Fama Fraternitatis

The Fama Fraternitatis (1614) is the first of the three legendary Rosicrucian Manifestos, published anonymously (likely by a circle including Johann Valentin Andreae) in Kassel, Germany.

The Myth of Christian Rosenkreutz

The text announces the existence of a secret brotherhood founded by the mythical "Father C.R.C." (Christian Rosenkreutz), who traveled to the East (Arabia, Fez) to gather pristine alchemical and magical wisdom before returning to Europe. The manifesto calls for a "General Reformation" of both the Church and the sciences, explicitly rejecting the stale Aristotelianism of the universities and the papal authority of Rome in favor of a Paracelsian, Hermetic understanding of nature. As Carlos Gilly has shown, while the brotherhood was a literary fiction, the manifesto sparked a massive, very real intellectual frenzy across early modern Europe.