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They probably were a hoax. I think of it as one of the greatest literary hoaxes in history because people took it literally. They thought this is a order of super intellectuals who they know exactly what they're doing and they're divinely inspired. I really think it was a bunch of college students.
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Keep watching to learn more.
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Book 4 in the New Thinking Allowed Dialogue series is Charles T. 70 Years of Exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology, now available on Amazon.
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New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body and spirit, the topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website@cihs.edu. you can now download all eight copies of the New Thinking Allowed magazine for free or order beautiful printed copies. Go to newthinkingaloud.org.
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Thinking Allowed Conversations on the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove.
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Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. I'm very happy to say that my guest today is my good friend Ronnie Pontiac. We'll be talking about the origins of Rosicrucianism. Ronnie was the personal research assistant for Manly P. Hall at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles. He is author of American Metaphysical Religion, Esoteric and Mystical Traditions of the New World. He is co author of, with his late wife Tamra, Lucid of the Magic of the Orphic Hymns, a new translation for the modern mystic. His most recent book that we will be discussing today is the Rosicrucian the Origins and Influence of the Invisible Society from the Thirty Years War to the New World. Ronnie is based in Los Angeles. And now I'll switch over to the interview video. Welcome, Ronnie. It's a pleasure to be with you once again.
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It's always a joy and an honor to speak with you, Jeffrey.
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Thank you. We'll be looking at an organization which I think almost everybody has heard something about, the Rosicrucians, particularly here in the United States. Even Woody Allen, as I recall, jokes about the Rosicrucians being the only religion that advertises in Popular Mechanics magazine. But modern Rosicrucianism only has, I suppose, a very tangential relationship to what we're going to be talking about today, which is events that took place in the 17th century related to the Thirty Years War. I think to begin with, we need to create some context, and part of that context has to do with a political entity that hasn't existed for a very long time called the Holy Roman Empire.
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As we approached 1600, there was this kind of display of amazing celestial events. Comets and the great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. And the sky seemed to be conveying a message. And on both sides of the divide that was tormenting Europe at that time, which was the Roman Catholic Church had ruled Europe for centuries and at one time had deployed a surveillance state that today's tech bros and oligarchs could only dream about. And it was all based on the confessional. Because if you did not tell the truth in that confessional, you would damn yourself to eternal suffering. And the priests were obligated to report anything of importance to the Vatican that was said in the confessional. So down to the smallest villages, the servants, the mayors of small towns, the people who were the powers in big cities or in the universities of the time, they all had to go into that confessional and tell the truth. And so this allowed the Vatican to know what was happening everywhere. And Luther, of course, was the father of a revolution, this Protestant revolution, which suddenly decided, what are these Catholics doing? They've got gold and statues, and what does this have to do with Jesus? And he famously hammered up his questions for the church on a church door, pointing out all the inconsistencies and contradictions that especially the most hated was that you could just buy an indulgence. So if you were a wealthy person, not unlike today, you could simply buy your way out of trouble by kissing up to the powers that be. And this was considered by the Protestants to be absolutely against the whole spirit of what Jesus had taught and was something similar to the idea that the Catholic Church still has today. I recently saw an article where it was about this whole nightmarish scenario involving Epstein. And somebody had asked a priest, what is the punishment of someone like this? What can they expect? And he said, well, if they. And we all hope that he did die in remorse and that he asked Jesus to forgive him, then he's going to go to heaven. There is no consequences because God wants to save everybody. Now. I was taught by Manly hall more of a karmic attitude about life. You cannot escape the consequences of your actions. God's mercy is limited from that point of view. You have to learn your lessons. And you can't just at the very last minute say, I'm sorry, please forgive me, and then you're out and all your victims suffered and it's okay. So Europe was in this kind of death grip between these two powers at the time. Germany, parts of Britain. Britain was kind of mostly Protestant under Elizabeth. But There was a strong Catholic presence. Mostly Northern Europe, it seems, was more hospitable for Protestant ideas, whereas the south remained under the control of the Holy Roman Empire, which was essentially the military arm of the Vatican, which was tied to the Habsburg family for generation after generation. It began with Charlemagne, and it was not supposed to be hereditary. It was supposed to be someone that was chosen by the electors. Who are these powerful. One of them, for example, who appears in our story, Frederick from the Palatinate, his family tree went all the way back to ancient Rome. And so these families would choose who the emperor was, but over time, the Habsburg simply took it over. And so you would have. Every new Holy Roman Emperor was the Habsburg family. And they had a very powerful military that was based on the Austrian military and the Spanish military. And together they were very powerful. So the Protestants had managed to make large parts of Germany and, for a time, England and other areas into Protestant cultures. But the Vatican never stopped trying to figure out a way to regain the lost territory. Jesuits were actually formed in order to think this through, to figure out a way for the Vatican to defeat Protestantism once and for all and bring back this massive surveillance state so that the Roman Catholic Church could go back to its original empire.
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As I read your book, Ronnie, I noticed, and it seemed quite striking that some of the Holy Roman Emperors, I think Maximilian, the father of Rudolph, and Rudolph himself, although they were nominally supportive of the Catholic Church, their authentic interests had something to do with what today is often referred to as the perennial tradition, the primordial tradition, hermetic culture, Neo Platonism and so on.
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Absolutely. I mean, Rudolph is a wonderful character. He was one of my favorite people to research in all the books I've ever done. He almost reminds me of a 20th century person. He's like a time traveler who got dropped into this era and he didn't really like it. To give your listeners and viewers a brief idea of his story. So his father was known for being a good emperor, somebody who tried to really care about the people and in a sense, defended them from the extremism that the Catholic Church would fall into. Sometimes Rudolph was sent to grow up, really, once he was a teenager, to the court of the Spanish king, and. And this was a Gothic. I mean, it's not the right word. I'm not using the traditional historical word. I mean, more like the modern scene of Goth, a horror movie kind of a world that he entered, where, for instance, the King of Spain would make Rudolph and his children kiss these gruesome relics that were supposedly the bones Pieces of saints where the Inquisition was practicing torture. And often the king would be there for this and was an extremely strict and judgmental kind of a ruler. And there were these horrors existing in the court. A son who had to be locked away and who starved himself to death because he was insane. And it was all very sobering for Rudolph. And he acquired some of the habits of the Spanish court. He would dress in black. He liked to speak in Spanish when he was having conversations that he was serious about. And it also made him. He did what his uncle did, which is he never let anybody know what he was going to do. His father would bring everybody together. They would all discuss, what should we do next? He would say, I'm leaning toward this, but what do you think? Not so the uncle. The uncle would keep to himself about what he wanted to do and would listen to advice and then would decide based on what he wanted and wouldn't give any justification. So Rudolf would also do that. When Rudolph became king.
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His uncle, parenthetically, was the king of Spain, Philip.
