The story appears in three anonymous German pamphlets. The Fama Fraternitatis (1614) tells of a German of poor but noble family, born 1378, who travelled to Damascus, Egypt and Fez, gathered a wisdom the East possessed and Europe had lost, returned to found a brotherhood of eight who healed the sick free of charge and worked in secret, and died at 106. The Confessio (1615) elaborates. The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz (1616) is a dense alchemical allegory in seven days. The Fama turns on the accidental discovery, 120 years after his death, of a seven-sided vault lit by an artificial sun, with his uncorrupted body and an inscription announcing that after 120 years he would be opened.
The manifestos produced a furore across Europe. People published open letters begging for admission to a brotherhood nobody could find; Descartes was suspected of membership and had to demonstrate he was not; a substantial polemical literature accumulated for and against. No brotherhood was ever located, and none appears to have existed.
The decisive testimony is internal. Johann Valentin Andreae, the Lutheran theologian generally identified as author of the Chymical Wedding and a probable hand in the others, later described the work as a ludibrium, a game, a jest, a piece of playacting, and treated the whole affair with irritation. The most plausible reconstruction is that a circle of Tubingen Lutheran reformers wrote the manifestos as a fictional provocation, a call for a general reformation of learning and religion dressed as the announcement of a secret order, and that the fiction escaped them.
Christian Rosenkreuz is a literary character. Every Rosicrucian body since, and there have been many, from the eighteenth-century German orders through the Golden Dawn's claimed lineage to the modern organisations, descends not from him but from the reading public's response to three pamphlets. That does not make the tradition worthless; it makes its origin a documented act of imagination rather than an unverifiable claim, which is rarer and more interesting.