The Winners of Tom's Challenge # 4

Hello all and thanks for participating in the most difficult challenge yet. First the answers:

1. The mysterious group was the Rosicrucians ( or the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross)
2. The Scholar of old was Christian Rosenkreuz
3. And the founders published their manifesto, Fama Fraternitatis, in 1614

And the winners are:

First place: Quilldancer, who managed to pull the Rose and the Cross from the Sean Connery movie, "Name of the Rose." She said she got lucky and had done caretaking for a woman who watched TV 24/7 and had seen the movie a bunch of times. she says, "lucky," but as she has won several of my challenges, I don't think it's luck at all. I think she's damn smart!

Second place: Goes to Jackie's Garden. I think this deserves special applause because she didn't have the flash of a movie to send her in the right direction and did hours of research and came up with all three answers before the clue was put up! That was no easy feat and at one point Jackie declared she didn't want to play any more (but I hope she does). She really did an amazing research job to pull that rabbit out of the hat. Great job, Jackie!

And Third place goes to Goldennib who managed to get the Rosicrucians, the date 1614, but guessed, the ancient scholar was Francis Bacon (not a bad guess at all). I'd like to mention here that not only did she get third place, but she should be proud of the fact that nobody else even submitted an answer besides these three. So this was a tough one. Good Job!

So, here's to the winners three. I hope you feel especially proud because I went to much greater lengths to make this challenge difficult, googled the stuff that I posted and reworded things to make it less googleable. But the two sisters, Quilly and Jackie, got the answers within hours. You guys are amazing!

The Rosicrucians were an exciting mystery during the 17th century as they published anonymously, saying that they lived among the population of any given city, could be your next door neighbor, blended like an alien race into society but held an almost Demi-God (that was the term that was used)-like knowledge of science and magic and met secretly to further humanity and to solve the problems of the world.

In the comments, I mentioned Descartes a couple of times as I came across their fascinating story in an equally fascinating book, called "Descartes' Secret Notebook," by Amir D. Aczel-- almost a very real Davinci Code. Truth being stranger than fiction, the adventures of Descartes and his contemporaries are quite amazing and due to the discovery of a single, quickly scrawled copy of Descartes secret notebook, which he had instructed his heir never to show to anyone upon his death, the author explores, among many things, the issue of whether or not Descartes was a Rosicrucian.

If that sort of thing is your cup of tea, this book is new, I bought it this summer while visiting Jackie and is probably pretty easy to find. As I said in some of the comments flying around during the contest, Descartes is the root of so much of who we are today. My father told me that he was watching a show where a group of nobel prize winners were round table discussing various topics and the question was put to them what they thought the greatest inventions of all time were and one of them thought for while and said, "the scientific method." So, there ya go. As we are all Cartesian, at least here in the West, if you haven't checked out the man who gave us "I think therefore I am, " and the fact that the existence of "imperfection" implies the existence of "perfection" and hence is proof that God exists, you might want to check him out.

Cheers and see you in the blogosphere.