, age 18 - having played himself out of a university career for a few years and sent to traveling with the hope that he would mature on the road that he wrote The Chemical Marriage of Christian Rosenkreutz. Chymische Hochzeit. The Chemical Marriage of Christian Rosenkreutz. It was written about 1603 but not published until 1616. When it was published in 1616 it had references to events in history that had just happened in 1613, 1614 so that obviously it was a revised version, a transformed version, from the 1603. And the reason why it was transformed is that The Chemical Marriage of Christian Rosenkreutz is such a sophisticated document that it could not possibly have been written by someone who was a teenager, an adolescent. It has such a masterful comprehension of the arcane cycle of maturity not maturity by a linear development leading from dot to dot to dot, but the arcane development of maturity that leads through, transformation by transformation by transformation. So that in order to understand the growth in this way one has to understand what the fullness of the horizon of experience was at any particular juncture of the development. So that one cannot move on to the next stage until one has mastered the unity of that stage. So that one moves by completed cycles of experience. And of course this model of transformational grammars of learning were exactly the prototype that were used by both Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz when they developed their calculuses. Because if there's anything revolutionary about Newton's method and Leibniz's method is that it left behind, at a dead stop, the old Aristotelian syllogistic logic and posited in its place a transformational method which stood science and science in good stead until the middle of the 20th century. This produced at that time a momentous sea change in the psychology of Western man. It was a psychology that had never been seen before on this planet. It produced good and evil in the sense that it freed man to realize that as long as he kept consistently to his developmental transforming he could posit his own purposes, his own directions of growth.

He made the mistake of thinking that any future that he envisioned could be engendered in this way, which is a mistake of the ego. But he did transform himself out of a stuttering, static worldview into a dynamic one that yielded all the discoveries of modern science. Now this was exactly the hoped-for advancement of learning that Bacon himself had put into his great 1605 volume by that title. And, as you will see, in the review I give you of The Chemical Marriage. The ideas in The Chemical Marriage are so close to Bacon's exposition that we have to assume that he had a hand in the writing of that document and that his hand was very heavy in the 1603 version and perhaps less heavy in the 1616 published version. But nevertheless there all the same. And if we wish to understand the chemical marriage we should not go back to alchemical treatises before 1616, but we should look ahead a couple of years to Bacon's Novum Organum. And when we do that, we realize that The Chemical Marriage, true to its position in the threshold of history, did not look back to alchemy at all. It looked forward to science and the Novum Organum especially as a new logic of scientific discovery based upon understanding nature's transformative cyclic patterns.

Of course Andrea, excited to be a part of all this as a young man of 17 or 18, found that he was participating in the revolution of his time, the intellectual revolution of his times. And the university courses at Tübingen began to pale, just as in the 1960s the great cultural events seem to be so much more important than any class that one could take. And the same thing happened. He dropped out. He eventually found himself again and when he found himself he turned his back on most of the implications that he was working with and juggling and went back to the good solid family background. And increasingly as he reoriented himself in that Lutheran orthodoxy he cemented himself in better and better with that tradition and towards the end of his life wrote many letters saying that these were foolish works and that he had in fact authored The Chemical Marriage but that it had been one of these stupid productions that produced only monstrosities. He disowned them. But before he got to the stage of disowning them, Andrea completed for himself, as one would expect a conscientious individual working with these realizations of completed cycles, completed for himself that mysterious cycle of revolutionary transformation. And at the end of that cycle, within three years of writing the revised version of The Chemical Marriage in 1616, he wrote two works in 1619 that for him completed his cycle and freed him up either to go forward with another transformation which would have led him into the world that Comenius inhabited. Instead he chose to stay comfortably back one step and become masterful in a traditional Lutheran way. The two works both published in 1619 one was called The Tower of Babel and the other was a utopian view of man called Christianopolis. And these two works display Andrea coming to terms with what was needed.

There must be a universal language so that all men may communicate. And that all men may communicate about transformational revolutionary consciousness. That the language that had developed and fractionated itself through Orthodox history had become so clumsy as to be incapable of expressing the dynamic relational functions that were available in the mystical metaphysical psyche. So that there should be a new language, a metaphysical language which was universal that would allow men to talk about relationships which were not objectively there but which were subjectively experiential - if I can use that term. And that language became in its great development calculus because calculus is the mathematical language of relational change. It takes geometry and trigonometry and throws it into motion and talks about all the changes that happen in those motions. And it changes the whole conception of what man may talk about with his fellow man.

