Announcing: The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz

cover art by Emi Shigeno

This day, this day, this, this

The Royal Wedding is.

Art thou thereto by Birth inclin’d,

And unto joy of God design’d,

Then may’st thou to the Mountain tend,

Whereon three stately Temples stand,

And there see all from end to end.

Keep watch, and ward,

Thy self-regard;

Unless with diligence thou bathe,

The Wedding can’t thee harmless save:

He’ll dammage have that here delays;

Let him beware, too light that weighs.

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Thus reads the invitation Christian Rosenkreutz receives that begins his wondrous journey; and thus begins my invitation to readers of my new edition of Ezekiel Foxcroft’s translation of a seventeenth-century wondertale that has baffled readers, the curious, and esoteric thrill-seekers ever since it first appeared in German in 1616.

As I've written here, I have pondered, puzzled over, and stood bemused by this text ever since my initial encounter with it in my youth. As such, I am very pleased that my own edition is now available. It has been, to say the least, a project with an extra-long incubation period.

As the jacket blurb describeth it:

The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz was first published in the seventeenth century and has perplexed, amazed, and entertained generations of readers, seekers, and scholars every since.  Often described as an alchemical romance, the book has also been recognized as a precursor to science fiction, as a satire, and as a storehouse of esoteric knowledge. In his commentary, Michael Martin undertakes an agapeic reading of The Chymical Wedding and finds a text that has been misunderstood from the beginning, a narrative that offers instead of hoped-for secrets something much more useful: physic for the soul.

I am also profoundly appreciative of the following individuals and their words concerning my edition of this extraordinary book:

“Tennyson observed that most who sought they Holy Grail followed will-o-the-wisps into a marsh. In hardly any book is the reader at so great a risk of likewise losing the way and falling into reveries than in the enigmatic Chymical Wedding, perhaps as its author would later say, intended more as a pastiche of alchemical allegory than as a straightforward esoteric text. The book becomes a magic mirror in which the readers patently find their own spiritual concerns and ways reflected. What Martin achieves in his version of Foxcroft’s old and classic translation of the wedding and in his commentary, is to go through the mirror to what is surely the goal of all inner ways, the mysterium coniunctionis, the union of opposites, the inner unity we all seek and which ,on the outer side, society today so urgently needs. Michael Martin’s work becomes then what the work in essence is an invitation to that wedding of unification for which we were brought into being and which can and must be ,as he wisely leaves in Foxcroft’s drumbeat, received ‘This day, this day, this, this...’ ”

~ Bishop Seraphim Joseph Sigrist

“This fine edition makes widely accessible a text probably written by the highly influential German Seventeenth Century Protestant theologian Johann Valentin Andreae. It is one of the most significant works of Christian esotericism, which is at the same time a satirical commentary on that very tradition. Its ambivalent and yet symbolically profound quest for the deepest sense of Christian truth, which can serve to heal violent Christian and human divisions, is entirely relevant for us today. Once more we can resonate with Andreae’s sense that this truth is necessarily most evident and yet most secret, most serious and yet most comic, most urgent and yet most dangerous.” 

~ John Milbank

“Michael Martin’s edition of the 17th-century tale of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, along with his deeply insightful and soulful introduction and commentary, reveals that this poetic metaphysical story wields a transformative power needed now. The intellectual hubris of our present civilization veils the true world with the life of death. The way out—breakdown as breakthrough—exemplified by the very language of the tale, undoes us, baffles us intellectually, while pure poetic Eros opens receptivity of soul and the equation of Life and Love.”

~ Robert Sardello, Director, The School of Spiritual Psychology

“Although several versions of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz are currently available, Michael Martin reframes his new edition in a very useful way— one that answers what is perhaps the fundamental riddle of Rosicrucianism and the Rosicrucian Brotherhood. Namely, that the authors of the texts that revolutionized Western Esotericism in the early seventeenth century between 1614 and 1616 later confessed that it was all just a ludibrium—a game. What they meant —as Martin explains in both his Introduction and his concluding essay on ‘Marriage and the Chymical Wedding’—was not that it was all a ‘joke,’ but rather that it was a most ‘serious game,’ a linguistic or literary game in the same way that so many alchemical texts (and secrets) depend on wordplay of a very serious kind. In other words: this is a valuable edition that opens new ways of thinking about language and esotericism.”

