The Missing RC Manifesto from the Golden Dawn and Stella Matutina.

When examining the Golden Dawn/Alpha et Omega 6=5 rituals content along with those of the Stella Matutina 6=5, the missing ingredient is the Third Rosicrcuian manifesto as part of their content, when its content was so rich in symbolic structure.

The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, published in 1616, occupied an unusual position within the Rosicrucian literature available to nineteenth-century occultists. The Fama Fraternitatis of 1614 and the Confessio Fraternitatis of 1615 presented themselves much more directly as communications concerning the existence, ideals and purposes of a Rosicrucian fraternity. The Chymical Wedding, although associated with Christian Rosenkreutz and consequently with the same Rosicrucian tradition, was a very different kind of work. It was an elaborate visionary and alchemical allegory in which Christian Rosenkreutz undergoes a series of trials, transformations, deaths and renewals before participating in a mysterious royal wedding. Consequently, nineteenth-century occultists could regard it as profoundly Rosicrucian without necessarily regarding it as a third constitutional document of the fraternity.

This distinction is important because the designation "three Rosicrucian manifestos" is to some extent a later scholarly convention, according to some circles. Nineteenth-century occultists certainly knew the Fama, Confessio and Chymical Wedding, but they did not necessarily arrange them into the neat trilogy implied by the modern expression "first, second and third manifestos." The Chymical Wedding was more often approached as a Rosicrucian alchemical mystery than as another manifesto announcing the existence and objectives of the fraternity. Its importance therefore lay less in its institutional claims than in its symbolism.

For occultists of the nineteenth-century revival, that symbolism was particularly attractive because the Chymical Wedding could be read as an allegory of spiritual and alchemical transformation. The journey of Christian Rosenkreutz, the strange invitation, the ascent to the mysterious castle, the trials, the executions and resurrections, and especially the royal marriage could all be interpreted as stages in an initiatory process. The wedding itself naturally suggested the alchemical coniunctio, the union of complementary or opposing principles. The text could therefore be read simultaneously as Christian mysticism, alchemy and concealed initiation. This made it highly compatible with the developing occult synthesis of the nineteenth century.

The revival of Rosicrucianism through organisations such as the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (SRIA), founded in 1867, provided an important environment in which this older literature could be reconsidered. The SRIA was not simply a historical society devoted to reproducing seventeenth-century Rosicrucianism. It interpreted the Rosicrucian inheritance through the accumulated traditions of Christian mysticism, alchemy, Hermeticism, Kabbalah and ceremonial magic. The Chymical Wedding consequently fitted naturally into this wider body of Rosicrucian literature, but its function was principally symbolic rather than constitutional. This distinction becomes especially important when considering the Golden Dawn, whose founders emerged directly from the SRIA environment.

The French occult revival, particularly through Éliphas Lévi, also contributed to this transformation of Rosicrucianism. Lévi did not attempt to reconstruct a seventeenth-century Rosicrucian fraternity from the Fama, Confessio and Chymical Wedding. Instead, Rosicrucian ideas became part of a much larger synthesis involving Kabbalah, ceremonial magic, alchemy, Christian symbolism and Tarot. The same tendency can be seen in other nineteenth-century occult circles: old Rosicrucian texts were increasingly treated as repositories of symbolic knowledge rather than as documents whose narrative and structure had to be reproduced literally.

This helps explain an apparent paradox of MacGregor Mathers. Mathers was deeply interested in Rosicrucianism, but he was not attempting to reproduce the Chymical Wedding as a ritual text; his objective in constructing the Adeptus Minor system was a working initiatory synthesis of Kabbalah, Christian mysticism, alchemy, astrology, Tarot, Hebrew symbolism and ceremonial magic. The Chymical Wedding could certainly have supplied an obvious narrative model, Christian Rosenkreutz's journey through trials, symbolic death and transformation is a higher octave of the death and rebirth principle, shown as a royal conjunction. While this does mirror the Adeptus Minor initiation's movement through darkness, death, burial, resurrection and illumination in Tiphareth, and this structural resemblance is striking. Regardie, in his 1983 visit to New Zealand, informed me that he was disappointed with the Felkin 6=5 ritual because it did not go further into the vault as much of the symbolism in my opinion is a higher level of the 5=6. I do not agree with everything Regardie has stated about the Golden Dawn, but do so on this issue.

However, today, with everything that is available to us the cultural shift in esotericism, and in Rosicrucianism in particular, the winds have changed a great deal on the subject of symbolic alchemy which the third manifesto represents. For example, the way that Mathers, may or may not, have seen this third manifesto is not the way I would have interpreted it, or many others in my age group.

A. E. Waite did make significant use of the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz in his understanding of Rosicrucian initiation. Especially his The Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross (1924), Waite examined the three Manifestos and treated the Chemical Wedding as an important expression of Rosicrucian mystical and initiatory symbolism. He interpreted its themes of death, purification, mystical marriage, resurrection and transformation as an allegory of spiritual regeneration. Waite therefore placed the Chemical Wedding much closer to the centre of his conception of Rosicrucian initiation, whereas Mathers incorporated Rosicrucian ideas within a broader Hermetic-Kabbalistic ceremonial system. The interesting part of all this is that Waite grouped the three manifestos as a unit and this is more than likely did not happen suddenly in 1924 with his book. A. E. Waite's The Real History of the Rosicrucians (1887). It contains discussion of the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, so Waite was publicly writing about the third Rosicrucian document before the Golden Dawn was founded in 1888.