Heidelberg is presented as the successor to Prague as a center for the English and German circles imagined by the novel’s speakers. Its importance rests on a dynastic wedding staged through Templar symbolism, then darkens when war and defeat devastate the city and the surrounding Palatinate. In this account, Heidelberg is both a ceremonial meeting point and a broken hinge in the supposed transmission of the Plan.

A New Center for the Circles

After Rudolf II’s death, Prague is said to have lost its appeal as a meeting place, and Heidelberg to have taken its place. The shift is linked to the 1613 marriage of Elizabeth, daughter of James I, to Frederick V, Elector Palatine of the Rhine. The marriage is not treated as merely dynastic: its festivities are interpreted as an attempt to strengthen relations between English and German circles and to renew an interrupted Templar lineage.

The account makes Francis Bacon the organizer of the London festivities, where an allegory of mystical knighthood culminates in knights appearing on a hill. Heidelberg extends that ceremonial language. Salomon de Caus has built hanging gardens for the elector, and a festival float presents the bridegroom as Jason; the Golden Fleece and the Garter hang from the ship’s two masts. The speaker connects those emblems to their appearance on the columns at Tomar, treating repetition across places as evidence that the separate episodes belong to one design.

The Wedding Allegories and the Plan

The festivities make Heidelberg a theatrical space in which political alliance is recast as inherited spiritual purpose. Their images do not disclose a verifiable organization; instead, the speaker reads them as signs that English Templars and German allies are trying to reunite the lines of an interrupted Plan. The argument depends on symbolic correspondences: Jason, the Golden Fleece, the Garter, the gardens, and the earlier imagery at Tomar are made to confirm one another.

Within that interpretation, the Rosicrucian manifestoes appear within a year of the celebrations as an appeal to Europe. The speaker proposes that they may have had two aims: to reach the French and to gather scattered members of the German group after the Lutheran Reformation. Heidelberg thus stands at the center of a proposed sequence connecting court spectacle, secret affiliation, and the circulation of manifestoes.

Defeat and Displacement

The movement’s supposed effort to guide the response to the manifestoes soon encounters events it cannot control. The texts attract a flood of replies, including literal-minded enthusiasts, fanatics, possible provocateurs, and impostors. Robert Fludd is presented as attempting to steer the discussion through three works written in a single year, but the response has already grown unmanageable.

The Thirty Years’ War then breaks the setting on which the Heidelberg-centered account depends. Frederick V is defeated by the Spanish, the Palatinate and Heidelberg are sacked, and Bohemia is left in flames. The English are consequently said to turn back toward France; in 1623, the Rosicrucians appear in Paris with an invitation comparable to the one previously addressed to the Germans. Heidelberg’s narrative significance lies in this reversal: the city briefly embodies the imagined reunion of the circles, then its destruction helps explain the alleged relocation of their appeal.