Max Heindel

The teaching

Taught from The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception (1909) and the lessons of his Rosicrucian Fellowship.

The seven worlds and the bodies

The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception teaches that the universe is built of seven worlds, interpenetrating one another and differing in the fineness of their matter: from the highest, the World of God, through the World of Virgin Spirits, the World of Divine Spirit, the World of Life Spirit and the World of Thought, down to the Desire World and the Physical World. The human being is a threefold spirit, Divine Spirit, Life Spirit and Human Spirit, clothed in a mind and in three bodies: the dense body; the vital body, which carries the forces of life and of memory; and the desire body, the vehicle of feeling.

The vital body is the key to much of his teaching. It is made of ether, it builds and repairs the dense body, and it is the seat of memory, in which the pictures of a whole life are kept.

The panorama of the past life

At death the silver cord that joins the higher bodies to the dense body is loosed, and for about three and a half days the spirit, still in the vital body, watches the whole life just ended pass before it, backward from death to birth. Heindel asks that the dying be kept in quiet, without loud grief at the bedside, and that the body be neither embalmed nor burned during those days, so that the panorama is not disturbed, since its pictures are etched into the desire body and become the ground of all that follows.

In purgatory, in the lower Desire World, the spirit lives through the pain it caused others, scene by scene, until its evil habits are burned out; in the first heaven it lives through the good it did, and the lesson of each is distilled into conscience and virtue for the next life. In the second heaven, in the World of Thought, it works on the patterns of its next body and surroundings, and in time it is drawn back to birth.

Retrospection and concentration

The Fellowship's two daily exercises follow from this. Each night, before sleep, the student reviews the day backward, from evening to morning, looking at each scene as an onlooker would, feeling sorrow for every wrong and gratitude for every good, and resolving to do better. What is judged and repented each night, Heindel holds, need not be lived through again after death, and the review makes the student's own conscience the judge, day by day.

Each morning, on waking, the student holds the mind for a few minutes on a high ideal, steadily, and passes from concentration on it to meditation. Those who take the Fellowship's pledge as probationers also keep from meat, strong drink and tobacco, which he counts part of the purifying of the bodies.

The order and its emblem

Heindel's account of the Rosicrucian Order, the brotherhood the manifestos tell of in The Rosicrucians, makes it a school of twelve brothers gathered round a thirteenth, founded by the teacher who bore the name Christian Rosenkreuz and working unseen for the spiritual growth of the West. Its emblem is the rose cross: a white cross wreathed with seven red roses and a golden star at its centre, the roses for the blood made pure and free of passion and the star for the spirit, so that cross, roses and star together picture the purified life the student is to reach.

Healing and the stars

The Fellowship heals by prayer. Invisible helpers, he teaches, work by night on the sick whose names are sent to the Fellowship, and its members meet in healing services timed by the moon's entry into a cardinal sign, to send out the force of their prayer together. The house teaches it as what he held and promises no cure from it: it stands beside medicine and never in its place.

Astrology serves the same end. The horoscope, in his teaching, is the record of the destiny a person has made in earlier lives, read so that they may know themselves and work with it, and he forbade his students to tell fortunes or to cast horoscopes for money. Nothing in a chart is to be used to judge or to treat an illness.

The Christ and the year

His Christian mysticism follows the sun's year. The Christ, in his teaching, is the great spirit of the sun, who entered the man Jesus at the baptism and at Golgotha entered the earth itself, becoming its indwelling spirit. Each year his life descends into the earth in autumn, is born in it at the winter solstice, works in it through the winter and is released again at Easter, and the feasts of the Church keep that rhythm.