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332
HISTORY OF THE ROSICRUCIANS.
Lucis, and Holy Household of Rosie Crucian Philosophers.
London,
1664. 8vo.
El Havarevna; or, the English Physitian's Tutor in the As-
trobolismes of Mettals Rosie Crucian. London, 1665. 8vo.
The philosophical principles of John Heydon need
hardly detain us long. That Typhon is the adversary of
Beata Pulchra, that Hyle is the spirit of the cold and dry
earth, that Beata Pulchra is the vivifying spirit of Nature,
that the bodies of the dead rebellious angels became a fruit-
less and unprofitable chaos, are matters which will scarcely
interest the serious student. His alchemical theories and
experiments belong to the lowest dregs
of this much de-
graded science, except in those parts which are bodily stolen
* from Eugenius Philalethes ; and all that is of value in his
numerical mysticism, geomantic revelations, astromancy,
and investigations of spiritual mysteries, is derived from
anterior writers. His medical treatises are disfigured by
his gross superstition and credulity ; but the unhc;ard of
experiments and recipes which they occasionally provide
make them extremely curious reading. Tres rares, trks curieux,
et rtclierchts des amateurs, his books, one and all, command
large prices in the market, and the republication of his
marvellous Rosicrucian reveries and romances, is a venture
that deserves well at the hands of all students of the by-
ways of occultism.
In John Heydon we find the names Rosicrucian, Rosi-
crucianism, &c., used in a general sense, and as terms to
conjure with. The supposed brethren are confounded with
the elder alchemists, theosophists, etc., and an irrational
1
Compare the "Temple of Wisdome," vol. i., last pages, with
the Preface to Vaughan's " Euphrates," and also with the " Occult
Philosophy " of Agrippa, book iv.