Order of the Golden Rosy Cross

This is the point where the Rosicrucian legend stopped being a story and became an organisation, and where the grade ladder that every later order climbs was first built.

The name appears in 1710, in a book by a Silesian pastor writing as Sincerus Renatus, which laid out the rules of a supposed Brotherhood of the Golden and Rosy Cross devoted to alchemy. Whether a fraternity stood behind it is doubtful. What is certain is that by the 1750s lodges under that name were operating in Germany, Bohemia and Austria, recruiting exclusively from Master Masons and teaching what the Craft did not: laboratory alchemy, Christian Kabbalah, and a Christian theosophy in the manner of Jacob Boehme. The order was a high-degree body, a Rosicrucian roof built on a Masonic floor, and it stands on this map as the first place the two lines fused.

In 1777 the order was reorganised and given the structure it is remembered for: nine grades, from Junior through Theoreticus, Practicus, Philosophus, Minor, Major and Adeptus Exemptus to Magister and Magus, each with its own curriculum, catechism and password. Members worked their way up through study and alchemical practice, and the whole was governed by unknown superiors whom nobody below the top grades ever met. That ladder, nearly unchanged, is the one the Societas Rosicruciana adopted in 1867 and the Golden Dawn in 1888. Anyone who has been a Zelator or a Philosophus in a modern order has been standing on a Prussian staircase.

For a decade it was the most powerful occult body in Europe. Its leaders, Wöllner and Bischoffwerder, recruited the crown prince of Prussia in 1781; when he became Frederick William II in 1786 they became his ministers, and the order briefly ran a kingdom. It fought the Illuminati, the rationalist secret society of Bavaria, as its declared enemy, one hidden order against another. Its great illustrated compendium, the Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians, was published at Altona in 1785 and remains the most beautiful book the tradition produced. Then, at the height of its influence, the superiors ordered a general suspension of work in 1787. The order never resumed, and by the 1790s it was gone.

It left two things behind. The first is paper: the grade papers, the Secret Symbols, the alchemical and Kabbalistic instruction that later Rosicrucians would claim to have received and would in fact simply have read. The second is a splinter, the Asiatic Brethren of the 1780s, which admitted Jews and drew on Sabbatian Kabbalah, and through which a thin line of actual Jewish esoteric material entered the Masonic world.

There is no living transmission from this order to any later one. When Kenneth Mackenzie told the founders of the SRIA that he had been in contact with German Rosicrucians, he was drawing on the memory and the literature of a body dead for seventy years. That is worth knowing, not to diminish what came after, but to see it clearly: from this point on, the Rosicrucian lineage is a lineage of documents, and each new order was founded by people who had read the last one.