Nineteenth century sense: being the paradox of Spiritus sanctus and of Rosicrucianism

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" Men do not know themselves, and therefore they do not understand the things that are in their inner world. Each man has the essence of God, and all the wisdom and power of the world (germinally) in himself; he possesses one kind of knowledge as much as another, and he who does not find that which is in him cannot truly say that he does not possess it, but only that he was not capable of successfully seeking it."

Sight of ships by him who cultivates ships, sight of poems by him who cultivates poetry, sight of scores by him who cultivates music, sight of the Divinity by him who cultivates the divine, — sight of none of these by him who cultivates none of them.

Striving after understanding of the universal and of

man's relation with it. Seeking a sanctuary where

higher dominates lower. Reaching comprehension

that for a beast, whether man or brute, there is the grass under its nose, nothing else; that for an '^ alchemist" there is gold ; that for the '^ immortal" there are cosmetics, if not indeed a liquor adolescentiae and an elixir vitse; that an "Illuminate" may reach and eat of the fruit that grows in the " midst of the garden;" eating of this fruit, and growing through the eating, until growth reaches whither growth leads.

Recognizing, with Paracelsus, that the beginning of wisdom is the beginning of supernatural power ; and with Ovid, that things alter, that nothing dies ; and with Empedocles, that man is in truth one with bird, beast, and fish; and with Plato, that he is one with none of these things. Able to read the paradox of '*hic jacet" in understanding that here he who lies is not he who lies but he who lies not.

Above all things recognizing oneness in Now and Eternity.

Freed of all confusion in understanding that duty and responsibility rest and relate with the Now, and with the Now alone.

Comprehending, out of understanding, with Zoroaster, that for a man to know himself is to know all things necessary for him to know in himself.

Recognizing, with Socratists, that correspondence between analysis and synthesis corrects imperfections as to judgments existing in defects of senses and reason.

Accepting, with Epicurus, that pursuit of pleasure is the highest wisdom.

Considering man in his relation to himself and to the universal. God, the devil, celestial and terrestrial. Occult and open. The bigness of littleness and the littleness of bigness. The strength and the weakness, the mortality and the immortality of man.

Being brought into a state of profound content,

ROSICRUCIAN EXCLUSIONS. 9

through comprehension. Recognizing self as a part of a universal whole, yet as a something forever separate and individual. Recognizing the import of universal.

Getting hold of the meaning of things; rejoicing ever with appreciation, enduring never without consolation. Understanding that pleasure and suffering are conditions of proper and improper relation.

Finding truth to be entirely apprehensible. Seeing that the real does not conceal nor obscure itself. Learning that life is a circle where there are no dark corners. Doubting never any more as to the purpose of being. Expert as to the office of feet and hands, mind and soul.

Cognizable to the confusions of philosophers in their confounding of things. Separating clothes and body and body and person. Appreciable of environment. Come to understanding that self is one thing and that soul is another thing. Having gotten hold of the meaning of an unpardonable sin in discovering it to be self-explaining and self-proving. Satisfied as to the existence of God in coming to a sight of Him upon the outside and the inside of men. Proving to one's self that one's self is God.

Able to grasp the meaning of an infinite eternity in an infinite now. Making nothing at all of the idea of an hereafter, knowing the present to be all that has been or that can be.

Comprehending, with Alexandrians, that recognition of the infinite means necessarily that the recognizer has himself become the infinite.

Coming, in highest wisdom, to care for nothing or lO SPIRITUS SANCTUS.

to think of nothing but the hour that is ; having learned that there is nothing else to care for or to think about.

Recognizing that an end reached is according to a way taken.

. Accepting that conformity to law, not violation, insures most against mishaps.

Appreciating that good and bad are not things of themselves but things of relation.