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Yes, exactly. Rudolph was being groomed to be the Holy Roman Emperor because the son of the king of Spain, who would have been, was this insane person who was locked up and who starved himself to death. Rudolf really didn't like the position. He hated the bureaucracy of being Holy Roman Emperor. He didn't like having meetings about political issues or having to deal with the Vatican. Rudolph loved occultism, essentially. He was fascinated by alchemy and was an alchemist himself. He had a huge chamber in which he kept alchemists and furnished them with everything that they needed. And every morning he would go see, how are my alchemists doing? What have they done today? And if somebody had a success, he would put their name up on a plaque and say, have the success like this guy did. And he would do his own experiments. He also loved painters and painting. So he had another huge chamber in which painters would paint. And every morning he would go there too, and he would give them little bits of advice about how to improve their paintings. And he was quite an avid art collector. He preserved the many of the great masterpieces that we still have today. Those things he enjoyed greatly. He also really loved young ladies. And so whether they were courtesans or local girls, he would have them brought over. And when I said that, he seemed like a person from the 20th century. He had. I won't go into an accurate description of it, but he had a really obscene door knocker that you would just not expect from a Holy Roman Emperor. And it was the door to his private chambers. And it was a door that these girls would be going through. So they had an idea of what was expected of them, let's put it that way. It was a sexual act. And he also had a massive collection of what we would today call pornography, of paintings of nudes and of sexual acts and such, which he enjoyed very much. And he had a big collection of. Of treasures from all around the world. What he thought was a unicorn horn, for example. He believed that he had the Holy Grail, which was an agate cup, and he would drink water from it, holy water from it, when he felt he was being attacked magically by either priests or by black magicians. And he also had a collection of animals and of rare plants. He was given the gift of a lion. And this lion was very close to him and would walk around with him. Sometimes he would nip people. It was a bit of a diplomatic problem. Those things made him happy.
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And his capital, if I understand correctly, was in Prague, now Czech Republic.
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He wanted to get away from his family and from the institution of the church that was so established in Austria and Vienna. Also, the Turks were getting a little bit too close in their war against Europe. But the main thing was he wanted to get away from this Catholic influence. His mother was a devout Catholic and wanted him to obey the Pope in all things, and was very upset with him because he wouldn't get married. So he decided to move to Prague, which was the capital of occultism. And he loved it because first it was far away from the Vatican and from his family. But he also loved it because it had a strong Jewish community and there were kabbalists there that he could study with. And one of the most famous of the Kabbalists was shocked when he found out how much the emperor knew about Kabbalah, even before he met him. Also he gathered there astronomers. And as we know, the Church looked down on this, the beginnings of science as being a heresy, but not in the court. There he had some of the most famous names of astronomy and the birth of astronomy, who at that time were also astrologers. And he had some of the earliest telescopes were ever built were built at his court. So he furthered science, he furthered the arts, and he furthered a kind of a blending of philosophies and was fascinated by all the different traditions, Hermetic, the Jewish traditions, the Christian mystical, gnostic traditions that had been left out of the autocracy of the Church. And because he did this, so I mentioned earlier that we had in the Heavens, these signs. The Catholics had astrologers, and they were predicting that these signs meant the end of the Protestant revolt. The Protestant astrologers were predicting that it was the downfall of the Pope. But something big was about to happen. Everyone believed, and they were all looking at Rudolf. Now, if you were somebody inclined toward the mystical, if you were inclined toward alchemy and toward the hermetic tradition, you saw Rudolph as being the hope of all your dreams come true. Because if he would just stand up and become the Hermetic Emperor, Plato's philosopher king, then there would be a whole rebirth in Europe, because he could make this. This new society where science was welcomed and where dialogue between different traditions was welcome, unlike the Church, which would censor everything. This was really what a lot of people wanted to see. Especially because in 1600, the church burned Bruno, partly because he had said that he believed that the earth traveled around the sun and not the other way around. And this was a heresy to the Church, also because he held very heretical ideas about infinity. And he was brilliant. I mean, really an amazing mind, but far too advanced for his time in the eyes of the Church, and a danger. But people were still reading him now realize that this was a time when a bookseller was killed by being thrown into a river because he had sold a book by Agrippa to somebody. This is how vicious the censorship was. And yet you could freely talk about Agrippa in Rudolph's Prague. And all the great minds came there. John Dee went there. He tried to convince Rudolph through his angelic seances that Rudolph had to do this, that he had to stand up and become hermetic Holy Roman Emperor, where something terrible would happen. Rudolf was very unimpressed by Dee, and he kind of shunted him out of his circle as quickly as he could. He didn't want that responsibility. But people who weren't at his court didn't know that. They were daydreaming about the possibilities. And I believe that this was one of the reasons that the. The great manifestos were written, because especially amongst students and their teachers in the colleges of Protestant Germany, especially in Tubingen, there was a feeling that could be compared to maybe the 1960s in America of this burgeoning new youth movement. These professors were encouraging brilliant young students. And one of them, I believe Andre, was most likely the author of the first of the manifestos. His whole record of publication makes me think that now he admitted to being the guy behind the Chemical Wedding, the third manifesto. And there were others in his circle who left notes saying I think Andre wrote all of them and it's possible that they wrote them together, because the thing about this is that these manifestos. Let's talk about them, because they're really the whole origin of the thing. The Fama was a manuscript. Andre claimed that he wrote it as early as 1605 and it went hand by hand. It was not supposed to be published. It was supposed to be shared amongst like minded people. So if you knew somebody, your neighbor, shared your interests in these forbidden topics, and you were lucky enough to get your hands on a handwritten copy of the Fama, you would say, look at this. And then maybe give him the permission to go ahead and do his own copy of it, write it out himself, and then he would share it with other people of like mind. That's really all they intended. And the Fama is an amazing document. Modern academics have compared it to surrealism, to magical realism. Some have said it's the first science fiction book. It was a huge leap of imagination. And it was also a revolutionary document in which the Pope is. They want the Pope dead. Let's just put it that way. And it's a vision of this new society and of this brotherhood of secret masters in a sense, and not masters in the sense that it later evolved into invisible masters with superhuman powers. These were simply great scholars and they had a vision for how society could be so much better if this could only be implemented. But it was meant to be quiet. It was simply circulating underneath the surface. There were even apparently Catholics who read it and some who actually liked it and thought that it had some interesting ideas in it. But what happened was that there was a nobleman named Moritz the Learned, who he believed it would be to his advantage if there was a war. What would ultimately be the 30 years war? Boy, was he wrong. It was a devastation for his whole life. And when he came across the Fama, he thought, this is perfect. And to give an understanding about why. You could compare it, for example, to Ginsberg's Howl, which was a poem that when it came out, it crystallized something that so many young people, not just young people, but mostly young people, were feeling about society and how sick it was and how it could be different. And they all thought they were kind of on their own. And they were even defined to some degree by politics and by psychiatry as being sick people because they didn't accept society as it is. So they were quiet about it and they wondered if there was something wrong with them because they couldn't fit in, that they had these doubts and that they had these expectations of something better. Then they would read how and they would say, that's it. That's exactly how I feel. And it galvanized a generation. You might be able to say the same thing of Kerouac's on the Road. And you see the same thing happen again with music not too long after that, with Dylan and the Beatles. And the way that they made people see the world. Well, they didn't make people see the world in a different way. They articulated what people were already seeing in a way that made them realize that they were not alone. I compare this to a friend of mine who the first concert they ever went to in the early 