The Real History Of The Rosicrucians

What It's About

This is Waite's attempt to separate historical fact from centuries of legend surrounding the Rosicrucian brotherhood. Rather than simply repeating the myths, he goes back to the original source documents, providing complete translations of the three texts that founded the movement: the Fama Fraternitatis, the Confessio Fraternitatis, and the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz. The book was written partly as a corrective to Hargrave Jennings' earlier, more sensationalist account of the Rosicrucians, which Waite criticises throughout for its inaccuracies.

Key Concepts

The three founding manifestoes and what they actually claim, as opposed to what later writers assumed they claimed; the question of whether an organised Rosicrucian order ever really existed; and the alchemical allegory running through the Chemical Wedding text.

About the Author

Arthur Edward Waite (1857–1942) was an American-born British poet and scholarly mystic who devoted much of his life to the systematic study of Western esotericism. He was closely involved with several occult orders, including the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and was recognised in his time as one of the first to treat the history of occultism as a serious spiritual tradition rather than as superstition or pseudoscience.