San Jose
Do you know the way to AMORC 1
About ten years ago, I visited the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose, California. Founded by a Rosicrucian organization called AMORC — the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis — it has the largest collection of Egyptian antiquities in the Western United States. The museum was established by Harvey Spencer Lewis in 1915, amid a massive publicity campaign.
Lewis was a writer and an advertising agent who wrote about a hidden city of Lemurians beneath Mount Shasta, and a plagiarized theory that Jesus Christ survived crucifixion. He had earlier been affiliated with Alistair Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis, but in 1916, after the German OTO split with Crowley over The Book of the Law, the German group recognized AMORC in a document Lewis proudly displayed. This recognition was in spite of OTO’s association with the practice of sex magick, which AMORC has never advocated.2.
The Rosicrucian park takes up an entire city block. The buildings are adorned with Egyptian motifs and hieroglyphs. The garden contains varieties of roses and other plants, sphinxes, and statuary honoring Pythagoras. The architecture is distinctive and evocative. Everything is laden with symbolism.
When I initially approached the building there were three strikingly beautiful girls attending a table covered with books and pamphlets. They were polite and friendly, and I talked to them for about half an hour before I decided to go inside.
“Is it a religion?” I asked. “Yes,” the girls told me, although officially the organization says it is not, and it points out that it includes members of every religion and creed. I was intrigued. When I entered there was another remarkably attractive young woman attending the front desk. The entry fee was twenty dollars but she insisted that I should only have to pay ten dollars. “Are you sure you’re not a member of AAA? We don’t need to see your card or anything.” So I paid ten dollars and spent the next several hours inside.
There is a large collection of artifacts, and in the basement there is a detailed mockup of a burial chamber. Upstairs there is a reading room filled with religious pamphlets from the 19th and early 20th centuries, which sits adjacent to a temple with an altar, which did not seem to be used during the day. I sat there and read through the materials, but I have to confess that none of it really made much sense to me.
Lewis is buried in a small shrine adjacent to the garden outside. His monument is enclosed in a locked steel cage, but it is visible to anyone who visits. I also confess that at the time my familiarity with Egyptology was extremely limited, so it was hard for me to understand what exactly I was looking at. In the past ten years my understanding has improved somewhat, and I still think about this place a lot.
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Based on some musings initially posted here on 29 December 2022 ↩
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Melton’s Encyclopedia of American Religions, 8th Edition (Gale, 2009) ↩