The Rose Cross
twenty-two letters upon the petals · the lamen of the Second Order, grade 5°=6°The twenty-two letters are laid out in three rings: the three mothers within, the seven doubles in the middle, the twelve simples without. The same order on which the whole table of tunnels in this archive is built.
Where our system came from
Everything this archive works with — the binding of the twenty-two letters to the arcana, the planets and the signs, out of which the table of tunnels is derived — came down a single chain. The Rosicrucian manifestos of the early seventeenth century, “Fama Fraternitatis” and “The Chymical Wedding”; out of them the English Rosicrucian Society; out of it, in 1888, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; out of that Mathers, Crowley, and later Grant.
The lamen of the Rose Cross is the object in which this system is folded up entire. An adept of the grade 5°=6° received it, and wore it upon the breast on a yellow silk cord. The cross is the four elements, the rose the twenty-two letters, and the whole together is read as a single correspondence.
From the order's document (“The Complete Symbol of the Rose Cross”, a Second Order paper, published by Israel Regardie, The Golden Dawn, vol. III, 1939, pp. 51–54): three rings of 3 / 7 / 12; Heh at the top, Lamed at the bottom, Daleth directly above Lamed; Aleph beneath the arm of air; Shin and Mem in counterchange — the fiery petal on the watery side and the reverse; the twelve simples in the order of the signs; the seven doubles in the order of the exaltations; the King scale, the letters in the complementary colour; the elements by the arms, fire to the viewer's left; the four colours of Malkuth on the lower arm; pentagrams on the coloured arms, a hexagram on the white part; a white centre to the rose, a golden cross of six squares, a red rose of five petals, four green thorns; white rays carrying the analysis of the word I.N.R.I.
The archive's reading. The document gives not a single dimension — every proportion here, the radii of the rings and the thickness of the arms, is ours. The counter-clockwise direction in which the letters run is nowhere set out in words in the text; it has been established from the surviving images. As for the exact shades: the source names its colours in words — “amber”, “greenish yellow”, “glowing orange-scarlet” — and therefore any numerical colour value is an interpretation.
A divergence the sources do not resolve. In the middle row Regardie prints “Gimel, Kaph, Tav”, while Chic and Sandra Cicero, in Secrets of a Golden Dawn Temple (2004), state outright that in all of Regardie's editions Tav and Kaph are transposed, and give “Gimel, Tav, Kaph”. We draw after the Ciceros: only so does the middle row read as an unbroken circle of colour, which is what the document requires. But this is a choice, not an established fact.