The whole thing begins with three short texts published in the German lands. The Fama Fraternitatis appeared in 1614 and told of Christian Rosenkreuz, his travels in the East, the brotherhood he founded and the tomb reopened after a hundred and twenty years. The Confessio Fraternitatis followed in 1615 and set out the reform the brotherhood intended. The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz, an allegorical narrative of quite a different literary order, came in 1616.
What happened next is better documented than the texts themselves. Hundreds of pamphlets appeared across Europe within a few years, some attacking the brotherhood, many addressed to it directly by people who wanted to be admitted and could find no one to apply to. That gap, an order everybody had read about and nobody could reach, is the engine of the entire subsequent tradition.
Johann Valentin Andreae, a Lutheran theologian in the circle around Tubingen, later described the Chymical Wedding as a ludibrium, a jest or a piece of play, and his authorship of it is generally accepted. Whether he wrote the other two, and whether the whole was satire, a serious call for reform in fictional dress, or a trial balloon, is still argued.
The result is unusual: a tradition with a full literature, real orders, and continuous practice for four centuries, founded on a body that appears never to have existed.