The Forbidden Universe by Lynn Picknett, Clive Prince

Meanwhile,outside forces presented them and the whole of Europe with the much wider horror of the Thirty Years War.
    Like the curse of the mythical Fisher King, the end of the Wedding’s great promise led to the devastation by war, massacre, famine and disease of large swathes of Germany. Protestantism and Jewry were wiped out in Bohemia. Frederick and Elizabeth, the iconic alchemical bride and groom and figureheads of the Protestant movement and Rosicrucian hopes, fled into exile at The Hague, where they maintained a semblance of grandeur on hand-outs from sympathetic relations. The Alchemical Wedding degenerated into bathos, the once-golden couple being sadly tarnished.
    For a while it really seemed as if all Protestantism was about to be snuffed out. The Hapsburgs would rule Europe, allowing the Catholic Church to re-establish itself by ‘punishment and pain’, to draw on Bruno’s all-too-accurate phrase. The future looked to be inescapably priest-ridden and grimly black with the smoke from the fiery pyres of martyrdom. The Hermetic reformers hurriedly regrouped. Rosicrucian mania in Germany abruptly ceased in the year that Prague fell. Campanella changed from opposing to advocating reform of the Spanish monarchy in the same year.

THE INVISIBLES
    The Rosicrucian craze then shifted to France. In 1623 notices appeared in Paris announcing that members of the ‘College of the Brothers of the Rose Cross’ were present in the city, on ‘a visible and invisible stay’, prompting the rather evocative nickname of the Invisibles – a sure carrot to dangle before all conspiracy theorists.
    Announcing the presence of the Invisibles generated a Jesuit propaganda campaign whose hysteria matched that of a witch hunt. Here were members of a secretmagical brotherhood – sorcerers , no less – abroad in the city, up to God knows what and only God would know what because they were invisible. Books and pamphlets speedily appeared warning that the Invisibles were part of a devilish plot. The anonymous but presumably delightful Horrible Pacts made between the Devil and the Pretended Invisible Ones claimed that the Invisibles were part of a global Satanic conspiracy, that six groups of six members in different areas around the world were plotting mankind’s downfall. Another pamphlet specifically named Michael Maier as their leader. The Jesuit François Garasse called them ‘a diabolical secret society who should be broken on the wheel or hanged on the gallows’. 17
    If this seems all rather sensational, then no doubt that was the intention. After all, claiming to be invisible Rosicrucians was likely to provoke over-heated imaginings. The PR genius involved in whipping up this type of frenzy suggests that the notices were actually the work of Rosicrucian haters, or more accurately enemies of Rosicrucianism.
    Why should anyone want to stir up anti-Rosicrucian paranoia, especially at that particular place and time? As Parisian intellectuals became fervently hooked on the manifestos’ furore and the works of their defenders such as Michael Maier, generating a major scare would have acted like a cold shower on potential new devotees. If all the hot air about pacts with the devil gave the impression that to dabble in Rosicrucianism would guarantee an eternity of being prodded by poker-wielding demons, then a similar fate would surely await them whilst they were still alive, care of the Pope’s men.
    It is unlikely to be a coincidence that in the same year the Hermetic tradition also came under a sustained onslaught in Paris, from Marin Mersenne, a Jesuit-educated monk. In works published from1623 he attacked everyone from Pico della Mirandola onwards, reserving special hostility forRobert Fludd, with whom he engaged in a high-profile war of words. He wrote of Bruno that he had ‘invented a new way of philosophy in order to secretly fight against the Christian religion’. 18 And tellingly, Mersenne was the first to use Casaubon’s