Enlarging being by increasing knowledge. Determining through the seen the existence of unseen. Understanding that the blackness of night is by reason of earth turning her back to the sun. Seeing the meaning of shadow to lie with light, and that to face about is to find the real. Perceiving what is involved in the fact that a beast is at its best when living powerfully and aggressively for self, and that a man is at his worst when so living. Understanding as fact that faith can remove mountains : smiling in derision at the idea of faith being able to remove anything : learning what faith is. Opening an enigma that both teaches and denies the existence of an overruling Providence. Finding out what alone will hold up when one leans against it.

Deriding the doctrine of a resurrection while being able to prove it true. Seeing a cocoon and a coffin to be alike; that the way to a butterfly is through a worm. Apprehending what is meant by a body terrestrial and a body celestial. Getting out of experimentation the differentiations of materializations and dematerializations. Smiling at the embalming of Egyptians and at the burying of Christians ; knowing the law of matter.

ROSICRUCIAN EXCLUSIONS. n

Not at all confused in accepting self to be the same self forever, holding at the same time with Pythagoras that he was Euphorbus of the Trojan war, and that, with Empedocles, he had lived as boy, girl, beast, bird, and fish.

Listening to complaints of unanswered prayers; astonished at the profundity of an ignorance which wastes time in prayer. Seeing a nation turned idiots asking for life of king or president. Hearing the preacher begging for rain and the preacher pleading for drouth. Regarding generals who, in opposite places, entreat for success to side in sectional and fraternal strife. Compelled to rebuke prayer, yet yourself hourly praying and never failing to receive answer to prayer.

Rosicrucianism, standing in the light of the nineteenth century, possessed of the immortal elixir, repeating, mockingly, ** O Grave ! where is thy victory? O Death ! where is thy sting ?' * Standing by the bedside of one who struggles to break the environment, seeing nothing different from a locust casting its shell, the wakeful going into a dream, or a birth of higher evolving itself from one of lower signification ; knowing as simple change of association what others call death.

A door shut and fast locked against the confusion of outside things \ yourself seated in meditative mood, listening to an inner voice and working at the opening of paradoxes; yourself profoundly content in what you have learned yourself to be, yet full of commiseration for afflictions endured by others. Asking yourself as to why and wherefore and as to distinctions and differences. Knowing what is the province and what is not the province of senses and reason. Awake to a light shining out of spiritual illumination. Having learned the source of instruction and where to apply for understanding.

Rich in absence of possessions. Healthy when weighed down by disease. Alive in death.

A believer in ghosts and demons ; yourself a maker and dispeller of things occult and mysterious. Yourself knowing yourself as maker of heaven and hell; yourself your own god and your own devil, and a god or devil to other people. Yourself brute beast or divine uplifter. Yourself able to reach to the antipodes or bound to a spot. Yourself having learned that there is neither forward nor backward, looking at that which alone is. Yourself overwhelmed in consideration of the dead ear of Christ. Yourself finding a horn in your hand to call Christ to his office. Yourself alive to the existence of a wall that separates prayer and answer. Yourself having discovered self to be Christ. Yourself the resurrected Christ.

Coming at last to understand the oneness of profound and simple. Coming at last to rest in absolute tranquillity.

THE ROSICRUCIANS.

II. About Spiritus Sanctus And The Rosicrucians

"The philosophy of one generation becomes the common sense of the next."

A RosiCRUCiAN is nothing more uncommon than that the word Inquirer stands as his synonyme.

Spiritus Sanctus means to a Rosicrucian Refuge from Doubt as refuge lies with understanding. It means also to him Sacred Spirit as final refuge.

Using the word Rosicrucian, a word somewhat unfamiliar to modern ears, instead of philosopher, or inquirer, in connection with the dissections and examinations of the present pages is assumed as justified and commendable in introduction afforded by it to a class of thinkers who evolved clearness out of obscurity and highest out of lowest. Any name implying people that think for themselves and who want to find out about things may be put, if preferred, in the place of Rosicrucian ; the name is to imply, however, a closer than the ordinary observer.

History. — Appreciation of Rosicrucianism is entrance, and the only entrance, upon the way of development j this is one with saying that cultivation of what a man finds to be his capability constitutes the glory and success of the man.

