SOURCE: Aldridge, A. Owen. “Shaftesbury, Rosicrucianism and Links with Voltaire.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 23, no. 2 (June 1996): 393-401.

In the following essay, Aldridge discusses Shaftesbury's critique of religious superstition in The Adept Ladies.

Scholars have realized for many years that a close connection exists between Protestantism and Rosicrucianism, but the only major literary figures that have been extensively studied from this perspective are the Renaissance martyr Giordano Bruno (who remained nominally a Catholic) and the political and philosophical propagandist of the early Enlightenment John Toland. Bruno's pantheistic hermetism contributed to the development of Rosicrucian texts of the seventeenth century, and Toland drew upon both Bruno and the Rosicrucians for the construction of his theological system, eventually portrayed under the title Pantheisticon. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, an associate and one-time patron of Toland, approved of the deistical aspects of Toland's system, but ridiculed Rosicrucianism as a...