~Christopher Bamford, author An Endless Trace: The Passionate Pursuit of Wisdom in the West

You can order a copy of The Chymical Wedding here.

The Irreducible Gap: The Paradox of Valentin Tomberg

Valentin Tomberg in the 1930s

Recently, I found myself getting pretty excited about the impending publication of Angelico Press’s edition of Valentin Tomberg’s magnum opus, known in English as Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Mysticism. My excitement started when I was allowed a sneak peak and opportunity to copyedit some of the paratexts for the edition. The paratexts—by Ernst von Hippel, Robert Spaemann, and Hans Urs von Balthasar—are practically worth the price of the book. Tomberg’s book, which has inspired many—but which has also undoubtedly concerned many—may be the most radically orthodox (yo, Milbank!) work of the last century.

Part of the wonder embodied in Meditations is how it balances a subtle (if highly idiosyncratic) traditionalism with some theologically daring proposition concerning astrology, reincarnation, and, most central to its message (if subsumed to some degree), sophiology. Spaemann attempts an explanation:

“What lies closest to the author’s heart, however, is opening a path for all seekers after Wisdom, all Hermeticists, Theosophists, and Anthroposophists, to the one Church—that of the apostles, of God-become-Man—as their true spiritual living-space, as the spiritual homeland from which, whether they will or no, they must daily draw life, and without whose prayers and sacraments the realities to which these latter correspond must surely disappear entirely from our world. His gratitude for this God-given spiritual living-space is most stirring in its warmth and depth. From the Catholic Church he does not expect a corresponding gratitude toward Hermetic wisdom-seekers and initiates, but only that it might clear out a humble corner for any who, in accord with their vocation, can do no other than walk the path of analogy and correspondence on the track of the mysteries—both great and small—of Reality, from time to time making most remarkable discoveries.”1

There can be little doubt that Tomberg’s book has done precisely this. I have encountered an extraordinary array of people from all walks of life, from all over the world, who entered or returned to the Catholic Church following their own encounters with Meditations, not least of whom is Robert Powell, the man responsible for translating the book into English. As he once told me, through the act of translating the manuscript, he felt called to enter the Catholic Mystery.

Tomberg’s non-traditional traditionalism (to turn a phrase) resides in his devotion to the dogmas of the Church, his upholding of the papal office, and his veneration for the saints, doctors, and teachers of Catholicism (he’s particularly fond of John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Bonaventure, and Bernard of Clairvaux, among others)—while at the same time expressing his admiration for certain figures from the French Occult Revival of the nineteenth century (for example, Joséphin Péladan, Eliphas Levi, Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, and so forth). His traditionalism, in fact, goes so far as to question Vatican II (Tomberg died in 1973). In his last book (Covenant of the Heart, also known as Lazarus, Come Forth!) he voices his skepticism about the aims of the Council:

“The combination of an unyielding, unshakable solidity of faith with the patience that can wait hundreds of years makes the ‘rock’ of the See of Peter unconquerable in the confrontation with the streams of time, which are all, indeed, merely temporal winds and waves. For the ‘demands and needs’ of the time are necessarily temporary. Also temporal, therefore, are efforts towards ‘democritization’ of the Church, de-dogmatization of Church teaching through psychological interpretations, and similar endeavors to ‘modernize’ the Church, her teaching, and her rules. They offend against the commandment: ‘Honor your father and your mother’.”2

Needless to say, a good many of Tomberg’s more zealous readers take up this thread—no doubt seasoned by a good dose of the anti-V2 hysteria that afflicts our times—and join in the chorus of Vatican II derision, if not flirting with Sede Vacantism or other varieties of alt-right Catholic bizarreness. But displeasure with Vatican II is not all there is to Valentin Tomberg.

More importantly, Tomberg was also a religious innovator who held a deep admiration for Teilhard de Chardin (which I’m sure feels awkward for the Traddies), Henri Bergson, and C. G. Jung. He also understood reincarnation as a metaphysical reality and recognized the influence of the stars on human life. And much more importantly (in my opinion), Tomberg was one of the first to articulate a Catholic Sophiology (I explore this in The Submerged Reality). But I don’t mean a “Catholic Sophiology” as intellectual construct: I mean a Catholic Sophiology as extension of the Tradition. In addition to other ways, he did this through his “Our Mother” prayer, as well as through his introduction of the Luminous Holy Trinity: The Mother, the Daughter, and the Holy Soul (I've written about these here and here). So maybe he wasn’t as traditional as all that. Tomberg’s a paradox.

