Would you have been received into the Golden and Rosy Cross of 1710?

In 1710 one Sincerus Renatus published at Breslau the laws of the Brotherhood of the Golden and Rosy Cross: sixty-three brethren and no more, and a way in unlike any other. Seven questions, each set beside what the text says.

This is the German Golden and Rosy Cross, that of the eighteenth-century alchemists — not to be confused with the Dutch school of a similar name, founded in the twentieth century, which has its own test. We follow the laws of 1710 as the historian A. E. Waite digests and quotes them. Nothing is sent anywhere.

1. Have you already worked in the laboratory — practised the art, not only read of it?

“An earnest desire to attain the Art, a part taken in its practice and full experience of all its workings are essential qualifications” (p. 407).

Yes Perhaps No

2. Are you unmarried?

“No married man shall be eligible for initiation” (p. 407). Another law then allows a brother to take a wife if he much desires it: Waite notes that the two contradict each other.

Yes Perhaps No

3. Do you have few ties — few friends, little family around you?

The choice should fall on those who are “unencumbered by many friends”; and it is better to choose strangers, “lest the Art should become hereditary” (p. 407).

Yes Perhaps No

4. Would you serve two years as an apprentice, obeying your master?

The chosen heir “shall serve as an apprentice for two years”; he “shall be obedient to his master, even unto death” (p. 407).

Yes Perhaps No

5. Would you swear silence, at the peril of your life?

Kneeling before the Imperator: “I will never reveal the Mystery which has been unto me communicated … to any human being whomsoever”; all this “I promise to preserve eternally in holy silence, at the peril of my life” (p. 408).

Yes Perhaps No

6. Would you leave seven locks of your hair, and your name?

The master “cuts seven locks of hair from the head of his pupil”; sealed in papers bearing his name, they are placed in charge of the Imperator. Every member must then change his name (pp. 405, 408).

Yes Perhaps No

7. Would you accept always passing for ignorant?

It is part of his pledge “that he shall always seem to be ignorant, maintaining that the existence of such Secret Arts is affirmed only by impostors” (p. 409).

Yes Perhaps No

Laws of 1710 as given by A. E. Waite, The Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, 1924, pp. 403–409.

See my result

Where this comes from, and its limits

The laws appeared at Breslau in 1710 in Die wahrhaffte und vollkommene Bereitung des philosophischen Steins der Brüderschafft aus dem Orden des Gülden- und Rosen-Creutzes, under the name Sincerus Renatus (Sigmund Richter). We read them in the digest of Arthur Edward Waite, The Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, London, 1924, pp. 403–409, on archive.org: it is he who groups and quotes them, not the German original.

By this text the order claims to possess the stone and the elixir; it counts sixty-three brethren at most; it receives Roman Catholics, forbids questioning a brother about his faith, and refuses members of religious orders. Waite doubts that the order existed as the laws describe it.

What we have not read. In 1777 a reformed Golden and Rosy Cross, with nine grades, recruited among the Freemasons of Germany: it is the one historians know best. Its regulations are not those of 1710 and we have not read them.

This test sets your answers beside laws printed in 1710, read in a historian’s digest. It receives no one and belongs to no order. No philosopher’s stone is handed over at the end.