Luther and the Rose

IN THE i4TH century, that region of Europe we know today as Germany consisted of numerous independent principalities and city-states. By that time, several of those principalities had emerged as the primary centers of Brotherhood activity in Europe, with most of that activity concentrated in the central German state of Hesse. In Germany and elsewhere, the Brotherhood and some of its most advanced initiates had become known by a Latin name: the "Illuminati," which means "illuminated (enlightened) ones."* 

*This Illuminati should not be confused with another iesser "Illuminati" founded in 18th-century Bavaria by Adam Weishaupt. The true Illuminati and Weishaupt's Illuminati are two distinct organizations. Weishaupt's Bavarian Illuminati will be briefly discussed in an upcoming chapter. 

One of the Illuminati's most important branches in Germany was the mystical Rosicrucian organization. Rosicrucianism was first introduced to Germany by the emperor Charlemagne in the early ninth century A.D. Germany's first official Rosicrucian Lodge was established in the city of Worms in the German state of Hesse in the year 1100 A.D. Rosicrucians achieved fame for their dedication to alchemy, their complex mystical symbols, and their secret degrees of initiation. The links between the Illuminati and early Rosicrucians were quite intimate in that advancement through the Rosicrucian degrees often resulted in admittance to the Illuminati. A number of Rosicrucian histories mistakenly state that the Rosicrucians did not begin their existence until the year 1614—the year in which German Rosicrucians published a dramatic pamphlet in Hesse announcing their presence and inviting people to join them. One reason this mistake is so commonly made, and why the Rosicrucian Order has been so difficult to trace as one consecutive existence, is a policy the Order adopted of engaging in 108-year cycles of "activity" and "inactivity." According to the regulation, each major branch of the Rosicrucian Order was required to establish an official date of its founding. From that date, each branch was to then compute successive 108-year periods. The first period would be a time of well-publicized "outward" activity during which the branch's existence would be made widely known to the public and the branch would openly recruit new members. The next period was to consist of concealed, silent activity in which there was to be no publicity and no one outside of the members' immediate families would be admitted to membership. Each Rosicrucian branch would then alternate between these two phases every 108 years. As Rosicrucian bodies switched back and forth between their "outward" and "hidden" phases, it seemed to observers that Rosicrucian Orders were appearing and disappearing in history. According to Dr. Lewis of AMORC, "just why this new regulation was brought into effect is not known."

1 The Illuminati and Rosicrucians were major powers behind a new wave of religious movements during the Plague years. One of the earliest of those movements was a mystical religion known as the "Friends of God." The Friends of God appeared in Germany in the same year that the Black Death first struck Europe. The Friends organization was founded by a banker named Rulman Merswin who had begun his financial career early in life and had made a sizable fortune from it. According to Merswin, in the year 1347 he was approached by a stranger claiming to be a "friend of God." The identity of the mysterious stranger was never revealed by Merswin, leading to suspicion that Merswin had merely invented him. It appears, however, that Merswin's "friend" was quite real, and quite influential, as evidenced by the sudden change in Merswin and by the considerable support that the Friends movement was able to so quickly gather. During one of their earliest encounters, Merswin's mysterious friend stated that he had had many mystical revelations directly from God and that Merswin had been chosen to disseminate those revelations to the rest of the world. Merswin was deeply impressed. After that meeting, Merswin gave up his banking business, "took leave of the world," and devoted himself and his personal fortune to spreading the new religion which the mysterious stranger was bringing him. As it turns out, what the stranger caused Merswin to create was another branch of the Brotherhood network. The teachings of the Friends were deeply mystical and were divulged through a system of secret degrees and initiations. History records that "illuminated" mystics and other Illuminati were among Merswin's principle backers. The teachings of the Friends of God were not only mystical, they were also heavily apocalyptic. The Friends preached a powerful End of the World message to gain converts. Merswin claimed to be the recipient of many supernatural "revelations" in which he was told that God had grown disgusted with the Pope and the Catholic Church. God was now placing His faith in people like Merswin to carry out His sacred plans. According to Merswin, God was planning to severely punish humanity in the near future because of mankind's increased corruption and sin. Merswin had the sacred duty of preaching the need for everyone to therefore become completely obedient to God. Merswin was not alone in spreading this dire message. Similar prophets also found their way into the Friends movement bearing identical warnings. They all emphasized the need to unwaveringly obey God on the eve of the world's destruction. Merswin and his fellow doomsayers were certainly correct about one thing: the world was about to undergo a cataclysm. The Black Death was just getting started. The Friends of God attracted a large following in Europe. Adherents were taught a nine-step program to become utterly and unquestioningly obedient to God. They were made to believe that this regimen would save them from the plague and resulting social devastation occurring around them. The first step of the program was a sincere confessional to restore health. A properly-done confessional can have a highly beneficial effect on an individual, although a poorlydone or unnecessary confessional can be damaging. The second step was a resolution by adherents "to give up their own will and to submit to an illuminated Friend of God, who shall be their guide and counselor in the place of God."