Rosicrucianism is questioning life. Christian Rosenkreuz, whose name finds association with a large class of such questioners, was a German noble, who, as he grew into years, developed wonderful inclination toward meditative and speculative studies. He is to be pronounced a born metaphysician. To appreciate the character of this representative individual, and through him that which is represented as a guild which has the peculiar reputation of being everywhere and yet nowhere, is to start with an assumption that his philosophical career commenced at the basis of the Ionian school, which basis is understood as accepting the composition of all things as lying with one or with a combination of four elementary bodies: the particular one, according to the teachings of the founder of the school, Thales, being water; according to Anaximenes, a close successor, air; according to Heraclitus, fire; according to Empedocles, things at large being existent in a mingling and then a separation of the mingled ; this flux lying with earth.

Here, where the studies of Rosenkreuz commenced, begin, necessarily, the investigations of every man who is to find out the meaning of himself and his relation with the universal. Rosicrucianism, in its highest and best sense, signifies material, soulistic, and intellectual evolution ; and evolution, after this manner, implies the student life. A Rosicrucian, come to the order of what is called an illuminatus, or an illuminated man, means one who has himself become, in a sense, God. Such a man comes naturally and necessarily to be esteemed singular by his fellows, and it is strange if this singularity possess him not with the reputation of laboring under hallucination. Rosicrucians are divided

THE ROSICRUCIANS. 1 5

into alchemists, immortales, and the class illurainati just alluded to.

Rosicrucianism, individualized, differs nothing, as far as the fourteenth century is concerned, from what it is found to be in the nineteenth. Alchemy is in a sense the start-point. Alchemy proposes to itself the transmuting of lead into gold and the crystallization of morning dew into diamonds.

Riches, in the shape of precious metal and jewels, is the ultima thule of young manhood, just as cleared ground upon which to grow bread is that of a young and pioneer colony. Rosenkreuz, while almost a boy, conceived the possibility of acting on the premise of Empedocles in compelling gold and diamonds to show what they are through analysis, arguing that as they are neither earth, fire, air, nor water, the composition must lie in some union of these supposed elements, there being nothing else in which it could lie. It was an intrinsic deduction that analysis might be duplicated, or conversed, by synthesis; hence, to find out what is the composition of a thing is to possess one's self with the power to make the thing.

Here is inauguration of the day of alembics and of the occult of the alchemists. It will be felt as natural, and as akin with the selfishness of men, that crucibles should be set up in hidden places, and that experimenters, in pursuit of a great secret, should grow recluse and mystic. This mars a page in the history of the master.

Failing in his own laboratory, Rosenkreuz passed from the environments of his home to live with the traditions of Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Gymnosophists, and it is averred that here, aided by his own analytical genius, he did in truth learn how to make sun-gold and dew-diamonds. Out of this developed, in turn, the "Fratres Roris Coctus," brothers of concocted dew.

Succeeding naturally the alchemists come the immortales. Bread is nothing without time and appetite to eat it; much less are gold and diamonds to him who finds no days left him in which to spend. The alchemist grew quickly into the most unenviable of men. Lacking one thing, all else was counted as nothing. Gold was had, but Fate had the alchemist. The need was time, — time and eternal youth. Metamorphosis was absolute. Alchemy revived under a new name and with a new aim. Again the fires of laboratories in hidden places were lighted. Men, old and bowed with anxiety, were to be met searching beneath the trees and carrying from the fields bundles of exogens too heavy for their bent backs to bear up. The waters of springs were analyzed. Journeys long and formidable were endured, not unlike the search recorded of Ponce de Leon, or that infinitely more dangerous one, the expedition of Jason to Colchis for the recovery of the "Golden Fleece." The search was for an Elixir Vitse ; at first for more than this, for a Liquor Adolescentise. Exhaustion begotten of effort was succeeded by renewed eff*ort and further exhaustion. Always on the verge of a grand discovery, the immortales one by one fell palsied and fainting into their boiling caldrons, or were overcome by fumes which poisoned them 5 this, or they lay down by the waysides ; otherwise, as is recorded by the vulgar, were caught up and

THE ROSICRUCIANS. 17

carried away by devils and genii. The story is simply one of history repeating itself; Menedemus trying to revive his failing body by inhaling the breath of children \ David courting to his enervated frame the lustiness living with the vigorous youth of Abishag.