1970s was a yes concert. And until then, they had been quietly smoking weed by themselves and feeling like something was wrong with them and they were a menace to society. And then they walked into this stadium, I guess it was probably an auditorium at that time, and everybody was smoking weed, and everybody shared similar opinions. And they realized, oh, I'm not alone. There's thousands of people like me. That's what the Fama meant to Moritz the Learned. He felt that when people read this, it would galvanize the revolution and lead to the war that he hoped would liberate Europe and would give him a lot more power. So he published it. He didn't ask permission from anybody. It was anonymous. No one knew who had written it, so he didn't bother to try to find out. And he just simply put it out as a book. No one expected what happened, which was. I mean, on one level, we can compare this to when Elvis came out and those little record players were first made available so kids could have music in their bedroom. They didn't have to go out and use Mom's big stereo in the living room. That really freed Elvis to sell a lot of records and to start a kind of a revolution that was based on that technology. Books, these kind of printed books were just happening. Like there was a way to mass produce them now through the printing press that had not been available before. And so the Fama became one of these very popular early books, and others reprinted it and translated it. And it caused this huge reaction. There were people who embraced it and who said, I want to be a Rosicrucian. I want to be one of them. There were German Paracelsians who said, mein Gott, they're describing me. I'm a Rosicrucian. I didn't even know it. There were people who said they were the devil's Jesuits and that this was the most evil thing, and it was going to steal men's souls. And there was a panic in Paris at one point because some smart ass put up posters that said, announcement, the Rosicrucians are here and we're recruiting. Don't bother to reach out to us. We will find you. We're invisible. You will not know where we are. Paris had a panic that summer because they thought that these evil Rosicrucian magicians were running around. And they actually managed to find somebody who claimed he was a Rosicrucian. He was an artist, a painter with a really filthy mouth. So they said, see, this is what a Rosicrucian is. This horrible person. He's not even civilized. People wrote books saying, this is why they're wrong. People wrote books saying, this is why they're right. People wrote books saying, please, please let me be a member. I know I belong. And then when they weren't answered, they wrote books saying they're a fraud. They didn't answer me, and I would have been perfect. Hundreds and hundreds of books and pamphlets were published about this one little. This one little book, the Fama.
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B
And I guess it's fair to say that at this point in time, there was no secret Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross or any Rosicrucian organizations.
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Andre referred to it at that time as a society. And he didn't mean a secret organization. He met a group of friends, really just a group of enthusiasts who had similar ideas. And that's where this came from. So Andre is watching this and he's horrified, as you can imagine. I mean, this thing wasn't even supposed to come out. And now it's the talk of all Europe and it's causing all kinds of unrest and hostility and suspicion. It was very disappointing for him. The second one comes out a year later. So 1614 is when the first is published, and in 1615, we get the Confessio. The Confessio, to me, is touching because on one level he is saying, you got it wrong. This is all wrong. But he's still trying to get the message across. He hasn't become completely bitter. He's saying, what? If I say it this way, maybe it'll be understood. Well, this causes another huge ruckus because this anonymous author has now released a Confessio. And it's a continuation of the Rosicrucian ideas. And it's critical of people who are supportive of it and critical of people who are against it. And it contains more concepts that are controversial and it just feeds the fire.
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B
Is it linked at this point? To the Hermetic tradition or to alchemy.
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It is saturated with it. We will see later with people like, for instance, Thomas Vaughan in England, who is the publisher of the first English translation. He put them together, the Fama and Confessio. And in his case, he wrote a book in which he laid it out. He's one of the first to say it starts in ancient Egypt and it's Hermetic. And then it comes up to here and the Greeks. And it's really the same thing that Manly hall and Madame Blavatsky and everybody else ever since has been saying. So it's implied very much there, but not written out the way it would be later.
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So the idea is that there was a continuous mystery tradition that ran through many different cultures, had many different forms of expression, but it represented an authentic, deep truth that was neither strictly Christian or strictly Islamic, or Protestant or Catholic or Jewish. Something more universal.
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Exactly. Something that informed all of them. The secret doctrine that was at the heart of all of these teachings. And that these teachings had been perverted into institutions that were used to consolidate power and wealth, but that there was a truth that would change a person's life, would awaken the divine, and that that truth appeared in all of these religions. And so, for instance, the early Protestants, it would seem, may have been influenced by Islam. Because Islam tells you you shouldn't have these glorious golden depictions of people and these idols, essentially. And the Protestants felt the same way. And we do think that it's possible when you look at history, because there's a lot of talk about in the mythology that these books created, that the founder, Christian Rosenkreuz, had gone east to get his knowledge. And the Rose was at the center of Sufism. There are Sufi like concepts in the Rosicrucian teachings. So it seems to be a blending of all these traditions or a seeking of this unifying truth within different traditions and an openness to all those traditions.
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And I also gather that Andreas, if he was the author of all three, or even just the third one, at the time he was a 19 year old theology student.
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Yes, he was really a teenager. That's part of the reason I like to compare it to the Beats. It was like a younger generation who had this radical new concept of literature and who dared to say things that no one else would dare say. So the Chemical Wedding comes out a year later, after the confessio. And now Andre has had it. And this is a satirical work, in my opinion. He called it a Ludibrium, which is like a lampoon A joke. And in it he does things like he has Christian Rosenkreuz, who was held up as this noble founder who had traveled the world in search of knowledge and tried to bring it back to Europe, but Europe wouldn't listen. And then he had a tomb that was, in every single detail represented divine truth, where his body was kept, and it didn't in any way decay. And then that tomb was found and the teachings rose from there. And in the third book, Christian Rosenkreuz is an old man and there's a young woman who's the narrator, and she says something along the lines of, you know, if I slept with him, he'd probably be in a lot better mood. I mean, it reflects German, I'm sorry, English theater. Because German Protestantism was so strict, you didn't have theater. And the Brits would come through and entertain people and they often had sexual humor in their theater. And so this was also in the Chemical Wedding. And the book was critical in a sense of the whole credulousness of human beings. And it still had an idealism about it. But you can see that Andre is very disappointed in how people have responded to the first two manifestos because they were meant to teach personal reformation as the way to achieve universal reformation. And instead they became a source of gossip and self aggrandizement and just everything that could go wrong. In fact, a year later, Andre publishes a book called Menippus, which is under his name for the first time, which is a satire on all these types. He's basically giving you a record of all the people, the types of people who ruined it, who ruined the whole Rosicrucian idea. And I have to say that you can recognize a lot of them. It's a very clever book. So, for example, he has historical characters like Alexander the Great and Socrates in there. He has Roman gods and goddesses. And they're all meant to satirize types of people. And they all represent those who just completely missed the point. There's a character named Fama, the same name as the first manifesto. And this person is just in love with fame and blindly seeks it, as so many of the people who want to be Rosicrucians were. And you have types of people that even to this day are seen killers, right? You have the clueless art collector, somebody that he calls the scholar of the vanities. You've got the connoisseur, you've got the politician, you've got the economist. And Andre's point, as soon as these people show up, your scene is dead. They will ruin it. And so these are all the people that reacted to the manifestos. This is what kind of. And this is not a settled point in academia that Andre was involved in every one of these, but the fact that he, like, let his bile out in these descriptions of the people that misunderstood it makes me just think, this is the author and he's turning around and saying, all right, well, then I'm going to write about you and how you messed it all up because you didn't get it.
