Rosicrucians, Knights of the Mystic Rose

Within the Rosicrucians is the perpetuation of a Tradition as well as the source of a Tradition. Simply put, the Mission is to serve humanity and all its aspects through esoteric, mystical, and chivalrous work through the establishment of sacred principles of freedom, tolerance, and harmony.

“The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical.

It is the sower of all true science…The cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest mainspring of scientific research.”

Albert Einstein

Membership

Membership in the Order is a rare and wonderful opportunity that empowers a person and enables him to enjoy life’s abundant blessings. Anyone can be a member, provided that he meets the following requirements:

¨ at least 15 years old

¨ has an open mind

¨ seeks self-improvement and a better life

Knights of the Mystic Rose

The list below enumerates a few of the world’s most famous men and women who are Rosicrucians or practiced similar techniques to achieve success in Science, Philosophy, Culture, and Spiritual Life.

Albertus Magnus

Albertus Magnus (Albert the Great; c 1200 – 1280) was one of the most universal thinkers to appear during the Middle Ages. He wrote on botany, astronomy, chemistry, physics, biology, and geography, and made original contributions to logic, psychology, metaphysics, meteorology, mineralogy and zoology.

Walt Whitman

Walter Whitman Jr. was an American poet, essayist, and journalist. He is considered one of the most influential poets in American history. Whitman incorporated both transcendentalism and realism in his writings and is often called the father of free verse.

Michaelangelo

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, known as Michelangelo, was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet of the High Renaissance. Born in the Republic of Florence, his work was inspired by models from classical antiquity and had a lasting influence on Western art.

Charlemagne

Charlemagne, first emperor (800–814) of the Romans and of what was later called the Holy Roman Empire.

He was responsible for uniting most of Europe under his rule by power of the sword, for helping to restore the Western Roman Empire and becoming its first emperor, and for facilitating a cultural and intellectual renaissance, the ramifications of which were felt in Europe for centuries afterward.

Al-Farabi

Abu Nasr al-Farabi is widely regarded as the founder of philosophy within the Islamic world. Although he had some noteworthy predecessors, such as al-Kindi and al-Razi, he was the first philosopher of his epoch to command the unqualified respect of future generations.

Teresa of Avila

Teresa of Ávila was a Spanish Carmelite nun who lived in the 1500s. She was a mystic and author of spiritual writings and poems. She founded numerous convents throughout Spain and was the originator of the Carmelite Reform that restored a contemplative and austere life to the order.

Francis of Assisi

St. Francis of Assisi is well-known for his many miracles involving animals and birds and his compassion for healing critically ill and injured people. St. Francis is also the patron saint of ecology, including animals, their lives and welfare.

Meister Eckhart

Eckhart von Hochheim OP, commonly known as Meister Eckhart, Master Eckhart or Eckehart, claimed original name Johannes Eckhart, was a German Catholic theologian, philosopher and mystic, born near Gotha in the Landgraviate of Thuringia in the Holy Roman Empire.

The teachings of the mature Eckhart describe four stages of the union between the soul and God: dissimilarity, similarity, identity, breakthrough. At the outset, God is all, the creature is nothing; at the ultimate stage, “the soul is above God.” The driving power of this process is detachment.

John of the Cross

John of the Cross was a great saint who was a reformer, a mystic and one of the great Spanish poets. He has inspired many other holy men and women to pursue God into the mysterious heights and depths of divine love. John was born in Spain in 1542.

Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse

Raymond VI, count of Toulouse from 1194, who at first tolerated the heretical Cathari in Languedoc, then (1209) joined the Albigensian Crusade against them and afterward fought the crusaders to save his own dominions. He was deeply religious, and wished to die in the Holy Land, and so when the call was raised for the First Crusade, he was one of the first to take the cross.

Thomas Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas was the greatest of the Scholastic philosophers. He produced a comprehensive synthesis of Christian theology and Aristotelian philosophy that influenced Roman Catholic doctrine for centuries and was adopted as the official philosophy of the church in 1917.

Dante Alighieri

Dante is considered the greatest Italian poet, best known for The Divine Comedy, an epic poem that is one of the world’s most important works of literature. The poem, which is divided into three sections, follows a man, generally assumed to be Dante himself, as he visits Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.

Giordano Bruno

Giordano Bruno was a controversial Renaissance philosopher whose theories on space and infinity led the Roman Inquisition to burn him at the stake. Giordano Bruno is a man of many labels. During his short life (1548-1600), Bruno was a monk, a philosopher, a cosmologist and a mathematician.

Heinrich Khunrath

Heinrich Khunrath, or Dr. Henricus Khunrath as he was also called, was a German physician, hermetic philosopher, and alchemist. Frances Yates considered him to be a link between the philosophy of John Dee and Rosicrucianism.

Sir Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon is most famous for his philosophy of science. He argued that scientific knowledge is obtained after making observations and then utilizing inductive reasoning to interpret the observations. Bacon also argued that controlled scientific experimentation is essential for understanding nature.

