The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

Further Reading

Peter Brookesmith, UFO: The Complete Sightings Catalogue, 1995

www.ufoworld.co.uk/rendlshm.htm

Rosicrucians

As for Rosy cross Philosophers

Whom you will have to be but sorcerers,
What they pretend to is no more
Than Trismegistus did before
Pythagoras old Zoroastra,

And Apollonius their master

Butler: Hudibras, Pt II, III

The mysterious sect known as the Rosicrucians may be a 3,000-year-old organization which holds the philosophical secrets of the Ancient Egyptian pharaohs, which begat the Freemasons, which was the humanistic force behind the Renaissance, which sponsored Sirhan Sirhan to assassinate Robert F. Kennedy, and which currently runs the

New World Order.

Of course, the Rosicrucians might also be a gigantic con trick.

The Rosicrucians first announced their presence in 1614 with the publication of a tract entitled Fama Fraternitatis Rosae Crucis, which claimed that their fraternity was established in 1407 by Christian Rosencreutz (translated as «Rosy Cross»), a German nobleman-cum-monk who had travelled to the Holy Land, Egypt and Spain gathering esoteric knowledge, and who had erected a House of the Holy Spirit on his return. Two other tracts quickly followed, the Confessio Fraternitatis Rosae Crucis Addressed to the Learned of Europe (1615) and The Chymical Marriage of Christian Rosencreutz

(1616). The tracts showed the Rosicrucians as consummately skilled in the Hermetic arts — able to transmute metals and to render people invisible. The name «Rosicrucian», it is sometimes suggested, derives not from «Rosy Cross» or «Rosencreutz» but from «ros crux», meaning «dew cross». In alchemy the cross is the symbol of light or knowledge, while the «dew» is the medium for turning base metal to gold. Some Freemasons have also claimed that «ros crux» refers to the bloodstained cross of Christ, and that the Rosicrucians were actually the banned Knights Templar under a new label. The Catholic Church concurred, finding the symbolic references to the Knights Templar in The Chymical Marriage so frequent and objectionable that they condemned it.

The Catholic Church might have seen the Rosicrucians as heretics and Satanists, but the intelligentsia of Europe were madly attracted to the promise in the tracts of a «universal reformation of mankind». Strangely, though, the tracts gave no indication as to how «students of nature» might contact the Rosicrucians. This led some critics to dismiss the Rosicrucian tracts as a «ludibrium» or hoax. Here the plot congeals: among those who characterized the tracts thus was Johann Valentin Andreae, a German Lutheran cleric known to have authored The Chymical Marriage and suspected of having penned the other early papers. It can be guessed that Andreae intended the tracts to catalyse opposition to the Catholic Church, and, in order to make them more substantial, pretended they were the work of a fraternity, the «Rosicrucians».