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Rose Cross over the Baltic: The Spread of Rosicrucianism in Northern Europe (Brill's Studies in Itellectual History)

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Much new information on the Rosicrucians has emerged in recent years. The publishing conditions for the first Rosicrucian manifestoes have been studied in detail and the origin of these writings in Tubingen and Cassel have been set beyond doubt. With this emphasis on local events in Southern Germany it has become increasingly evident that it is time to construct a general perspective of the movement that supplants Francis Yates controversial statement, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1973). The way to do so is to study the various Rosicrucian replies as they emerged in their local settings. In this book, Akerman does this for the Baltic area. She investigates the millenarian aspects of Rosicrucianism as it emerges from a reading of Johannes Burcus' papers. This material has been little known due to the reticence of researchers to publish on Burcus as a Rosicrucian. When Burcus' favorite idea, that of The Lion of the North, was studied by Johan Nordstrom in the 1930s, it was readily seen that it could be associated with the Nazi myth of the Nordic Superman. Confronted by the negative role of national myths, Nordstrom abandoned the project of making a synthesis of the Paracelsian and Hermetic material found in Swedish archives. In 1942, Nordstrom's student Sten Lindroth published on Brucus as a Paracelsian but kept the references to the Lion of the North to a minimum. Here, Akerman shows that the Paracelsian myth of the Lion to the North was an essential ingredient in the political use of the Rosicrucian writings.

Readership: All those interested in intellectual history, seventeenth-century studies, and the history of Western esotericism.