2 By the seventh step, a member had completely given up all self-will and had "burned all bridges" to become completely subservient to the Lord. By the final step, all personal desire was to be destroyed, the individual was to be "crucified to the world and the world to them," enjoying only what God does and to wish for nothing else. These teachings were a program to make human beings obedient to an ultimate degree. Members were taught that obedience was a spiritual being's highest calling and something to be striven for as a quest. Merswin's conversion to his mysterious "friend's" religion was very damaging to Merswin, as it no doubt was to many others. Merswin soon began to suffer strong "manicdepressive" symptoms: the phenomenon of alternately being in a happy state and then inexplicably experiencing mental depression, back and forth. In Merswin, these symptoms became severe and they were erroneously perceived by his followers as a sign of religious transformation. Many people today would recognize such symptoms as an indication that Merswin was connected to a repressive influence—in this case, the corrupted Brotherhood and probably his mysterious "friend." During his life in the Friends movement, Merswin continued to claim many mystical experiences, including "joint revelations" with his "friend." In one of those revelations, Merswin was told to use his money to buy an island in Strausberg for use as a Friends retreat. Strausberg was Merswin's home city and is located by the southwestern French-German border. Five years later, Merswin had another joint revelation in which he was told to turn the whole Friends operation over to an organization called the Order of St. John, which governed the Friends movement thereafter.* The Friends of God religion was one of many mystical movements that proliferated during the Plague years. Those movements were usually Christian in nature, but they advertised themselves as an alternative to the Catholic Church and attracted many disgruntled Catholics on that basis. This began to split apart the Christian world. Unfortunately, the split did not mean that Christians were returning to Jesus's maverick teachings. The new mystical religions only strengthened the emphasis on obedience and apocalypticism. This began to drive many people out of religion altogether and helped lay the foundation for the radical materialism which began to arise out of Germany shortly thereafter. 

Exactly what the Order of St. John was, and where it came from, is quite a mystery. It has been described in Albert MacKey's Encyclopedia of Freemasonry as a 17th-century system of Freemasonry with a secret mission. Is the Order of St. John described by MacKey the same one which had taken over the Friends of God movement three centuries earlier in the 14th century? I do not know. 

