Hargrave Jennings

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Hargrave Jennings (born around 1817, died 1890) was an English author of the Victorian occult revival, remembered chiefly for The Rosicrucians: Their Rites and Mysteries, first published in 1870. The book was among the most widely read English treatments of Rosicrucianism in its day, and it carried an argument far beyond the Rosicrucians themselves: that the symbolism of ancient religion, and of the hidden tradition descending from it, was at bottom a veiled worship of generative power — of fire, the sun, and human sexuality read as a single sacred mystery.

The dating is itself uncertain. Most reference works, following the Dictionary of National Biography of 1892, give the birth year as 1817; the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography heads its entry from a baptism recorded in 1815, and the later date may have crept in through confusion with his younger brother Frederick, born in 1817. The conventional figure is convenient rather than secure. The death is firmer: he died on 11 March 1890 at his brother’s residence in Ambassadors’ Court, by St James’s Palace, and was buried at Kensal Green. Full name John Hargrave Jennings, he is the man whose vision of a single fire at the bottom of all religion shaped, for the better part of a century, how English readers pictured the Rosy Cross.

A self-taught man of letters

Little of his early life is fixed, and much of what circulated after his death is legend dressed as biography. The documented figure is a self-educated man of letters rather than a scholar or an initiate. By the DNB’s account he placed a series of anonymous sea-sketches in the Metropolitan Magazine at fifteen, under the editorship of the naval novelist Frederick Marryat, and his first books were nautical and miscellaneous — a marine memorandum book, a romance of a mysterious island, a volume on the opera. For years his trade was practical: he served as secretary to the operatic impresario Colonel J. H. Mapleson in the management of the Italian Opera in London. It was supposed, the DNB adds, that Wilkie Collins drew the consumptive, opium-haunted assistant Ezra Jennings of The Moonstone from him — a flattering rumor that says more about the aura Jennings cultivated than about any verified resemblance.

That aura mattered. Jennings moved through the antiquarian and esoteric circles of mid-Victorian London and corresponded with men of larger reputation. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, author of the Rosicrucian romance Zanoni, told him that no better book on such a theme could be written unless a sworn member of the fraternity broke his vow of secrecy — praise Jennings prized and quoted. The American “sex magician” Paschal Beverly Randolph, before the two men fell out, called him the chief Rosicrucian of all England. Yet on the central point Jennings was consistent and candid: he stated that he was not a member of the Rosicrucian sect, only a historian of it. He claimed access to no living lodge, no surviving guardianship. The legend that he was initiated around 1860 by the fringe-Masonic compiler Kenneth Mackenzie, or that he in turn initiated Randolph into a “real” order, is later embroidery and rests on nothing verifiable. By the account of his most careful modern reader, Jennings came in time practically to despise the adepts and societies of esotericism even as he furnished their imagery.

The system, built book by book

The thesis did not arrive whole. It accreted across four doctrinal works written over more than two decades, and the sequence matters, because the Rosicrucian book is best understood as one station in a longer argument about the origin of religion.

It began with The Indian Religions, or Results of the Mysterious Buddhism (1858), published anonymously as the work of “an Indian Missionary.” Prompted by press debate over Buddhism and by the convulsion of the Indian uprising of 1857, it made Jennings one of the earliest popular Anglophone sympathizers with the Buddhist tradition, which he spelled in his own idiosyncratic way. Then came Curious Things of the Outside World: Last Fire (1861), where the governing ideas of the later work first surface. Here he absorbed the antiquarian comparativists who would furnish his evidence — above all Godfrey Higgins, whose sprawling Anacalypsis hunted a single primeval religion beneath all the historical faiths. In these years Jennings made contact with a small London circle of occult enthusiasts: Mackenzie, the crystal-gazer Frederick Hockley, the astrologer who wrote as “Zadkiel.”

The Rosicrucians: Their Rites and Mysteries (London: John Camden Hotten, 1870) gathered the argument into its famous form. By Jennings’s own reckoning in the preface it was the harvest of some twenty years’ labor. It went through a revised and enlarged second edition (Chatto & Windus, 1879) and a third, expanded to two volumes (John C. Nimmo, 1887) — all within his lifetime, against the persistent trade legend of a posthumous edition. The 1887 set, often miscalled a fourth or a posthumous printing, is the labeled third edition, issued while its author was still alive. Reprints by Routledge and Dutton followed in 1907 and 1921, and a German translation in 1912.

