Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [23]
Not every member of the sect exercised his license to cheat and steal. The founders of the movement taught that perfect happiness was most likely to be found in quiet contemplation. But in truth the Free Spirit was generally perceived, even among its adepts, as a movement of anarchy and self-exaltation. As such it was vigorously persecuted and never had a large number of adherents, even in its German heartland. From time to time the Catholic Church seems to have hoped that the sect had been stamped out altogether. But antinomianism was too potent a philosophy to be repressed for long. Although the Brethren of the Free Spirit vanished around 1400, their ideas found their way into the Low Countries under the guise of “Spiritual Liberty.” A sect of this name was crushed in Antwerp around 1544, and the surviving Libertines fled from Flanders. Some of them turned up in Tournai and Strasbourg. Others vanished altogether. It seems at least possible that a few went north into what became the Dutch Republic.
Cornelisz, then, was apparently a Libertine—though not a very good one, for he ignored the more spiritual aspects of the faith in favor of the promise of complete freedom of action. In this he resembled Torrentius, his friend and teacher, and the two men might well have gone on enjoying their philosophical debates indefinitely had the painter not at last attracted the attention of the Dutch authorities around 1625. From then on, however, Torrentius found himself fighting for his freedom and his life. Labeled a heretic, hounded by both church and state, he became the first of Giraldo Thibault’s circle to be persecuted for his beliefs. The thoughts and views of his acquaintances became of increasing interest to the authorities as well.
The seeds that led eventually to Torrentius’s downfall were sown in the little German town of Kassel in the year 1614. It was there that a small group of German adepts produced an esoteric pamphlet that was not only to inspire generations of mystics but also to lead, at least indirectly, to Jeronimus’s departure from Haarlem.
The pamphlet was an anonymous work of indeterminate origin purporting to be nothing less than the manifesto of a powerful secret society called the Order of the Rosy Cross. It was a potent call for a second reformation—a reformation, this time, of the sciences—which promised, in return, the dawning of a golden age. But what really excited those who read the work was its subtext—scraps of information about the mysterious Brethren of the Rosy Cross themselves.
The Order, said the pamphlet, had been established in the fifteenth century by a man named Christian Rosenkreuz, who had spent many years traveling in the Middle East, collecting ancient wisdom and occult knowledge. The pamphlet stated that upon his return to Germany, Rosenkreuz created a brotherhood to ensure that his discoveries were put to use. There were eight Brethren of the Rosy Cross, and they moved from place to place, spreading secret knowledge, adopting the customs and the dress of the countries where they lived, and living incognito. Each brother was a potent mystic in his own right, and each was tasked with recruiting a worthy replacement for himself as he grew old. Christian Rosenkreuz himself, the pamphlet continued, had lived to be 106. When he died, in 1484, the members of his order laid him to rest in an underground vault hidden somewhere within the borders of the Holy Roman Empire. The vault was then sealed for a period of 120 years, and its rediscovery by a member of the Order, in the first years of the seventeenth century, had heralded the dawning of a new age. The opening of the tomb was a signal