the Fraternity of the Rosy Cross used for healing to a precisely
opposite and deadly purpose. This would explain the fact that
contemporaries like the author of the _Examination of the Unknown and
Novel Cabala of the Brethren of the Rose-Cross_ should identify these
brethren with the magicians and believe them to be guilty of practices
deriving from the same source as Rosicrucian knowledge--the Cabala of
the Jews. Their modern admirers would, of course, declare that they were
the poles asunder, the difference being between white and black magic.
Huysmans, however, scoffs at this distinction and says the use of the
term "white magic" was a ruse of the Rose-Croix.

But of the real doctrines of the Rosicrucians no one can speak with
certainty. The whole story of the Fraternity is wrapped in mystery.
Mystery was avowedly the essence of their system; their identity, their
aims, their doctrines, are said to have been kept a profound secret from
the world. Indeed it is said that no real Rosicrucian ever allowed
himself to be known as such. As a result of this systematic method of
concealment, sceptics on the one hand have declared the Rosicrucians to
have been charlatans and impostors or have denied their very existence,
whilst on the other hand romancers have exalted them as depositaries of
supernatural wisdom. The question is further obscured by the fact that
most accounts of the Fraternity--as, for example, those of Eliphas Levi,
Hargrave Jennings, Kenneth Mackenzie, Mr. A.E. Waite, Dr. Wynn Westcott,
and Mr. Cadbury Jones--are the work of men claiming or believing
themselves to be initiated into Rosicrucianism or other occult systems
of a kindred nature and as such in possession of peculiar and exclusive
knowledge. This pretension may at once be dismissed as an absurdity;
nothing is easier than for anyone to make a compound out of Jewish
Cabalism and Eastern theosophy and to label it Rosicrucianism, but no
proof whatever exists of any affiliation between the self-styled
Rosicrucians of to-day and the seventeenth-century "Brothers of the Rosy
Cross."[263]

In spite of Mr. Wake's claim, "The Real History of the Rosicrucians"
still remains to be written, at any rate in the English language. The
book he has published under this name is merely a superficial study of
the question largely composed of reprints of Rosicrucian pamphlets
accessible to any student. Mr. Wigston and Mrs. Pott merely echo Mr.
Waite. Thus everything that