In the year 1616, there appeared a strange document: The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz. It told of an old man, nearly eighty years of age, who received an invitation to a royal wedding in a mysterious castle.
The invitation came by an angel with wings full of eyes like peacock feathers. It bore this warning: "Examine yourself. If you are unclean, this wedding will bring your destruction."
Christian Rosenkreutz prepared himself with prayer and meditation. He dressed in white linen with a red ribbon crossed over his shoulder. He set forth on the journey, knowing it might be his last.
"At the first gate, I was asked: What do you seek?
I answered: Transformation.
At the second gate: What will you give?
I answered: Everything.
At the third gate: What do you fear?
I answered: Nothing any longer."
In the castle, he witnessed wonders and terrors. He saw a king and queen beheaded. He saw their bodies dissolved in baths of strange liquors. He saw birds born from the dissolved bodies, fed and grown, and finally sacrificed. He saw new bodies formed from the blood of the birds, and the king and queen restored to life — transformed, younger, radiant.
"The wedding is not between two persons," he was told. "It is between two principles within you. The king is your reason, the queen is your soul. They must die together and be reborn together. Only then can they truly wed."
"The old must die for the new to be born.
The separate must dissolve to become one.
The wedding is not a ceremony but a death.
The marriage chamber is a tomb.
And from the tomb, new life emerges."
At the end of seven days, Christian Rosenkreutz was made a Knight of the Golden Stone. But before he departed, he was shown a tomb where the founder of the order lay incorrupt, a book in his hand, a light perpetually burning.
"This light has burned for one hundred and twenty years," they told him. "It will burn until the end of the age. You too must become a light that burns without being consumed."
The wedding, the text reveals, is always happening. Every moment, we are invited. Every moment, we may answer. The castle exists within us. The king and queen await their death and resurrection.
Teaching 11
True union requires the death of separation. The king and queen within you — reason and soul, thought and feeling — must dissolve and be reborn as one. This is the wedding to which you are always invited.