A Dictionary of All Religions and Religious Denominations/Rosecrucians

by Hannah Adams

*ROSECRUCIANS, certain hermetical philosophers, who, in the fourteenth century, formed a secret society, pretending to the knowledge of the philosoper's stone, and other wonderful mysteries derived from the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Magi. Among their most celebrated professors they reckon Jacob Behmen, the mystic, Dr. Robert Fludd, an English physician, and many others of eccentric genius and learning, who blended the mysteries of alchymy, chemistry, and theology, into one system. The term Rosecrucian is of chemical derivation, from ros, dew, and crux, the cross; because they considered dew as the chief solvent of gold, and the cross as an emblem of lux, the light, those letters being formed out of the figure of a cross.^[1] The Rosecrucians have been sometimes confounded with the free masons, who pretend also to mystic secrets.

Original footnotes

1. Mosheim, vol. iv. p. 226.