Michael Maier

Michael Maier (1568–1622) was a famed yet ill-fated alchemist of the German late Renaissance. He is best known for a beautiful multimedia work — Atalanta fugiens (1618) — and for his defense of the Rosicrucian brotherhood, an elusive esoteric order which claimed to possess the secrets of alchemy. Like the Rosicrucians, Maier dedicated his life to the quest for the highest goal of alchemy: the philosophers’ stone. In Maier’s day it was thought this mysterious substance could transmute lead into gold, heal the sick, and even reverse the aging process.

Robert Fludd

Robert Fludd is remembered as an astrologer, mathematician, cosmologist, Qabalist and Rosicrucian. Fludd is best known for his compilations in occult philosophy. He had a celebrated exchange of views with Johannes Kepler concerning the scientific and hermetic approaches to knowledge.

Jacob Boehme

Jacob Böhme (1575–1624) is famous as a shoemaker and spiritual author. His works and thought are frequently studied as a product of his mystical illumination. Jacob Böhme (1575–1624) is famous as a shoemaker and spiritual author. His works and thought are frequently studied as a product of his mystical illumination.

Jan Amos Komensky (Comenius)

John Amos Comenius was Czech educational reformer and religious leader, remembered mainly for his innovations in methods of teaching, especially languages.

He introduced a number of educational concepts and innovations including pictorial textbooks written in native languages instead of Latin, teaching based in gradual development from simple to more comprehensive concepts, lifelong learning with a focus on logical thinking over dull memorization, equal opportunity for impoverished children, education for women, and universal and practical instruction.

Rene Descartes

René Descartes is most commonly known for his philosophical statement, “I think, therefore I am” (originally in French, but best known by its Latin translation: “Cogito, ergo sum”).

Known as Cartesian dualism (or mind–body dualism), his theory on the separation between the mind and the body went on to influence subsequent Western philosophies. In Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes attempted to demonstrate the existence of God and the distinction between the human soul and the body.

Elias Ashmole

Ashmole was an antiquary with a strong Baconian leaning towards the study of nature.^[1] His library reflected his intellectual outlook, including works on English history, law, numismatics, chorography, alchemy, astrology, astronomy and botany. Although he was one of the founding Fellows of the Royal Society, a key institution in the development of experimental science, his interests were antiquarian and mystical as well as scientific.

Baruch Spinoza

Baruch (de) Spinoza was a philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish origin, born in Amsterdam, the Dutch Republic, and mostly known under his Latinized pen name Benedictus de Spinoza. His philosophy encompasses nearly every area of philosophical discourse, including metaphysics, epistemology, political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science. It earned Spinoza an enduring reputation as one of the most important and original thinkers of the seventeenth century.

Sir Christopher Wren

Sir Christopher Wren was an English architect, astronomer, mathematician and physicist who was one of the most highly acclaimed architects in the history of England. Known for his work in the English Baroque style, he was accorded responsibility for rebuilding 52 churches in the City of London after the Great Fire in 1666, including what is regarded as his masterpiece, St Paul’s Cathedral, on Ludgate Hill, completed in 1710.

Sir Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton was an English polymath active as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author who was described in his time as a natural philosopher. He was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment that followed. His pioneering book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), first published in 1687, consolidated many previous results and established classical mechanics.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (b. 1646, d. 1716) was a German philosopher, mathematician, and logician who is probably most well known for having invented the differential and integral calculus (independently of Sir Isaac Newton).

Johannes Kelpius

Johannes Kelpius was the 3rd son of a German pastor, born in Transylvania in 1673. He graduated in theology from the University of Altdorf with high honors, had a brilliant mind, was familiar with not only German, but also English, Hebrew, Greek and Latin.

He was a German Pietist, mystic, musician, and writer. He was also interested in the occult, botany, and astronomy. He came to believe with his followers – called the “Society of the Woman in the Wilderness” – that the end of the world would occur in 1694.

Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin, American printer and publisher, author, inventor and scientist, and diplomat. One of the foremost of the Founding Fathers, Franklin helped draft the Declaration of Independence and was one of its signers, represented the United States in France during the American Revolution, and was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. He made important contributions to science, especially in the understanding of electricity, and is remembered for the wit, wisdom, and elegance of his writing.

Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743[b] – July 4, 1826) was an American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from 1801 to 1809.[6] He was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence. Following the American Revolutionary War and prior to becoming president in 1801, Jefferson was the nation’s first U.S. secretary of state under George Washington and then the nation’s second vice president under John Adams.

Louis Claude de Saint-Martin

Louis Claude de Saint-Martin (18 January 1743 – 14 October[1] 1803) was a French philosopher, known as le philosophe inconnu (“the unknown philosopher”), the name under which his works were published; he was an influential of the mystic and human mind evolution and became the inspiration for the founding of the Martinist Order.