The Friends of God and other mystical practices of the time became a juggernaut which brought about one of the greatest challenges ever faced by the Catholic Church: the Protestant Reformation of Martin Luther. Luther began his famous ecclesiastical rebellion in the early 1500's. By that time, the Catholic Church had fallen into the hands of Pope Leo X, son of Lorenzo Di Medici. Lorenzo Di Medici was the head of a wealthy international banking house in Florence, Italy. The Medici family had become involved with the Papacy a generation earlier when the Medicis financed an archbishop who later became the schismatic ("anti-Pope") Pope John XXIII. Under John XXIII, the Medicis were awarded the task of collecting taxes and tithes that were due this Pope. The Medicis operated a far-flung network of collectors and sub-collectors to accomplish this undertaking. The fees earned from this operation helped make the Medici family one of the wealthiest and most influential banking houses in Europe. The involvement of profit-motivated bankers in Church affairs transformed many spiritual activities of the Catholic Church into business enterprises. For example, Catholics believed in the importance of paying "indulgences." An indulgence is money paid to compensate for sin. When paid in conjunction with a properly-done confessional, monetary penance can often be effective in relieving guilt, especially if the money is used to assist the injured party. Most indulgences, however, went into Church coffers. Medici collectors were more often concerned with how much money a person could pay than whether or not the penitent achieved any spiritual benefit from paying it. Understandably, many Catholics grumbled and their discontent helped pave the way for Martin Luther. History books tell us that Martin Luther was a German Catholic priest and educator. He had begun his career as a monk in the Augustinian Order and worked his way up to holding the chair of Biblical study at the University of Wittenberg in the German state of Saxony. As a Catholic priest, Luther was subject to the strict regimen imposed upon all clergy of the Church. That included regular attendance at confessional. In Catholic confessional, a person tells a priest in confidence of wrongs that the confessor has committed. This is designed to help unburden a person spiritually. As already mentioned, a properly done confessional has a positive effect and, interestingly, it does appear to be necessary at some point for nearly everyone's spiritual advancement. By Luther's day, however, confessionals were often done improperly or unnecessarily so that people often felt little relief. Luther eventually found going to confessional difficult. He had already come to hate the angry condemning God of the Catholic religion and, as a result, he began to lose his faith in the Catholic way to salvation. There was, however, another equally important reason why Luther was having difficulty in confessional: he had committed acts which he felt unable or unwilling to confess. Luther claims that he tried to purge himself of every conceivable sin, but some acts still "eluded" his memory when it came time to divulge them to his confessor. In part because of this, Luther did not feel himself advancing spiritually and he despaired of ever achieving salvation. He felt compelled to seek another path to spiritual recovery that would not force him to endure the uncomfortable confessionals. Although Luther voiced many legitimate criticisms of the Catholic Church and claimed that he was trying to re-establish the primitive Christian Church of Jesus, Luther was, to an extent, a man driven by the demons of unconfessed wrongs. As a result, he helped create a new form of Christianity that only further departed from the true teachings of Jesus. Despite the East Roman corruption of Jesus's teachings and the brutal methods of the Inquisition, Catholicism during Luther's time still retained several important elements of Jesus's maverick lessons. For example, the Catholic Church continued to preach that salvation was up to the individual to achieve. It taught further the importance of doing good works,* the need to confess sin when sin had been committed, and the importance of rectifying wrongs or compensating for them. The Catholic Church emphasized that man had the free will to either accept or reject salvation, that salvation could not be imposed upon anyone against his or her will (even by a monotheistic God), and that all people were endowed with the right to seek salvation. While Catho- lic teachings still had many serious flaws and lacked a true science of the spirit, these ideas reflected some of the truth and decency which were at the heart of Jesus's message. Luther's key to reform would have been to reinforce the good tenets still alive in Catholicism while eliminating the blatant commercialization and the East Roman changes to Christian doctrine. That was not the road Luther chose to take. He taught instead the false idea that a person has no personal control over his spiritual salvation. Luther convinced people that salvation is dependent entirely upon the grace of a monotheistic God. There was only one 

*Good works are important to the extent that they improve a person's environment and bolster his level of ethics, which in turn helps provide a foundation for an individual's ultimate spiritual recovery. Unfortunately, the Catholic Church used good works as a scorecard. Catholics believed that a person's good works ("merits") were added up like points by God, and once a person had accumulated enough merits in his or her "treasury," the person was guaranteed salvation (provided that a few other requirements were also met). The Church taught that saints had a surplus of merits and that the Pope could transfer merits from the saints' treasuries to other people whose treasuries were lacking. The lucky recipients were naturally expected to contribute money to the Church for the favor. Luther rightly rejected the notion of merits and treasuries, and that became a major issue over which Luther was eventually excommunicated. Unfortunately, Luther did not restore an understanding of the true relationship of good works to salvation, but instead he wrongly eliminated the doing of good works altogether, even though it is one ingredient which can help lay the foundation for a person's spiritual recovery. 

