Rose Cross Declaration

The Rosicrucian manifestoes are presented as an appeal intended to reconnect interrupted lines of the Plan, but their publication sets off a disorderly European response that no single group can control. In Casaubon’s reconstruction, they invite English, German, and French currents into contact; in the story’s increasingly elaborate account, they also provide the Jesuits with an opportunity to gather information, confuse the debate, and seek the Plan through a method resembling the protagonists’ own combinatorial work.

The Appeal and Its Historical Setting

Casaubon places the manifestoes amid a sequence of ceremonial and political signs. After festivities in London, celebrations take place in Heidelberg, where Salomon de Caus has built hanging gardens for the elector. An allegorical float presents the bridegroom as Jason, with the Golden Fleece and the Garter hanging from the ship’s two masts. Casaubon connects those emblems to their appearance on the columns at Tomar, reading the recurrence as evidence that apparently separate historical scenes belong to a continuous design.

In this account, the manifestoes appear within a year of the Heidelberg festivities. Casaubon interprets them as an appeal from the English Templars, aided by German associates, to Europe: their purpose is to reunite the lines of an interrupted Plan. He also proposes a second function. The texts may address the French while helping gather the scattered German group in the aftermath of the Lutheran Reformation, where the political and religious situation has become especially unstable.

The Response in Germany and France

The manifestoes attract too many replies. Between their appearance and about 1621, their reception fills with pamphlets, enthusiasts, literal-minded readers, possible provocateurs, and impostors. Casaubon recalls the pamphlets that had once entertained him in Salvador with Amparo and allows that one respondent might possess genuine knowledge, but suggests that such a voice would be difficult to distinguish amid the surrounding noise. The English attempt to guide the debate: Robert Fludd, whom Casaubon identifies as another English Templar, writes three works in a single year that point toward what Casaubon regards as the proper interpretation of the manifestoes.

That effort does not contain the crisis. The Thirty Years’ War begins; the Elector Palatine is defeated by the Spanish; Heidelberg and the Palatinate are sacked, and Bohemia is in flames. Casaubon’s account makes the English turn back toward France after the German initiative is overwhelmed by war. In 1623 the Rosicrucians appear in Paris, presenting the French with much the same invitation they had offered the Germans.

The Parisian response is visible in hostile writing as well as in the appeal itself. One libel calls the Rosicrucians worshippers of the Devil, but Casaubon argues that even slander cannot wholly suppress the clues it contains: the libel places their meetings in the Marais. He emphasizes that the Marais is both the quarter of the Temple and the Jewish ghetto. The same polemic alleges contact with the Iberian cabalist sect of the Alumbrados. Casaubon entertains the possibility that attacks on the thirty-six invisibles are not merely denunciations, but efforts to encourage their identification with the Rosicrucians.

Competing Interpretations and the Jesuit Hypothesis

The evidence remains equivocal in Casaubon’s account. Gabriel Naudé, librarian to Richelieu, writes instructions concerning the truth of the history of the Brothers of the Rose-Cross. Casaubon asks whether Naudé speaks for a third Templar group or is an adventurer entering a contest that is not his. Naudé dismisses the Rosicrucians as lunatic diabolists while also implying that three Rosicrucian colleges still exist. The contradiction supplies another possible clue, but does not settle who is speaking for whom.

The idea of a Jesuit connection recurs in the group’s reconstruction. In Germany, the Rosa Jesuitica appears as early as 1620, presenting the rose as a Catholic and Marian symbol before it became associated with Rosicrucianism. The suggestion is that the two orders are allied, or that Rosicrucianism is a reformulation of Jesuit mystique adapted for Protestant Germany. A cited claim that Templarism is Jesuitism intensifies this suspicion, but does not prove it.

Casaubon treats Father Kircher as central to the story. Kircher’s books address subjects associated with Rosicrucian interests, ostensibly to oppose them but, in Casaubon’s interpretation, also to adopt them in a Counter-Reformation form. The reversal is sharpened by an earlier claim in the first edition of the Fama: Haselmayer, condemned to the galleys by the Jesuits for reforming ideas, calls the Rosicrucians the true Jesuits. Casaubon inverts the charge: Kircher’s many volumes argue, in effect, that the Jesuits are the true Rosicrucians. Kircher’s planetary clock, designed to provide the exact time to the widely scattered headquarters of the Society of Jesus, becomes another sign in the group’s speculative account of Jesuit coordination.

The Manifestoes as Bait and Information Network

Casaubon briefly proposes that the Jesuits invented the Rosicrucians as a red herring. In this hypothesis, after Postel’s death they anticipate calendar confusion and use the manifestoes to draw out a genuine group member among the fanatics who respond. The imagined scheme depends on deception within deception: the English Templars might mistake the Jesuits for allies, while the Jesuits exploit the ensuing confusion. The proposal is presented as an extravagant possibility, not as an established fact.

Belbo challenges the hypothesis by asking why Jesuits or their polemicists would then denounce the Rosicrucians in France as heretics possessed by devils. After arguing over the alternatives, the group unanimously returns to Casaubon’s earlier explanation: the manifestoes are bait cast for the French by the Baconians and the Germans. The Jesuits recognize the opportunity as soon as the texts appear and enter the game to muddy the waters. Their alleged objective is to prevent the English and German groups from meeting the French; within this reconstruction, almost any tactic could serve that end.

The collection of information becomes as important as the disruption. Belbo jokes that the Jesuits put their records into Abulafia, but Diotallevi insists that the possibility is no joke: the Jesuits may be constructing a vast computational system from a patient accumulation of truth and falsehood. He credits them with recognizing that the map could be reconstructed through ars combinatoria, a method anticipating electronic computers. In this account, Kircher’s study of combinatorial treatises, from Lullus onward, and his Ars Magna Sciendi connect the Jesuits’ intellectual work to the protagonists’ own attempt to combine scattered clues.

The manifestoes therefore matter not because their meaning is finally secured, but because their publication makes interpretation itself a contest. They call for reunion, generate a flood of responses, and furnish rival groups with opportunities to recruit, mislead, and record. The apparent invitation to restore an interrupted Plan becomes an instrument in the very process that obscures the Plan: every hostile pamphlet, symbolic recurrence, and proposed alliance can be treated as either noise or another piece of evidence.