Secret Societies: Inside the World's Most Notorious Organizations (21 page)

Cover of the
Fama Fraternitatis.

Like a Boy's Club annual, a third publication on the same subject appeared the next year, published in Strasbourg and bearing the provocative title
Di Chymische Hochzeti Christiani Rosenkreuz
(The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz). Filled with so many references to the Templars that it was immediately condemned by the Catholic Church,
The Chemical Wedding
is written in Rosenkreuz's voice, describing his attendance at the marriage of a king and queen. Within their magnificent castle, the regal bride and groom celebrate the event with a strange ceremony involving the killing and restoring to life again of selected guests, using mysterious techniques of ancient alchemists.

While the earlier two publications had generated limited curiosity among readers,
The Chemical Wedding
launched a flood of interest. Soon Rosicrucian groups were appearing everywhere in Europe with many illustrious names among their membership lists, including prominent Englishmen Sir Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle and mathematician and mystic John Dee. The common interests of these three men led to their founding of The Royal Society, whose presidents over the years have included Christopher Wren, Samuel Pepys and Isaac Newton. The society exists to this day as Britain's national academy of science.

Bacon's identification with the Rosicrucians has inspired some surprising claims regarding his life and the influence of Rosicrucians on literature. Born in 1561, the precocious Englishman became a brilliant scholar and statesman, was appointed attorney-general under King James i, and was later selected to be Lord Chancellor. The king even assigned Bacon the responsibility of performing the final edit on the English-language version of the Holy Bible, the same King James translation so widely used today.

Two aspects of Bacon's life have fascinated students of secret societies. Charges of indulging in the bribery of public officials forced him from office. In retrospect, it's widely agreed that the charges were unfounded, and that Bacon was caught in a power struggle between King James i and the Commons. The uncertainty of Bacon's guilt and speculation that he had been a martyr to political intrigue adds an extra veneer of mystery to the plot. In any case, forced to retire in 1621, Bacon spent the remainder of his years paralleling the efforts of his contemporary Galileo by trying to break the hold of Aristotelian logic on scientific study and replace it with deductive reasoning. This was a man, apparently, whose intellect knew no bounds.

The second, more fascinating facet linking him with Rosicrucianism in the minds of many is his supposed association with Shakespeare. A small but obstinate cluster of scholars insists that Shakespeare could not have produced all the works attributed to him without assistance from a colleague more prolific, more skilled and more educated than himself. Stratford-on-Avon, they claim, could not have yielded the store of culture Shakespeare drew upon for his plays and poems. Moreover, they add, Shakespeare's parents were illiterate and their son had demonstrated no aptitude for study. “Where did Shakespeare acquire his knowledge of French, Italian, Spanish and Danish, to say nothing of classical Latin and Greek?” the skeptics demand, noting that his contemporary, Ben Jonson, claimed Shakespeare knew “small Latin and even less Greek.” They point to the few examples of his penmanship, all of them signatures, suggesting the man was “unfamiliar with the use of a pen, and it is obvious either that he copied the signature or that his hand was guided while he wrote.”

This is not the place for a to-and-fro discussion about the true source of the plays and sonnets that represent the core of English literature, but it demonstrates the degree to which many people search for, and find, evidence of covert incursion into everyday life. It also illustrates the far-fetched convictions of individuals who insist that our lives are manipulated by clandestine groups.

Were the works of Shakespeare composed by the erudite Sir Francis Bacon, prominent Rosicrucian?

Literary scholars have their own explanations for many of the unanswered questions about Shakespeare's life and works, but conspiracy theorists focus on a subversive explanation. Building on the secrecy aspect of Rosicrucian philosophy, they insist not only that Bacon created all the works attributed to Shakespeare but that the greatest body of work produced by a single author in English literature is, in reality, an extended proselytization on behalf of Rosicrucianism.

Shakespeare, they contend, acted as a front for Bacon, a gullible or perhaps collaborative partner in a scheme to imbed Rosicrucian beliefs and principles into English culture. Bacon's immense library, they point out, contained all the sources for quotations and anecdotes that inspired the Bard of Avon's plays, many of which did not exist in English translations during his lifetime. The plays were created and performed not for their entertainment or commercial value, but as vehicles to communicate with other Rosicrucians. Or so the story goes.

Is it possible that the greatest single fount of English literature is merely a series of envelopes containing clandestine messages in murky codes? Consider a handful of the claims:

• Sir Francis Bacon's cipher number—his identity as a Rosicrucian—was 33. In Henry iv, Part One, the word “Francis” appears 33 times on one page.