action an individual could take to obtain God's grace, said Luther, and that was to believe in Jesus as Saviour and to accept Christ's agony and crucifixion as penance for one's own sins. Luther's curious notion that Jesus's crucifixion can be the penance for other people's sin is partially based upon the concept of "karma." "Karma" is the idea that all acts in this universe eventually "come back" at a person in the future. People frequently invoke the idea of karma when they ask, "What did I do to deserve this?" In modern science, "karma" has been expressed as: "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." In monotheism, "karma" usually comes in the form of God's inevitable punishments for sin and rewards for good. On a personal level, the principle of karma seems to hold true in the sense that the world one creates, good or bad, through action or inaction, is ultimately the world that comes back to one. Poor ethics seem to boomerang in the form of spiritual degredation. A major benefit of a properly-done confessional is that it actually seems to break the negative "boomerang" effect and it will thereby help start a person back on the road to spiritual recovery. Because Luther's confessionals were unsatisfactory, he felt compelled to invent another way to escape the "karma" cycle enforced by the rewards and punishments of his monotheistic God. Luther therefore developed the idea that God would allow Jesus's pain and suffering on the cross to become the "boomerang" for everybody. In other words, by "believing in" Jesus, you will not spiritually suffer for the bad things you have done in the past because Jesus has already suffered for you. This is a wonderfully magical notion, but it is hardly a philosophy of responsibility, nor is it fair to Jesus that he should be expected to take the brunt for everyone else's wrongs. More importantly, Luther's solution simply does not work. Many people do feel and act better after "proclaiming Christ" because they have acknowledged their spiritual existences in a way they had not done before and they often begin more ethical behavior as a result, but their act of belief has not caused them to overcome the many other barriers which stand in the way of complete spiritual recovery. Protestants continued to practice confessional, although it was no longer considered vital for achieving salvation. Practical knowledge of the spirit was also largely ignored. Luther's method amounted to "quickie salvation": a simple act of belief. Luther taught that salvation was guaranteed by God for as long as a person continued to adhere to a belief in Jesus as Saviour. Luther's ideas were clearly mystical. This is not surprising when we consider that Luther had been greatly influenced by some of the mystical religions which were so popular in his country. Luther's primary mentor in the Augustinian Order, Johann von Staupitz, preached a theology containing many elements from the writings of the prominent German mystics Heinrich Suso and Johann Tauler. Tauler was one of the most widely-read mystics of the 14th century and he was associated with the Friends of God movement. Luther became an avid reader of Tauler's works. Evidence of a more direct connection of Luther to the Brotherhood network is found in Luther's personal seal. Luther's seal consisted of his initials on either side of two Brotherhood symbols: the rose and the cross. The rose and cross are the chief symbols of the Rosicrucian Order. The word "Rosicrucian" itself comes from the Latin words "rose" ("rose") and "crucis" ("cross"). Both during his life and after, Luther counted among his supporters important individuals and families who were active in the Illuminati and in Rosicrucianism. One of them was Philip the Magnanimous, head of the powerful royal house of Hesse, whose descendants would later hold important leadership positions in Brotherhood organizations, especially in German Freemasonry, as we shall later see. As one of the prime leaders of the Reformation, Philip the Magnanimous founded the Protestant University of Marburg and organized a political alliance against the Catholic German Emperor, Charles V. After Luther's death, his religion was supported by Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), who was at one time the Lord Chancellor of England. Bacon was also the highest executive of the Rosicrucian Order in Great Britain. One of Bacon's greatest contributions to the Reformation arose from his efforts as the coordinator of a project to create an authorized English Protestant Bible under his king, James I. This Bible, known as the "King James Version," was released in 1611 and became the most widely-used Bible in the English-speaking Protestant world. Luther and his supporters created the single largest schism in Christian history. Enormous power was wrested from the Roman Catholic Church. The