The second and that was the subject by implication of the Tower of Babel. The second one Cristianopolis was the by now familiar theme that there must be a human community of experience by a vanguard of the best of man to pioneer a way by which society may be changed and renewed and thereby seed the revolution and the change of the world as a whole. And of course one of the earliest documents in this series was by Thomas More, Sir Thomas More, who was a student of John Colet who was the great compatriot of Ficino and Trithemius and Trismosin. And one of the next utopias in this line of development was Bacon's New Atlantis which came out about the same time that Andrea’s Cristianopolis came out. And just before them was published Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun. All of these utopias are published together in one book, one document which is for sale incidentally at the bookstore of the Philosophic Research Society, Four Utopias. And the four of them together give us a real good template of what the mind of man was looking at in terms of a comprehensive social philosophy which was revolutionary at that time and is still revolutionary today. Not so much by the examples which they give us. If we look at them today, each of the utopias there, we would not live in any of them. They would seem static to us because in a sense we have evolved considerably along the lines that they had hoped we would evolve and our conception of what is possible in terms of a society a community today are enormously advanced except that we don't have the courage of heart today to put ourselves into that situation as an operational reality. They did, they had that. But their visions today would seem somewhat antiquated. But it's interesting that these utopias, three of them, come around the same time. But the fourth one comes from 90 years before and it's still in place. And the best indication is to realize, as I've been trying to develop in this course, that the generation that matured and came into play, from about 1460 till about 1540, was an 80 year period of sheer genius. And that the most fruitful period of universal history for us to look at today to tutor ourselves to possibilities is to look at that era of cultural history from 1460 to about 1540. In fact it ends exactly in 1541. It ends with the death of the hero who carried within his mind and experience the culmination of it all - Paracelsus. And we died when he died in 1541. It put an end to the lineage and we found that John Dee had to reconstruct that lineage. And in reconstructing it through his genius he brought every element into play except the one that he couldn't. There was no living contact. There was no experience of the master who in a million ways shows what to do by doing it.

Wallace Stevens has a very great poem where he talks about the impossible possible philosopher’s man who in a million diamonds sums us up. Who in his arcane chanting of the hymns of the spirit conveys an intelligence which we could never understand without that experience. The transmission of a living lineage. So that the Hermetic tradition suffered in the 1540s a crimp. There was a gap. There was a hiatus. And we'll see that that hiatus comes again in European history just about the time that the lineage had been recovered and put back into operation in the 1720s, again there's a gap, and again there is a fallout of all kinds of partial approximations of what should have gone on but nothing real. And we find that the early 18th century will be filled with all kinds of metaphysical societies, arcane personalities, and they're all guessing. And the only one who really puts it together in a realistic mode and starts the tradition again happens to be a seemingly ordinary American named Benjamin Franklin. That's where this course leads to. The figure of this great epochal change around 1460 became for the writers of The Chemical Marriage, that mythical protagonist named Christian Rosenkreutz because on the very title page of The Chemical Marriage of Christian Rosenkreutz it dates it anno 1459. And the reason that that date is there is because that was the turning point in European history and they knew it in 1616 when they published it. They understood that; they were not naïve children. The mistakes they made are sophisticated honest mistakes that any generation can make. We are all subject to the machinations of an infinitely sophisticated ego and its tentacles of complication are much deeper than any of us are willing to even believe. So the mistakes that they made are not mistakes of the ignorant so much as mistakes of the oversophisticated. So they understood that 1459 was a pivotal year and therefore on the title page it was The Chemical Marriage that had happened in 1459. And in fact it was to that turning point in history that The Chemical Marriage turns itself. And it's exactly in that time frame that its predecessor by two years the document known as the Fama Fraternitatis, the great broadside announcing a universal reformation of the entire world, also pointed back to that time period, and pointed to the fact that the protagonist who exemplified the spiritual maturity of that time had in fact brought together a sacred society, a fraternity, a brotherhood of four individuals which became eight individuals and then realized that times were not yet ripe for the transformation of the world and so took all of his learning and all of his capacities and was sealed in a vault - ten feet cube - to be opened in 120 years when history would have evolved to the point where man could make use of the material and the viewpoint thus synthesized. And 120 years from the date of the suspended animation burial of Christian Rosenkreutz and all his information worked out to the year 1604. And of course in 1602 and 1603, with those new supernova in the constellations of Sagittarius and the serpent And the computing by arcane history that 1604 was an epochal threshold. Commensurate with that The Chemical Marriage of Christian Rosenkreutz was written, the play Hamlet was written, Johann Arndt's True Christianity was written, Bacon's Advancement of Learning was written. They, all the great documents which if we list them externally now are unrecognizable, but if you get into the history of the period one could show maybe 25 or 30 titles that came out clustered all around that date. And the inescapable conclusion, just fortified by more research, is that there was a tremendous population of dozens if not hundreds of individuals who were conscious of working together on a planned basis. Not a plan so much as a design that you would put up on a wall, such as a architect would plan today building a skyscraper, a process flow chart of where you're going to be, but really a plan in the sense of a template that here's what the completed pattern has yielded again and again in human history and now it's up to us to take this template and put it on our experience and go through it again with one exception, one primary primordial difference. We are no longer going to go through the pattern that man has gone through back to his beginnings. We're going to change that pattern because we want man to go in a different direction. We don't want him just to mature along this horizon any longer. We want him to go in a different direction and therefore we're going to emend this eternal pattern and change it in one primary respect. We're going to put the capacity for man to self-direct his future into the pattern.