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B
Well, in spite of the satire, the title the Chemical Wedding implies an alchemical process, the merging of the male and female to create something greater.
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Absolutely. And I think that it has something to do with, you know, Andre was in the Palatinate around the time that this wedding was going to happen in England. And many of the people who became famous as supposedly being Rosicrucians, such as Michael Myer and Robert Flood, were there in England for that wedding. And Shakespeare wrote Midsummer Night's Dream, and it said that he wrote the Tempest for the wedding. And the reason this wedding was so important is because Princess Elizabeth of England, the daughter of King James, she had been raised to be a second Elizabeth. Not just her name, but she had the same tutors. She famously tried to sign her name to look the same as Queen Elizabeth did. And Queen Elizabeth was a champion for astrologers and hermeticists and. And for all of these approaches that were anathema to the Church, it was all part of her rebellion, carrying on her father's rebellion against the control of the Vatican in England. And so where her father was somebody who leaned a little Catholic and who wanted everybody to just kind of get along, but he would definitely punish the Catholics when they became too ambitious, but he would also try to keep the Protestants down. He wanted peace. Elizabeth grew up under the influence of her older brother, Henry, and Henry would have been a tremendous king. He was a brilliant, brilliant kid. And he was deeply into ancient knowledge, deeply into this whole hermetic tradition. He revived the ancient arts of statue making, so his garden had statues that moved and whistled, or, you know, they're considered black magic by the Catholics, but he considered them symbols of science and of enlightenment and of the power of knowledge. Unfortunately, he got a fever and he died right before her wedding, actually. And this changed the whole course of Europe because he had intended to go to war against the Pope. He had a very different opinion than his father about all this. The marriage was going to be arranged between this remarkable princess, who was a brilliant woman, and the Elector Palatine Frederick. Frederick was from that family that went all the way back to Rome, and he was one of the most powerful electors. He was really just a kid at the time. They both were. They were teenagers, but he had grown up steeped in this stuff in his father's court. Now, Francis Yeats, who was a wonderful scholar but had a very active imagination, seemed to view Frederick as being essentially a Hermetic king. You know, somebody who was not only valued, but was trying to further the cause. Modern scholarship shows us that's not really the case. He appreciated it and he thought there was great wisdom in it, but he was not somebody that was trying to force it on the world or trying to be the hermetic Holy Roman Emperor. Because Rudolph wouldn't be. Rudolf had been forced out by his own brother. The Church has had enough of him and his unwillingness to do the things that needed to be done by a Holy Roman Emperor. And he became a prisoner in his own castle. It's a very sad story, really. He said that he felt like a ghost wandering in his own castle. All the power was stripped from him. Now, Rudolph had done something very revolutionary that is important to the history of America in a way, which is that he had declared freedom of religion. In Prague, everybody was welcome to practice whatever it is they wanted to practice. And this is part of what gave such life to the dialogue between these different traditions in Prague. Because it was now, okay, you could talk to a Jewish rabbi about the Kabbalah and you weren't risking the church coming down on you. Of course, the church was very unhappy about it, and that's probably the reason they replaced him with his younger brother. But that idea of freedom of religion, that everyone should be allowed to practice what they believe in, was something that was very radical at the time. And this was something that Frederick resonated with as well. And so when he was removed, Rudolf, his younger brother, was the opposite of him. He immediately, with his own hands, he tore up this decree for freedom of religion. He let everybody know this is over. This is now a Catholic town. The Bohemians, the people of Prague, they did not like this. And so after they endured a little bit of taste of this Catholic domination, they literally threw the officers of the church that had been placed there out of the second story window onto a garbage heap and told them to get out of town. And then they turned around and they invited Frederick to come be the King of Bohemia. He had already married Elizabeth, and this was viewed in Europe as this incredible opportunity by the Protestants. And as a Terrible threat by the Catholics, because what they thought would happen is that the British and the Germans would get together and that was a formidable force and could possibly challenge the Habsburgs also as the Elector. There was a small chance that Frederick could become the Holy Roman Emperor. And being King of Bohemia was kind of a step toward that. There's so much mythology around all this. So, for example, one of the stories. So much misogyny in history. One of the stories was that the mother of Frederick, and Frederick himself did not want to take the throne of Bohemia because it was a bad choice. It was basically telling the Pope to go f himself. Just couldn't do it. I mean, you knew you were starting a war, basically. And the story went, and for years all the academics repeated it, that this crazy British princess showed up and she said, nonsense, this is God's will. You've got to do it. You've got to help these poor Bohemian people. Well, this wonderful scholar, Nadine Ackerman, the first one to go into the papers of Elizabeth, her letters, and found that it was absolutely not true that she had actually said, I will not give you an opinion because you must make this decision. I couldn't really tell you what to do. And Frederick was the one who said, it must be God's calling. I have to go there. It was a disastrous move.
- [44:31]
B
Well, I assume, Ronnie, that the Rosicrucian manifestos kind of whipped up the public support for the idea that this marriage was an alchemical marriage and that the new King and Queen of Bohemia, who might become the emperor of the whole Holy Roman Emperor, he was going to initiate a new order. All of the comets and conjunctions in the sky that the astrologers had noticed were all, like, creating this fervor in the culture around. Around this possibility obviously premature.
- [45:15]
A
Yes, it was this beautiful young princess who was brilliant, educated, who wore her neckline too low, showed too much cleavage for the court and such. She represented a revolution. It was like the 1960s where women were wearing miniskirts from or something, and they were suddenly educated and demanding equality. And she demanded a certain kind of equality from Frederick. After all, she was the daughter of the King of England. And Frederick, being into all this stuff, doing these plays, these masks in which he dressed as Orpheus, or constantly referring back to pagan religion, giving her permission to build a garden that was filled with these moving and talking statues and they brough in trees. They turned a bleak, barren part of the Palatinate into this gorgeous garden.
