download PDF version: 38.1MB - Global Grey

266 HISTORY OF THE ROSICRUCIANS.
and assistance. Pseudo-Kosicrucian societies, of course,
appeared on the field, and gangs of miserable tricksters who
traded on individual credulity by the power of the magical
name. Buhle cites from the " Occulta Philosophia" of
Ludovicus Conradus Orvius, the unhappy personal experi-
ence of that writer concerning such a society, " pretending
to deduce themselves from Father Kosy-Cross, and who
were settled at the Hague in 1 622. After swindling him
out of his own and his wife's fortune, amounting to eleven
thousand dollars, they kicked him out of the order, with
the assurance that they would murder him if he revealed
'
'
their secrets, which secrets,' says he,
I have faithfully
kept, and for the same reason that women keep secrets
viz., because I have none to reveal ;
secret.' "
for their knavery is no
Vague rumours of veritable Kosicrucian adepts were
occasionally heard, but in spite of their boasted powers, in
spite of their projected reformation of all the world, and in
spite of the seven years' strife of tongues which they occa-
sioned, they had no influence whatsoever upon the thought
of their age. An isolated and doubtful transmutation is
occasionally ascribed to them, which is the sum total of
their alchemical achievements. They posed principally as
a healing fraternity, yet their influence on the medical
science of their century is less still than that which they
exerted upon alchemy.
"
In medicine," says Figuier,
"
that art which they were pledged to practise wherever they
wandered, according
to the first commandment of their
master, the catalogue of their triumphs is speedily exhausted.
We have already seen that they boasted of having cured the
leprosy in an English count. They
also claimed to have
restored life to a Spanish King after he had been dead for