Lost History Secret Society Histories Rosicrucians : Their Rites and Mysteries

Rosicrucians : Their Rites and Mysteries

Rosicrucians : Their Rites and Mysteries
Catalog # SKU1422
Publisher TGS Publishing
Weight 3.00 lbs
Author Name Hargrave Jennings
 
$35.95
Quantity

Description

The Rosicrucians

Their Rites and Mysteries

By Hargrave Jennings


THIS book, which now leaves our hands, concentrates in a small compass -the results of very considerable labour, and the diligent study of very many books in languages living and dead. it purports to be a history (for the first time treated seriously in English) of the famous Order of the 'Rose-Cross', or of the 'Rosicrucians'. No student of the occult philosophy need, however, fear that we shall not most carefully keep guard--standing sentry (so to speak) not only over this, which is, by far, the pre-eminent, but also over those other recondite systems which are connected with the illustrious Rosicrucians.

Excerpt:

An accomplished author of our own period has remarked that 'He who deals in the secrets of magic, or in the secrets of the human mind, is too often looked upon with jealous eyes by the world, which is no great conjuror.'

How is it that, after centuries of doubt or denial--how happens it, in face of the reason that can make nothing of it, the common sense that rejects, and the science which can demonstrate it as impossible, the supernatural still has such vital hold in the human--not to say in the modern--mind? How happens it that the most terrible fear is the fear of the invisible?--this, too, when we are on all hands assured that the visible alone is that which we have to dread! The ordinary reason exhorts us to dismiss our fears. That thing 'magic', that superstition 'miracle', is now banished wholly from the beliefs of this clear-seeing, educated age. 'Miracle', we are told, never had a place in the world--only in men's delusions. It is nothing more than a fancy. It never was anything more than a superstition arising from ignorance.

What is fear? It is a shrinking from possible harm, either to the body, or to that thing which we denominate the mind that is in us. The body shrinks with instinctive nervous alarm, like the sensitive leaf, when its easy, comfortable exercise or sensations are disturbed.

Our book, inasmuch as it deals--or professes to deal--seriously with strange things and with deep mysteries, needs the means of interpretation in the full attention of the reader: otherwise, little will be made, or can come, of it. It is, in brief, a history of the alchemical philosophers, written with a serious explanatory purpose, and for the first time impartially stated since the days of James. the First and Charles the First. This is really what the book pretends to be--and nothing more.

Let it be understood, however, that the Author distinctly excepts against being in any manner identified with all the opinions religious or otherwise, which are to be found in this book. Some of them are, indeed, most extraordinary; but, in order to do full justice to the speculations of the Hermetic Brethren, he has put forward their ideas with as much of their original- force as he was able; and, in some parts of his book, he believes he has urged them with such apparent warmth, that they, will very likely seem to have been his own most urgent convictions. As far as he can. succeed in being so considered, the Author wishes to be regarded simply as the Historian of, the Rosicrucians, or as an Essayist on their strange, mysterious beliefs.

Whether he will succeed in engaging the attention of modern readers to a consideration of this time-honoured philosophy remains to be seen; but this he is assured of, that the admiration of all students and reflective minds will be excited by the unrivalled powers of thinking of the Rosicrucians. The application, proper or otherwise, of these powers is a matter altogether beside the present inquiry.

The Author has chiefly chosen for exposition the Latin writings of the great English Rosicrucian, Robert Flood, or Fludd (Robertus de Fluctibus), who lived in the times of James the First and Charles the First.

THAT modern science, spite of its assumptions and of its intolerant dogmatism, is much at fault--nay, to a great extent a very vain thing--is a conclusion that often presents itself to the minds of thinking persons. Thus thoughtful people, who choose to separate themselves from the crowd, and who do not altogether give in with such edifying submission to the indoctrination of the scientific classes--notwithstanding that these latter have the support generally of that which, by a wide term, is called the 'press' in this country--quietly decline reliance on modern science.

They see that there are numerous shortcomings of teachers in medicine, which fails frequently, though always with its answer--in theology, which chooses rather that men should sleep, though not the right sleep, than consider waking--nay, in all the branches of human knowledge; the fashion in regard to which is to disparage the ancient schools of thought by exposing what are called their errors by the light of modern assumed infallible discovery.

It never once occurs to these eager, conceited professors that they themselves may possibly have learned wrongly, that the old knowledge they decry is underrated because they do not understand it, and that, entirely because the light of the modern world is so brilliant in them, so dark to them, as eclipsed in this novel artificial light, is the older and better and truer sunshine nearer to the ancients: because time itself was newer to the old peoples of the world, and because the circumstances of the first making of time were more understood in the then first divine disclosure, granting that time ever had a beginning, as man's reason insists it must.

Shelley, the poet, who, if he had not been so great as a poet, would have been perhaps equally eminent as a metaphysician, that is, when age and experience had ripened and corrected his original brilliant crudities of thought--used to declare that most men--at least, most thinking men--spend the latter half of their lives in unlearning the mistakes of the preceding half. This he declares to have been the fact in his own experience--which was, even for this test, a very brief one; for Shelley was only twenty-nine when his lamentable death occurred. The early departure of three brilliant poetic spirits of our fathers' period, at the same time that it is very melancholy, is worthy of deep remark. Shelley was, as we have said, twenty-nine; Byron was only thirty-six; John Keats--in some respects the most poetically intense and abstract of the three--was only twenty-four. And in these short several lifetimes, measuring so few years, these distinguished persons had achieved that which resulted in the enrolment of their names in a nation's catalogue in a grand branch of human attainment.

They live in lasting records, they grow in honour, and their names do not fade, as is the case with those reputations which have been unduly magnified, but which give way to time. Perhaps the lot of some contemporaneous accepted important, not to say great, reputations will be diminution and disappearance.

Time is not only an avenger, but a very judicious corrector.


Softcover, 10.75" x 8", 360+ pages

HiddenMysteries

: *
: *
: *
Type the characters you see in the picture:


*
Solomon Maimon
Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt
PARA-X POWERS
 
Is the Bible Worth Reading (MobiPocket Edition)
Seminole Indians of Florida
Washington's Masonic Correspondence