‘Rose Circle 2011’

     

Yes, that’s correct, 2011! I cannot even comprehend that five years have passed since this stellar event in New York City took place, but this Flashback Friday edition of The Magpie Mason does indeed reach back exactly to February 26, 2011, when the Rose Circle Research Foundation hosted Christopher McIntosh and Steve Burkle for invaluable talks on Rosicrucianism and Alchemy, with David Lindez doing a great job as emcee.

Here’s the catch: While I know I still have my notes from this conference somewhere at Magpie headquarters, I can’t put my hands on them easily. The notebook will turn up, as it does every so often, and I will update this post with information from those notes, but for now here is my photographic record from the Renaissance Room in Masonic Hall. A partial record. I shot more than 160 photos during the event, but these are among the most colorful. Others show some PowerPoint projections that simply do not belong on the web, so there’s that.

Some of the architecture of the Renaissance Room at Masonic Hall, the headquarters of the Grand Lodge of New York, Free and Accepted Masons. 

This is the northwest corner of the lodge room, looking to the ceiling, with pipe organ at left.

I do not recall how Jason appeared at the lectern—
but I am sure he has a good reason for it!

Steve Burkle was the first of the two speakers to address the audience. I have forgotten the title of his presentation, but he discussed aspects of the practical application of spiritual alchemy concepts, among other things, to wit:

And Steve always works a fish story into his lectures!

Seriously, he is one of the best speakers around.

David Lindez stepped ‘unto the breach,’ as it were, to serve as master of ceremonies, providing comment and context to the proceedings. (I have my moments in public speaking. Sometimes I am coherent. Sometimes I can see that I grabbed the audience. I would never attempt to emcee a Rose Circle conference.)

That is Gene and Phillipe in the rear. Don’t know the gentlemen in front.

Here are Sam and Bob from New Jersey.

I regret not knowing the names of this couple because
they are regulars at Rose Circle events.

Geoffrey from Old No. 2.

Mario, Sr. and Mario, Jr.

Michael and Joe.

Henry at center, with Richard and Nick behind him.

The incomparable Janet Wintermute perusing the index of McIntosh’s
book. (If I didn’t use her full name, she’d kill me.)

To be a fly on the wall of that room.

I don't recall how many attended the conference,
but it pretty much was a sold out affair.

Dr. Christopher McIntosh spoke on ‘Rosicrucianism and the Search for a New World Order,’ which was based on his book The Rose Cross and the Age of Reason, an utterly mind-roasting history of early European Rosicrucianism and its effects on society. The text had been published a second time since 1992 just weeks before this conference, bringing down the retail price of the book from more than $1,000 to around twenty bucks or so.

Equipment, such as mic stands, is unavoidable, but
sometimes it can drive a photographer nuts.

I’m afraid I don’t know the gentleman with the microphone,
but that’s the inimitable Jonny Clockworks at left.

Never mind McIntosh, Burkle, and Lindez (although David’s
devilish smile is priceless), look at that room!

Oscar Alleyne. All this time I didn’t realize
I had such a good photo of him on file.

You have to appreciate an audience member who drafts his questions on the pages of his own notebook (to say nothing of coordinating his sport jacket with said notebook) in preparation for the Q&A!

David and Piers A. Vaughan. Sorry to say the Rose Circle
website store is sold out of those ties!

Piers, our president, makes Christopher a Fellow in the Rose Circle.

And—sigh—it’s over.

     

‘Music: The Rose and the Cross’

     

Among the symphony orchestras performing in New York City, the American Symphony Orchestra is the experimental, eccentric one. That is its reason for being, as it aims to give life to music of diverse sources and inspirations that otherwise linger in silence. Based at Carnegie Hall, the ASO will launch its 53rd season soon; included on the calendar this fall will be the New York debut of an obscure Russian work that I suspect would be of interest to the initiated ear.

From the publicity:

Russia’s Jewish Composers

American Symphony Orchestra

Thursday, December 17

7 p.m. Conductor’s Notes Q&A

8 p.m. Concert

Carnegie Hall

Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage

881 Seventh Avenue

Manhattan

Program:

Aleksandr Krein:

The Rose and the Cross (N.Y. Premiere)

Anton Rubinstein:

Cello Concerto No. 2

Mikhail Gnesin:

From Shelley (U.S. Premiere)

Maximilian Steinberg:

Symphony No. 1 (U.S. Premiere)

I know nothing of any of these pieces of music, but of course this edition of The Magpie Mind concerns the Krein composition. ASO says: “Krein was one of the leading Russian modernist composers of the early 20th century. This work was inspired by settings from Aleksandr Blok’s last play, The Rose and the Cross.” Nor do I know Blok’s last play—and, frankly, Russian modernist music is not my thing—but I do know Rosicrucianism has a long history in Russia. Paradoxically perhaps, but it has been there for centuries.