- [46:18]
B
We're talking Heidelberg, the Heidelberg Castle, if I recall.
- [46:22]
A
Yes, exactly. And so there was a beautiful plaque there. It was so romantic. It was a gift from Frederick to his beloved wife. And people were so touched by the romance and the obvious love between them. A lot of writers talk about how they would light up when they saw each other and how moving it was to see these two royals who were deeply in love. And all of it together seemed to be this new generation that was going to change everything and finally break the stranglehold that the Vatican had on so much of Europe. It was a disaster, though, because first of all, Prague was filled with Catholic spies. And so when war did break out, because obviously the Vatican could not have any of this. I mean, Rudolf's decree for freedom of religion was reinstituted by Frederick and that was not allowed. So, sure enough, the Habsburg army marched and Frederick, who was very inexperienced, he gathered generals, and one of the generals that he hired was a Catholic, and that's questionable. And he complained later that every move they made was known by the Catholic army before they did it. So they had some brilliant strategy, but that didn't matter because everyone knew exactly what he was going to do. And the defeat was immediate. I mean, he was there for, like, one winter in Bohemia, and the Battle of White Mountain crushed his power and he had to flee along with Elizabeth, lost all his wealth. The Palatinate was attacked and pillaged by the Habsburg army. So he lost his own domain as well as Bohemia, and he became, for the rest of his life, this kind of pathetic character. They were both refugees. Elizabeth really emerged as the great leader. People commented how stressed out Frederick was as they were escaping, but how she kept her poise the whole time and her kindness to people, and she became known as the Queen of Hearts because of this. And it just made people fall in love with her more and see her as this lost kind of queen, Elizabeth that should have become the Queen of England. England, but never did. And so they lived at the mercy of their relatives, essentially, and of their allies for the rest of their lives. And in the case of Frederick, he didn't live that long because the 30 years war broke out. He tried to be involved, but generally he was manipulated by greater powers than himself. And in the end, he caught a fever that was going around the army and he passed away. And so that dream died with him. And I think part of the founding of America and the emphasis on the Virginia colony is partially informed by Rosicrucian sympathizers who figured, we're not going to make this happen in Europe, this is over, but maybe we can do this in A new continent. And we can establish this freedom of religion idea in this new place that's far enough away from the Vatican that they can't really control it. And this is when you start to see groups of German pietists and mystics and other kind of communes of free thinking mystics moving to America and starting these small communities so that they can practice this freedom of religion without fear of being burned like Bruno or just being punished in other ways. There were in the group that created the Virginia Colony and financed it, there were notable Rosicrucian sympathizers who were part of that small group and were definitely had the ear of Sir Walter Raleigh, who was at the center of it and who had been a friend of Henry's, of this great kid. It would have been really, would have been kind of a hermetic British king. And so the dream was transplanted to America now. And I do think that there's a Rosicrucian influence there. Not in the sense that in the modern day it's kind of been painted out by some writers as it was a plan all along. And the Rosicrucians were the ones behind the founding of America? No, it was just people who had been informed and inspired by Rosicrucian ideas. People like Comenius, a great philosopher of education, who took the Rosicrucian ideas and he made them into practical suggestions. And it gives you a sense of what Rosicrucianism was. So for example, he believed that everyone should be educated. Everyone. The indigenous people of Africa and of America, women, for God's sake, should be educated, should be able to read and write. I mean, that was a crazy radical idea at the time. He also believed that we should gather together all the best thinkers in the world into one place. And he called it the College of Light. And there they could all work together in order to further science and make a better society. And. And they would put together books that would contain all the knowledge of all the civilizations of history. And there would be one language created by them so that everyone could have their own personal language from their own place of birth. But there would be a language that everyone could speak as well so that we could get over these borders and these separations. Those were Rosicrucian or the application of Rosicrucian ideas.
- [52:26]
B
I presume that many of these ideas were taken up by Freemasons.
- [52:31]
A
Yes, absolutely. I think the Rosicrucians, you know, did the Rosicrucians start Freemasonry and all that. This is all hidden and no One's really sure what happened. But there's no question that the Freemasons were very inspired by Rosicrucian ideals. And in fact, in some of the Freemasonic orders, there's Rosicrucian degrees. Rosicrucian ideas and history are taught, for instance, in the Scotch rite. And so was this. Some people think that it was the Rosicrucians reinventing themselves into the Freemasons. But this is the problem with Freemasonry and with Rosicrucianism. And I use the example of punk to explain this. Because today you have. You have people who are very passionate about punk. And that's not punk. It's like something you hear a lot said to other punk rockers. And that's because punk is everything. There are Nazi punks. There are punks who are very liberal. There are communist punks. There's punk on Broadway, thanks to Green Day. There's pop punk, which is just for fun. Punk doesn't really have a definition. It's. It's been so many different things now that it's even contradictory to itself. And this is true of the Rosicrucians, too. Because as we look in the progression of history. We see that these ideas we've just been discussing. Are not always what the Rosicrucians. Or the people who identify themselves as Rosicrucians are teaching. Later we'll have a Rosicrucian order that gets into positions of power with royals in Europe. And they basically run the state. And it's just as bad as the Vatican. It's filled with censorship and centralized power. That's not what the early Rosicrucians were about. The early Rosicrucians were about decentralized knowledge. That you see in the Christian hierarchies, whether Protestant or Catholic. Knowledge comes from the top. The Pope decides. The priest teaches the flock. You're not even supposed to read the Bible. In some of the Catholic periods, the priest does that and then tells you what to do. The Rosicrucians were doing this kind of horizontal transmission. Where if you're somebody that gets it, then it'll find you and it'll change your life. And then maybe you'll find somebody else who gets it. There is no hierarchy. There's no capital. There's no headquarters for the Rosicrucians, although later there were alleged to be. This is merely. It's really kind of exciting because when you look at what's going on right now in the world. This is the model for resistance in A sense. And it's the model of every counterculture that occurred after that that they. They spread through these works of literature or. Or whatever. Anything you can use, really, to express yourself, using symbolism in ways that people don't understand, like Dylan's lyrics. Like you. You had to be in that state of mind that Dylan was writing in as part of that generation to get what he. And he was aware of that and talking about that in his lyrics. And this is the way the Rosicrucians were manifesting their order, so called, was in this kind of the sharing of knowledge freely, letting it flow where it will and letting it find the people that it's destined to find. And then they apply that in their own way in ways that change the world and inspire other people. And in the rare cases where you find somebody who really gets it, you can hand over your handwritten copy of the Fama and say, oh, it's all right here, Read this. And so it tells us that culture is how we change societies that have grown rigid and obstructive to human progress.
- [56:54]
B
Well, it is interesting that the word bohemian has come to be identified with countercultures in locations far away from Prague and Bohemia.