The capstone was Phallicism, Celestial and Terrestrial, Heathen and Christian (George Redway, 1884), issued to subscribers only, in which Jennings tried to reconcile the two impulses that pulled at his system. On one side stood a contemplative attraction to non-being and renunciation; on the other, a mystic’s hunger for union with a creating God. He bodied the contradiction in two figures: the Archangel Michael, the angel who refuses to create — patron of asceticism and of the Buddhist Nirvana he admired — and Lucifer recast as the Demiurge, the first creative Fire. The pairing is the clearest window onto what Jennings was actually doing: not history, but a private cosmology of the divine spark, told through whatever emblems lay to hand.

The philosophy of fire

The architecture of the system is simpler than its sprawling execution. At its center is fire, taken as the one element that is at once all-consuming and all-creating — destroyer and generator in a single substance. Above, this fire is figured in the sun; below, on earth, it is figured in the generative organs and the act of generation. Religion, on this reading, is everywhere and always a veiled cult of that creative fire, and its myriad outward forms — temple, sacrament, symbol — are so many disguises for the one mystery.

The word Jennings reached for was “phallic,” and it repays precision, because its plain modern sense misleads. He meant it in a deliberately non-gendered way: the worship of the generative power as such, embracing the female emblem as fully as the male, the yoni with the lingam — not the worship of the penis. In his own formulation the whole of religion finds its justification only in the relation of the sexes. In later editions, bowing reluctantly to popular usage, he let the coarser word “phallicism” stand for what he had intended as something closer to a metaphysics of the creative principle.

The method by which he proved all this was associative rather than historical. Jennings treated towers, spires, fish-symbols, the cross, the round towers of Ireland, the ornament of churches, and a long catalog of ritual objects as so many encoded emblems of solar and generative religion. Resemblance of shape or of function was taken as evidence of a shared secret meaning; a steeple and an obelisk and a standing stone were, for him, one idea in three disguises. He drew his materials from comparative mythology, from ecclesiastical decoration, and from the emblem-books of the alchemists, layering them onto the mesmeric and odic currents of the day. The procedure has a long pedigree in the period: it runs back to Richard Payne Knight’s Discourse on the Worship of Priapus (1786), which had argued that an impulse to revere the generative principle pervaded ancient religion and had provocatively traced even the Christian cross to pagan genital imagery, and forward through Thomas Inman, Thomas Wright, and Higgins. But the specific move — folding this universal “philosophy of fire” onto the Rosicrucians and presenting it as their recovered ancient wisdom — was Jennings’s own. It was not a doctrine he had inherited; it was one he built and then attributed to others.

This is the seam that scholarship has worried at. Jennings’s comparative claims about the religions of India, of the Buddhist world, and of Indigenous peoples are, by present judgment, dated, Eurocentric, and Orientalist — Victorian assumptions projected onto traditions described from the outside, with resemblance standing in for understanding. Read frame-internally his system has a strange coherence: once fire is the one sacred thing, everything that points upward or generates downward can be made to testify to it. Read as comparative religion, it is a hall of mirrors in which the seeker finds, in every faith, only the figure he brought to it.

Reception: praise, theft, and demolition

The book’s afterlife splits cleanly between those who used Jennings and those who weighed him. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky did both. Isis Unveiled (1877) cites and praises The Rosicrucians — on the pyramids, on the lineage of the original Rosicrucians — and Jennings sits among the modern occult sources cataloged in the source-analyses of Blavatsky’s borrowings. Yet her use was selective and pointed: in her own writing on Buddhism, Christianity, and phallicism she explicitly rejected the core of his system, refusing the claim that phallic worship is the origin of all religion and substituting her own derivation from a sexless, infinite, absolute principle. The mature Theosophy of the Theosophical Society took the imagery and discarded the engine.

The sober reaction was harsher. A. E. Waite built The Real History of the Rosicrucians (1887) in part as a rebuke to Jennings — the adjective in the title is itself a jab. Waite allowed that Jennings was the one English writer who had come forward as the historian of the order, then took him apart: he charged that Jennings had lifted a whole passage from Higgins without acknowledgment, spoke of his absurd pretensions, and accused him of perverting the story he claimed to tell. The judgment held. Jennings’s own relation to organized Rosicrucianism only sharpens the irony. He belonged to the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia — but joined only in 1870, after the book was substantially written, and Waite, listing him among the society’s notable members, used the whole body as his exhibit of how thoroughly its members misunderstood the very thing they were named for.

