Rosicrucian Magic. A Manifest.
Let’s begin with an exercise.
Think of an equal-armed cross, and yourself standing in its middle. You turn towards the North and begin to divest yourself of all aspects of your being that belong into this realm: your past, your roots and ancestors, your bodily strength and integrity. All things float back over this threshold that shield and contain: your skin, your bones, your blood. When there is nothing left to give to the North, whatever is left of you turns towards the East.
Here you continue the process: You hand over your familiar thought patterns, your intellect and mind, your ability to speak and utter, until you no longer remember your own name. Then, whatever is left of you turns towards the South and divest the aspects of yourself that belong here: Your future, that path leading ahead, your desires and fire, and all the chapters to come in your book of life. Now the little of yourself that still stands in the centre turns towards the West. Immediately the cells of your being that came from here begin to float back over the threshold of their origin: Your emotional weave, your traumas and delights, your love and anger, and the invisible substance from which – countless times without realising – you have created, destroyed and rebuilt that fragile sense of meaning.
What is left of you now, what finally returns to the centre, is nothing but a dim light. One breath of wind and your spark would be gone. Naked, vulnerable, almost unborn again, that is how your light hovers in the centre of the cross. – Then a ripple returns from the four quarters, as well as from below and above. And the spark that is an echo of your essence lights up, and unfolds into the form of a rose-bud. No roots, no stalk, no leaves, just a flower waiting to be awoken, hovering in the middle of the cross.
That is the mystery of the Rosy-Cross: For standing in its centre means giving up much of ourselves; it means no longer having the luxury of being orientated by the quarters, and neither by ones own hand, heart or head. The one who has become the rose knows no directions any longer, above and below have fallen into one. All that remains is the dim light shining forth, waiting to hear the echo of Divinity.
Speaking of Rosicrucian Magic is a folly for many good reasons. It’s best to be avoided to be honest. Most people – scholars and practitioners alike – quickly came to substitute it with terms such as Theosophy, Pansophy, Astronomia Olympi more rarely, or simply adepta philosophia. So if we dare to use these two often romanticised and rarely understood terms here bound into one – Rosicrucian and Magic – it is for one reason alone. Because, if properly understood, nothing describes the essence of the work better than this simple term. The four arms of the cross span the world, they uphold its necessary tides and tensions; the rose is our work.
We would like this term to be understood as referring to the practical magical legacy left behind by great adepts such as Johannes Tauler, Johannes Trithemius, Paracelsus, Jakob Böhme and many other, now nameless German mystics of the first and second century of the Protestant Reformation. We are precisely not referring to any occult order, any organisation known by seal and stamp, nor even any magical lineage. We are referring to a light that came through with these humans, shining in their works and words, and which, if we chose to, can guide us again today.
Rosicrucian Magic, as we like to apply the term, can be many things to many people, and yet, it is one thing above all: It is the magical work that ripples out from the rose-bud described above. Void of human motives, void of the ever hungry I, Me and Mine, void of roots and times passed, void also of eyes seeing a path.
Rosicrucian Magic requires us to master three tools, which when used together from the centre of the cross, allow us to balance the fulcrum of being fully involved in the physical, as well as deeply present in the spiritual realm. It operates on the premise that everything is always present – or can be awoken – and that each thing created holds a spark of consciousness and presence of its own. Thus everything wants to be spoken to, and everything wants to be heard. Silence and listening are at the heart of this craft; just as learning how to not apply its power. If we wanted to condense it into a most simple framework – and this is the intent of this short text – it could look like the diagram above. The choices we make on the right, the world we encounter on the left, the fulcrum of our craft at its centre. Left and right necessarily bound into one, organically reacting to each other like the arms of the scale: You make a movement on the right, you feel its ripple on the left, and vice versa. Spirit work is everyday work. The scent of your will attracts beings alike. The impression of your deed creates a hollow for the spirits to follow. Always surround by a tribe, always surrounded by all facets of life. One word uttered, a million ears pricked. One arrow shot, a hive of spirits awaiting its impact. Rosicrucian Magic is born from the deep realisation that we cannot be part of this world, without forever changing it. None of us will ever walk over snow without leaving a trace. Rather, we have to come to terms with the fact that each of our acts is both mundane and magical, secular and sacred at once. Right at the same time, in every second, with every breath, we are being born from the outside just as much as from the inside.
– If all of this sounds a little too abstract, let me invite you to meditate over the three diagrams below.
They condense much of the above into a pragmatic formula: As humans we are granted free will, and yet constantly perplexed by nature. As (e.g. elementary) spirits we are granted the essence of nature, and yet constantly perplexed by humans applying free will. – So what if we became both teachers and students to each other? What if humans came to see each act of applying their free will as a learning blueprint for the spirits around them. And what if we invited the spirits teach us about Nature on their own terms, in their own ways, rather than forcing our way through it with sheer will.
Rosicrucian Magic, as we like to apply the term, invites us to assume a deeply animistic worldview. One where we are not a distant observer or cool operator, but a swirling whirlwind of blind destruction - until we came to stand in the centre of the cross, silent, hands empty, heart open, waiting and ready for whatever will happen next…