CHAPTER 10
As well as showing me the memorial stones in the Margam Museum, Alan also accompanied me to several churches with old stones of their own. Foremost among these was the church of St Illtyd, after which the Vale of Glamorgan town of Llantwit Major is named. Prior to the Norman invasion, of which much more will be said later, this was a major church and college. Because of its eminence, it is in possession of some very fine memorial stones of its own, comparable with those I had seen earlier at Margam. Some of these stones were again shafts of former crosses that had lost their ‘wheels’. What was special about them was that they carried quite long inscriptions, two of them mentioning ‘Illtutus’ (St Illtyd) by name. St Illtyd, Alan informed me, is recorded in the genealogies of Wales as a cousin of King Arthur son of Maurice. In addition to St Illtyd, one of these stones also mentioned that it had been raised by St Samson, who again was a cousin of this King Arthur. The biographical ‘Life’ of St Samson records that he later moved to Brittany, where he became the Bishop of Dol. All this was interesting because the mention of Samson’s name on these stones was a further clue to their antiquity. As Bishop of Dol he is recorded as having signed papers at the Church Council of Paris, which took place in AD 556; he died in AD 570. Thus, the stones he raised at Llantwit must certainly date from before AD 556. They also cannot be from the 10th century.
Leaving these stones, which stand near the door, I walked on down the north aisle. Here, my attention was immediately caught by several large flagstones which, intriguingly, were unmarked with names or any other kind of writing. What made them interesting was that they were decorated with foliated crosses, sometimes contained within a halo. They were of a style which, had they been from the 17th century, I would have called ‘Rosicrucian’. By this term I mean a style of cross that is based on the symbol of a crucified rose rather than a wheel.
This symbol, which I was now beginning to think could be of great antiquity in Wales, became famous after 1614. In that year, the first of a number of controversial pamphlets was published in Germany – the Fama Fraternitatis Roseae Crucis, or ‘The Rumour of the Brotherhood of the Rosicross’ – in the German language. It was soon available in other languages, including French, Italian and English, causing a Europe-wide furore. It announced the existence of a secret order that called itself the Brotherhood of the Rosy-cross.
This brotherhood was, allegedly, founded in Germany on the return of a pilgrim there who called himself Christian Rozencreutz. It was claimed that while travelling in the East, he had met and been instructed by certain adepts. They had taught him a great deal about healing and other esoteric matters, and on his return to Europe, he set up an esoteric school of his own in order to pass on this arcane knowledge. All this had happened way back in the 15th century, for CRC, as he is referred to in the pamphlet, died over 110 years before their writing and, therefore, around 1500.
There were several, different versions of the ‘crucified rose’, the prime symbol of the movement. The first was a simple calvary cross, with a rose at its crossing and a halo of light radiating from it.
Another was a budded or floriated cross of gold. Such a cross was evidently to be worn as a pendant. In its most advanced form, it features a figure representing the risen Jesus Christ, a rose growing from his aura. On the cross bar is written ‘Immanuel’ and below this a quote from the Bible: ‘I am a flower of Sharon, and a Rose in the Valley.’ (Figure 3)
Figure 2: Calvary cross
Figure 3: Foliated cross of gold
The basic symbol – a crucified rose on a calvary cross – was not much different from those on the flagstones I was looking at. Could there be a connection between the 17th-century Rosicrucian Brotherhood and those who designed the flagstones? For now, I had no answer to this, but I felt sure that if I looked hard enough, I would discover there was a connection.
The connection with tombstones evidently goes right back to the beginning of the Rosicrucian movement, for the publication of the Fama (and later another pamphlet called the Confessio) had evidently been triggered by the rediscovery of CRC’s own tomb. According to the pamphlets, it was only after this event that the brothers decided it was time they went public. Yet despite their promises made in the pamphlets, they continued to keep their identities secret.
After a few years had gone by and the brothers had still failed to come forward and make themselves known, the general consensus was that the whole thing had been a hoax: there was no Brotherhood of the Rosy-cross. Even so, there was still a lingering suspicion that even if a Brotherhood of the sort described in the pamphlets did not actually exist, the ‘hoax’ could be a cover story for something else: a secret society with a different name, perhaps, but nevertheless an agenda similar to that described in the pamphlets. If such a society did indeed exist, then it could be inferred from their contents that its members were well educated. As for their motive in publishing the pamphlets, might this have been to test public opinion? Did they simply want to see what sort of a response the pamphlets generated before revealing their real identities and agenda? These would presumably have been linked to the esoteric understanding of the primary Rosicrucian symbol: the crucified rose.
In the event, the pamphlets caused such an uproar (including death threats) that the ‘brothers’ deemed it wise to keep their heads down. The location of CRC’s tomb and the identities of the pamphlet writers remained a secret, although a German pastor called Johann Valentin Andreae admitted writing a third pamphlet called ‘The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rozencreutz’. He didn’t admit to having penned the first two, and so their authorship has never been established.
The Rosicrucian affair had long fascinated me, so I was on the lookout for clues that might reveal more about it. It seemed strange, at first, that South Wales could have any connection with such a pan-European movement. But then I noticed that lying near to the Samson stone was a sculpted funerary effigy of a lady. With her expensive-looking dress and fashionable ‘ruff’ around her neck, she was clearly aristocratic and from the Elizabethan period (1558–1603). It is true that ruffs went out of fashion towards the end of the 16th century, but this was still only a couple of decades before the publication of the Rosicrucian manifestos. Thus, the evidence in stone was that there were at least some people in Wales of a class and fashion-ability to act as potential links between the culture that gave rise to the earlier, floriated cross on stones and the 17th-century movement we call Rosicrucianism. The congruency of symbols used by the Rosicrucians of the 17th century and the medieval Welsh stonemasons who had fashioned the flagstones in Llantwit hinted at linkage between the two. Accordingly, I decided to examine what those links might be and whether this might point the way towards a connection with some deeper mystery. This mystery, though, was a deep secret. Indeed, it was buried so deeply that only these scattered symbols gave any hint that it was even there.
Given the location of the stones, it seemed likely that this secret was in some way concerning King Arthur. However, this was only speculation. Without more information and more data, I could not be sure that I was even looking in the right direction. I soon realized that to even begin to understand what the connection might be between the flagstones of Llantwit and a 17th-century German sect society that called itself the Rosicrucian Brotherhood, I would need to make a much deeper examination of the medieval history of the British Isles. The obvious place to begin such a study was the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, but this is really only a stepping stone. Of greater interest was the history of Wales, which is not taught at all in schools and is therefore a complete mystery to all but a very few people, even those living in the Principality itself. Therefore, I make no apology for digressing from the immediate quest and exploring in some detail Wales’ medieval history, for without this basic understanding, it is not possible to grasp what follows and its extraordinary implications for our own times.