The Rosicrucians Their Rites and Mysteries by Hargrave Jennings [4th ed., 1907] [first published 1870]

Hargrave Jennings was a nineteenth century English writer and occultist. His vision of the inner knowledge of the Rosicrucians in this book is, at its core, very similar to that of the left-hand Tantric path. In some ways he was very reactionary; for instance, he rejects the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs and the atomic theory of the elements. In other ways, he was far in advance of his time in his concepts of the roles of gender and sexuality in the quest for spiritual perfection.

You won't find much in the way of historical description of the Rosicrucians here. Key Rosicrucian documents such as the Fama Fraternatis, Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkrueutz and Confessio Fraternatis (see Waite's The Real History of the Rosicrucians) are not even mentioned. Nor will you find any disclosure of inner secrets. Jennings constantly drops hints that he knows more than he is letting on, but states up-front that he is not an initiate. Jennings believed that the doctrines of the Rosicrucians were derived from ancient phallic worship, and to a lesser extent fire and serpent worship. In this book, Jennings constructs elaborate and constantly shifting sets of correspondences. He tries to interrelate huge sets of symbols and objects in his search for the elusive Rosicrucians. This is not a mainstream concept of the Rosicrucian doctrine, and contemporaries such as A.E. Waite summarily dismissed Jennings' theories.

The book makes frustrating reading at times. Like his friend Bulwer-Lytton, Jennings piles clause upon clause. Often he seems on the verge of stream-of-consciousness automatic writing, walking the thin boundaries between illumination, synesthesia and psychosis. Because of Victorian sensibilities, he is unable to discuss aspects of sacred sexuality without elaborate circumlocutions, resorting to French and Latin when he needs to spell things out. Uncharacteristically for a book of this vintage, there are almost no footnotes, and very little other scholarly apparatus (although he occasionally gives elaborate bibliographic citations in the body of the text).

This book dovetails with Hall's Secret Teachings of All Ages, although Hall is a lot more coherent and organized. The two books cover a lot of the same ground such as eternal flames, Alchemy, the Kabbalah, and so on. Jennings also wrote a number of other books, primarily on phallic worship, including The Masculine Cross and Ancient Sex Worship, (also at online sacred-texts), under odd pseudonyms such as 'Sha Rocco' and Abisha S. Hudson.

Production Notes: Due to the huge number of small illustrations, where multiple figures occurred on a page, I merged them into one image file. This text uses Unicode for Greek, Hebrew and astrological signs; if you have trouble viewing them you should refer to sacred-texts Unicode walkthrough.

--John Bruno Hare, May 1st, 2006

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