Cimelia Rhodostaurotica Carlos Gilly. Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica. 1995. 191pp. Soft-cover.

This ‘Treasury of the Rose Cross’, produced for a joint exhibition of early 17th century ‘Rosicrucian’ works held by the Prince August Library, Wolfenbüttel, and Amsterdam’s Hermetic Philosophy Library, is a triumph of scholarship. While the work is only available in German, there is some justice in this : the original movement (which Thomas de Quincey in 1824 believed to have been the true inspiration behind Anglo-Scottish ‘speculative’ Freemasonry) was a German achievement. I hope the Founder of the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, Joost Ritman, will permit an English translation. (The Library can be contacted at Bloemgracht 19, NL 1016 KB, Amsterdam).
    Beautifully presented, this book takes the origins and purpose of the movement out of the mist of occult legend and into its strict historical context, demonstrating the very mechanics of how the dream of a second Reformation of Truth, a restirring of the great Renaissance ideals, flowed from the minds of Johann Valentin Andreae (1586-1654) and his friends Christoph Besold and Tobias Hess into one of the greatest (misunderstood) intellectual and spiritual hurricanes ever to hit Europe.
    Andreae, the brilliant Lutheran pastor, was a dramatist of the absurd and the real. Little wonder then that the folly of the world turned his realities into absurdities and his absurdities into realities - he knew perfectly well that his ‘Brotherhood of the Rose Cross’ was a spiritual utopia designed to show the world up for what it is : a fool spitting on the name of Love and of Truth.
    Tobias Churton