What Tomberg does, I think, is explode complacent notions of what it means to be “Catholic.” Ironically, the Tombergian Traddies often follow him here initially before trying to pass as the Catholic conservatives of their pre-V2 imaginations. He’s much more important than that. Tomberg, that is, cuts to the core of the Christian Mystery. As Slovoj Žižek explains it, “Christianity is the miraculous Event that disturbs the balance of the One-All; it is the violent intrusion of Difference that precisely throws the balanced circuit of the universe off the rails.”3 If Valentin Tomberg doesn’t disturb the balance of the One-All, nobody does.

It may be that even Tomberg didn’t see the power in what he was proposing. Sophiology, in the context of contemporary Christianity, carries with it a complete paradigm shift. No one likes to change, let alone shift paradigms, but that is clearly what confronts us in the work of Tomberg. Again to quote Žižek :

“...it is possible today to redeem this core of Christianity only in the gesture of abandoning the shell of its institutional organization (and, even more so, of its specific religious experience). The gap is irreducible: either one drops the religious form, or one maintains the form, but loses the essence. That is the ultimate heroic gesture that awaits Christianity: in order to save its treasure, it has to sacrifice itself—like Christ, who had to die so that Christianity could emerge.”4

Michael's latest book is Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses, including courses on Sophiology and Valentin Tomberg’s Meditations on the Tarot.

1 Robert Spaemann, “Introduction to Second German Edition,” Meditations on the Tarot, trans. Robert Powell (Angelico Press, 2019), v.

2 Valentin Tomberg, Covenant of the Heart: Meditations of a Christian Hermeticist on the Mysteries of Tradition, trans. Robert Powell and James Morgante (Element, 1992), 197.

3 Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute: Or Why the Christian Legacy Is Worth Fighting for (Verso, 2000), 112.

4 Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (The MIT Press, 2003), 171.

The Green Man, or how to resist the tyranny of the algorithm

This is a post originally found on my former blog at Angelico Press.

Once upon a time, in a summerland called The Late-Nineteen Hundreds or Early Two Thousands, my wife and I went to the Michigan Renaissance Festival accoutered in festival attire and accompanied by our then extant brood (might have been three, might have been four or five—I’m not good at keeping track), at least one of whom was probably in a stroller. At one point in our festivality, we encountered a unique character: The Green Man. This was an ingenious character and even more ingenious costume. The figure looked not unlike the ents from the LOTR films (long before they appeared), but it was much less bulky—in fact, it was rather lithe. Through a clever use of stilts and crutch-like appendages extending from where the hands must have been, it stood at least ten-feet tall and moved at an excruciatingly slow pace. I stood there dumbfounded. After ten minutes or so of taking in the spectacle, my wife and our easily-bored little ones wanted to move on, though I stalled them as long as I could before finally acquiescing.

As we moved along in search of jousting and/or sword-swallowing, my wife asked, “Why were you so into that thing?” (meaning The Green Man). I told her the truth: “I’ve seen him before.”

Only I didn’t mean I’d seen this-guy-in-an-ingenious-costume-at-the-Renaissance-Festival. I meant “The Green Man.”

Allow me to explain.

Professor Martin getting into the Renaissance Festival vibe, c. 1994.

In the mid-80s, while out for a picnic in the woods, I had seen a figure very much like the one I’d encountered at the festival. At least I thought I did. The figure I saw in the woods, though, or rather figures (actually there were more than one) seemed to travel at an even slower rate, more or less through the canopy of maple and oak trees around me. They were a bit smaller than the costumed figure, but very similar. Only, they were less “substantial.” Imagine a walking nervous system, but replace the nerves with twigs and sticks and you’ll get the idea. Of course, seeing such things is crazy. So I convinced myself my eyes were playing tricks on me. I never thought about it again until that moment at the festival.

One fall afternoon several years later as my wife was raking leaves in our yard, our eldest daughter, then probably three-years-old, asked her stop what she was doing. “Those people,” she said, pointing to the place in the garden where her mother had just cleared some leaves. My wife saw nothing, but our daughter was insistent and didn’t want the people to be hurt. She’s now almost twenty-one and still swears it really happened.