• Acrostic signatures indicating Bacon's identity show up frequently in the plays. Note how Miranda's speech in act i, scene ii of
The Tempest
appears (italics added): You have often

B
egun to tell me what I am, but stopt,

A
nd left me to a bootless inquisition,

Con
cluding, ‘Stay: not yet.’

• The word
hog
frequently appears on page 33 of various portfolios of Shakespeare's plays.

• Watermarks on works by Shakespeare illustrate Rosicrucian or Masonic symbols, including the Rose Cross, urns and grapes.

• Mispaginations in many Shakespearian folios, consistent among various printers, represent keys to Baconian ciphers. These usually involve pages ending in 50, 51, 52, 53 and 54. Example: Both editions of the First and Second folios identify page 153 as 151, and pages 249 and 250 respectively as 250 and 251.

• Decorative designs on Shakespearian publications incorporate Rosicrucian symbols.

And many more.

But why, assuming there is any veracity to the suggestion, would Bacon and his colleagues undertake such a complex and obscure chore, using the (supposedly) undereducated and untalented Shakespeare as a beard, and for what nefarious motives? And how could Bacon create all the plays and poems attributed to Shakespeare while simultaneously producing his own vast body of work, including the final edit of the King James Bible? Manly P. Hall, author of a codex to ancient occult traditions and the wisdom of antiquity, suggests an explanation:

Bacon is not to be regarded solely as a man but rather as the focal point between an invisible institution and a world which was never able to distinguish between the messenger and the message which he promulgated. This secret society, having rediscovered the lost wisdom of the ages and fearing that the knowledge might be lost again, perpetuated it in two ways: (1) by an organization (Freemasonry) to the initiates of which it revealed its wisdom in the form of symbols; (2) by embodying its arcana in the literature of the day by means of cunningly contrived ciphers and enigmas.

Why be so secretive and complex? Hall has a reason:

Evidence points to the existence of a group of wise and illustrious Fratres who assumed the responsibility of publishing and preserving for future generations the choicest of secret books of the ancients, together with certain other documents which they themselves had prepared. That future members of their fraternity might not only identify these volumes but also immediately note the significant passages, words, chapters, or sections therein, they created a symbolic alphabet of hieroglyphic designs. By means of a certain key and order, the discerning few were thus enabled to find that wisdom by which man is “raised” to an illumined life.

Perhaps. But there remains a small problem of the origin of the Rosicrucian writings, and their author.

In the midst of all the early excitement over the Rosenkreuz books and the society that everyone wanted to join, establish, or resurrect when they first appeared, a Lutheran pastor named Johann Valentin Andreae made a startling confession:
he
had written
The Chemical Wedding
as well as the two preceding pamphlets. The entire tale of the Rosicrucians was a hoax, Andreae admitted, a mockery of alchemy and its zealous adherents that had spun out of control.

Christian Rosenkreuz had never lived, had never traveled to Palestine for ancient Arabic secrets, had never founded a secret order, and had obviously never been buried after his death at 106, only to be found 120 years later as whole as the day he had died. He and his adventures were the product of Andreae's imagination, nothing more. He had written the
Fama
as a prank, adding the second pamphlet and
The Chemical Wedding
when many people took the
Fama
seriously.

The family crest of Johann Valentin Andreae, with roses and a cross on the shield.

It bore the ring of truth. Andreae had a reputation as a prankster; in his youth, he had been refused the right to complete his final examination after he was caught nailing a libelous note to the chancellor's door. With no degree, he spent the next few years hiking through Europe, returning to his studies and successfully writing his liturgical examinations at age twenty-eight. After Andreae's admission that he had conceived the character of Rosenkreuz and his organization like a modern-day mystery writer concocting the plot, setting and characters of a whodunit, people began to notice that his family's coat of arms was composed of roses and a cross. Could there be any doubt?

There was, among the most fervent members of the new order. If Andreae could claim that he wrote the Rosicrucian stories as a prank, some wondered, how do we know this so-called confession isn't the real prank? Or perhaps he wrote the books as a means of galvanizing people into doing good works and pursuing esoteric interests. Even if Rosenkreuz's life were entirely fictional, the argument went, it inspired an idea that could benefit the world, and a philosophy that could reward mankind with insight and spiritual value. Perhaps, it was proposed, Andreae declared that the league existed with the expectation that those who believed in its principles would create it. And they had. So what did it matter?

The debate continues. If, as seems likely, the tale of Christian Rosenkreuz and his secretive followers sprang entirely from Andreae's imagination, it was an idea whose time had come. But what inspired him to conceive of this tale in the first place? The answer may have been incinerated in Rome's Campo de Fiori on a February morning in 1600 when, after eight years’ imprisonment and torture, the mystic and former Dominican priest Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake on charges of heresy.