Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume IIVaughan, Henry
General
Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II
Vaughan, Henry
Poetry
I now come to the remarkable statements made with respect to Thomas
Vaughan in the _Memoires d'une ex-Palladiste_, now in course of
publication by Miss Diana Vaughan. Miss Vaughan is a lady who has
created a considerable sensation in Paris. Her own account of herself is
that she was brought up as a worshipper of Lucifer, and was for some
years a leading spirit amongst certain androgynous lodges of Freemasons,
in which the worship of Lucifer is largely practised. She has now, owing
to the direct interposition of Joan of Arc, become a Catholic, and has
made it her mission to combat Luciferian Freemasonry in every way. Her
_Memoirs_ are partly a biography, partly an account of this cult.[23]
Miss Vaughan claims to be a great-grand-daughter of Thomas Vaughan's.
She declares him to have been a Luciferian, Grand-master of the
Rosicrucian order, and the founder of modern Freemasonry; and gives an
exhaustive account of his career on the authority of family archives.
The following paragraphs contain the substance of her narrative, the
"legend of Philalethes," as it was told to Miss Vaughan by her father
and her uncle, who were intimate friends of Albert Pike.
The traditional accounts of Thomas Vaughan, says Miss Vaughan, contain
serious errors. The dates of his birth and of his death, and the
pseudonym under which he wrote are all incorrectly stated[24] (p. 110).
He was born in Monmouth in 1612, being two years the elder of his
brother Henry. The two boys were brought up at Oxford, after their
father's death, by their uncle, Robert Vaughan the antiquary,[25] and
entered at Jesus College (p. 114). In 1636, at the age of 24, Thomas
Vaughan went to London, and became the disciple of Robert Fludd, who was
a Rosicrucian (p. 148). The real nature of the Rosicrucians has hitherto
been a mystery. They were in reality Luciferians, and carried on in
secret during the seventeenth century that warfare against Adonai, the
god of the Catholics, out of which had already sprung Wiclif, Luther,
and the Reformation, and out of which was some day to spring, more
deadly and more dangerous still, Freemasonry. The Fraternity of
Rosie-Cross was founded by Faustus Socinus in 1597. He was succeeded as
head of it by Caesar Cremonini (1604-1617), Michael Maier (1617-1622),
Valentin Andreae (1622-1654), and Thomas Vaughan (1654-1678).[26] When
Thomas Vaughan first came to London in 1636, Valentin Andreae was
_Summus Magister_ of the Fraternity, and amongst its leading members
were Robert Fludd and Amos Komenski, or Comenius (pp. 129-148). Robert
Fludd initiated Thomas Vaughan into the lower degrees of the Golden
Cross (p. 148), and sent him to Andreae at Calw, near Stuttgart, with a
letter in which he prophesied for him a miraculous future (p. 163).
After this visit to Germany, Vaughan returned to London, and after
Fludd's death, in 1637, undertook in 1638 his first visit to America. In
many of his writings he speaks as a Christian minister, and at this time
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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