Solemn Historical Dissertation on the Rosicrucians

IV. Now I proceed to the Origin of the Rosicrucians, if we can first agree on the time. Indeed, according to all the writers I have examined, a writing appeared in 1614 at Cassel in Hesse, or a Discourse on the common and general Reformation of the whole World, and the Fame of the Fraternity of the Rose-Cross. The same writing, which I have seen myself, appeared again at Frankfurt in 1615, with the Confession and the letters of some who wished to be referred to this society, and in the same year at Marburg and Danzig, and in the following year, 1616, at Cassel, it was given the Latin citizenship (for thus, I think, a better account of the times or places where these writings were published is kept than in Arnold); later, however, it was translated into four or five languages, as is said. Scarcely had this book been published when the fame of these Brethren resounded everywhere and spread so far that an Apocrisis, or Response to the Fame of the Fraternity and Society, was immediately opposed to them, published at Frankfurt, 1614, 8vo. Nevertheless, it remained unknown at what time or in what place this society began, whence most writers also disagree in defining the time. Hoornbeek writes in the same place, p. 434, that "the famous fraternity only began to exist around the year 15," whom B. Pfeiffer, theologian of Lübeck, follows in his Antichiliasmus, p. 62, and the theologian of immortal fame of Greifswald, Colberg, in his Hermetic-Platonic Christianity, p. 267, who notes that in this year a certain book, whose title is Arithmetical Mystery, was dedicated to this Society, as the same man of much reading observes.