Protestant sects today account for about one third of all Christians worldwide, and nearly half of all Christians in North America. The Catholic Church did not allow this to happen without a fight, however. The Catholics launched a Counter-Reformation in an unsuccessful attempt to squelch the Protestant heresies. Leading the Counter-Reformation was, interestingly, a new Brotherhood-style organization created for the purpose: the Society of Jesus, better known as the Jesuits. The Jesuit Order was founded in 1540 by a soldier-turned-cleric named Ignatius of Loyola. The Jesuits were a Catholic secret society with degrees of initiation, periods of probation, and many secret rituals. It was also militant. Jesuits were encouraged to adopt a soldierly spirit of loyalty to their "captain" Jesus. Ignatius was chosen to be the first "general" of the Order in April 1741. The image of Jesus as a quasi-military captain may seem rather humorous to anyone familiar with Jesus's teachings, but the image was helpful in making the Jesuit Order an effective cadre for combating the Protestants. Although it is true that the Reformation led the human race further away from spiritual understanding, it did have one very beneficial effect: it helped break the back of the Catholic Inquisition. The Inquisition had been one of the most oppressive institutions to burden the human spirit. Inquisitors meddled in nearly every human endeavor—from religion to the sciences to the arts. The Inquisition enforced some of the most hopelessly antiquated scientific thought by threatening people with torture and death. It hindered the development of many of the fine arts, notably theatre. It probably did not greatly matter what the Protestants taught; they would have still been able to bring enormous relief to Europe as long as they were able to reduce the power of the Catholic Inquisition. There was an eventual price to be paid for this benefit, however, and that was the price of an ever-deepening materialism. Philosophies of "humanism," "rationalism," and similar ideologies with a materialistic bent took on renewed vigor in the Reformation climate. Most importantly, many of the positive effects of the Reformation were offset by the fact that Protestantism was yet one more human faction placed in unresolvable conflict with other factions over erroneous religious issues. Luther himself contributed to this by hinting that the Pope represented the forces of the "anti-Christ." The result has been more war, this time between Catholics and Protestants—notably today in Ireland.  Despite the Brotherhood network's continued pattern of generating conflict during the centuries discussed in this chapter, it is important to note that a maverick influence had manifested itself in the Rosicrucian organization by the early 1600's. The Rosicrucian goal of individual spiritual recovery and some of its teachings were remarkably similar to some earlier maverick goals. Modern Rosicrucian literature from the United States continues to reflect some of this positive influence by attempting to propagate a more scientific view of spiritual phenomena and by teaching that humans can intelligently control their lives. Unfortunately, modern Rosicrucianism still contains many Custodial elements which will prevent adherents from achieving full spiritual rehabilitation. Although Rosicrucians contributed to the success of the Reformation, they did not achieve much fame until the year 1614 when, as noted earlier, a lodge of German Rosicrucians began a phase of "outward" activity by mass-producing a leaflet announcing the presence of Rosicrucians in Hesse's largest principality, Hesse-Kassel. The pamphlet created a stir by urging all people to abandon their false teachers, such as the Pope, Galen (a popular ancient Greek physician), and Aristotle. The pamphlet also told the story of a fictitious character, "Christian Rosenkruez," to symbolize the founding of the Rosicrucian- Order. The pamphlet is best known by its shortened name, the Fama Fraternitis ("Noted Fraternity" or "Famous Brotherhood"). The full title of the leaflet, translated to English, is: Universal and General Reformation of the Whole Wide World, together with the Noted Fraternity of the Rosy Cross, inscribed to all the Learned and Rulers of Europe. Despite the quaint high-sounding tone, the leaflet's title revealed a deadly serious intent: to create broad universal changes in human society. By the time of the Fama Fraternitis, the Brotherhood network had already launched its program to bring about this transformation. For the next several hundred years, the Brotherhood network supplied the world with leaders who inspired and led violent revolutionary movements in all parts of the world in an effort to bring about a massive transmutation of human society. They succeeded, and we live today in the world they created.