After all, an elixir of life and a liquor of youth were found. Avaricious in the pursuit of knowledge, Rosenkreuz acquainted himself with the sublimities of the Vedanta philosophy and made himself familiar with the Greek schools of Plato and the Alexandrians. Here body differentiated itself to his understanding as a thing of little significance ; a mere shield-bearer to a principal standing within or behind. Ego, Eros-like, had arisen, an intangible tangibility; not to be doubted as the real existence ; seen and understood as not capable of being lessened or heightened or deepened or broadened by elixirs ; a something carrying no purse, neither possessed of neck nor finger for ornamentation. The life and meaning of man were seen to lie with Ego. Body was recognized to be external.

Few of the misunderstandings of men are more curious and unexplainable than misconceptions concerning the Rosicrucians. In a worm-eaten encyclopaedia, which has descended in the writer's family through the generations of two hundred yfears, Rosicrucians are described as an hermetical cabal, who appeared, or at least were first taken notice of, in the beginning of the sixteenth century ; professors of secrets whose principal idea was a philosopher's stone, a sect of fanatics at whose head, in England, stood Robertus de Fluctibus, and, in Germany, Jacob Behmen

and Michael Mayer. Concerning Behmen, or rather b 2*

Boehm, the most modern biographical dictionaries perpetuate the crudity of Hallam in writing of his supernatural illuminations as lacking in the power of transferring a light to others, quite overlooking the fact that uncouched cataractous eyes cannot see. Here language will be wisely slightly changed to accord Rosicrucianism better with what is to follow. While, during any period between the fourteenth century and the present hour, a band of workers interested in chemical pursuits may have taken as a society name that of a master in the art, and while it very well may be that Rosenkreuz himself organized such a band and retired with fellow-workers to unravel such mysteries as lie with the composition of gold and diamonds (surmising, not unlikely, what modern chemistry seems never to think of, namely, that elements are no elements at all, being simply phenomena arising out of and going back into a primary or noumenon, which, had Empedocles named it matter, instead of earth, would be recognized to comprise all that the science of the present day knows of the abstract) ; yet here is simply provisional association, and not, as surmised by some, a secret and continued order, as, for example, that of Freemasonry, with which, in the estimation of many, Rosicrucianism is more or less identical.

It is not at all to be denied that savants, called Rosicrucians, used language not fully understood by those unfamiliar with their nomenclature; thus the writer of an article in an English encyclopaedia says of them, out of such misunderstanding, ''In fine, the Rosicrucians, and all their fanatical descendants^

THE ROSICRUCIANS, 19

agree in proposing the most crude and incomprehensible notions and ideas in the most obscure, quaint, and unusual expressions." Let this criticism be measured by the language of the present chemistry when compared with names and terms familiar to the popular ear. A chemist prefers request to fellow-chemist for HNO3 or HSO^, meaning by these symbols to ask for nitric or sulphuric acid, — symbols full of meaning to the inquirer, empty entirely of sense to the unlearned.

There is a closely-printed little volume entitled "Apologia Compendiaria Fraternitatis de Rosea Cruce," written by Robertus de Fluctibus in reply to strictures appearing against Rosicrucians during the time of Charles I. and the Protector, which, although I have never seen it, I feel sure is entirely familiar to me in its contents. This is so predicated because true learning leads but in one direction, and Robert Fludd was learned. Perhaps full expression is given of this in a quotation from Jennings, who refers to Shelley as one who if he had not been so great a poet would perhaps have been equally eminent as a metaphysician, — that is, when age and experience, as he puts it, had ripened and corrected original brilliant crudities of thought, — a constant declaration being upon the poet's tongue to the effect that most men, at least most thinking men, spend the latter half of their life in unlearning the mistakes of the preceding half. I know this English Rosicrucian as an illuminatus and not as an alchemist. There was but one way for him to write, and that I may be sure is the way of his pages.

