The Chemical Wedding, by Christian Rosencreutz Read online

  ALSO BY JOHN CROWLEY

  The Deep

  Beasts

  Engine Summer

  Little, Big

  Ægypt: (The Solitudes, Love & Sleep,

  Dæmonomania, Endless Things)

  The Translator

  Novelties and Souvenirs: Collected Short Fiction

  Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land

  Four Freedoms

  A ROMANCE

  IN EIGHT DAYS

  by

  JOHANN

  VALENTIN ANDREAE

  in a new version by

  JOHN CROWLEY

  illustrated by THEO FADEL

  SMALL BEER PRESS • EASTHAMPTON, MASS.

  The Chemical Wedding by Christian Rosencreutz:

  A Romance in Eight Days

  by Johann Valentin Andreae in a New Version

  ©John Crowley, 2016. All rights reserved.

  Cover and interior illustrations ©Theo Fadel, 2016. All rights reserved. (theofadel.com)

  Designed by Jacob McMurray (jacobmcmurray.com)

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are either fictitious or used fictitiously.

  SMALL BEER PRESS

  150 Pleasant Street #306 • Easthampton, MA 01027

  www.smallbeerpress.com • www.weightlessbooks.com

  [email protected]

  Trade paperback edition distributed by Consortium.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Rosencreutz, Christian, author. | Andreča, Johann Valentin, 1586-1654, author.

  | Crowley, John, 1942- author. | Fadel, Theo, illustrator.

  Title: The chemical wedding by Christian Rosencreutz : a romance in eight days / by Johann Valentin Andreae ; in a new version by John Crowley ; Illustrated by Theo Fadel.

  Other titles: Chymische Hochzeit. English

  Description: Easthampton, Mass. : Small Beer Press, [2016]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015029661 | ISBN 9781618731074 (hardcover)

  | ISBN 9781618731081 (trade pbk.) | ISBN 9781618731098 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Society of Rosicrucians.

  Classification: LCC BF1623.R7 R6613 2016 | DDC 135/.43--dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015029661

  First edition 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  Text set in Adobe Garamond Pro.

  Paper edition printed on partially recycled paper by in the USA.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction

  The First Day

  The Second Day

  The Third Day

  The Fourth Day

  The Fifth Day

  The Sixth Day

  The Seventh Day

  The Eighth Day

  Introduction

  I

  The Chemical Wedding by Christian Rosencreutz is the way I’ve decided to present the title of this book. Most versions in English are called The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz, which suggests (and most people who’ve heard of it suppose) that the wedding is Christian’s. It’s not; Christian Rosencreutz is the purported author of a book called The Chemical Wedding. The actual author is Johann Valentin Andreae, whose name didn’t appear on the book originally, thus ensuring the confusion. I’ll call it herein (as everyone mostly does) simply The Chemical Wedding.

  Though its original readers would have had a certain amount of context for the truly bizarre and surprising events it tells of, it’s possible that The Chemical Wedding is now more enjoyable without knowing that context, and experiencing the book unmediated. You might therefore wish to start right in on the first page of text that follows and only then return to this introduction.

  Consider a similar case: a little book published in 1934 by the Surrealist artist Max Ernst called Une Semaine de Bonté. It was made entirely of collaged illustrations cut out of old books (Ernst can be said to have invented this now common art medium, actually), and the resulting dream-scenes, seeming to propose a narrative that’s actually impossible to discover, are wonderfully mysterious and compelling. You certainly don’t need to know that Ernst may have plotted the whole thing according to the principles of ancient alchemy and alchemical practice. In fact, to me at least, knowing that it has such a unifying subtext makes it somehow less interesting, not more.

  The Chemical Wedding is also based on or connected to alchemy and alchemical practice, and may even be a parody of such practice, which was taken very seriously when the book appeared. If you have a particular interest in decoding texts along those lines, you may want to investigate those connections; but even if you investigate assiduously, The Chemical Wedding will puzzle and may occasionally annoy you with its irreducible strangeness. Read simply as a story, however, whatever its meaning, if any, it’s perfectly easy to follow and very readable. Sometimes it’s very funny. And the allegorical (or symbolic or political or theological) explanations that have been offered can’t really account for all that happens in it anyway.

