Johann Valentin Andreae was born in Herrenberg, in the Duchy of Wurttemberg, in 1586, into a family already prominent in Lutheran church life, and studied theology at Tubingen, where he moved in a circle of students absorbed in alchemy, Paracelsian medicine and utopian reform literature. It was from within or immediately around that circle that two anonymous manifestos appeared in 1614 and 1615, the Fama Fraternitatis and the Confessio Fraternitatis, announcing a secret brotherhood of the Rosy Cross founded by a mysterious adept, Christian Rosenkreutz, and calling for a general reformation of learning, religion and society. A third text, the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, appeared in 1616, an elaborate alchemical allegory narrating seven days of symbolic ritual at a royal wedding.
The three texts together set off a genuine European sensation, drawing responses, applications to join the invisible brotherhood, and heated controversy from readers who took the announced fraternity as entirely real. Andreae, decades later in his autobiography, claimed authorship of the Chymical Wedding specifically, describing it as a ludibrium, a jest or game, written in his student years and not meant to be taken as seriously as it was. He went on to a substantial and entirely conventional career as a Lutheran pastor and eventually a senior church official in Wurttemberg, and spent much of that later life visibly uncomfortable with the reputation his youthful writing had given him.