- [57:05]
A
True. I mean, these days it's considered something of an appropriation and is frowned upon. But for generations, that is what you would call somebody. You know, the beats were called bohemians, the hippies were bohemians. I used to say that I was bohemian because what other word do we have for it, really? Counterculture, I guess, is it that really shows you how bohemia, that culture around Prague and around Moritz the learned, how it became understood as being a seed of something that was the answer to these oligarchical impulses in society. And in rejecting. That, you had to prove yourself according to the existing system, that rather you could awaken within yourself a knowledge and a creativity that was more powerful than these hierarchies. And you could do things just on your own that would have huge influence and inspire others to do things. And so it again brings our focus onto the idea of culture. As we sit around now and we see in social media, everybody is worried, you know, what are we going to do about this surveillance state? What are we going to do about this brutal hierarchy that's being imposed? And we try to think of political solutions and we feel like we don't have the power or the traction in order to make any. In fact, they can be lying to us and we can call them out on it and no one cares. Well, the Rosicrucian answer to that was culture, was writing that book that everybody's got to read or making that piece of music or today we could say a film or something that goes far beyond that. And these were not simply social pieces, criticism, although social criticism, was part of it. They were filled with wonderful, crazy ideas, you know, and a vision of the future that was so optimistic. And so it had belief in human agency, in the power of the individual and the power of individuation, as Jung called it, that as we as individuals, as we truly explore ourselves and the world of ideas, and we come to love the world of ideas from every culture that we can produce things that have tremendous impact on other people. And we've seen this in the way that, for example, we look at the talk about original, rigid culture in the 1950s. I mean, talk about, you know, white guys are in charge and all that was so firmly placed. And yet Elvis, I mean, he wasn't even trying to do it. But some guy was born who, you know, he was nervous and his leg would shake and his hips would shake when he sang, and the girl started screaming, and it wiped out a whole, you know, like several generations of this is how things are done. And so it shows you the power of culture, the way that it can attach. Even when you look at the chemical wedding and the nude narrator, the woman who says that if she slept with Rosenkreuz, he would be in a better mood, radical. It was almost pornographic. And it was a view of sexuality that wasn't allowed for from the church. And so the freedom that these works could crystallize and articulate was intoxicating for people. And that's really what countercultures do. I know that I spoke to you about the Orphic counterculture in the past and how if you were educated into these Orphic ideas and you were living in this rigid Olympian culture where soldiers, the warrior was the hero, and everybody had to be a good citizen and do what was best for the state, and you had to participate in Olympian religion. And then all of a sudden, here you had this young generation who Aristophanes satirizes, who are walking around, and when that big, strong warrior walks by, they think, what a loser. You know, you're just an idiot. You're going to be reincarnated over and over and over and over again, killing people because you think that's the right thing. You don't get it. Now, me, I know where I'm going. I know the secret code words to say when I die so that I go get to feast with the Gods, while you have to come back down here and be a prisoner in this horrible world again, absolute reversal of the whole thing. No, I don't want to fight in your war. No, I don't want to vote, because your voting is ridiculous. I mean, this is Orphic. And so they were condemned because they were destroying the city. But it was a counterculture, I've argued. It was really the first great Western counterculture. And the Rosicrucians were aware of it. And they do drop the name Orpheus and Orphic ideas in many works. So it's really. I think of Rosicrucianism as a paradigm of counterculture. And this horizontal transmission of knowledge will repeat itself over and over again and change the way that societies view themselves. Usually it requires a new generation to take up these ideas and to embrace them with passionate belief in a better world and in more freedom. And so they don't think to themselves, how are we possibly going to defeat the Vatican? It's so rich. It's got the Habsburg armies. It's hopeless. They don't care about that. They're going to just let this truth out in the best way that they can. And let's see what happens. And generally what happens is cultures change, they evolve. There's this huge influence that occurs. As I mentioned, there were even Catholic priests who wrote books in which they praised the Rosicrucians, if you can believe that, because they thought that some of these ideas were essential and that they could improve society.
- [63:56]
B
You refer to the Rosicrucians as the most influential secret society that never existed.
- [64:04]
A
They probably were a hoax. I think of it as one of the greatest literary hoaxes in history because people took it literally. They thought, this is an order of super intellectuals who they know exactly what they're doing and they're divinely inspired. I really think it was a bunch of college students with radical professors who created these documents that are really a literary hoax. And it scared the Vatican, it scared all of Paris. It changed the way people viewed the world. And I think that's, you know, to me, that's more exciting than the idea that these are some kind of superhuman masters who came down to influence how history was going to play out, because it gives agency back to us if you're going to be. And I fell victim to this. So, you know, when I was studying with Manly hall and I was reading about the Rosicrucians, man, I wanted it. I wanted to be an initiate more than anything, you know, And I drove Tamara, my wife, crazy because I was like, you know, no, I have to be celibate now. You know, no watching television. We have to eat this special diet, and we have to, because I want to be an initiate. You got to earn this, you know? And I thought that if I lived the right life, that someday an initiate would appear out of nowhere in my room and say, you did it, young man. Tamara had ways of getting around all that stuff.
- [65:46]
B
Well, it is fair to say there are large organizations today, particularly in San Jose, California, where the Rosicrucian Museum is quite a substantial operation, that call themselves Rosicrucians and claim to be identified with a tradition that goes back to ancient Egypt.
- [66:06]
A
Yes, and they also claim Lincoln and all kinds of historical figures as being Rosicrucians. I mean, if you ever received a Rosicrucian lesson from the back of a magazine, you were a Rosicrucian. But I don't think that's the case. And again, I think that in a way to back up now for a moment with an overview, one of the things that's. That's been striking me for a while now is the dangers of the intellect, which appears everywhere from the Tech Bros to the Rosicrucians and the orators that believe that they represent these. These, let's call them Blavatsky's invisible masters. Maybe not Blavatsky's particular ones, but she really popularized that idea more than anyone, I think. And it entangles your life in this intellectualized view that dehumanizes us, I think. And I think it takes away our agency because. So, in other words, I can't do what I want to do to help change the world until I master all the things that are required for me to become an initiate, to become a master. Well, this is taking us back to the Catholic paradigm of you work your way up through the priesthood and then you become, you know, maybe you become a bishop, and then maybe you become the pope, and then you're initiated and you're the guy. That's not what these Rosicrucian manifestos were about. They were about freedom. They were about personal reformation. Yes, but not because you wanted to climb in a hierarchy and tell people.
- [67:44]
B
What to do or be told what to do.
