The Rosicrucian Manifestos

Between 1614 and 1616 three anonymous pamphlets appeared in Germany announcing a secret fraternity founded by one Christian Rosenkreutz: the Fama Fraternitatis, the Confessio Fraternitatis and the Chymical Wedding. No one could find the brotherhood, and Europe argued about it for a century.

This shelf holds the manifestos, their probable author Johann Valentin Andreae, and the long afterlife of the idea, from Franz Hartmann’s studies to Max Heindel’s Rosicrucian Fellowship and the Rosicrucian orders of the modern era.

The Fama and Confessio are short and can be read in an evening; the Chymical Wedding is a longer allegorical romance that repays slow reading. Read all three as early seventeenth-century Protestant documents, written amid hopes for religious and scientific reform, before turning to the later claims of Rosicrucian descent. Waite’s and Jennings’s histories reach opposite conclusions and are best read against each other. The later fraternities that took the Rosicrucian name are a real part of the story, but the original manifestos remain the fixed point by which every later claim can be measured.