Michael Martin - Rosicrucianism & Sophiology

Welcome to Occult of Personality: esoteric podcast extraordinaire. I’m your host, Greg Kaminsky.

This is episode number 202, featuring an outstanding interview with Michael Martin about the revised version of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and much more!

Occult of Personality podcast is made possible by you, the listeners, and by the subscribers to https://chamberofreflection.com, our membership site. This episode is also sponsored by several listeners who made generous donations to aid us and the cause of informed, authentic, and accessible interviews about western esotericism. Thank you again Martin, Andrew, David, and Judith! Because of your donations and the support of the subscribers to the Chamber of Reflection, we’re able to bring you interviews of this caliber and more to come.

Now, in episode #202, Michael Martin joins us to discuss this recent version of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz which features two of his essays that recontextualize and add a much greater depth of meaning to the story. To put it briefly, my interpretation of Martin’s assertion is that the actual intention of the text was to allow readers to see through the attachments to pride, recognition, and knowledge, whether esoteric or mundane and gather themselves around a simpler spirituality that endeavors to see and understand the vast mystery of reality beyond any classification or even languaging.

“The story is full of jokes, puzzles, satires, and red herrings—mostly at the expense of academic pride and the pretentions of occultists. Adding to the humor of The Chymical Wedding, most of the commentary written over the last five hundred years in hopes of probing its secrets has been of exactly the sort Andreae was pranking in the first place—which is why he described the book’s reception as “a game which was evaluated and foolishly explicated with subtle ingenuity and which proves the stupidity of the curios.” Indeed, some people don’t know a good joke when it’s played on them.

“It is my contention that the playful construction of The Chymical Wedding is evidence of Andreae’s intention to apply physic to the soul of the reader. The text, that is, serves as what Stanley Fish (one of the great readers of seventeenth-century literature before he turned to law and the life of a public intellectual) has called “a self-consuming artifact,” which, as he further explains, “signifies most successfully when it fails, when it points away from itself to something its forms cannot capture. If this is not anti-art, it is surely anti-art-for-art’s sake because it is concerned less with the making of better poems than with the making of better persons.” As a self-consuming artifact, The Chymical Wedding—reveling in the high comedy of intellectual hubris, revealing its own “mysteries” despite its occult paraphernalia, and ever again reminding the reader to not rely on learning or the discovery of the secrets of nature as surrogates for salvation—tries to enact a transformation on the soul of the reader by destabilizing the reader’s preconceptions of what a “chemical wedding” is—or, for that matter, what a “Rosicrucian” is. The Chymical Wedding succeeds when it fails (the sham “lost ending” certainly supports this supposition) because if it had succeeded as an occult text it would have surely failed as physic for the soul. Herein lies the brilliance of Andreae’s ludibrium. That so many have missed what is so obvious only proves his point the more.” – Michael Martin, Introduction: “So unlooked for an adventure,” The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, The Ezekiel Foxcroft Translation, revised, and with two new essays by Michael Martin, 2019

I think Martin’s work here is crucial and I am really thrilled to be able to talk to him about it and share that conversation with you! Although I wish I’d encountered Martin years ago when I first became interested in Rosicrucianism, but it seems fitting that it has taken until now. I would