interpreted the initials on the cross INRI by the sentence "Igne Nitrum Roris Invenitur." Supposing this derivation to be correct, it would be interesting to know whether any connexion could be traced between the first appearance of the word Rosie Cross in the Fama Fraternitatis at the date of 1614 and the cabalistic treatise of the celebrated Rabbi of Prague, Shabbethai Sheftel Horowitz, entitled Shefa Tal, that is to say, "The Effusion of Dew," which appeared in 1612. Although this book has often been reprinted, no copy is to be found in the British Museum, so I am unable to pursue this line of enquiry further. A simpler explanation may be that the Rosy Cross derived from the Red Cross of the Templars. Mirabeau, who as a Freemason and an Illuminatus was in a position to discover many facts about the secret societies of Germany during his stay in the country, definitely asserts that "the Rose Croix Masons of the seventeenth century were only the ancient Order of the Templars secretly perpetuated."
Lecouteulx de Canteleu is more explicit:
In France the Knights (Templar) who left the Order, henceforth hidden, and so to speak unknown, formed the Order of the Flaming Star and of the Rose-Croix, which in the fifteenth century spread itself in Bohemia and Silesia. Every Grand officer of these Orders had all his life to wear the Red Cross and to repeat every day the prayer of St. Bernard.<sup></sup>
Eckert states that the ritual, symbols, and names of the Rose-Croix were borrowed from the Templars, and that the Order was divided into seven degrees, according to the seven days of creation, at the same time signifying that their "principal aim was that of the mysterious, the investigation of Being and of the forces of nature."
The Rosicrucian Kenneth Mackenzie, in his Masonic Cyclopædia, appears to suggest the same possibility of Templar origin. Under the