And they hoped that that would work. And of course we can see in retrospect what a courageous daring acrobatic work this was and how they walked on the tightrope of expectation for ten or twelve or thirteen years and then fell off, fell into the 30 Years War, shredded all their dreams and it all fell apart. But before that happened, before the tragedy manifested itself, it seemed for about ten years as if in fact they had got hold of the dragon of history and had transformed their capacity to handle this. Not so much by killing the dragon as they had done in the past, but by taming the dragon and making that dragon of history a beast of burden for their own purposes. To take the dynamic of history instead of being a series of resistances that would stop man from realizing himself and become a workhorse under man's direction to help him to realize his purposes. And in fact all they needed was a leader, somebody who could embody in a very realistic way the head of this whole direction, this whole movement. And what they looked for was a monarch, a king, an emperor who would serve this purpose. He had to be extraordinarily intelligent. He had to be someone whose background was impeccable. He had to be someone in whose life all of the currents of the time were integrated. And especially he needed to be someone who brought together the two major traditions as they had developed England and Germany.

Now they hoped for some time that Queen Elizabeth would be the English side of this bridge. And they looked around for a European compliment and they realized that it was too late to suppose that she could marry a European man but perhaps a European man could be adopted as a son so to speak. And in 1597, very early on in this game, they found such an individual in the Duke Frederick. And Duke Frederick became the individual upon whom increasingly the hopes were pinned and in fact he was an extreme Anglophile. He loved everything English and the thing that he wanted more than anything else was to be included in the Knights of the Garter. Because the knighthood involved in the Order of the Garter was the most sacred order in English history, the one that had the most arcane influence. And later on where in the 17th century, when the great antiquarian Elias Ashmole decided to undertake a great esoteric project, he wrote a great history of the Order of the Garter which we have a copy in the PRS vault. Great big huge thick tome. And when you look through it, it isn't just a history of the Order of the Garter, but it is a whole metaphysical rationale of why there are orders among men and why Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism and all these orders have a legitimate place in the spiritual development of man. And why the Order of the Garter is the penultimate order that after which there will only be one more great order, and that will be the universal development of a reformed mankind.

It was Duke Frederick's wild ambition to become a part of the Order of the Garter, and he knew it was very very difficult for a European to be included. And yet he hoped that some way would be found. Now when Elizabeth died in 1603 it was not cause for alarm for the proponents of Duke Frederick. In fact when James came to the throne he loved the young man. He loved his dashing style. He loved the fact that he really embodied the best of the European families, the best of young manhood and he increasingly wanted to make it possible for Duke Frederick to become a part of the Order of the Garter. Finally in 1612 they found a way. James the First, James Stuart, married off his daughter Elizabeth to Duke Frederick and the joining of England and Germany, in one fell swoop, the development of the exact arcane metaphysical ruler in one fell swoop, happened around Christmas time of 1612. And it was at this time that wonderful Shakespeare wrote the great play The Tempest to be performed at this royal marriage. And it was a way of signaling that in fact the New Age was about to dawn because the right man and the right circumstance had finally come to be. And England and Germany, their traditions finally brought together and wedded. And Duke Frederick and Elizabeth Stuart, after their great wedding festivities in London which went on for months, took their entire entourage to their court at Heidelberg. And it was there at Heidelberg that they built and developed an enormous castle complex and a fantastic esoteric garden which was the prototype of many esoteric, arcane gardens of the time. The most famous one in England belonged to Sir David Lindsay, Lord Balfour. And if you run across references to him Balcarres rather, not Balfour's, Balcarres. If you run across references to him it is his esoteric garden that formed the initiation labyrinth of late Stuart England out of which all the English Rosicrucians were initiated in united, and out of which the earliest meetings of that group which became the Royal Society of London took place.

Heidelberg and London were the two points of a metaphysical axis and the direction was all for Duke Frederick with his beautiful English wife. She loved him madly. He was a great man. He was just excellent. Their castle was famous for mechanical marvels. They had fountains that did magical tricks. They had mechanisms in the castle that just were the awe of everybody at the time. And where have we heard all this before? We heard it because John Dee and all the great alchemists were great toy makers, mechanical makers. They could make machines that would do things. And of course the granddaddy of all those was the great Roger Bacon. 300 years before who we’ll get to over at the PRS lecture series in about a month. But Heidelberg became, in 1613, the esoteric center of the European mind. And with the focusing of the esoteric center of the European mind on the court at Heidelberg in 1613 it was a signal that the threshold of realization was upon Europe. And therefore we find in 1614 the very next year the publication of these enormously explosive broadsides, the most famous of which was the Fama Fraternitatis R. C. It was published in 1614 and overnight created a sensation. Everybody in every country in Europe was buzzing about, who could these Rosicrucians be? How could one join? Works of criticism and and praise came out off the press so fast that by 1615 dozens and dozens of publications had come out and a complement to the Fama Fraternitatis called the Confessio was published. And generally ever since the Fama and the Confessio had been published together. The Fama however when it came out did not come out as a broadside by itself but came out in an enormous publication by a man named Boccalini, Boccalini - little mouth in Italian.

Now Boccalini was one of these characters who by his swift wit and his clever implications made many enemies. He was found strangled in his bed some months after the publication of his enormous tome. And in his tome, it was called The Universal Reformation of the Entire World, in about a hundred different chapters in the 77th chapter had appended to it this Fama Fraternitatis. So it came out under the aegis of this enormous perhaps spoofing perhaps guerrilla theater-type encyclopedia of world change. And yet it was singled out immediately as the meat of the entire publication, the moving point of the history that was being offered. And what was being offered of course was the conception that man, through taking control of his own future, could change himself, could change his nature. And of course this was getting dangerously close to that primordial fault which had even gripped Adam in the old Kabbalistic understanding. That by assuming that just because one can name reality that one then can by changing the names can change reality invites one to be thrown out of the garden of Paradise. The name is not the object. Unfortunately no matter how arcane the correlation is made nature is not a referential system to man's mind, but a realistic complement to its natural workings and they have to work in tandem in a complementary fashion. And they cannot be polarized even on a sophisticated level and produce a confrontation. Because in every case that man confronts nature he's going to lose. It's like the spoon trying not to fit into the soup bowl. It can not because it's a part of it. Man cannot step outside of nature and hope to grab it by its tail and twist it around.

The great example of this is Carl Jung's statement that as far as he was concerned there was no such thing as a birth trauma because there were no human beings that had never been born so we had no way to compare. So it was nonsensical to talk about a birth trauma. We've all been born until we know what it's like to be human without being born. We can't talk about those kinds of things with any real meaning the same way. In an analogous way man cannot revolutionize his consciousness in a supranatural way because he never has existed outside of nature in terms of his consciousness. But it was a rare high-falutin mistake to make even though they made it at the time.

Now the best discussion of how the English involvement with the Rosicrucians through this development leading to the marriage of the Elector Palatine Frederick and Elizabeth daughter of James the first came to be is found in a book by Frances Yates called The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. I think it's available in a paperback and she has a couple of chapters in here. And one of the very profound chapters in recent intellectual history is John Dee and the Rise of Christian Rosenkreutz. Now she presents a little bit different view from one that I've been developing for you. But one must keep in mind that she really was a pioneer in this work and had other purposes in mind. She worked patiently as a scholar building up step by step. Whereas I've been moving in hermetic patterns and building from unity to unity. So you get a different view. But she writes, something very interesting in here about “the Fama and the Confessio are printed in an English translation in appendix to this book where the reader may study for himself their stirring announcements of a dawn of enlightenment and the strange romance about Christian Rosenkreutz and his brotherhood in which the announcements are wrapped up. The many problems concerning the manifestos cannot all be dealt with in this chapter but are distributed over this entire book. For example, the problem of why a long extract from an Italian work translated into German was printed with the Fama will be deferred until the discussion in a later chapter of the slant towards Italian liberals implicit in the German Rosicrucian movement,” and so on.

Part of the indication here is that along with the English and German involvements we should be aware that there was a tremendous Italian involvement. That in fact Paracelsus’s death, while creating a hiatus for the German speaking Hermetic tradition and while creating a hiatus really for the English speaking tradition, the Italian Hermetic tradition did not suffer that hiatus. That it was carried on and the two individuals that should be investigated - and I'm sorry that we just don't have time. I think you can appreciate the fact that we're jamming as much as we can. And the two individuals that should be looked at in Italian intellectual history, the first one is Francesco Giorgi and he wrote an enormous work called the Harmony of the World and the second individual is Tommaso Campanella and Campanella's City of the Sun is the primary document in his intellectual development. There are others.

Campanella harkens back also to the great Italian mystic Joaquim de Fiore and this is because Campanella came from southern Italy from Calabria exactly from the region where Joaquim de Fiore had done his developing, and there's only 400 years history between Joaquim de Fiore and Campanella. And I just suggest to you that there's no way to understand some of the deeper implications of the Hermetic movement without realizing this Italian lineage and without realizing that you have to go back to the mystical histories of Joaquim de Fiore. Because in the development came this enormous emphasis on the Sancti Spiritus - the Holy Ghost, the Holy Spirit - that somehow the nature of understanding the future, any future, in a visionary whole within a pattern that was a visionary whole depended upon one understanding the third level of history of Joaquim de Fiore. That after the age of the father and after the age of the son there would be the Third Age that of the Holy Ghost, of the Holy Spirit. And in fact the emphasis on the Holy Spirit, the Sancti Spiritus, the Holy Ghost is the ultra sophisticated paradigm of the alchemist using an interior yoga balance to transmute matter and again and again in the very operating core of alchemical transformation when it is based on perceiving rather than the goal when it is based on perceiving the center, the Unio Mystica, then one is working with the Holy Spirit manifesting within oneself.

And the best delineation of this great occult secret is found in Carl Jung's Psychology and Alchemy. And on page 166, this is Collected Works volume 12, Jung displays his magnificent understanding - he was wonderfully given a background in intellectual history as well as the depth perception of his own experience - that he writes. And in talking about the mystical center in alchemy he's bringing in Jacob Boehme the great mystic whose Aurora came out in 1600. “Boehme’s mysticism is influenced by alchemy in the highest degree.” Thus he says, “the form of the birth is as a turning wheel which Mercurius causes in the sulfur. The birth is the golden child. The Filius Philosophorum the archetype of the divine child whose master workman is Mercurius.” The Spiritist Mercurius, Hermes. “Mercurius himself is the fiery wheel of the essence,” fiery wheel. And of course you run across the fiery wheels in the visions of Ezekiel. The fiery wheels occur in the Apocalypse attributed to John.

So that all of the classical mystical visions of final days, eschatological concerns, in the ancient tradition, were not ultimate world ending goals but were world transforming unities, patterns of wholeness brought to their completion which is different from a goal - it's a center. Jung points this out. “Mercurius himself is the fiery wheel of the essence in the form of a serpent.” And of course the two serpents, wrapped like DNA around that central rod, is the caduceus of Hermes. “Similarly the unenlightened soul,” this is according to Boehme via Jung. “The unenlightened soul is just such a fiery mercurial. It has to be transformed. “Vulcan kindles the fiery wheel of the essence in the soul when it breaks off from God. Whence come desire and sin which are the wrath of God. The soul is then a worm, like the fiery serpent, a larva and a monster.” Remember Andreas said that his Chemical Marriage had been the matrix of monstrous monstrosity. “The interpretation of the will in Boehme reveals something of the mystical secret of alchemy and is thus of considerable importance in this respect as well as from the psychological point of view. The wheel appears here as a concept for wholeness which represents the essence of mandala symbolism and therefore includes the Mysterium Iniquitatis. The idea of the center writes Jung. The idea of the center which is the unconscious has been repeatedly thrusting upon the conscious mind of the dreamer and is beginning to gain foothold there and to exercise a peculiar fascination. The next drawing is again of a blue flower but this time subdivided into eight. Then follows pictures of four mountains round a lake in a crater and also of a red ring lying on the ground with a withered tree standing in it round which a green snake creeps up with a leftward movement.” And of course this is the clockwise movement of the eternal process. Reds and greens and blues - primaries. Trees in the center. Fours. Fiery wheel.

The realization was very clear in Boehme, in his mysticism, just as in Jung's alchemy, just as in the traditional process that there was a leap that man must make on his own. But the mistake made in this stupendous period of European revolutionary thought was that somehow man could get away with changing the very nature of his nature, and he substituted his will for the universal pattern. I don't have time to go through all The Chemical Marriage I guess as I had hoped to have for you. But I want to bring this point out that there is in development of spiritual process the creation of a threshold. This threshold is not an object, not a shape in and of itself but is a space which allows for a motion to transpire through it. The mistaking of the outline of that threshold for an objective, transcendental object which could be juggled like any other thing is a mistake of man's pride. Very very familiar one in world history. What is involved in seeing the threshold as a space rather than as a manipulable stage, an objective stage which can be included then by parentheses or some other way into one's own willful process is understanding the capacity of perception, understanding that perception is an act of doing which requires one's wholeness and that clear perception, true perception is an act of wholesomeness. The lack of understanding of this is apparent in this quotation. This is from Rudolf Steiner's Commentary on The Chemical Marriage. He says, “A true insight into the experiences the author of this book assigns to the pilgrim at the portal, at this threshold shows that the satiric mood of later parts of the work is really to be traced to soul experiences of such seriousness that they assume a form of mere satire only to those who wish to remain in the sphere of the senses.” That we come to a bifurcation of perceptual capacity where the sublime and the ridiculous happen exactly at the same time. And for those who are rooted in the sensate referential world of the old logic will forever see the spirit as a ridiculous absurdity. While those who are able to pass through unknowingly through that threshold and have absolutely Lutely no registry consciously of having changed except that they exemplify more and more in their lives a different wholesome kind of wholesomeness about the pattern. And it's only by seeing what they actually do from then on that they recognize in retrospect that they went through that threshold and were changed because they no longer are satisfied with the old referential representation of symbolism. They rather understand that they have somehow entered into a realm of interpenetration of realities. And the key to this, if we can for a moment presume to give you some mnemonic key, is the understanding of the term symbol, symbolon, from the Old Greek, meant the interpenetration of two realms and where the two interpenetrate that what occurs in the median between them refers equally, not in an ambiguous sense, but in an integrating sense to both realms at the same time. So that symbols occur out of the material sensate and the spiritual transcendent realm together. So that a symbol never represents something else, it always presents itself and the person who has gone through that threshold begins to have occur to him more and more. That he himself symbolizes, presents the spiritual reality. And thus the American Indians say, I am holy sitting here, I am holy when I walk, I am holy when I stop, I am holy sitting here. That simple phrase, the recognition of having passed through the threshold and that one's life no matter how daily, symbolizes exactly in the doing of it the highest spiritual values you could have.

It was a great sin if we may use that term of pride for a European man in the early 17th century to have assumed that by understanding and being able to manipulate language these secret processes that he had grasped them as simply tools for his own self-aggrandizement. And the first slap in the face was the 30 Years War and the second slap in the face came with the development of a schizophrenic mind which increasingly began to dominate society at the end of the 17th century. And if you want to see the change in the mind take up Shakespeare's The Tempest and then read Sheridan's School for Scandal right after it. They're both very entertaining plays but the implications of the one yield the world of the spirit and the implications of the other yield some kind of a social satire. This all did not go unnoticed and I wish I had more time to go into it in depth, but there were individuals who understood what was happening and strove mightily to try to prevent its developing beyond human control.

So next week we'll take a look at one of those figures who came out of Czechoslovakia, who came out of Eastern Europe, who went into England, who went into Germany, went into Sweden, went into Amsterdam, went into the mountains of Hungary, and strove mightily to try to find some way to rectify the damage that had been done. The first great educational philosopher since Plato. Comenius is really a major mind and he sought through his pan-sophic colleges to try to develop a way by which modern European man could get rid of the errors of pride which had crept into his mentality. And at the same time carry on the better purposes which he had supposedly ascribed to. So we'll take a look at Comenius next week. And I think it's just sufficient and significant to note that when he went to England in 1641 one of the first things that he designed was a program of teaching hermetic science to the American Indians so that they could help European man get back on his feet again. And all this of course has been lost in the standard histories, they don't even give you a footnote. We're too old now for footnotes. We've got to have the real story. At least you're getting part of it.