The Brethren of the Rosy Cross No Longer Exist

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 9 pages

Nine pages, first published in The Theosophist volume III number 6, March 1882, pages 139 to 140, and republished in the Collected Writings volume IV as "The Hermetic Brethren". *The claim in the title is a negative one*, and the file exists to draw a positive conclusion from it: that the Theosophical Society is now the torch-bearer of the truth of Hermetic science.

The heart of the file is a long quotation from an old Rosicrucian apologia, and it is one of the most striking passages in this section. We of the secret knowledge, it runs, do wrap ourselves in mystery, to avoid the objurgation and importunity or violence of those who conceive that we cannot be philosophers unless we put our knowledge to some ordinary worldly use. There is scarcely one who thinks about us, it continues, who does not believe that our society has no existence — because, as he truly declares, he never met any of us. And then the reason for that, which is the sting: we do not come, as he assuredly expects, to that conspicuous stage upon which, like himself, as he desires the gaze of the vulgar, every fool may enter, winning wonder if the man's appetite be that empty way, and when he has obtained it crying out, Lo, this is also vanity. Around that passage the file assembles the historical evidence, including the testimony of Dr Edmund Dickinson, physician to King Charles the Second and a professed student of the subject. The argument the whole is put to service of is the transfer of a torch: the brethren of the Rosy Cross no longer exist as an order, so the question the running heading asks — who now bears the torch of truth? — is answered by the Society itself, described as a beacon of hope on whose seven rays hang the seven worlds of being.

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