  My aim in producing this new version was simply to make this, one of the great outlandish stories in Western literature, accessible to readers in the context of no context. I haven’t cut anything or added anything. My biggest contribution was to ask the artist Theo Fadel to take whatever she liked from it and make pictures reflecting her response. Perhaps they’ll reflect your own. In addition to this introduction, I’ve also added some annotations about various historical, literary, and textual matters.

  II

  The Chemical Wedding by Christian Rosencreutz was published in Germany in 1616, though it probably circulated in manuscript for some time before that. It was presented as the work of a person named Christian Rosencreutz, or Christian of the Rose-Cross, a mysterious magus who died at the age of 106 in 1484 after a lifetime of traveling the world being inducted into the wisdom societies of several lands and forming his own secret society of wise brothers. Ever since, these Brothers of the Rose-Cross have gone about the world healing illness and doing good without our recognizing their presence among us.

  That, at any rate, was the story told of him in two pamphlets that appeared, also without any author, just before The Chemical Wedding was published. The pamphlets demanded or promised a universal reformation, announced that human knowledge was about to take a vast leap forward, and predicted the fall of many states and kingdoms. These little books, plus The Chemical Wedding, which is a very different affair, became the foundation of what has ever after been known as the Rosicrucian phenomenon, or movement, or scare, or hoax. (The Ancient and Mystical Order of the Rose-Cross, or “Rosicrucian Order,” is a modern fraternity founded in 1915 and related only in name to the older one.)

  Even today it’s unclear how these texts came to be, who wrote them, what they intended, and whether there ever was really a mystic brotherhood at all (probably not). It’s clear that segments of the society in which they first appeared were very ready to hear what they had to say, insofar as that could be divined, and others felt very threatened by them. Furious debates about religion were under way, in the midst of war and the threat of war between states with different Christian religious establishments; the witch hysteria was intensifying, and there were signs that the world might be coming to an end, or maybe that a new world was about to dawn.

  So it was the moment for a craze, and these Rosicrucian challenges and revelations fit the bill. From their manifestos you could deduce that the brothers were able to move among the population invisibly, that they had the means to overthrow the Pope, and that you’d never know who they were or who was allied with them. Of course these ominous possibilities were based on the merest hints and obscure matte
r in the original documents, which most people didn’t have access to, but dozens of later reports appeared, either telling further stories about the original brothers, or begging them to make themselves known, or denouncing the movement as a hoax or a plot. At the right social or historical moment, such manias can spread fast. I had a friend who in the 1950s spent a day fooling around with some pie plates and a camera, tossing the plates into the air and taking grainy pictures of them. It was the height of the UFO mania. He sent the pictures (which he claimed he had snapped by chance) to the local paper and almost instantly they went national. They were making headlines when my friend got cold feet and confessed. His pictures, though, continued to show up in UFO literature for years. It was like that in 1616, I imagine, and the imaginary Rosicrucians have been imbedded in popular mythology ever after.

  III

  The Chemical Wedding is the only one of the Rosicrucian books whose author eventually came to light. Johann Valentin Andreae was born in Herrenberg, Würtemberg, Germany. His father was a Lutheran pastor, and that’s what the son trained to be, though he was apparently not a great student, or didn’t care as much for orthodox Lutheran theology as he would later in life; it took him a long time to get a position. His father was very interested in alchemy and did a lot of what we would call lab work in it. After his death Andreae’s mother became a court apothecary or pharmacist to a German duke. Paracelsian alchemy, the cutting-edge physical science of the times, was bound up with the beginnings of chemical medicine. So Johann grew up knowing a lot about alchemy, including its downside – his father was always poor because he spent his money on his experiments.

