FAMA FRATERNITATIS: THE TRUE STORY OF THE ROSICRUCIANS A film by Tobias Churton, To be available in the New Year. Please contact Lewis Masonic for details.

As regular readers of Freemasonry Today will know, our former editor, Tobias Churton, has long pursued extensive research into the history of the Rosicrucian movement, its origins in the early seventeenth century and the important men at its centre. He has written two articles for Freemasonry Today (Issues 17 and 18) and a book The Golden Builders (2005). He explains that the Rosicrucians never existed as a chartered organised group rather, it was an idea. It was idealism given a voice. It was idealism seeking practical expression. It was also, as Churton notes, the ‘greatest publicity-stunt of all time.’
    Churton has now completed a two-part documentary film about the Rosicrucians in which he has striven to cut away the mythology which has grown around them and aims to understand and express what those men at the centre had to say. In particular it reveals their passion and commitment for the pursuit of truth; a pursuit which, in the early seventeenth century, was a dangerous profession: Adam Haslmyer, ‘Rosicrucian’ and doctor, supporter of that medical genius, Paracelsus - who had pioneered the benefits of science to medicine - was sent to the papal galleys for five years as a slave for his enthusiasm for ‘a new heaven and a new earth’. His opponents preferred the old ones.
    These ‘Rosicrucians’ were ahead of their time; their light burned brightly, but briefly, before being driven into the shadows by the unholy alliance of Habsburg and Papacy who, committed solely to power and control, led an onslaught before which even truth had to retreat in order to fight another day.
    Churton’s film explores and explains one of the major building blocks of our modern culture, an idea which sought to bring idealism down to earth; it is the story of men who strove to marry science and spirituality in order to bring some of that divine perfection into a practical form in order that all men might be free and live more fulfilling lives. It was a truly noble aim. And it was essentially a simple aim. That figure at the heart of the Rosicrucian ‘publicity-stunt’, Johann Valentin Andreae held, as Churton explains, that the ideals were ‘best expressed in love for one’s neighbour and an open-hearted and open-minded response to new knowledge.’
    Michael Baigent