eenth century finally disappeared and re-entered this invisible
fraternity "--from which they had presumably emerged. Whether any such
body really existed or whether the above account is simply an attempt at
mystification devised to excite curiosity, the incredulous may question.
The writer here observes that it would be indiscreet to say more, but
elsewhere he throws out a hint that may have some bearing on the matter,
for in his article on the Templars he says that after the suppression of
the Order it was revived in a more secret form and subsists to the
present day. This would exactly accord with Mirabeau's statement that
the Rosicrucians were only the Order of the Templars secretly
perpetuated. Moreover, as we shall see later, according to a legend
preserved by the Royal Order of Scotland, the degree of the Rosy Cross
had been instituted by that Order in conjunction with the Templars in
1314, and it would certainly be a remarkable coincidence that a man
bearing the name of Rosenkreutz should happen to have inaugurated a
society, founded, like the Templars, on Eastern secret doctrines during
the course of the same century, without any connexion existing between
the two.

I would suggest, then, that Christian Rosenkreutz was a purely mythical
personage, and that the whole legend concerning his travels was invented
to disguise the real sources whence the Rosicrucians derived their
system, which would appear to have been a compound of ancient esoteric
doctrines, of Arabian and Syrian magic, and of Jewish Cabalism, partly
inherited from the Templars but reinforced by direct contact with
Cabalistic Jews in Germany. The Rose-Croix, says Mirabeau, "were a
mystical, Cabalistic, theological, and magical sect," and Rosicrucianism
thus became in the seventeenth century the generic title by which
everything of the nature of Cabalism, Theosophy, Alchemy, Astrology, and
Mysticism was designated. For this reason it has been said that they
cannot be regarded as the descendants of the Templars. Mr. Waite, in
referring to "the alleged connexion between the Templars and the
Brethren of the Rosy Cross," observes:

The Templars were not alchemists, they had no scientific
pretensions, and their secret, so far as it can be ascertained, was
a religious secret of an anti-Christian kind. The Rosicrucians, on
the other hand, were pre-eminently a learned society and they were
also a Christian sect.[256]

The fact th