Rosicrucianism Was One of Many Offshoots of Oriental Occultism

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 27 pages

Twenty-seven pages placing the Rosicrucians in a family tree rather than treating them as an isolated curiosity. Rosicrucianism was not a sect, the argument runs, but one of many branches of the same tree — and the analogy offered is exact: as primitive Christianity split into numerous sects, so the science of occultism gave birth to a variety of doctrines and brotherhoods. The Egyptian Ophites became the Christian Gnostics and then the Basilideans of the second century; the original Rosicrucians produced the Paracelsists or Fire-Philosophers and the European alchemists.

The claim that gives the document its running head is a closing one: that the Rosicrucians no longer exist, the last of the fraternity having departed in the person of Cagliostro. Around that sit the cautions the series repeats — that the Kabbalah is the compound mystic textbook of all the great secrets of nature; that occultism is a double-edged weapon for anyone unprepared to devote a whole life to it, its theory unaided by serious practice remaining foolish and ignorant speculation; and that any attempt to learn it by book study alone will prove insufficient even to an analytical mind trained to extract truth from myriads of contradictory statements.

Read the full text (PDF, 1.8 MB, 27 pages)