  We know that Andreae was the author of The Chemical Wedding because he admitted it in a satire written not long after the book appeared, in which he seems to make fun of the whole Rosicrucian thing, and again in an autobiographical account 25 years later; in that piece he describes The Chemical Wedding as a sort of youthful prank – a ludibrium, he calls it, a word with more than one shade of meaning: joke, play, nonsense, ridiculous thing. A lot of argument has been occasioned by this word. Committed believers in the deep significance of esoteric texts in general and The Chemical Wedding in particular don’t want Andreae to scorn or reject his work. Maybe he meant joke in the sense of silly story that masks a deep secret. Or maybe he meant play in the sense of drama or comedy, which wouldn’t imply rejection. On the other hand there are commentators who are sure he dismissed this early work as mere piffle as he grew into a major theologian, thinker, and cleric.

  But it seems to me that all Andreae was saying was that The Chemical Wedding was never supposed to be taken seriously as a picture of the world, a plan for reform, an alchemical recipe in disguise, or anything like that. And it was just because it almost immediately got bound up inextricably with “Rosicrucianism” as a supposed heterodox movement which you could be for or against that Andreae has to pooh-pooh it later. These so-called Rosicrucians were lying, he seems to say, but he was kidding. His book was a hoax, in one sense; in another, it was mental play with the period’s hot topics. Above all it was, and ought now to be regarded as, a novel. A romance, a fiction, a tale.

  More than that: I would contend that The Chemical Wedding is not only a fantasy-romance/joke-parody/hoax-tall tale, it is in fact the first science fiction novel.* Such a claim of course has to be based on some sort of definition of “science” (and also “fiction”), but I think it can be sustained. The Chemical Wedding predates Kepler’s Somnium (1634), which usually gets the nod, and Somnium (about a dream-trip to the moon) is more of an illustrated example or thought-experiment than a real story; the astronomy underlying it is new, but it doesn’t carry the thrill of wild but just-around-the-corner possibilities that SF ought to.

  The science that The Chemical Wedding builds on is late Renaissance alchemy, which had the same fascination for readers of the time as the scientific possibilities of classic SF did in its last-century heyday: the aliens, spaceships, people-shaped robots, telepathy, time travel. Alchemy is not science if by science we mean only what is now included in that accretion of tested knowledge that still holds up as true even if primitive or inadequate – in this sense Ptolemy’s geocentric astronomy is science but judicial astrology is not. Alchemy is science, though, in the sense that it had a general picture of the material world and a rational scheme for formulating hypotheses and proceeding with investigations of it. It’s also science in the sense that what it attempts to learn about the world will implicitly expand practical human possibilities and powers.

  Where it differs from anything we would call science is in the picture of the world it was based on. Alchemy – like astrology, with which it was intimately bound up – supposed that there were common qualities that ran through the universe, able to be discerned alike in plants and animals, stones and metals, planets, and human souls; and though these qualities were physical, they were also moral and spiritual. The universe was shot through with personality: Mercury the metal had the same qualities as Mercury the planet and Mercury the god – it was fast-moving, changeable, tricky, “mercurial.” Things, like people, were jovial or martial or saturnine in sharing qualities with Jupiter or Mars or Saturn. In the alchemist’s lab, chemical compounds were regarded as persons; they grew angry and hot, they suffered, died, and were reborn, they were transformed from lowly to noble, they could marry and they would procreate. Alchemy didn’t work as science, not so much because the alchemists misunderstood the nature of chemical composition and interaction – often they made good observations about that – but because they thought the physical world was pervaded by a psychic and moral order, by personality.

  Another way in which alchemy differed from modern scientific proceeding was that almost everyone engaged in it was desperate to keep their experiments and their methods secret. Many alchemical works exist telling what the procedures were and what they were supposed to produce, but almost all were written as elaborate allegories, with kings, goddesses, green dragons, red dragons, springs and trees being locked in prison, given wings, murdered, revived, weeping, eaten, etc. It’s not always clear what materials are represented by the players in these weird dramas, much less what was actually done with them.