In his The Rose Cross and the Age of Reason (essential reading!), scholar Christopher McIntosh traces Russian Rosicrucian origins to the 1780s, when Germany’s Rite of Strict Observance fell into decline in Russia, and Rosicrucians there recognized an opportunity to attract spiritually inclined Freemasons. McIntosh writes:

“At his home in Moscow, [Freemason Johann Georg] Schwarz held a series of Sunday lectures, whose theosophical tenor places him firmly in the Rosicrucian tradition of thought. The doctrines conveyed by Schwarz included…the notion of the creation of the world through a series of emanations from God, and the idea of an invisible hierarchy of spirits…. From this standpoint, Schwarz attacked the French philosophes and helped to swell the reaction against the influence of French rationalism in Russia.”

The author continues with a timeline that shows an influential Rosicrucian publishing house, their creation of a hospital and pharmacy that served the poor, Rosicrucian-organized relief for the victims of the 1787 famine, and ultimately the government oppression of the movement.

But back to the music.

The ASO assembles this December 17 program thusly: “These Russian Jews exploded ethnic stereotypes by refusing to be known only as Jewish composers. These works identified them more with their homeland than their ethnicity.”

Krein composed The Rose and the Cross in 1917 for a large orchestra. The piece runs 20 minutes, and is constructed in five movements. It incorporates plenty of woodwinds, brass, strings, percussion, harp, keyboard, “other plucked strings,” voice(s) treated as instruments, and—and I’m eager to hear what this means—“electronic tape.” Its alternate title is “Symphonic Fragments for Symphony Orchestra after Aleksandr Blok.”

Aleksandr Krein

Aleksandr Krein (1883-1951) was born into a family of klezmer musicians. (Seven of the ten children in this family became professional musicians.) At age 13, Aleksandr entered the Moscow conservatory to study cello, and he began to compose music to accompany Russian and French symbolist poetry. He would embark on a career in music that made him pivotal to Jewish music in Russia (and later the Soviet Union). His Zagmuk, a story of the Jewish revolt in Babylon, would be the first Russian opera staged at the Bolshoi, and his Second Symphony is his musical expression of Jewish suffering from ancient times through the Holocaust, so I don’t get ASO’s downplay of his Jewish life. His career also included politically reliable work (e.g. a funerary ode for Lenin), as communist orthodoxies tolerates nothing else, and he was made an Honored Artist of the Soviet Union in 1934.

Aleksandr Blok’s drama The Rose and the Cross, the literary inspiration of Krein’s musical composition, was published in 1913, but it never has been staged, even after hundreds of rehearsals in Moscow. It is written in verse. The Columbia Encyclopedia of Modern Drama says it is “one of the finest plays of the symbolist era.” In Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement, Simon Alexander Morrison writes:

“It constitutes the most elaborate product of a short-lived endeavor among the ‘mystic’ Symbolist poets to write opera libretti, song texts, and plays calling for incidental music. The basic theme of this drama is the heterogeneity of human existence, the idea that there exist two realities, one cognitively graspable by the mind, the other intuitively graspable. The plot brings together dissimilar characters, settings, images, and events: a grief-stricken lady and a dejected knight, a dilapidated castle and a windswept beach, the bells of a sunken city and a ghost in a dungeon, a peasant dance around a decorated tree and a song contest in a flowering dale. The spring that sets the plot in motion is a song so provocative that it haunts the dramatis personae for years after they hear it performed by an itinerant troubadour. The troubadour reappears at the drama’s end for an encore performance…the song’s pastoral text identifies joy and suffering as equivalent emotional states. Its music was intended to mesmerize its listeners—both those on and off the stage.”

Tickets ($29-$54) for the ASO’s December 17 concert will go on sale September 8. Click here. Audio and video clips of the other three pieces to be performed can be heard here.

Let’s get together and check out this concert! Rosicrucians, Rose Croix Masons who get it, Martinists—come one, come all! Maybe meet a few doors down at the Russian Tea Room for dinner first?
     

‘Rose Circle and Rose Cross’

    

On Saturday, February 26, the Rose Circle Research Foundation will host another of its world renowned conferences, welcoming to its podium none other than Dr. Christopher McIntosh in celebration of the new publication of his The Rose Cross and the Age of Reason: Eighteenth-Century Rosicrucianism in Central Europe and its Relationship to the Enlightenment in January by SUNY Press in its continuing Western Esoteric Traditions series. This will take place at Masonic Hall, the headquarters of the Grand Lodge of New York, located at 71 West 23rd Street in Manhattan.

First published in 1992, The Rose Cross and the Age of Reason has been heralded as an indispensible text, and has fetched prices in the many hundreds of dollars in the secondhand book market. SUNY Press offers this title at $80 per copy.

The publisher offers this summary of the revised text:

“This new edition of Christopher McIntosh’s classic book on the Golden and Rosy Cross order is eagerly awaited. The order stands out as one of the most fascinating and influential of the high-degree Masonic and Illuminist groups that mushroomed in Europe from the eighteenth century onward. Active mainly in the German-speaking lands, it recast the original Rosicrucian vision and gave it renewed vitality. At one point it became politically influential when the Prussian King, Frederick William II, was a member of the order. Historians have often perceived the Golden and Rosy Cross as having had a conservative, anti-Enlightenment agenda, but this study – drawing on rare German sources – shows that the matter was more complex. The members of the order practiced alchemy and operated a degree system that was imitated by later orders, such as the Golden Dawn. Like the latter, the Golden and Rosy Cross exerted a wide and enduring cultural influence. Both the alchemy of the order and its powerful ritual system are insightfully described in Christopher McIntosh’s clear and compelling style.

