{"collection":"Secret Rosicrucian Order","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/sro/rrm/index.htm","path":"sro/rrm/index.htm","source_url":"https://sacred-texts.com/sro/rrm/index.htm","text":"Hargrave Jennings was a nineteenth century English writer and occultist.\nHis vision of the inner knowledge of the Rosicrucians in this book\nis, at its core, very similar to that of\nthe left-hand Tantric path.\nIn some ways he was very reactionary;\nfor instance, he rejects the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs and the\natomic theory of the elements.\nIn other ways, he was far in advance of his time in his concepts\nof the roles of gender and sexuality in the quest for spiritual perfection.\nYou won't find much in the way of historical description of the Rosicrucians\nhere.\nKey Rosicrucian documents such as the\nFama Fraternatis,\nChemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkrueutz and\nConfessio Fraternatis\n(see Waite's The Real History of the Rosicrucians)\nare not even mentioned.\nNor will you find any disclosure of inner secrets.\nJennings constantly drops hints that he knows more than he is letting on,\nbut states up-front that he is not an initiate.\nJennings believed that the doctrines of the Rosicrucians\nwere derived from ancient phallic worship, and to a lesser extent\nfire and serpent worship.\nIn this book, Jennings constructs elaborate\nand constantly shifting sets of correspondences.\nHe tries to interrelate huge sets of symbols and objects in his search for the\nelusive Rosicrucians.\nThis is not a mainstream concept of the Rosicrucian doctrine,\nand contemporaries such as A.E. Waite summarily dismissed Jennings' theories.\nThe book makes frustrating reading at times.\nLike his friend Bulwer-Lytton, Jennings piles clause upon clause.\nOften he seems on the verge of\nstream-of-consciousness automatic writing, walking the thin boundaries\nbetween illumination, synesthesia and psychosis.\nBecause of Victorian sensibilities, he is unable to\ndiscuss aspects of sacred sexuality without elaborate circumlocutions,\nresorting to French and Latin when he needs to spell things out.\nUncharacteristically for a book of this vintage,\nthere are almost no footnotes, and very little other scholarly apparatus\n(although he occasionally gives elaborate bibliographic\ncitations in the body of the text).\nHe goes on about hats, flags, and heraldry,\nwith digressions and out-of-context asides.\nFor instance, in Part I, Chapter 18,\nhe starts out with the\ncolor spectrum and its correspondence to the vowels,\nsuddenly veers into the question of\nevil, and ties the chapter up with a note on the Filioque.\nHe proposes bizarre etymologies, e.g. Iona == Yoni,\nthat even in the 19th century would have been dismissed\nas bunk (perhaps he is actually using esoteric phonetic resonances).\nAnd he is definitely obsessed with spotting phallic symbols, both\nmale and female, everywhere.\nThis book dovetails with Hall's\nSecret Teachings of All Ages,\nalthough Hall is a lot more coherent and organized.\nThe two books cover a lot of the same ground such as eternal flames,\nAlchemy, the Kabbalah, and so on.\nJennings also wrote a number of other books, primarily on phallic worship,\nincluding The Masculine Cross\nand Ancient Sex Worship, (also at online sacred-texts),\nunder odd pseudonyms such as 'Sha Rocco' and Abisha S. Hudson.\nProduction Notes:\nDue to the huge number of small illustrations,\nwhere multiple figures occurred on a page, I merged them\ninto one image file.\nThis text uses Unicode for Greek, Hebrew and astrological\nsigns; if you have trouble viewing them you should\nrefer to sacred-texts Unicode walkthrough.","title":"The Rosicrucians Index","type":"page"}