- [67:48]
A
Yes, exactly. It was a rejection of that. And so I think that we tend to. And this is so true, I think, today of metaphysics in general. I think I've said this to you before. We are blessed to have almost every teaching that survived into history is now available online in one way or another. I Mean, you can find the most obscure religious traditions from anywhere in the world. And I know so many people who are brilliant, I mean, wonderful people who are collecting these things like they're collecting ladders. They can tell you, this ladder has five rungs, that ladder has seven rungs. That this ladder is so wide and this ladder is so tall. But they never climb any of the ladders. And so they don't get the benefit of waking up, let's call it that, to your spiritual heritage, your destiny as an eternal being that is living. This experience of temporality and of impermanence. They become so entangled in, and I did this myself, they become so entangled in the intellectual collection of ideas and comparing and contrasting. And the kindness, the love at the center of all of this. That's the thing that's lacking. And it's so easy for human beings to find, fall into this intellectual trap. Even in love, that can happen where we judge. Is this the love that I want? Is it good enough? How does it compare to this and.
- [69:37]
B
Love?
- [69:38]
A
True love is beyond the intellect. It defeats the intellect. And its action in the world is powerful. This is why Ficino, who was one of the fathers of the Renaissance, said that it was the great secret of magic is love. And love is left out. Love is at the center of all these ladders. It's climbing the ladder of love, of divine love. But the love is forgotten as the intellect explores all these details and gets a sense of satisfaction, action from it. And so I believe that the Rosicrucians are a good example of that. And I like to use. I'm sure I've spoken to you in the past about him, this American character who went looking for Rosicrucians and who couldn't find any. He met people that people said were Rosicrucians, but when he spoke to them, he just couldn't. That's not a Rosicrucian. That's not what I'm looking for. His father was the governor three times of Massachusetts Bay Colony, was the man who came up with the idea of the shining city that the presidents have always brought up when they're talking about America. And he gives us a viewpoint into how different the Pilgrims were really from what we're taught. Because this is John Winthrop the Younger.
- [71:12]
B
By the way, who brought an alchemical library over to the United States.
- [71:18]
A
Yeah, that belonged to John Dee, including John Dee's alchemical equipment. The governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony. His father had an active alchemical laboratory in his house because of his son and his son was a practicing astrologer. And essentially what his son did was when he was 18, he went to college in London and he ran across alchemy, this is around 1650s. And he also found the manifestos. Now, at that time in theater in England, the Rosicrucian was a comedy character, an old man who was lost in old books and was just hopelessly out of touch and clueless. And Winthrop looked at this, the younger looked at this, and, and he thought, no, these are great ideas. This is, I, this, these are things that should be put into, into practice. And as I said, you know, really tried to follow Christian Rosenkreuz's alleged footsteps and visit the east and trying to find that knowledge. And when he couldn't find it, he did something very interesting. He decided to simply live the principles. If he couldn't find a Rosicrucian to initiate him into it, then he would live as much as he could as a Rosicrucian. So he was an alchemist who created medicines. He became really the doctor for all of Connecticut territory and was a very talented healer. Wealthy people would go all the way across the Atlantic if they could afford it and they could survive the trip to be treated by him. He originated this kind of system of using color coded packets for medicines and trained nurses and midwives to go out into these rural areas and recognize diseases by their symptoms. And then just, you get a red packet, you get a blue packet. And he also made gold. And there's still a place that they point to as the governor's ring, a place where he would go with his assistant and supposedly would come back with these rings of pure gold that he had created. He devoted himself to science. He built a desalinization plant. He found a new way to extract iron ore. He protected the innocent, the Pequot Indians, when they were attacked by the tribe of Uncas, the Mohicans. Uncas is a hero in American literature, but he was not a hero in actual history. He was a brute. And he tried to enslave this Pequot tribe, which had been devastated by the diseases that the Europeans brought with them. And his tribe at that time would do terrible things. They were famous, for example, for they would want to gamble with you, and you had to let them win or they'd kill you. They were bullies in every sense of the word. And Winthrop the Younger, he protected the Pequot tribe. Even when his fellow white colonists sided with Uncas and the Mohicans against him, he found clever ways to still protect them. And eventually he won everyone over and they got their freedom and he even helped them regain their status and their names and all these things they lost. He was also someone who protected his own people. He was very clever. So the King of England would often call for troops. So you have to send your young, young men to join our army because we're about to fight a war. And John Winthrop the Younger would ignore this as long as he could just, okay, not even respond. And then eventually, of course, the King would get angry and he would, what are you doing? I told you to send these men over. And John Winthrop the Younger would say, well, you want this iron ore, right? I'm building this iron extraction plant. I need every one of these guys, otherwise you're not going to get your iron. The King would say, okay, well then you can keep them. That's how he lived. And he was amazing person. I mean, there was a war. When finally, too late, the tribes realized what was going on. They burned half the colonies, including, they burned his little town, New London. He forgave them and he died making plans for the new town and for how to bring back and how to treat the indigenous tribes better so it wouldn't happen again. And interestingly, he was eulogized a little bit later on by one of the most outstanding pilgrims, I guess you would say. And he was called Hermes Christianus in this eulogy. A pilgrim calling, somebody praising them, you know, Hermes. I mean, Hermes is either thrice great as Hermes from the Hermetic tradition, which I'm sure is what it was, or it's Hermes, the ancient Greek God. Either way, that's not what we expect from the pilgrims. We don't expect them to be using Hermes. And then we dig deeper and we find out that we've got these theologians, these pilgrim theologians who are saying, oh, you know, this hermeticism is good stuff, but it's not for the regular people. It's for scholars like me. We're talking about Cotton Mather, of course. And so this, this view that we've been taught of the Pilgrims as being strictly Christian and they would never tolerate anything occult for a moment is wrong again. There was an alchemical laboratory in the house of the guy who came up with the Shining City quote and who was three time governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony. There was astrology being practiced there. This Rosicrucian enthusiast was one of the founders of Connecticut and became a governor of Connecticut territory.
- [77:36]
B
The ideals expressed in these manifestos dating back to the early 1600s, took root in America and have become In a way, intertwined almost inextricably with the American character.