Among the ritual magicians Jennings fared better. The Rosicrucians entered the Crowleyan canon; Aleister Crowley’s order placed it on its reading list, and Jennings is named among the “saints” in the Gnostic Mass of the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica. His non-gendered reading of the generative power — the sacred located in fire and union rather than in any single organ — prefigured and partly fed the sex-magical currents of the next generations. The correspondence curriculum of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor drew on his writings, and that order made its first printed appearance in a volume Jennings himself helped produce.

For that single Hermetic connection is worth marking. In 1884 Jennings supplied an introduction and preliminary essay to a subscribers’ reissue of the Elizabethan divine John Everard’s English translation of the Divine Pymander, edited and published by Robert H. Fryar of Bath — a leading text of the Corpus Hermeticum attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. The Hermetica had been dated to the early Christian centuries by Isaac Casaubon in 1614, long stripping it of the fabulous antiquity the Renaissance had granted it; Jennings, characteristically, cared less for that philology than for the text’s usefulness to his solar-fire cosmology. The same volume carried the first public notice of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, and so Jennings’s fingerprints lie on the threshold of late-Victorian occultism’s next chapter.

Scholarship and the philosophy of fire

Dedicated study of Jennings is thin, and the thinness is itself instructive: he survives less as a subject than as a cautionary case. The one substantial treatment is Joscelyn Godwin’s essay Hargrave Jennings and the Philosophy of Fire, published in Le Défi magique (Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1994), which reconstructs the sequence of the four books and the Michael–Lucifer scheme of the 1884 Phallicism. Godwin’s verdict is unsparing: the Rosicrucian book is the kind of thing that makes esoteric studies disreputable among the educated — unscholarly, disorganized, and shedding no real light on the Rosicrucians, their rites, or their mysteries — and its actual subject, he notes, is sex and sexual symbolism rather than the early seventeenth-century reformers who issued the Rosicrucian manifestos. Godwin’s The Theosophical Enlightenment (1994) places him within the longer line of phallic-worship antiquarians and the pre-Theosophical milieu; Christopher McIntosh’s history of the Rosicrucians treats him as a representative of the unreliable Victorian Rosicrucian imagination. The current frame for reading such nineteenth-century syntheses — as historiographic constructs distinct from the traditions they invoke — belongs to the academic study of Western esotericism.

A reading text of The Rosicrucians is available through the Internet Sacred Text Archive, and the work has been reissued in facsimile by the Cambridge Library Collection. Any such reading carries an unavoidable caveat, and the scholarship is unanimous on it: Jennings’s central claim — that all religion is at root a phallic and solar cult of fire, and that the Rosicrucians were its inheritors — is an idiosyncratic nineteenth-century personal synthesis, not a reliable account of any Rosicrucian order, of ancient religion, or of the comparative study of the faiths he ransacked for emblems. He does not so much as engage the founding manifestos of the movement whose history he claimed to write.

One question the scholarship leaves genuinely open is what to make of him. Read one way he is simply an unreliable enthusiast, justly demolished. Read another, he is an early voice of a sacred-sexuality current that would matter to the ritual magic and neo-pagan movements that came after — a man who, before the language existed for it, treated the generative power as a metaphysical rather than a merely carnal thing. The mainstream holds his factual claims to be worthless; his imaginative reach is harder to dismiss. What he built was less a history than a cosmos: a universe in which a single fire burns at the heart of every altar, and the work of the seeker is to read its disguises.

The theory faded; the book stayed in print, read less for its arguments than for the strange completeness of its vision.

→ In the library: The Divine Pymander of Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus (Everard trans., 1650)

→ Related: Golden Dawn Lineage · Hermetic Brotherhood Of Luxor · Theosophy · Rosicrucianism · Helena Blavatsky · Freemasonry · Aleister Crowley · Corpus Hermeticum · Hermes Trismegistus · John Everard · Isaac Casaubon · Alchemy · Theosophical Society · Prisca Theologia · Demiurge · Lucifer · Michael