Years later, I found another daughter’s makeshift booklet outside (she was about seven or eight at the time). It read:

On the cover, in a circle, the title: Fairys

Page 1: Sientifec fairy Reaserch

—when a baby laughs for the first time a fairy is born

One day this same child showed up at the back door with a long-handled fishing net. “What do you want?” I asked. “Is this good for capturing things?” she said. “Depends,” I answered. “What kinds of things?” “Faeries,” she replied, very forthrightly. I told her I thought it could work; it was worth a shot. She was not successful.

Of course, children often believe that fairies exist. We find it cute.

When they don’t grow out of it, we find them odd. And some never grow out of it.

Some of those who never grow out of it grow up to be philosophers and theologians, which is perhaps not as surprising as one might think. Two that come immediately to mind are John Milbank and David Bentley Hart. I am sure there are others. Some, though, tend to hide this proclivity beneath a literary veneer—pointing to J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and even J.K. Rowling as imaginative explorers of the land of magic, but ultimately backing off from actually signing on the dotted line. Such a posture may be very convenient, but also a bit cowardly, a kind of aestheticism both disingenuous and patronizing. At best, I wonder if such individuals are simply hedging their bets and trying to cover their behinds. At worst, perhaps there is something of infantilization at work there. Freud wasn’t exactly a moron.

My grandfather, Michael Patrick Conlon, was born in Carrick-on-Shannon, Ireland in 1910 and died in Detroit in 1984. He was a burly redhead who worked in a factory, but, on some summer evenings when I was a child, prompted no doubt by beer and Kessler’s, he would tell his grandchildren stories of his childhood (or that he’d heard in childhood) concerning the invisible kingdom and its denizens. He was not one of those people given to fancy; but he knew these things were true. Untold numbers of people claim to have seen into this kingdom, and in the early twentieth century it was still easy to collect their stories, though I imagine now such experiences are not nearly as common as they used to be. Unfortunately, positivistic psychology, science, and sociology dismissed these kinds of experiences as wish-fulfillment, the product of unintended ingestion of natural hallucinogens, or a kind of atavistic primitivism. I never liked these kinds of explanations, which always seems to me an example of the kind of arrogant colonization western intellectuals have yet to resist inflicting on peoples and cultures they deem inferior.

Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has written about the development of a “buffered self” that accompanied the rise of modernity and the Scientific Revolution and which cordoned Western people from a porosity to nature and a trust in realities not readily apparent to the five senses: realities such as fairies, of course, but also those concerning the subtle qualities of things (such as the moon, relics, holy water, icons), not to mention angels, demons, even God. The Scientific Revolution and the Reformation served as what Taylor calls “engines of disenchantment” made only more efficient by the Enlightenment and what followed: the Industrial Revolution, the Marxist revolution, and, perhaps most insidiously, the digital revolution.

But even to use words like “re-enchantment” betrays that we don’t really accept these realities; that we’re simply nostalgic for a cultural past that lives only in our memory. We are still outside of it, doomed by a Cartesian separation oppressing us, an affliction of our cultural patrimony.

This affliction troubles most Christians today. I am often puzzled by theologians and other Christian intellectuals and academics who resolutely affirm the Real Presence in the Eucharist, the efficacy of prayer, and the existence of God, but who get a little fuzzy in their assurance when it comes to angels and demons, not to mention the qualities of relics and holy water. And don’t even start them on fairies and green men. If the numinous exists, it cannot be only in the context of the Mass. Unfortunately, most of us are only porous (or pretend to be) on Sundays.

I think one of the best examples of a figure who can hold both Christian orthodoxy and folk belief in balance (with a little Roman paganism thrown in) is the seventeenth-century Anglican priest and poet Robert Herrick. (I have a chapter about him in my book, The Incarnation of the Poetic Word.) In his massive Hesperides and Noble Numbers, Herrick asserts the joy of parish life: a life that includes Christian piety as well as pagan revelry. In his unwieldy collection of verses, Herrick embraces the rosary as well as the maypole, the lares as well as the Holy Spirit, the annoying members of the parish as well as the beautiful maidens, the Virgin Mary as well as Queen Mab, the faerie kingdom as well as the Kingdom of God. The world he describes is a messy one, but open to all. And that is about as Christian as it gets. The fact that he published his book after being ejected from his living in Devonshire and used it as a stick to thrust in the eye of the tiresome Puritan killjoys who censured him makes it all the more delicious.