- [77:53]
A
I first encountered them when I was working for Manly Hall. He actually gave me his own copy of A.E. waite's book, the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross. That's what set me off on my initiation fever. Tamara called it initiate fever, which I think was a pretty good term for it. But I was allowed to have lunches with Manly hall in his vault of rare manuscripts and books so I could pick up the original copies. You know, I had in my hand the first edition of the Fama published by Moritz. I had all of them. And it was so thrilling. I mean, I don't even know how to describe it. I just. I realized what it was that these people were risking their lives to write this stuff down and how radical these ideas were, and that they were intended to create a better future. And how many of these ideas? For example, one of them is the invisible college, right? A college that can be anywhere at any time. Well, that's the Internet, more or less, at this point. And so some of these. These things have come into reality that they were imagining. And I found it. I just thought, you know, after growing up surrounded by institutional religions and just this dry, dead culture is how it appeared to me. And my limited experience of life had never introduced me to anybody who cared that much about others or about the future or anything outside of make a good living and raise some kids. And to suddenly see in this vault all of these books that were created to pick up Robert Flood's books, in which he's trying to give you all the knowledge of the world. You know, there's an incredible art where you would. You could open up the drawings and see the symbolic insides of the human body and how they corresponded to celestial bodies. And it was thrilling. And the influence on art is huge, of this Rosicrucian movement and of the ideas that came from it. And in the case of Flood, for example, you see the way that he does it. Aside from inspiring artists and such, he has friends who become the beginnings of science. He has arguments in pamphlets and books with people who are arguing against the occult aspect of what he's saying. And together, their arguments kind of give birth to real science, which rejects both of them and says Flood's crazy. He doesn't know what he's talking about. And that Catholic guy, he doesn't know either. We have to experiment and figure out what's really going on. So we see the birth of science sometimes is defining itself against the Rosicrucian ideas. But I think that would have thrilled Andre and the other early Rosicrucians. That's part of what they wanted was this wide open debate and, and a free for all of knowledge so that knowledge could grow. And there's one more irony here which can't be left out, which is that although this is true, that the Rosicrucians were so concerned about the future and all that part of it was a belief that the world would end when human beings recovered the knowledge of Adam. So the celestial intelligencers and the Rosicrucians, Rosicrucian enthusiasts were people who expected the end of the world to come soon and were hurrying it along by uncovering all of this scientific knowledge, this wisdom that was divine because once it was uncovered, the world would end. We could get out of this mess and be free and be immortal souls and not stuck in bodies anymore. So that's kind of an ironic. And yet it's poignant because it speaks to where we are today, where we are so worried about what if that big glacier finally breaks down? What will happen? And we're so worried about what's going to happen with AI. Is it going to destroy everything? And what will the oligarchs do? Just these nuclear war, these huge threats that they didn't even have back then. Their major threats were plague and war which were devastating. The 30 years war which the Rosicrucians helped light the fuse for decimated Europe over 30 years of disease and fighting.
- [82:35]
B
Well, there's a good lesson in that. Misguided enthusiasm for utopian ideals often achieves the opposite of what its proponents intended.
- [82:49]
A
Yes, I think so. There again is the intellect. Running away with it is the way I see it. Because when you leave, the intellect is what allows us to think. It doesn't matter what it does to these people. It doesn't matter what it does to the children or what it does to the women or what it does to cultures that aren't as wealthy or powerful or educated. They don't matter. That's the intellect when you're coming from a place of love in these teachings. So Comenius, for example, he does care. He wants women to be able to read and write. He wants indigenous people to be able to read and write. He wants to share this with everyone. And we see so little of that kind of thought these days of trying to. The utopias are so limited now. It's like they're utopias only for those who have the power to take advantage of them. That wasn't the Rosicrucian ideal. The Rosicrucians wanted to open this up for everybody. The Rosicrucian heroes were nobodies in a sense, but people who were daring in terms of their thoughts and their creativity. And it's a challenge to all of us, I think, in a way, the way the world is today. How can we do something similar? How can we break away from the addiction to the news and the shock and the daily litany of horrifying facts? And how can we create something that's filled with this divine energy? Because one of the things about the Rosicrucians is that they believed that they had God at their back, that God wanted this freedom. God wanted us to have knowledge. God wanted us to figure out the secrets of nature so we could have medicine and so everybody could have food. And it was kindness. It was meant to make a better society for everybody. It was not about exploitation and this harsh concept that this is a world of jungle law where only the strong survive and the weak will be ground under and there's nothing you can do about it. And if you sympathize for that, I mean, empathy has become a dirty word to our leaders today. For many of them, it's considered to be a weakness. I think the Rosicrucians were very filled with empathy and had faith in the divine, that the divine has empathy for the least of us, as it says in the Bible, and that therefore we should unleash that divine creativity within ourselves, the personal reformation. And then we can have a universal reformation. Reformation. Because if enough people, and it's not even that many, really, but if enough people embrace this personal reformation and have that daring to want the knowledge, to want to love the entire world and to prove God's love by manifesting this awesome creativity in ways that change how people view the world, and it sweeps away these other points of view in ways that you can't imagine. I go back to the Elvis thing. Who could have imagined that this, basically a hillbilly, would have such a powerful impact in terms of a generation, several generations of people who learned to appreciate black music because he did, who looked at women in a different way, to a degree, even though he was still very exploitational, but women were suddenly held up and sung about. And it wasn't sentimental, it was horny, you know, and sexuality was liberated. And there were great intellects who were defending the social order of those days, who were just swept away by this guy. No one cared about it anymore. They were living in this new world. And then many came after him. And they took him into very weird places. And we wind up with Kiss getting a medal from President Trump. And it's hard to imagine how those two things relate. But in the same way, the Rosicrucians, they were a great inspiration to Cromwell, and he wanted to create the Rosicrucian utopia, but he thought that he had to kill a whole bunch of people before he could make that happen. And so he created the New Model army and an industrialized sort of an army, thinking that somehow that was going to make the Rosicrucian dream come true. There again, the intellect, right, running away into this crazy kind of missing the whole point and creating suffering for everybody instead of what the Rosicrucians were trying to do, which was inspire.
- [87:40]
B
Well, Ronnie, you've been very inspirational and very generous in sharing your knowledge and in correcting the historical record about these events, which I regard as extremely significant for our culture today and in particular for the audience here at New Thinking Allowed. So I want to thank you so much for being with me. It's always a pleasure to be with you, and I'm looking forward to many more conversations with you in the future.
- [88:15]
A
Likewise, I do want to mention that this book is the third in a series of books about counterculture. My first was American Metaphysical Religion, which exposes the counterculture of esoteric religion throughout the history of America. And we've talked about that in depth. And the second was written with my beloved wife, Tamara, the Hymns of Orpheus, one of the great countercultures and possibly the originating counterculture of the West. And this book, the Rosicrucian Book, is the last of the trilogy. And our intent was to give this information to people, to inspire them, to create a new counterculture, to show them how countercultures are created. So I hope that anybody who's feeling what we've been talking about here today, it's been done under much worse circumstances than what we face today. And if you feel that urge in you, by all means explore it. Trust that divine grace. And let's hope that we see something that the Rosicrucians would have been proud of happening sooner than later.
- [89:32]
B
Ronnie, thank you again so much for being with me today.
- [89:36]
A
Oh, thank you for having me. It's an honor every single time.
- [89:40]
B
And for those of you watching or listening, thank you for being with us because you are the reason that we are here.
- [90:11]
A
Book four in the New Thinking Allowed dialogue series is Charles T. Tart, 70 years of exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology, now available on Amazon.
- [90:26]
B
New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body and spirit. The topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website@cihs.edu. you can now download all eight copies of the New Thinking Allowed magazine for free or order beautiful printed copies. Go to newthinkingallowed.org for early access to our videos and livestream events. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter@newthinkingallowed.org.