Societas Rosicruciana In Anglia

The Rosicrucian background

The word “Rosicrucian” goes back to two anonymous German pamphlets of the early seventeenth century, the Fama Fraternitatis and the Confessio Fraternitatis, followed by the allegorical Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz. They announced a secret brotherhood of the Rose Cross dedicated to healing, learning and the reform of knowledge. Whether such a brotherhood ever existed is still debated, but the texts inspired generations of alchemists, mystics and scholars across Europe.

The SRIA builds its teaching on these writings, yet it is careful not to claim descent from the original fraternity. There is no documentary thread connecting the seventeenth-century Rosicrucians with the Victorian society. Groups calling themselves Rosicrucian probably did exist from the 1600s onward, though how faithfully they kept to the ideals of the Fama is unclear. The antiquary and early Freemason Elias Ashmole (born 1617) is often linked with the Rosicrucians by reputation, although he was never shown to have been one of them.

Origins and history

The Society’s story begins in Scotland. A non-Masonic Rosicrucian society had been meeting in Edinburgh since at least 1857 under its Magus Maximus, Anthony Oneal Haye. On 31 December 1866 Haye admitted two well-known English Masons, Robert Wentworth Little and the Masonic historian William James Hughan, and over several return visits in the following months they were advanced through its grades and given authority to form an English branch.

Little was the driving force. A clerk and cashier in the Grand Secretary’s office of the United Grand Lodge of England, and later secretary of the Royal Masonic Institution for Girls, he was still in his twenties and had already helped establish the Red Cross of Constantine. The first recorded meeting of the “Rosicrucian Society of England, or Brethren of the Rosy Cross” took place on 1 June 1867 at a hotel in Aldermanbury, close to the Guildhall in the City of London, with Little presiding as Master General. Because no ceremony could yet be worked, the handful of Masons present appear simply to have been declared members of the first grade.

During 1867 the London group set aside the Scottish rituals and reshaped the Society as a body for Master Masons in amity with the United Grand Lodge of England. According to the Society’s own archives, Little assumed the title of Supreme Magus on 14 January 1869, working from rituals he had found in the storerooms of Freemasons’ Hall. Some historians, including Christopher McIntosh, note that the grade system closely resembles that of the eighteenth-century German Order of the Golden and Rosy Cross.

For its first years the Society worked through a few informal Colleges, and the High Council and the London College were hard to tell apart. That changed in 1874, when Metropolitan College No. 1 was set up as a distinct body, holding its first recorded meeting on 16 April at the Regent Masonic Hall. A High Council took over the government of the Society, and growth became steadier: a College for Manchester and the northern counties followed in 1871, York and other northern Colleges later in the decade, and the Society reached Canada in the 1870s.

Little died in April 1878, aged about forty, having named Dr William Robert Woodman as his successor. The Latin title Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia came into use from the mid-1880s, during the secretaryship of Dr William Wynn Westcott, a London coroner and student of the Kabbalah who later became Supreme Magus himself in the early 1890s and revived a Society that had lost momentum after its founder’s death. The Society’s records also show that the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, author of the “Rosicrucian” romance Zanoni, was voted Honorary Grand Patron in 1871 without being asked; he never attended a meeting.

In 1888 three SRIA members, Woodman, Westcott and Samuel Liddell “MacGregor” Mathers, founded the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Unlike its parent, the Golden Dawn admitted women, non-Masons and non-Christians, and it borrowed much of the SRIA’s grade structure. It went on to have an enormous influence on twentieth-century occultism, but there is no link between the SRIA and any present-day Golden Dawn group. Other notable Fratres included the occult writer Arthur Edward Waite, the Masonic writer John Yarker, Kenneth Mackenzie (who resigned in 1875) and Rudyard Kipling, who joined in July 1909 and chose for himself the modest motto Fortuna non virtute, “by good fortune, not by merit”.

The Society also seeded sister bodies abroad. A party of American Masons received the first grade at an English College in 1878; finding no answer to their request for a warrant, they turned to the Scottish society, which chartered Colleges in Philadelphia and New York and led to the formation of the Societas Rosicruciana in Civitatibus Foederatis in 1880.

