osicrucians. In De
Quincey's words:

Having maintained the probability of the Rosicrucian pretensions
on the ground that such _magnalia Dei_ had from the creation
downwards been confided to the keeping of a few
individuals--agreeably to which he affirms that Adam was the first
Rosicrucian of the Old Testament and Simeon the last--he goes on to
ask whether the Gospel put an end to the secret tradition? By no
means, he answers: Christ established a new "college of magic"
among His disciples, and the greater mysteries were revealed to St.
John and St. Paul.

John Yarker, quoting this passage, adds: "This, Brother Findel points
out, was a claim of the Carpocratian Gnostics"; it was also, as we have
seen, a part of the Johannite tradition which is said to have been
imparted to the Templars. We shall find the same idea of Christ as an
"initiate" running all through the secret societies up to the present
day.

These doctrines not unnaturally brought on the Rosicrucians the
suspicion of being an anti-Christian body. The writer of a contemporary
pamphlet published in 1624, declares that "this fraternity is a
stratagem of the Jews and Cabalistic Hebrews, in whose philosophy, says
Pic de la Mirandole, all things are ... as if hidden in the majesty of
truth or as ... in very sacred Mysteries."[257]

Another work, _Examination of the Unknown and Novel Cabala of the
Brethren of the Rose-Cross_, agrees with the assertion that the chief of
this "execrable college is Satan, that its first rule is denial of God,
blasphemy against the most simple and undivided Trinity, trampling on
the mysteries of the redemption, spitting in the face of the mother of
God and of all the saints." The sect is further accused of compacts with
the devil, sacrifices of children, of cherishing toads, making poisonous
powders, dancing with fiends, etc.

Now, although all this would appear to be quite incompatible with the
character of the Rosicrucians as far as it is known, we have already
seen that the practices here described were by no means imaginary; in
this same seventeenth century, when the fame of the Rosicrucians was
first noised abroad, black magic was still, as in the days of Gilles de
Rais, a horrible reality, not only in France but in England, Scotland,
and Germany, where sorcerers of both sexes were continually put to
death.[258] However much we may deplore the methods employed against
these peopl