The brotherhood of the rosy cross, Arthur Edward Waite

The Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, Arthur Edward Waite

Readers of the author's books on the Kabbalah, the Tarot, the Holy Grail, need scarcely be told that he was a mystic. It is important to stress at the outset how completely Arthur Edward Waite identified himself with the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross.

For when the readers gets into the book itself, they will find the author for a long time primarily engaged in cleaning the Augean stables. The point is that Rosicrucianism has been so falsely reported and written about. Only when all this is cut away can one approach the spiritual Mystery of the Rosy Cross.

The Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross gives us in its more than 650 pages the most scholarly conceivable picture of the origins of Rosicrucianism, its original doctrines, their unfolding and changing, what was and what was not its relationship to Freemasonry, a most notable chapter on the great English Rosicrucian Robert Fludd, and a particularly fascinating chapter on the history of the Rosy Cross in Russia.

Arthur Edward Waite's account bears very little resemblance to the claims of the Theosophists and latter-day Rosicrucians. To put it more plainly, our author has taken their skins off in the course of establishing the true story.

But all this is only to make way for his reverence and love for the real Rosicrucians. The myths and frauds fall away and there emerges the inspiring true history of Rosicrucianism; from Lutheran sectarians to profound Kabbalists, from alchemists preoccupied with trying to make gold to alchemists for whom the philosopher's stone is the spiritual quest. Thomas Vaughan and Robert Fludd prove to be more fascinating than Francis Bacon and our complaint is, rather, that Waite gives us so little that he only whets our appetite for them.

To be a Rosicrucian meant peril of life and limb in the intolerant societies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But is it necessary to continue a Secret Tradition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? The author thinks it remains necessary.

Details

• Hardcover without dust-jacket
• Condition: Good
• Publisher: University Books