Frederick and his Elizabeth were beings of a different order. Of course they stood for True Religion, of course they were Evangelical, but they were also Hope and Beauty and Conciliation and Possibility and Fructification and Peace; somehow this seemed obvious to all, all at least who came within range of the happy rays their persons emanated. There were two young men in the throngs when He and She first met beneath the Arch at Heidelberg: one was a peregrinating Lutheran pastor, Johann Valentin Andreæ, and the other a student at the university, a Moravian and a member of the Moravian Brethren, a gentle pietist sect—his name was Jan Komensky, which he latinized to Comenius. And both of them felt it: good stars in conjunction, the world going the right way after a long wandering, Saturnian cold hatred and Martian hot fury both abating. Sun and the scent of roses.

More than that even.

They both imagined, Jan and Valentin—they talked about it long in the halls of the university, in the thronged inns and the silences of the Bibliotheca palatina where the great Johannes Gruter was librarian—that a universal reformation of the whole wide world might be beginning, now, right now. What did it matter that the almanacs and prophecies had so far been wrong—the fateful year 1600 had brought no vast changes that they could see—that didn't mean the world wasn't in the throes of a transformation, one that remained invisible so far. Anyway it filled their own souls. How could they help to forward it? Smuggled out of the dungeons of the Inquisition came manuscripts of Tommaso Campanella, who taught that the earth was now growing closer to the sun, and the temperature of the cold north was warming, and Love was increasing. Campanella projected a great city, perfect city, City of the Sun, ruled by a philosopher hidden in a circular tower inside a square inside the cubic walls of the city. A universal hieroglyphic picture-dictionary would cover those walls, instructing all the citizens in virtue and wisdom by the immediacy and force of its magic images.

Magic. Theurgical, cabalistical, alchemical, hieroglyphical, historico-alchemical, cabalistico-theurgical, thaumaturgico-iatrochemico-astrological. As the alchemist recreates in his furnace the entire world, which thereupon grows gold as gold grows in the matrix of the earth, but faster; as the cabalist manipulates the letters of the words by which God commanded the world to be and to be fruitful, thus sharing in the divine creative power; in the same way couldn't the slow-advancing history of the world be accelerated, if only its events could be read right? In 1614—when the sacred couple had been two years in Heidelberg and the two friends had parted, Comenius returning to the Czech lands, Andreæ to Tübingen to be a Lutheran pastor—there came the outfolding, the sudden way opening, the cry of summoning and possibility.

Universal and General Reformation of the Whole Wide World; together with the Fama Fraternitatis of the laudable Order of the Rosy Cross, written to all the Learned and Rulers of Europe. It was a little gray pamphlet printed in Cassel, it was a manuscript read in Prague, it was a letter warmly responded to in Germany, the respondent thrown into the galleys by the Jesuits (so the pamphlet itself proclaimed). This happy time, when there is discovered not only the other half of the world, which lay hidden from us before, but also many wonderful and never-before-seen works and creatures; and men reimbued with great wisdom, who might renew all arts, so that Man might understand his own nobleness and worth, and why he is called Microcosm, and how far his knowledge might reach into Nature.

Impossible not to be moved by these huge certainties. Andreæ in Tübingen, Comenius in Moravia, scholars and Inquisitors in Bavaria and Saxony read and reread. Who were these Brothers? They had long been among us, it appeared, awaiting their hour. The wisest of them, C.R., had traveled the world and discoursed with the wise in every land. The realms of the Turk too, Fez, Damascus, Ægypt and Arabia Felix. And from C.R. the wisdom passes to R.C., his brother, and B., a painter, and G., and P.D., their secretary. Thence to A., and D., and to J.O. in England, master of Cabala, as his book H. shows. With the whole alphabet seemingly summoned, the pamphlet then tells how the Brothers went out into various lands, not only to communicate their Axiomata secretly to the learned but to heal the sick for free; and they vow to keep their brotherhood a secret for a hundred years. Why now have they broken their silence? Because the lost tomb of Brother R.C. (or C.R.C. as he apparently becomes) has at last been discovered, and the door opened. As also there shall be opened a door to Europe, which has already begun to appear, and which many expect and long for.

Johann Valentin Andreæ stayed up all night reading, walked the streets, unable to stay still. What was he being told to do? What was being asked of him? How could the universal reformation of the world be both at hand and impossible? In a later age, unimaginable then, you would say: the current of that work passes through him, and the resistance of his soul heats him to incandescence.

Then silence. Silentium post clamores, the little screed promised, a pause for the leaven to work in souls, nothing more needing to be said.

Then in the following year a new call, another libellum, this one in Latin:

A brief consideration of a More Secret Philosophy, written by Philip à Gabella, a student of philosophy, now published for the first time together with the Confession of the R.C. Fraternity. Printed at Cassel by Wilhelm Wessel, printer to the Most Illustrious Prince, in 1615.

The more secret philosophy was a sign, one he seemed both to have always known and to be seeing for the first time:

* * * *

The Consideratio of the sign was an arithmetic, or a mathesis; the sign itself was a stella hieroglyphica—so it said of itself. It began with a Pythagorean Y, and therefore it might be a story, the history of the universe described as a soul's journey, or maybe a soul's journey described as the universe. Johann Valentin Andreæ stared at the sign, which seemed to him to be something like a small human figure, and then he studied the paragraphs that followed, recounting the vicissitudes, divisions, and reassemblings through which that figure was put. The more he stared the more he understood and the less he knew. He shook his head, laughed, felt tricked, wondered; he cast it aside, he picked it up again. It was a joke, but a good joke. Or it was no joke: the old cold world was ending, and an influx of the truth, light, and glory that God had commanded should accompany poor Adam from Paradise and sweeten his misery was about to poured upon the world.

For the past year Johann Valentin had studied in secret the Great Art of transmutation, as the Fraternity was said to be doing in many places, as he was seemingly commanded to do if he wanted to be one of them, if there were really any of them at all: to see how far his knowledge might reach into Nature. His own mother was a chymist and worker in materia medica; he had stood by her as she worked at her stills and her ovens when he was a boy, but alone now he was too timid to start a physical fire, and to mix physical alchymia in physical cucurbites, to torment actual materia and lay his athenor within an actual physical stove. That was not the only way to work in the Art, though, he was sure. The heart was a stove too, the brain an athenor. He thought that this figure, this stella hieroglyphica that he looked at, might itself be a précis or epitome of the whole Art. It was the mathematical bones of the homunculus, a stick figure to be clothed in flesh, and that clothing was the Work, and the Self that resulted was the object and goal.