The Pelican and the Rose: a Templar Angle 

By borsky

While researching the hermetic Bruges, I came upon many representations of a pelican often in a templar context. Researching even further it seems this animal, from which was thought it fed its offspring with its entrails, symbolizes both Christ, offering his body as food to his followers as well as the sacrificial Order of the Rosicrucians, often referred to as the eighteenth grade of freemasonry. I wanted to know more about this linkage, and I found the following, loosely translated from
Roland Edighoffer: “Les Rose-Croix”, coll. Que sais-je, Presses Universitaires de France, 1986, Paris, pp. 88-97. Snippets from my own biased view are between brackets.

The pelican appearing on top of the entrance to the Holy Blood Chapel in Bruges.

Introduction

Freemasonry probably originated from the Templars through the Rosicrucians. To the humanism of the masons they added their catholic goal, the search for the spiritual Golden Fleece.

(Jason returns with the golden Fleece. Above a figure that looks like Eris…)

A Strasbourg manuscript from 1760 compares the Templar to the Rosicrucian initiation mysteries. It also mentions that all the canonics (the Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre ) guarding the grave (Anastasis) of Christ in Jeruzalem were all members of the Rosicrucian order. It was said the rosicrucians were the secret heir to the knowledge, more specifically the alchemical one, of the excommunicated Templars.
(In this perspective one should see alchemy as the ancient art of transcending ones consciousness through the use of delicately selected metaphors. The current consensus considers it as a primitive origin of the modern, paradoxically a-spiritual science; this paradigm, succesfull for the last 150 years approximately, has been revealed by Niels Bohr to tell us more about ourselves. Which it was intended to, originally…)

Further on, the manuscript tried to prove a continuous linkage from Adam himself, through Salomon, the Roman Mystery cults, the school of Pythagoras, the Gymnosophists, the Essenes, the Gnostics, the Kabbalists and the Templars, all the way up to Freemasonry as an initiatic congregation.
Several Rosicrucian chapters started to appear in Germany and surrounding countries. One famous lodge started in 1770 in Ratisbonn in Bavaria (!), and spread further to Venice in 1775 which then became the center of the rosicrucian activity. Chapters further appeared in Saxony, Hesse, Silesia, Upper Lusatia and even the Polish king Stanislas II joined one.

Although we might consider their dogmas as a bit fuzzy, we know that one of the two grades, the Scottish Ancient Master, used in its coat of arms three cups representing salt, sulphur and mercury, supposedly the three items discovered by the Templars when they first entered Salomon’s temple. Other symbols often used were the two masonic columns but with a twist, where Boaz is upside-down and Jachin is broken, representing the destruction of the Templar order, and the rope and the palms of Arcadia, from the tree symbolically growing on the Salomon's temple mythical architect, Hiram Abiff's tomb of transgression, representing his resurrection.

Jachin and Boaz. From "The Compass of the Wise", Berlin, 1782. Jachin on the left has male characteristics (Pater), the superior fire (Aesch) and inferior air , Boaz has female characteristics (Mater), the superior water (Majim) and inferior earth . Combined, they produce the Lapis in the middle, which combines elements from the higher world - symbolized by the 5 planets - with elements from the lower world - symbolized by the elements tartarium, sulphur, salmiak, vitriol, salpetre, aluin and antimony in the centre (symbolized by the imperial apple ). This symbology clearly appears in Bruges in the Church of Jeruzalem.

Poussin, Et in Arcadia Ego

The Golden Rosicrucian Order

Finally in Berlin the Masonic Lodge of the Three Spheres became the receptacle for what would become the most succesful Rosicrucian kabbal: the “Golden Rosicrucian Order” (which for many appear as the blueprint for the Golden Dawn). It found the origins of its doctrine in the “Opus Mago-Cabbalisticum et Theosophicum - In Which The Origin, Nature, Characteristics, And Use Of Salt , Sulfur and Mercury are Described in Three Parts Together with much Wonderful Mathematics” published in 1784 by Georg von Welling in Leipzig (which I was lucky to flip through when visiting the Hermetic library in Amsterdam on the 2007 Euro-meetup).

From Welling's Opus Mago-Cabbaliticum

Again, the importance of an unbroken line of the hidden knowledge is stressed here, starting from Adam over to Salomon, the Eleusis Mysteries, the druids, etc. According to the “Fama Fraternitatis”, the key document for the Rose Cross (published in 1614), the official creator of the order was an Alexandrian monk named Ormus, who was baptised by the apostle Mark during his priesthood in Egypt. The Order was kept hidden in Palestine under the leadership of seven Magisteri. After a defeat following the death of the king of Jeruzalem, Baldwin I (Godfroy of Bouillon's brother) in 1118, the Brethren of this secret society started to travel around the world (The Order of the Knights Templar, officially named “The Knighthood of God,” was formed in 1118 by nine French knights who travelled to Jeruzalem). In 1196 three Brethren started an initiatic school in Scotland. The polymath Raymond Lull (1232-1326) as well as most members of the Houses of York and of Lancashire became high-ranking members.

