Rosicrucianists
Reference

Glossary

Key terms used across this site, defined plainly.

Fama Fraternitatis

1614 pamphlet announcing the Rose Cross brotherhood and the discovery of Christian Rosenkreutz's tomb.

Confessio Fraternitatis

1615 companion text, more theologically pointed, reiterating the invitation to respond to the brotherhood.

Chymical Wedding

The 1616 alchemical romance narrated by Rosenkreutz, describing a seven-day allegorical wedding.

Ludibrium

Johann Valentin Andreae's later term for the manifestos: a literary jest or game he claimed had been taken too seriously.

Rose Cross

The combined emblem of a rose (secrecy, unfolding spirit) laid over a cross (matter, the body, redemption).

Sub rosa

Latin, "under the rose" — a pre-existing phrase for confidentiality that fed into the rose's symbolic meaning.

Albedo / Rubedo

Alchemical stages of purification (white) and completion (red/gold), echoed in Rosicrucian color symbolism.

Hermeticism

A Renaissance-revived philosophical tradition holding that the cosmos is unified by correspondence and that ancient sages once possessed complete wisdom.

Gold- und Rosenkreuz

An 18th-century German initiatory order, among the first actual organizations to adopt the Rosicrucian name and grade structure.

SRIA

Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, an 1866 Masonic-adjacent society whose members went on to found the Golden Dawn.

AMORC

Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis, founded 1915 in the U.S.; the largest modern Rosicrucian organization, known for claiming ancient Egyptian lineage.

Seven-sided vault

The geometrically symbolic tomb described in the Fama, evoking the seven classical planets.