Léonce de Saint-Martin, composer and organist, was a distant relative of Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Johann Wolfgang Goethe is widely regarded as the greatest and most influential writer in the German language. His work has had a profound and wide-ranging influence on Western literary, political, and philosophical thought from the late 18th century to the present day. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is perhaps best known for The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), the first novel of the Sturm und Drang movement, and for Faust (Part I, 1808; Part II, 1832), a play about a man who sells his soul to the Devil that is sometimes considered Germany’s greatest contribution to world literature.

Karl von Eckartshausen

Karl von Eckartshausen was a German Catholic mystic, author, and philosopher. Born in Haimhausen, Bavaria, Eckartshausen studied philosophy and Bavarian civil law in Munich and Ingolstadt. He was the author of The Cloud upon the Sanctuary, a work of Christian mysticism which was later taken up by occultists.

William Blake

William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his life, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age.

One of his most famous works is a book called Songs of Innocence and Experience. It was published in 1789 and was inspired by illuminated manuscripts made by monks in medieval times. One of the most famous poems in the book is called The Tyger. The painting below is called The Good and Evil Angels.

Dr. John Dalton

John Dalton FRS was an English chemist, physicist and meteorologist. He introduced the atomic theory into chemistry.

Dalton’s atomic theory suggested that all matter was comprised of indivisible and indestructible atoms with distinct masses and properties, the combination of which determined the physical nature of their constituent elements.

Michael Faraday

Michael Faraday FRS was an English scientist who contributed to the study of electromagnetism and electrochemistry. His main discoveries include the principles underlying electromagnetic induction, diamagnetism and electrolysis.

He was a British physicist and chemist who is best known for his discoveries of electromagnetic induction and of the laws of electrolysis. His biggest breakthrough in electricity was his invention of the electric motor.

Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. The novel sequence La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life, is generally viewed as his magnum opus.

Balzac believed that Romanticism, with its focus on individualism and sentimentality, failed to present a meaningful perspective on society. The goal of his Human Comedy, stated expressly in his preface, was to study the “social species” the way a scientist would examine the phenomena of the natural world.

Anton Rubinstein

Anton Grigoryevich Rubinstein was a Russian pianist, composer and conductor who became a pivotal figure in Russian culture when he founded the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. He was the elder brother of Nikolai Rubinstein, who founded the Moscow Conservatory.As a pianist, Rubinstein ranks among the great 19th-century keyboard virtuosos. He became most famous for his series of historical recitals, seven enormous, consecutive concerts covering the history of piano music. Rubinstein played this series throughout Russia and Eastern Europe and in the United States when he toured there.

Julius Friedrich Sachse

Julius Friedrich Adolph Sachse was an American scholar of the history of Pennsylvania, particularly of the Ephrata Cloister and sectarian Pennsylvania German groups, as well as of American Freemasonry, and photographer. He was born in Philadelphia and graduated from Muhlenberg College. Sachse was president of the Pennsylvania German Society for 1914 and belonged to a large number of American and European historical and social organizations. He died in Philadelphia and is buried at West Laurel Hill Cemetery in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania.

Martinez de Pasquales

Jacques de Livron Joachim de la Tour de la Casa Martinez de Pasqually (1727?–1774) was a theurgist and theosopher of uncertain origin. He was the founder of the l’Ordre de Chevaliers Maçons Élus Coëns de l’Univers – commonly referred to as the ‘Elus Cohens’ in 1761. He was the tutor, initiator and friend of Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin and Jean-Baptiste Willermoz.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Ella Wheeler Wilcox was an American author and poet. As a teenager, she published poems in the Waverly Magazine and Leslie’s Weekly. She studied at the University of Wisconsin, but left after just a year to focus on her writing. Wilcox’s essays appeared widely in magazines such as Cosmopolitan, and she wrote popular poetry, generally in plain, rhyming verse. Her works include the collection Poems of Passion and the poem “Solitude”, which contains the lines “Laugh, and the world laughs with you; weep, and you weep alone.” Her autobiography, The Worlds and I, was published in 1918, a year before her death.

Claude Debussy

Claude Debussy was a French composer. He is sometimes seen as the first Impressionist composer, although he vigorously rejected the term. He was among the most influential composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

His major works included Clair de lune (“Moonlight”; in Suite bergamasque, 1890–1905), Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894; Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun), the opera Pelléas et Mélisande (1902), and La Mer (1905; “The Sea”).

Nicholas Roerich

Nicholas Roerich, was a Russian painter, writer, archaeologist, theosophist, philosopher, and public figure. He was interested in hypnosis and other spiritual practices and his paintings are said to have hypnotic expression.
His main interests were literature, philosophy, archaeology, and especially art. He was a dedicated activist for the cause of preserving art and architecture during times of war. He was nominated several times to the longlist for the Nobel Peace Prize. The so-called Roerich Pact was signed into law by the United States and most other nations of the Pan-American Union in April 1935.