According to Rose Circle:

Christopher McIntosh was born in England in 1943 and grew up in Edinburgh, Scotland. He studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, and German at London University, later returning to Oxford to take a doctorate in history with his dissertation on the Rosicrucian revival in the context of the German Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment. After working in London in journalism and publishing, he spent four years in New York as an information officer with the United Nations Development Program, then moved to Germany to work for UNESCO. In parallel, he has pursued a career as a writer and researcher specializing in the esoteric traditions. His books include The Astrologers and their Creed (1969); Eliphas Lévi and the French Occult Revival (1972); The Rosicrucians (latest edition 1997); The Rose Cross and the Age of Reason (1992), based on his dissertation; The Swan King: Ludwig II of Bavaria (latest edition 2003); and Gardens of the Gods (2005). His fictional work includes the occult novel Return of the Tetrad (1998). He also has a long-standing interest in nature-oriented belief systems. He has lectured widely and is on the faculty of the distance M.A. program in Western Esotericism at the University of Exeter, England. His home is in Bremen, North Germany.

McIntosh is indeed a Freemason, a longtime member of Pilgrim Lodge No. 238 in London. This lodge was founded in 1779 by Germans in London, and still conducts its rituals in German. Read more about it here.
 
The Magpie Mason also is the publicist of the Rose Circle Research Foundation, and expects to unleash a blizzard of publicity in a few days in support of this remarkable event. If you are interested in learning about Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, other esoteric disciplines, or European history, do not miss this conference.

‘Rose Circle and Rose Cross’

    

The details are being worked out still, but please know that next February the Rose Circle Research Foundation will host another of its world renowned conferences, welcoming to its podium none other than Dr. Christopher McIntosh in celebration of the new publication of his The Rose Cross and the Age of Reason: Eighteenth-Century Rosicrucianism in Central Europe and its Relationship to the Enlightenment in January by SUNY Press in its continuing Western Esoteric Traditions series. The date and location of this event are yet to be determined, but I think we can expect a Saturday afternoon in Manhattan.

First published in 1992, The Rose Cross and the Age of Reason has been heralded as an indispensible text, and has fetched prices in the many hundreds of dollars in the secondhand book market. SUNY Press will offer this title at $80 per copy.

The publisher offers this summary of the revised text:

“This new edition of Christopher McIntosh’s classic book on the Golden and Rosy Cross order is eagerly awaited. The order stands out as one of the most fascinating and influential of the high-degree Masonic and Illuminist groups that mushroomed in Europe from the eighteenth century onward. Active mainly in the German-speaking lands, it recast the original Rosicrucian vision and gave it renewed vitality. At one point it became politically influential when the Prussian King, Frederick William II, was a member of the order. Historians have often perceived the Golden and Rosy Cross as having had a conservative, anti-Enlightenment agenda, but this study – drawing on rare German sources – shows that the matter was more complex. The members of the order practiced alchemy and operated a degree system that was imitated by later orders, such as the Golden Dawn. Like the latter, the Golden and Rosy Cross exerted a wide and enduring cultural influence. Both the alchemy of the order and its powerful ritual system are insightfully described in Christopher McIntosh’s clear and compelling style.

According to Rose Circle:

Christopher McIntosh was born in England in 1943 and grew up in Edinburgh, Scotland. He studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, and German at London University, later returning to Oxford to take a doctorate in history with his dissertation on the Rosicrucian revival in the context of the German Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment. After working in London in journalism and publishing, he spent four years in New York as an information officer with the United Nations Development Program, then moved to Germany to work for UNESCO. In parallel, he has pursued a career as a writer and researcher specializing in the esoteric traditions. His books include The Astrologers and their Creed (1969); Eliphas Lévi and the French Occult Revival (1972); The Rosicrucians (latest edition 1997); The Rose Cross and the Age of Reason (1992), based on his dissertation; The Swan King: Ludwig II of Bavaria (latest edition 2003); and Gardens of the Gods (2005). His fictional work includes the occult novel Return of the Tetrad (1998). He also has a long-standing interest in nature-oriented belief systems. He has lectured widely and is on the faculty of the distance M.A. program in Western Esotericism at the University of Exeter, England. His home is in Bremen, North Germany.

McIntosh is indeed a Freemason, a longtime member of Pilgrim Lodge No. 238 in London. This lodge was founded in 1779 by Germans in London, and still conducts its rituals in German. Read more about it here.
 
The Magpie Mason also is the publicist of the Rose Circle Research Foundation, and expects to unleash a blizzard of publicity later this year in support of this remarkable event. If you are interested in learning about Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, other esoteric disciplines, or European history, do not miss this conference.