Raymond Lull.

They considered themselves as being the elite amongst Freemasons, and even thought of all other masons as the “Brethren of the Courtyard”, symbolically placed on the courtyard outside the real temple. In this Scottish order, brothers only knew the adepts from their own circle, while the nine higher grades offered a progressive initiation in kabbalah and alchemy. It was said the Magisteri had complete knowledge thereof.
Some of the more outstanding writers in this period, whose works were published by the “Golden Rosicrucian Order” in Berlin, were F. Schröder, a professor of medicine at Marburg University and an erudite hermeticist, and F. Oetinger, a follower of Jacob Boehme and Immanuel Swedenborg.

An elaborate hoax?

It seems the very succesful Golden Rosicrucian Order was founded on a not very honest basis by two con men, J.R. von Bisschoffswerder (1714-1803) and J.C. Woellner (1732-1800). The former, an officer in the Prussian army, and follower of the “Templar Strict Observance”, was lured into thaumaturgy by a cabaretier and stage magician named Schröpfer. The latter was an ambitious ex-priest, also a proclaimed Templar, and a brilliant speaker who befriended many German princes who were attarcted to the secret knowledge. Together they created the new movement while partaking in the activities of the Three spheres Lodge in Berlin. Bisschoffswerder became acquainted with Prince Frederich-Wilhelm, the heir to the Prussian throne. Together they convinced the naive Prince they had cured him of a disease and went on providing him the time of his life talking with spirits. The séance was held at the appartment of the Prince's misstress, who was in on the con. In the appartment were lots of mirrors and gizmos installed to fool him. A Viennese ventriloquist hiding for the Austrian police was the main attraction. After the prince had had conversations with both Julius Caesar and Gottfried Liebniz, he became one of Bisschoffswerders and Woellners “Golden Rosicrucian Order” more enthousiastic followers. In 1786, the prince became Frederich-Wilhelm II, king of Prussia; Woellner became State Secretary for religious matters and Bisschoffswerder State Secretary of war. From then on the order to grow even more powerful. Many masons left their lodge to become members.

The Florentine connection

Independently from the Berlin lodge, C.E. Waechter (1746-1825), a very active member of the “Templar Strict Observance” in Stuttgart was send to Italy by Duke Ferdinand von Brunswick who wanted to start a new millenarist church, combining both Catholicism and Protestant reformation. It was believed the “Unknown Superiors” were hidden in Florence. In 1778 Waechter claimed to have been contacted by an initiate who told him the Templar Order was just one of many emanations of the original order, that of the Rose Cross. Waechter also claimed to have been elevated throught the first six grades. Brunswick would try to adapt the Strict Observance accordingly but it seems it didn’t work out so the idea was seemingly abandoned.

The end of the order

The pope had aborted the order of the Jezuites in 1773. Many catholics thought of the Rosicrucians as of crypto-jezuits. A pamphlet written in 1782, “Der Rozenkreuzer in seiner Blösse” (then naked rosicrucian) described them and the Templars as mere puppets of a hidden jezuit kabbal. Some Rose Cross members even started to think they were infiltrated.
In 1784, the Three Globes Lodge published a manifest against the Illuminati of Bavaria. According to them, although the lower grades seemed similar, Weishaupts organisation, created in 1776 in Ingolstadt, had no masonic values but were a rationalist and atheist kabbal with hidden revolutionary goals. Strangely the Illuminati were forbidden in Bavaria in 1785, and the “Golden Rosicrucian Order” disappeared in 1786. It seems Woellner and Bischoffswerder simply abolished the order after their claims on medical cures were questioned. They kept their high-ranking positions though.

The Eighteenth grade

The first mention of a rosicrucian grade inside a masonic lodge was in France, where in 1762 a “Council of the Oriental Knights” was founded. For this lodge seven grades were developped, based on the Adonhiramite rite.

The highest rank was named “Knight of the Rosy Cross”. Their main ceremony was the “Third Point of the Rosy Cross” and involved a ritual of death and reincarnation, and the loss and recovering of speech, symbolized by the acronym INRI, with its three meanings: Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaerum (Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews), Igne Natura Renovatur Integra (All nature is renewed by fire) and a third one that had to be provided by the initiate.
The masonic lodge in Lyon had an eighth grade called the “Knight of the Sword and the Rosy Cross” and in 1763 the “Chapter of the Black Eagle” was founded by a Jean-Baptiste Willermoz which had a secret grade called “Grand Master of the Rosy Cross Black Eagle”.
Finally the most succesful rite, the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry has kept an eighteenth grade named “Knight Rose Croix” in Europe, or “Knight of the Rose Croix de Heredom Council of Kadosh” in the United States (Usually it seems mere a historical denomination with no direct bounds with the Templar tradition). Its symbol is the pelican.

Further Resources