"Descartes’ Three Visions" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "The Rosicrucian Trilogy: Modern Translations of the Three Founding Documents"
November 10
Descartes’ Three Visions
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It was St.
Martin’s Eve, November 10, 1619, and a young French gentleman-soldier had shut
himself away in a stove-heated room somewhere in southern Germany, waiting out
the winter in the army of the Duke of Bavaria. He was twenty-three, restless,
and burning with an idea. Before he slept that night, he believed he had
glimpsed the foundations of a wonderful new science. Then came the dreams.
By morning,
René Descartes
was convinced that heaven itself had shown him his life’s path. The father of
modern rationalism, it turns out, was launched by a prophecy in the night, and
within a few years half of Paris would suspect him of belonging to the most
mysterious brotherhood in Europe…
Descartes had
spent the previous year in the Dutch Republic, where, according to the journal
of the Dutch scholar Isaac Beeckman, the
two men met on November 10, 1618, exactly a year before the famous night.
Beeckman awakened Descartes to the possibilities of applying mathematics to
physics, and the young Frenchman left for Germany fired with ambition. That
winter, in quarters traditionally placed near Ulm, though some scholars favor
Neuburg on the Danube, he spent his days alone in his heated room, thinking. A
private notebook he titled Olympica opened with a Latin note recording
that on November 10, 1619, filled with enthusiasm, he had discovered the
foundations of a marvelous science.
That night he
dreamed three times. In the first dream, he was walking through streets haunted
by terrifying phantoms, buffeted by a whirlwind that spun him around, so weak
on his right side that he had to lean to the left to keep walking. Struggling
toward the chapel of a college, he was hailed by an acquaintance, and someone
mentioned a gift for him: a melon from a foreign land. He woke with a pain in
his side, prayed to be protected from the dream’s evil effects, and lay awake
for some two hours brooding on good and evil. When he slept again, he dreamed
of a sharp crack like a thunderclap, and woke to see his room filled with fiery
sparks.
The third
dream was quieter and stranger. On his table he found a dictionary and an
anthology of Latin poetry. Opening the anthology, his eye fell on a line from
the poet Ausonius asking which path in life one should follow, and a stranger
handed him another poem beginning with the words “Yes and No.” Remarkably,
Descartes began interpreting the dream while still dreaming it: the dictionary
represented the sciences gathered together, the poetry represented philosophy and
wisdom united, and the Pythagorean “Yes and No” stood for truth and falsehood
in human knowledge. On waking, he concluded that the thunderclap of the second
dream had been the Spirit of Truth descending upon him, and he vowed a
pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Loreto in
Italy to give thanks.
Unfortunately,
the Olympica itself is lost. Our account comes almost entirely from
Adrien Baillet, whose Life of Monsieur Descartes
appeared in 1691, more than forty years after the philosopher’s death, in a
French paraphrase of the Latin notebook. Leibniz also saw the manuscript and
copied a few fragments, and he complained that Baillet had misunderstood parts
of it. Baillet himself was clearly uneasy with the episode’s “enthusiasm,” even
hinting that a St. Martin’s Eve celebration might explain things, while
dutifully reporting Descartes’s insistence that he hadn’t touched wine in three
months. Centuries later, Sigmund Freud was asked to comment on the dreams and
judged them “dreams from above,” closer to waking reflection than to the depths
of the unconscious. How much of the night belongs to Descartes and how much to
his biographer remains a live scholarly question.
Only a few years earlier, the Rosicrucian manifestos had electrified Germany. Readers of our November 6th post will remember the Fama Fraternitatis of 1614 and the Confessio of 1615, announcing an invisible brotherhood of adepts who would reform all knowledge, followed in 1616 by the alchemical allegory of the Chymical Wedding. Descartes was in Germany at the height of that furor, and Baillet reports that he tried to find the Brothers of the Rosy Cross and failed. His surviving notes include plans for a mathematical treatise, attributed to an imaginary “Polybius the Cosmopolitan,” dedicated to learned men throughout the world and especially to the most famous Brothers of the Rosy Cross in Germany. And in Ulm, he came to know the mathematician Johannes Faulhaber, who had publicly expressed his own hope of joining the fraternity. Some historians have even suggested that the very form of Descartes’s revelation, a dream-vision announcing a universal reform of knowledge, carries an unmistakably Rosicrucian echo.
The rumors
caught up with him in Paris. In 1623, the city was startled by placards posted
on its walls announcing that deputies of the Rosicrucian college were present
among its citizens, both visibly and invisibly. Descartes had just returned
from Germany with a reputation as a would-be reformer of all knowledge, and
gossip soon numbered him among the invisible brethren. According to Baillet, he
answered in the wittiest way possible: by appearing in public and letting
himself be seen, since a Rosicrucian, by definition, was supposed to be
invisible. Here, too, honesty is in order. There’s no evidence that Descartes
ever joined any Rosicrucian body, the fraternity itself almost certainly never
existed as an organization, and the playful dedication to the “famous” Brothers
may well have been tongue in cheek.
When Descartes
finally published his Discourse on Method
in 1637, he described those winter days in his heated room as the beginning of
his philosophical project, but he said nothing of whirlwinds, sparks, melons,
or the Spirit of Truth. The public founder of modern rationalism was careful,
measured, and methodical. The private young man behind him had searched for an
invisible brotherhood, interpreted his dreams while still asleep, and promised
the Virgin of Loreto a pilgrimage for revealing his destiny. It’s one of the
most delicious ironies in intellectual history, and a reminder to every modern
occultist that the line between reason and revelation has rarely been as sharp
as the textbooks pretend.
The
Rosicrucian Trilogy: Modern Translations of the Three Founding Documents
Translated by Joscelyn
Godwin, Christopher McIntosh & Donate Pahnke McIntosh | Red Wheel / Weiser
The
Rosicrucian Trilogy, published by Weiser Books in 2016 for the
four-hundredth anniversary of the movement, presents fresh, annotated
translations of the three founding documents: the Fama Fraternitatis of
1614, the Confessio Fraternitatis of 1615, and The Chemical Wedding
of Christian Rosenkreuz of 1616, illustrated with thirty images by Hans
Wildermann. The translators bring serious credentials. Joscelyn Godwin is a
composer, musicologist, and translator renowned for his work on music and the
occult, including the first complete English translation of the Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili; Christopher McIntosh is a historian of Western esotericism who
taught at the University of Exeter’s Centre for the Study of Esotericism; and
Donate Pahnke McIntosh is a scholar of religion specializing in esotericism and
ritual. Together they offer reliable, readable modern English, with
introductions that set each text in its historical context.
What makes it
the perfect pairing for today’s post is simple: these are the documents
Descartes and Faulhaber were reacting to. Reading the Fama’s tale of
Christian Rosenkreuz and his hidden tomb, and the Confessio’s promise of
a coming universal reformation of knowledge, makes it easy to understand why an
ambitious young mathematician might dream of a “marvelous science” and dedicate
an imaginary treatise to the famous Brothers. And the Chemical Wedding,
a landmark of European fantasy literature, shows how vividly the Rosicrucian
imagination worked in symbols, journeys, and visions, the very language
Descartes’s dreams seem to speak.
This is a
collection of primary sources rather than a history of the Rosicrucian furor,
and readers wanting the full story of the movement’s reception, including
figures like Descartes and Faulhaber, will want to pair it with a narrative
history. The Chemical Wedding in particular rewards slow, patient
reading. But for readers who finished today’s post wondering what exactly
Descartes went looking for in Germany, there is no better place to start than
the manifestos themselves, now beautifully accessible in modern English.
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