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Liber XXV · Secret Societies

Liber XXV · Secret Societies · Chapter IV: Rosicrucianism

AMORC: H. Spencer Lewis and the Rosicrucian Order Since 1915

AMORC, the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis, explained: H. Spencer Lewis's 1915 founding, mail-order lessons, Rosicrucian Park, San Jose, and teachings.

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AMORC, the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (also styled the Ancient and Mystical Order), is a Rosicrucian organisation founded in New York in 1915 by Harvey Spencer Lewis. It teaches a non-sectarian mystical philosophy through graded home-study lessons sent to members, supplemented by lodge rituals, and from its headquarters at Rosicrucian Park in San Jose, California, became the most widely known Rosicrucian body of the twentieth century. It presents itself as heir to an ancient tradition, a claim historians regard as legendary.

H. Spencer Lewis and the Founding of AMORC§

Harvey Spencer Lewis was born in Frenchtown, New Jersey, in 1883 and worked in New York as a commercial illustrator and advertising man. In the early 1900s he was active in amateur psychical research, founding a New York Institute for Psychical Research, and he moved in the city's circles of Theosophists, New Thought writers and occult students. According to his own account, in 1909 he travelled to France, where he was received into an ancient Rosicrucian order in Toulouse and authorised to revive the work in America. He also credited a New York woman, May Banks-Stacey, with transmitting Rosicrucian authority to him. Neither claim can be independently confirmed, and historians treat the Toulouse initiation as part of the order's foundation narrative.

Lewis issued a public manifesto, the "American Pronunziamento", in 1915 and held the first meetings of the order in New York that year, with a national convention following in Pittsburgh in 1917. He took the title Imperator. The name he chose, Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis, joined English and Latin and signalled a claim to continuity with the Rosicrucian tradition as a whole.

From New York to Rosicrucian Park, San Jose§

The early order moved several times: from New York to San Francisco around 1918, to Tampa, Florida, in the mid-1920s, and in 1927 to San Jose, California, where it settled permanently. There Lewis and his successors built Rosicrucian Park, a campus of buildings in Egyptian and Moorish revival styles, with a temple, administrative offices, a library, gardens, a planetarium opened in 1936, and the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum.

The museum, which began with Lewis's own collection and opened to the public in the early 1930s, grew into one of the largest collections of ancient Egyptian artefacts on the American West Coast, including mummies, coffins, papyri and a walk-through replica of a tomb. It reflects the central place of Egypt in AMORC's self-understanding (see ancient Egyptian religion), but it is also a serious public museum used by schools and visitors with no interest in the order.

Mail-Order Mysticism: Monographs and Advertising§

AMORC's most influential innovation was its method of teaching. Lewis, an advertising professional, recognised that most people interested in mysticism lived far from any lodge. From the 1920s the order recruited through advertisements in popular magazines, inviting readers to send for a free booklet that explained how the Rosicrucians had preserved secret wisdom about the mind and life's mysteries. Applicants who joined received weekly lessons called monographs, organised into numbered degrees, which they studied at home.

Members were encouraged to set up a private "sanctum", a quiet place with simple symbolic furnishings, for study, meditation and experiments in concentration, visualisation and breathing. Local lodges, chapters and pronaoi offered group rituals and fellowship for those who wanted them, but the home lesson remained the core of membership. This model, combining the fraternal grade system of initiatory orders with the correspondence course, reached tens of thousands of people and was widely imitated. It also drew criticism from rival Rosicrucian bodies and journalists who saw in it a commercial enterprise; AMORC has always described itself as a non-profit educational and fraternal organisation.

Teachings, Lineage and the Rosicrucian Legend§

AMORC's teachings are a synthesis typical of early twentieth-century esotericism. The monographs present a universal "Cosmic" intelligence, a vital life force pervading living beings, the nature of consciousness and the psychic faculties, reincarnation and karma, mystical approaches to health, and the attainment of "Cosmic Consciousness". Their language owes much to Theosophy and to the New Thought movement, as well as to popular psychology and science of the period. The order is non-sectarian, admits women on equal terms, and states that membership is compatible with any religion.

Lewis's Rosicrucian Questions and Answers with Complete History of the Rosicrucian Order (1929) set out the order's traditional history. In it the Rosicrucian brotherhood originates in the mystery schools of ancient Egypt under Thutmose III and Akhenaten, passes through Greek philosophers and medieval mystics, and manifests publicly in cycles of 108 years of activity and dormancy. Historians find no evidence for this lineage. The historical Rosicrucian movement began with the anonymous German manifestos of 1614–1616, and no organisation can document an unbroken connection to them. Lewis also wrote popular books, including The Mystical Life of Jesus (1929), which presents an esoteric reading of the life of Jesus drawn from alleged Rosicrucian records, and Mansions of the Soul (1930) on reincarnation.

Rivals and alliances§

AMORC's claims provoked a long public quarrel with R. Swinburne Clymer of the Fraternitas Rosae Crucis in Quakertown, Pennsylvania, who asserted his own American Rosicrucian lineage; the two sides exchanged polemics and lawsuits in the 1920s and 1930s. Lewis also cultivated contacts with European esoteric orders. He received a charter from Theodor Reuss of the Ordo Templi Orientis in 1921, and in 1934 AMORC joined a short-lived federation of initiatic orders, FUDOSI, alongside Martinist and other European groups, seeking recognition within the wider network of magical and initiatory orders.

AMORC After Lewis§

When H. Spencer Lewis died in 1939 his son Ralph Maxwell Lewis became Imperator and led the order for nearly fifty years, until his death in 1987, overseeing its international expansion into Europe, Latin America and Africa and its translation into many languages. His successor, Gary L. Stewart, was removed in 1990 amid disputes over finances and authority, which led to litigation and the departure of some members to new groups. The Frenchman Christian Bernard then served as Imperator for nearly three decades, and the order is now governed through an international Supreme Grand Lodge with jurisdictions organised by language.

Today AMORC continues to offer graded home-study, now partly online, and to maintain Rosicrucian Park and its museum. In 2001 it published a fresh manifesto, the Positio Fraternitatis Rosae Crucis, consciously echoing the original manifestos of the seventeenth century. Scholars of new religious movements, such as J. Gordon Melton, treat AMORC as one of the most successful esoteric organisations of the twentieth century, significant less for its claimed antiquity than for the way it brought a structured, private and non-sectarian mysticism to a mass audience.

Frequently asked questions§

What does AMORC stand for?§

AMORC stands for Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis, sometimes given as the Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis. The order usually calls itself the Rosicrucian Order, AMORC.

Who founded AMORC and when?§

Harvey Spencer Lewis founded AMORC in New York in 1915, after claiming to have been initiated into a Rosicrucian order in Toulouse, France, in 1909. He led it as Imperator until his death in 1939.

Is AMORC a religion?§

AMORC describes itself as a philosophical and initiatic fraternity rather than a religion. It requires no particular faith, and its members include adherents of many religions and none.

Is AMORC connected to the original Rosicrucians?§

AMORC claims descent from an ancient tradition, but historians find no documented connection between it and the brotherhood announced in the manifestos of 1614–1616, or with ancient Egypt. Its significance is as a modern order that popularised Rosicrucian ideas.

Sources and further reading§