Rebecca Vaughan. He was a self-described member of the "Society of Unknown Philosophers", and was responsible for translating into English in 1652 the Fama Fraternitatis Rosae Crucis, an anonymous Rosicrucian manifesto first published in 1614 in Kassel, Germany. Vaughan quarrelled in print with Henry More. Their pamphlet war petered out, but More returned to the subject of alchemists in Enthusiasmus Triumphatus (1656). Another critic of Vaughan was John Gaule. Allen G. Debus has written that a simple explanation of Vaughan's natural philosophy, in its mature form, is as the De occulta of Cornelius Agrippa, in an exposition coming via the views of Michael Sendivogius. As a writer in the school of Sendivogius, Vaughan follows Jacques de Nuisement and Andreas Orthelius. He placed himself in the tradition of the Rosicrucian reformers of education, and of Johannes Trithemius, his teacher Libanius Gallus, and Pelagius of Majorca, teacher of Libanius (of whom the last two are not known to have been real people apart from what Trithemius relates of them). According to some writers of catalogues of hermetic and alchemical treatises (such as John Ferguson, Denis Ian Duveen, Vinci Verginelli et al.), Thomas Vaughan could be the anonymous author of the treatise Reconditorium ac Reclusorium Opulentiae Sapientiaeque Numinis Mundi Magni, cui deditur in titulum CHYMICA VANNUS... Amstelodami... Anno 1666, i. e. a mysterious masterpiece of the hermetic tradition. Posthumous attack In 1896 Vaughan was the subject of a hoax making alleged revelations as to the practice of devil-worship by the initiates of freemasonry, and that Thomas had helped to found freemasonry as a Satanic society. The inventors of the hoax were some Paris journalists. References 1621 births 1666 deaths 17th-century alchemists 17th-century Christian mystics 17th-century philosophers 17th-century Welsh scientists 17th-century Welsh writers Alumni of Jesus College, Oxford Protestant mystics Welsh twins Welsh alchemists Welsh Anglicans Welsh occult writers Welsh philosophers