uperior beings, control the elements to his will, defy the obstructions
of time and space, and acquire the most intimate knowledge of all the
secrets of the universe. Wild and visionary as they were, they were not
without their uses; if it were only for having purged the superstitions of
Europe of the dark and disgusting forms with which the monks had peopled
it, and substituted, in their stead, a race of mild, graceful, and
beneficent beings.

They are said to have derived their name from Christian Rosencreutz, or
"Rose-cross," a German philosopher, who travelled in the Holy Land towards
the close of the fourteenth century. While dangerously ill at a place
called Damcar, he was visited by some learned Arabs, who claimed him as
their brother in science, and unfolded to him, by inspiration, all the
secrets of his past life, both of thought and of action. They restored him
to health by means of the philosopher's stone, and afterwards instructed
him in all their mysteries. He returned to Europe in 1401, being then only
twenty-three years of age; and drew a chosen number of his friends around
him, whom he initiated into the new science, and bound by solemn oaths to
keep it secret for a century. He is said to have lived eighty-three years
after this period, and to have died in 1484.

Many have denied the existence of such a personage as Rosencreutz, and
have fixed the origin of this sect at a much later epoch. The first
dawning of it, they say, is to be found in the theories of Paracelsus and
the dreams of Dr. Dee, who, without intending it, became the actual,
though never the recognised founders of the Rosicrucian philosophy. It is
now difficult, and indeed impossible, to determine whether Dee and
Paracelsus obtained their ideas from the then obscure and unknown
Rosicrucians, or whether the Rosicrucians did but follow and improve upon
them. Certain it is, that their existence was never suspected till the
year 1605, when they began to excite attention in Germany. No sooner were
their doctrines promulgated, than all the visionaries, Paracelsists, and
alchymists, flocked around their standard, and vaunted Rosencreutz as the
new regenerator of the human race. Michael Mayer, a celebrated physician
of that day, and who had impaired his health and wasted his fortune in
searching for the philosopher's stone, drew up a report of the tenets and
ordinances of the new fraternity, which was published at Cologne, in the
year 1615. They a