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Extracted from The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz – translated by Joscelyn Godwin, commentary by Adam McLean

The Sight of Venus

On the morning of the Fifth Day, Christian Rosenkreutz descends in the company of his page into the underground chamber beneath the castle and intrudes into regions the Royal Persons would not have him see. This realm was called the King's Treasury, and beyond it, barred by an iron door with copper letters, was a chamber in which lay Lady Venus. The castle above is full of wondrous inventions. Its valued possessions are subtle mechanical devices, such as the great globe of the world, and other works of science and the creative intellect. However, deep in the foundations of the Castle, well hidden from all eyes, lies Lady Venus locked up, unable to manifest her forces, for she is in a state of suspended animation or coma/ in an underground chamber having all the qualities of a mausoleum. (Indeed, the page tells Rosenkreutz that the coffins bearing the royal bodies from the 'Wedding' had earlier been stored in this underground vault.)

The castle is outwardly dedicated to lofty abstractions, the pursuit of the Arts and sciences, and is only able to achieve this through an unbalanced, one-sided development of the forces of the human soul; it needs to deny and hide away under lock and key the primal Venus forces in the soul, the powerful passions of the feminine side of human nature. (The text subtly underlines this point by having the door of the vault of Venus made of Iron, the hard masculine Mars metal, while the letters that tell that she lies within are of copper, the softer Venus metal.) Because of this distorted polarization - this fear of the masculine powers in the realm of the castle of being engulfed by the powerful feminine energies - any meeting between the masculine and feminine must result in inner struggle and death…….

The masculine abstract, scientific, and artistic crafts of the realm of the Castle have been bought at a high price.