  This allegorical masking is further complicated by the general belief that the transformations taking place in the vessels and the furnaces were supposedly also taking place in the soul of the operator, and that only if the operator were “pure” in his intentions and noble in his aims could the Work (as the alchemists called it) succeed.

  Given this way of presenting alchemical processes, it might seem that The Chemical Wedding is probably an allegory of the Work, with its marriages and its beheaded kings, golden balls in which blue birds are born, white snakes and red fluids, all of them standing not only for physical processes but for the soul-transformation the Work was supposed to effect. In fact the tale has often been interpreted so. But to my mind this doesn’t work: Christian, our hero, is not himself the alchemist, only a participant along with others; nor can he be interpreted as standing for any part of the alchemical process. He doesn’t understand all that he’s seeing, but certainly he is presented as seeing a series of actual events, not an allegory. So far from being transformed or reborn or even made young again, he’s actually left at the end worse off than at the beginning, and remains throughout fretful, hopeful, opinionated, and horny – a person, not a symbol. It’s not that the transformations and rebirths he witnesses don’t have symbolic force – they do – but they aren’t simply disguises for physical interactions in a furnace, or metaphors for the soul’s journey. They are what they are: an account of the farthest-out, most mind-blowing possibilities of a new and unfolding science, witnessed by an Everyman who perhaps doesn’t get it all but vouches for its truth. At the same time it’s clearly a romance, a flight of fancy, even, yes, a joke.

  So that’s why The Chemical Wedding is the first science fiction novel: unlike other contenders, it’s fiction; it’s about the possibilitie
s of a science; and it’s a novel, a marvelous adventure rather than simply a parable or an allegory or a skit or a thought-experiment. (Like SF, it probably appealed to a self-selected readership of geeks and enthusiasts). Of course Andreae didn’t intend it to be taken seriously – after all it’s not a theology, not a utopian scheme, not a sermon, all of which he later wrote. But we today think that a fiction – a novel, a story – can be at once unserious and as serious as can be; both a joke and the opposite of a joke; a mirror of nothing and an unforgettable vision. Even science fiction and fantasy, in their different ways, can be those things. Pastor Andreae may have ended up ashamed of it, but we can see it differently.

  IV

  My version of The Chemical Wedding is not a new translation. I have based it on the original English translation by Ezechiel Foxcroft (1690) – he called it “A Hermetick Romance,” very justly – and the more modern version, based on Foxcroft, published by A. E. Waite in The Real History of the Rosicrucians (1887). I have consulted the recent translation by Joscelyn Godwin (Magnum Opus Hermetic Sourceworks #18, Phanes Press 1991). Andres Paniagua has given invaluable help, checking my evolving versions against original German printings of the book in European libraries. Still, I make no scholarly claims for this version. I have felt free to expand and contract a bit (though rarely to the extent even of a whole sentence), and I have done things to make the text more readable, such as turning reported or indirect speech into quoted speech and seeking modern equivalents for unfamiliar words and concepts. I have annotated the text for readers who wish for more context, or for explications of various arcana; I make no claim for these notes as being either authoritative or exhaustive. In translating the passages of verse, I chose my own rhyme schemes and meters, and shortened most of them quite a bit. I hope the reader won’t mind.

  The first thing to be explained about this new version, though, is why I have described The Chemical Wedding as “A Romance in Eight Days.” The number of days named as such in the text is seven; seven is an important number throughout the book for various groups of persons, collections of items, and actions taken. It’s also the number of the planets known to alchemy and astrology, the number of the days of creation, and thus the number of days that the alchemical Work is said to take (Max Ernst’s Un Semaine de Bonté also takes place in seven days). Certainly the main action of the story does take seven days to complete. But – as the reader will learn who reaches the end of the story – there is an eighth day, a day that is at least as important as the others to the story of Christian Rosencreutz, and – I believe – to the import of the book, though just how it modifies or enlarges that import is a little hard to say.