The alchemy of the sixteenth century was simply the infancy of the chemistry of the present day. Is it not known that chemistry is a worker of natural miracles? Are there not found coming out of the crucibles daily things richer than are to be compared with gold and diamonds ?

Alchemy is and was material, so also is and was man's body material. Out of the glasses and furnaces and crucibles came a genius, which, under the name EXCLUSION,* is found to be a light which illuminates remote and near, the physical and the metaphysical. By and through a use of this process of exclusion, immortales developed into illuminati.

Recognition of the fact that the body is external is the meaning of illumination, and this, in turn, is the true and whole meaning of an illuminatus. To attain to consciousness of a tripartite nature as belonging to man, is to get above accidents as it is to be above concern. Body is matter. Ego is intangible, immortal, and unchanging individuality; nothing in nature can hit or hurt it : the bag of human bones may be beaten, but Nicocreon cannot pound Anaxarchus. Soul comes to be understood out of recognition of matter and Ego ; and so, as Zoroaster first asserted, " He who knows himself, knows all things in himself."

In every sect are people who are of it, and in it, by name only. What the confused thoughts and writings of an alchemist are to the perceptions of him who has advanced to the state of an illuminatus, so, and nothing different, are the perplexities of modern spiritists to the illuminations of a subjectist; noth-

* Knowing what a thing is by knowing what it is not.

THE ROSICRUCIANS, 2i

ing is hidden save to him who cannot open ; darkness to one is light to another.

Ultimate of illumination is knowledge of the fact that Ego, even while in the body, may live a life of its own independent of it, hence knowledge of the fact of spiritual existence and proof obtained through the intercourse with Ego.

Knowledge of Ego exists in understanding of hypostases.

Referring back to the opening suggestion of this chapter that *' a synonyme of Rosicrucian is Inquirer," the reader will wisely pause to consider as to whither inquiry may or will lead. It certainly is agreed to by everybody that inquiry is a thing of many directions, and that men go according to a direction taken. Some go after gold, some after medicine, others after other things. The first correspond, as implied, with the alchemists, the second with the immortals. The others, being a limited number, a very limited number, go after Wisdom ; these correspond with the " illuminates;" they live in the refuge.

Something is to be added. Reason for using the word Rosicrucian is not alone that introduction is afforded thinkers, but that unfamiliar may introduce unfamiliar, so many of the subjects considered not being germane to every-day common-sense living ; while to begin a book with what is to show itself as the text of this one — namely, * ' Common sense is little better than no sense'' ^ — is wisely to secure to one's support wisdom going before, which wisdom plainly enough is to show the superiority over common sense of educated sense, and the superiority over this ktter of Egoistic sense, and the superiority over this superior of soul sense.

To anticipate. The science of medicine begins its study of man at the dissecting-table ; here, too, it ends. What is here defined as Rosicrucianism begins also with a scalpel, but difference lies with induction. A Rosicrucian quickly differentiates that what he cuts apart is not man but man's body. Induction discovers to him Ego. Further advance exposes to him soul.

Man discovered to be not one save as three are one, that is, not at all what common sense sees him to be, Rosicrucianism gets its understanding of the nothingness of common sense, and goes on with little regard to it.

HYPOSTASES.

A Rosicrucian approaches the hypostases with full appreciation that here and only here is understanding of man and of man's relation with the universal; having, as his clear proof of this, that requirements are ever in accord with capability. Understanding hypostases, he knows that he knows as to capability. Knowing that he knows as to capability, induction solves for him everything else as to what is below, above, and around men. He attains certitude.

Seeking, not the familiar lower, but the unfamiliar higher, constitutes searches which an interested reader is here invited to pursue with a doctor.*

* Books leading up to the present one are " Odd Hours of a Physician," " Hours with John Darby," " Thinkers and Thinking," " Brushland," and " Man and his World."