Aims of the Society

The founders’ statement of purpose is still quoted by the Society today. Its aim is “to afford mutual aid and encouragement in working out the great problems of Life, and in searching out the secrets of Nature; to facilitate the study of the system of philosophy founded upon the Kabalah, and the doctrines of Hermes Trismegistus, which was inculcated by the original Fratres Rosae-Crucis of Germany, A.D. 1450; and to investigate the meaning and symbolism of all that now remains of the wisdom, art and literature of the ancient world.”

In practice this makes the SRIA a ritual-based research fraternity. Its grade ceremonies are one strand of the work; the other is learning. Every Frater is encouraged to prepare and deliver a paper of his own, and recent topics range from alchemy, symbolism and mysticism to philosophy, music and even artificial intelligence. In London the Metropolitan Study Group has met monthly for roughly a century as an open forum for this kind of discussion.

Membership

An aspirant must be a subscribing Master Mason in good standing, belonging to a lodge under the United Grand Lodge of England or a Grand Lodge in amity with it, and must declare his belief in the fundamental principles of the Trinitarian Christian faith. The Society stresses that it is not simply one more degree to be collected along the ordinary Masonic path: it stands outside Freemasonry and is not governed by any Grand Lodge, even though it draws all of its members from the Craft.

Organisation

The Society is led by a Supreme Magus, assisted by two Substitute Magi and the High Council. Where numbers allow, Colleges are grouped into Provinces, each under a Chief Adept supported by a Suffragan and a Provincial Council. Each College, which meets regularly for its ceremonies and its “great work” of study, is directed by an annually elected Celebrant with an Exponent and other officers. In 2020 Greater London became a Province in its own right, and today it includes Metropolitan College No. 1, which still meets without a warrant as the founding College, the London College of Adepts and the newer Sophia Hermetica College, consecrated in 2023.

Grades and Orders

The Society works nine grades, gathered into three Orders. Their names are published openly by the Society and its sister bodies:

• Grade I: Zelator
• Grade II: Theoricus
• Grade III: Practicus
• Grade IV: Philosophus
• Grade V: Adeptus Minor
• Grade VI: Adeptus Major
• Grade VII: Adeptus Exemptus
• Grade VIII: Magister
• Grade IX: Magus

Grades I to IV form the First Order and are conferred in the Colleges, with at least six months between each. Grades V to VII form the Second Order and are in the hands of the Provinces: the Chief Adept may confer them on deserving Fratres of Grade IV who have been members for at least four years, with a year or more between each, and a Frater must hold Grade VII before he can preside over a College as Celebrant. Grades VIII and IX form the Third Order and are conferred only at the Supreme Magus’s discretion, on members who have given notable service.

The Society likes to describe the three Orders as learners, teachers and leaders. Advancement in any of them is not automatic; a Frater who is not ready to serve the Society should not expect to progress beyond the First Order.

Regalia

Every Frater wears the Society’s jewel, and the colour of its ribbon shows his place in the Society: green in the First Order and yellow in the Second. Once a Frater has served as Celebrant he wears a red robe from then on, and High Councillors and certain College officers wear robes or regalia proper to their rank or office.

The Society today

The SRIA now has Colleges in England and Wales, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Hungary, Georgia and Slovenia. It does not work in Scotland, Portugal, Italy or the United States, which belong to its sister societies. The closest of these is the Societas Rosicruciana in Scotia, with Colleges in Scotland, Australia, Hong Kong and Finland, and the two Societies have always encouraged their members to visit one another.

For many years the Society’s headquarters was Stanfield Hall in Hampstead, London. In 2022 its library moved to the Library and Museum of Freemasonry at Freemasons’ Hall, where its collection of Rosicrucian books, letters and manuscripts, some around four centuries old, is held on loan, and the headquarters moved to Harlthorpe Hall in Yorkshire.

For more information or if you would like to join, please visit the following URLs:
– https://sria.uk.com/
– https://freemasonrymatters.co.uk/sria/societas-rosicruciana-in-anglia-an-introduction-sria/
– https://www.lewismasonic.co.uk/blog/societas-rosicruciana-in-anglia-is-england-s-oldest-rosicrucian-order-with-the-most-brand-new-province.htm
– https://srialondon.org/