A pelican tearing at her own breast to feed her chicks is one of the oldest Christian symbols of sacrifice. Medieval bestiaries claimed that the mother bird revived her young with her own blood, and artists put “the pelican in her piety” on altars and church walls. Thomas Aquinas called Christ “pie pelicane” in his hymn Adoro te devote. In Rosicrucian and Masonic art the same image stands at the center of the Rose Croix jewel.
The Rosicrucian story
The Rosicrucians first appeared in three German manifestos, the Fama Fraternitatis (1614), the Confessio (1615) and The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz (1616). The Fama tells of a German noble, Christian Rosenkreuz, who traveled to the Middle East, brought back secret wisdom, and founded a brotherhood of healers who treated the sick for free and kept their order secret. His tomb, the story says, was found after 120 years in a seven-sided vault. The pamphlets set off a frenzy: hundreds of books and letters appeared, some defending the order, some attacking it, some pleading to be admitted to it.
A rose and a cross
Whether the brotherhood ever existed is disputed. Scholars point out that the coat of arms of Johann Valentin Andreae, the man usually linked to the manifestos, shows a St Andrew’s cross with four roses, and that Martin Luther’s seal also pairs a rose with a cross. The symbols entered Freemasonry, and the Knight Rose Croix is the eighteenth degree of the Scottish Rite. The jewel of that degree is a pair of compasses with a pelican and her young, the design of this painting. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn later built its own rituals around the rose cross.
What INRI means
The letters began as the Latin title on the cross, Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum. Rosicrucian writers read them as Igne Natura Renovatur Integra, “by fire nature is renewed whole.”
The painting
A pelican feeds her chicks on a shore, in front of a white cross with a red rose set inside a pair of golden compasses. It was painted by J. Augustus Knapp for Manly P. Hall’s The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928).
Little-known facts
- Europe searched for the Rosicrucians for years. According to his biographer, the young René Descartes looked for them in Germany around 1619 and found no one.
- Johann Valentin Andreae, the man usually linked to The Chymical Wedding, later called it a ludibrium, a playful joke or fiction.
- The Fama says Christian Rosenkreuz’s tomb was found after 120 years in a seven-sided vault lit without sun or lamps.
- Alchemists also gave the name “pelican” to a glass vessel with two curved arms in which liquid circulated and returned to the flask, like the bird feeding her young.
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