An important aspect of Herrick’s book is that it also serves as lament for a world that was passing away: the world of a faith life integrated with nature. Nowhere does he describe so directly this world he so loved as in “The Argument of his Book”:

I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers, Of April, May, of June, and July flowers. I sing of May-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes, Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal-cakes. I write of youth, of love, and have access By these to sing of cleanly wantonness. I sing of dews, of rains, and piece by piece Of balm, of oil, of spice, and ambergris. I sing of Time’s trans-shifting; and I write How roses first came red, and lilies white. I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing The court of Mab, and of the fairy king. I write of Hell; I sing (and ever shall) Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all.

As the Scientific Revolution asserted its superiority, as the Reformations (and Counter Reformations) reduced the Church calendar to a shadow of its simultaneously cosmic/agrarian and divine character, and as enclosure laws and the march of capitalism more and more removed people from the land and drove them into the squalor of the cities and the self-fulfilling prophecy of a dastardly social Darwinism, there was no room left for such a world. Such a world—of fasts, festivity, and divinity, of fairies, fertility, and fairs—is not efficient. It is not economically viable. Stockholders don’t like it.

Our own world has no fasts to speak of, so it has no true festivity. It is hostile to both divinity and fertility. But it has its own faeries. Indeed, is not the internet a diabolical faerie Otherworld, a world of no material substance that nevertheless exists? Is not the posture of the person with a cellphone in his or her lap the same as the person in a state of contemplation? Do we not enter another world in just this way, whether in contemplative repose or by way of a screen? Is not the second of these a demonic parody of the former?

It seems to me that a connection to the natural world and its rhythms, to the wheel of the cosmos and the cycle of the liturgical year, is the anti-internet because it’s the real internet: it opens us to what is real, the intertwined realms of the natural and the supernatural, and it helps us stay in touch with each other because it allows us to stay in touch with reality. In considering the sterile benefits of modernity at the beginning of the twentieth century, G.K. Chesterton saw the return to the land as a significant part of the return to sanity: “If we ever get the English back onto English land they will become again a religious people, if all goes well, a superstitious people. The absence from life of both the higher and lower forms of faith is largely due to a divorce from nature and the trees and clouds.” We could use some healthy superstition connected to nature instead of the unhealthy superstition of virtual reality by which our humanity has become so degraded.

What I am saying, then, is that the green man I saw (or didn’t see) so long ago, the little people my daughter saw as a child, and that many of the thousands upon thousands (probably more like millions) of experiences others have had of the invisible realm throughout history are indicative of what I have called in another context a poetic metaphysics. And by “poetic” I do not mean less real than what we’re accustomed to. On the contrary, I mean more real than what we’re accustomed to.

Such a world is not any more inconsistent with Christian belief than the internet is. Indeed, being mindful of even the possibility of such a world can certainly restore health to psyches affected in untold ways by the ravages of postmodernity so clearly made manifest in the utter madness so prevalent on social media and the internet. The digital revolution, like those before, cares nothing for human flourishing, but, like its antecedents, merely instrumentalizes human beings for other purposes. As Martin Heidegger told us so long ago, technology is never neutral.

At the first performance of J.M Barrie’s Peter Pan on December 27th, 1904, no one knew what to expect when, after Tinkerbell’s death, Peter asked the audience, “Do you believe in fairies? If you believe, wave your handkerchiefs and clap your hands!” An anxious Barrie had told the orchestra to be ready to lay down their instruments and clap their loudest when that moment came. But when it did come, the audience burst into such overwhelming applause that the actress playing Peter Pan burst into tears and had to leave the stage for a few moments to compose herself.

I don’t think people are any different now. Only now, people are even more distanced from nature: that lack more than compensated for by their addictive involvement with their phones. They still desire a connection with the real, but look for it in exactly the wrong place.

I’m not suggesting everyone try to see faeries or the green man, or even to believe that such things exist. All I am saying is that there is more to the natural world than can be boiled down to an algorithm. As William Blake wrote, “We who dwell on Earth can do nothing of ourselves; everything is conducted by Spirits, no less than Digestion or Sleep.”

Those of us who go by the name Christian would do well to not confine the numinous to Sundays, for the Lord poured out his Wisdom over all of nature (Sirach 1:9). God is a spirit, and he is to be worshiped in spirit and truth. And spirit is impervious to data or algorithms.

Michael can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses.