The secret symbols of the Rosicrucians
A "simple ABC booklet" from 1785 full of circles, triangles and six-pointed stars, and the thesis that the fourness is explained geometrically in it.
Rosicrucians are the members of a secret mystical society whose beginnings lie in the 17th century. Their teaching combines alchemical, Hermetic and Kabbalistic elements. Anyone who looks into them soon comes across the work Geheime Figuren der Rosenkreuzer aus dem 16ten und 17ten Jahrhundert (Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians of the 16th and 17th Centuries), published in Altona in 1785 in three parts. One part is subtitled a “simple ABC booklet” for young pupils in the school of the Holy Spirit.
The many hand-coloured drawings and diagrams do not explain themselves. The texts that go with them make matters worse: Bible verses, allegories in verse and a great deal of incomprehensible explanation. One gets the impression that the author wanted to confuse the reader on purpose, or was himself confused. Against this stands the fact that figures such as Isaac Newton studied Rosicrucian material intensively. Newton devoted himself at least as thoroughly to alchemy and Kabbalah as to physics. And the very title “simple ABC booklet” hints that there were people who knew more than the ABC.
Some of the truly symbolic figures belong to the geometric foundations of the tetractys. These strong symbols were probably surrounded deliberately with a great deal of confusing decoration: whoever wanted to understand the secret was meant to work for it.
Luther, Protestantism and the rose
Revealing is the seal of Martin Luther, the Luther rose with a cross in a heart in a rose, a hint of Luther’s closeness to Rosicrucian thought. On this view Rosicrucianism was the counter-programme to the Catholic Church of its time: a return to the Gnostic roots of Christianity, to spiritual self-determination and the vision of a new humanity, against dogmas and the sale of indulgences. Freemasonry sympathised with it too. In this reading Protestantism arose from esoteric and Kabbalistic roots and later itself hardened into dogma.
The four elements
The four elements are a focus of the booklets. One plate shows them as four figures holding hands: the fourness is to be understood as a unity. The frequent references to the Kabbalah underline the connection, for there the four worlds together yield the ten sephirot (see The Kabbalah).
Good and evil on one trunk
Another plate shows the tree of knowledge, from which Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit. Three hands reach for the good fruit, three for the evil one, but both hang on the same trunk, and from the cloud the hand of God reaches for this one tree. The roots grip two triangles, upright and inverted. Above, they unite into a six-pointed star. Good and evil depend on each other: without light no shadow, without darkness the candle’s glow would not be seen. Triangle and hexagram are two of the four start figures, and this allegory corresponds exactly to the rhythm of six, in which the primes lie mirrored about their axes of symmetry.
Figura Cabalistica: 1, 2, 3, 4
One page is headed Figura Cabalistica and speaks of “the true ground of God’s wondrous number: 1. 2. 3. 4.”, with a circle in four segments bearing the numbers 1 to 4 below it. Directly underneath, without explanation, comes the turn to the Trinity and the six-pointed star: three that bear witness in heaven, and three on earth. Where an explanation is needed, there is only “O Arcana Arcanorum”, O secret of secrets.
The explanation is geometric:
- Threeness is in Hermeticism the purely spiritual creative principle. Fourness is its realisation in matter.
- A triangle has the angle sum of half a circle. One more vertex, and the square has the angle sum of a full circle, the only polygon to do so. This is exactly what the circles with four segments show.
- The six-pointed star expresses the same: two triangles, each with half a circle, together make a full one. The hexagram is the only star polygon composed of polygons with this property. The circles with six segments show this.
The full circle stands for unity and perfection, that is, for God. But this is not only about symbols. It is about the foundations of number theory, which go hand in hand with the geometry of circle and sphere, and probably about the blueprint for energy, space, time and matter. The same reflections lead to the secrets of the pentagram, the third start figure. They should not only be read but checked for oneself.
All three booklets are freely available today as digitised copies, among other places on Wikimedia Commons.