The manifestos that announced Christian Rosenkreuz's brotherhood produced one of the strangest publishing events of the seventeenth century: a mass correspondence with an address that did not exist. The Fama of 1614 invited the learned of Europe to declare themselves to the invisible order; hundreds did, in printed pamphlets and open letters, since no other channel was available, professing sympathy, requesting admission or denouncing the whole affair, and the flood ran for a decade, several hundred titles by modern bibliographers' count.
Libavius attacked the manifestos' program; Fludd defended it in apologiae that made his name; Descartes, returning to Paris from Germany in 1619 amid rumours that he had joined, had to show himself to his friends, the joke ran, to prove a Rosicrucian could be visible. Andreae, watching the storm he had helped raise, called it a ludibrium, a comedy, and in later writings tried to redirect the energy into an open Christian society. But the fiction had done something real: it created the expectation of a hidden college of the wise reforming the world from concealment, and that expectation proved permanently available. Actual societies formed to be what the manifestos described, from the Gold- und Rosenkreuz of the eighteenth century to the Rosicrucian orders of the nineteenth and twentieth; a man who never lived became a founder retroactively, and the empty address has been receiving mail, in one form or another, for four hundred years.