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By Root 810 0

but this applied only to the pope. France adopted the new calendar in 1583 and abolished the tenth to the nineteenth of December. In Germany there was a schism: the Catholic regions adopted the reform in 1584, with Bohemia, but the Protestant regions adopted it in 1775, almost two hundred years later, and Bulgaria—and this is a fact to bear in mind—adopted it only in 1917! Now, let’s look at England...It adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752. That’s to be expected: in their hatred of the papists, the Anglicans also held out for two centuries. So you see what happened. France abolished ten days at the end of 1583, and by June 1584 the French were all accustomed to it. But when it was June 23, 1584, in France, in England it was still June 13, and ask youself whether a good Englishman, Templar though he may have been, would have taken this into account. They drive on the left even today, and ignored the decimal system for ages...So, then, the English show up at the Refuge on what for them is June 23, except that for the French it’s already July 3. We can assume the appointment wasn’t to take place with fanfares; it would be a furtive meeting at a certain corner at a certain hour. The French go to the place on June 23; they wait a day, two days, three, seven, and then they leave, thinking that something has happened. Maybe they give up in despair on the very eve of July 3. The English arrive on the third and find nobody there. Maybe they also wait a week, and nobody shows. The two grand masters have missed each other.” “Sublime,” Belbo said. “That’s what happened. But why is it the German Rosicrucians who go public, and not the English?”

I asked for another day, searched my card files, and came back to the office glowing with pride. I had found a clue, an almost invisible clue, but that’s how Sam Spade works. Nothing is trivial or insignificant to his eagle eye. Toward 1584, John Dee, mage and cabalist, astrologer to the queen of England, was assigned to study the reform of the Julian calendar.

“The English Templars meet the Portuguese in 1464. After that date, the British Isles seem to be struck by a cabalistic fervor. Anyway, the Templars work on what they have learned, preparing for the next encounter. John Dee is the leader of this magic and hermetic renaissance. He collects a personal library of four thousand volumes, a library in the spirit of the Templars of Provins. His Monas Hieroglyphica seems directly inspired by the Tabula smaragdina, the bible of the alchemists. And what does John Dee do from 1584 on? He reads the Steganographia of Trithemius! He reads it in manuscript, of course, because it appeared in print for the first time only in the early seventeenth century. Dee, the grand master of the English group that suffered the failure of the missed appointment, wants to discover what happened, where the error lay. Since he is also a good astronomer, he slaps himself on the brow and says, ‘What an idiot I was!’ He starts studying the Gregorian reform, after he obtains an appanage from Elizabeth, to see how to rectify the mistake. But he realizes it’s too late. He doesn’t know whom to get in touch with in France. He has contacts, however, in the Mittel-europaische area. The Prague of Rudolf II is one big alchemist laboratory; so Dee goes to Prague and meets Khunrath, the author of Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae, whose allegorical plates later influenced both Andreae and the Rosicrucian manifestoes. What sort of relationships does Dee establish? I don’t know. Shattered by remorse at having committed an irreparable error, he dies in 1608. Not to worry, though, because in London someone else is at work—a man who, everybody now agrees, was a Rosicrucian and who spoke of the Rosicrucians in his New Atlantis. I mean Francis Bacon.”

“Did Bacon really talk about them?” Belbo asked.

“Strictly speaking, no, but a certain John Heydon rewrote the New Atlantis under the title The Holy Land, and he put the Rosicrucians in it. But for us that makes no difference. Bacon didn’t mention them by name for obvious reasons of discretion,