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You've seen the ads in the back ol Omni, Psl,chology Today or Fate'. a torch and a
searching face superimposed on a night sky. The

headline reads, "Expand Your Level

sciousness," and the ad copy may advise,

ol

Convast

"A

psychic realm lies just beyond your conscious

mind."
To get in touch with this vast realm, you must

fill out the coupon: "Kindly send me a lree copy

of The Mastery of Life. I am sincerely interested." Address the envelope to: Scribe, Rosicrucian Order, AMORC Rosicrucian Park, San Jose, CA 95191, USA. Whcn that glossy 33-page pamphlet arrives, you will not be disappointed. You will be provided "A Blueprint for Living" and an answer to the question "Why Are We Here?" as well as an account of "Age-Old Rosicrucians" and thumbnail sketches of later adepts: Benjamin Franklin, Rcne Descartes, Gottfried Leibnitz and Francis Bacon. You
know you will be in good company. In their parnphlet, the Rosicrucians promise to impart "amazing knowledge" that will explain "strange experiences." ("You may call them uncanny.") "Have you, for example. . .met persons lor the first time who have been presentable in appearance and in speech-and yet immediately a wave of distrust and dislike lor them would sweep over you? Why? It is a manifestation ol the human aura invisible, magnetic radiation from the human body -an which we can detect." Or, "Have you ever entered a room that depressed you? Do you know that intense emotional outbursts, hatred, jealousy and anger can and do affect material substances so that every room in which they occur takes on a depressing environment? These are not supersti-

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tions-not suppositions-but the effects of little-known

natural laws around us."
Yes.

And lathoming the uncanny will be fun. No laborious

study or tedious memorizing, promises Mastery of Lrfe
"The teachings are issued in manuscript form, four for every
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month in the year. Their wording is in large, eosytGread type. . . . No college education ne@ssary. . . Arranged in
easy steps."
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15, 1987

THE HIPPO GODDESS TAURT GUARDS THE EGYPTIAN MUSEUM.

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Perhaps best ol all, "The lessons, or monographs, are mailed to the member in
sealed envelopes by first-class mail." Sealed envelopes. The real thing. There is a bil of deia vu to it all, a vague leeling of having been, as the Rosicrucians

might say,
because,

in the room before. This is

I think, the Rosicrucian order is the granddaddy of California cults. Everything lrom the Theosophic Society to New Age healing and Silva Mind Control seems related to Rosicrucian beliefs.

Yet cult is too raw a word lor such a gentle lellowship ol seekers. The Rosicrucians (like the Masons, to whom they have often been related), though spiritual, have never been a religious organization. And
though they have met in secret many times in their long history and still profess a fondness for ritual, they have avoided sensationalism almost to the point of boredom. "Rosicru-

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cians are walking question mark," their publicist will tell me.
Certainly, the wonderfully occult buildings and gardens at Rosicrucian headquarters raise a number of questions, calm and intriguing questions to be sure. What a place! The grounds-San Jose's biggest tourist attraction---cover an entire square city block. The sand-colored administration building is a copy of the great temple of Medinet Habu in upper Egypt. The Rosicrucian Planetarium and Science Museum was built to resemble a Moorish castle in North Africa. With its painted columns, guarded by reclining stone sphinxes, the building that houses the unaccredited Rose-Croix University-where 300 or so Rosicrucian students meet every summer for week-long @urses in such things as health and healing, dreams and archeolo gy-look like a mating of Hollywood Egyp tian with 1920s California high school. The headquarters were begun in 1927,when San Jose was mostly fruit orchards. In front of the university is a blue, green and red tiled fountain with a golden virgin at the top. Her arms are outstretched. This is the Fountain

,ia1'-,.f,ll

of the Living Waters, and you expect some

old-movie actress like Veronica Lake to pop out like an art deco nymph from a cake. Even wilder statuary leads to the Rosi crucian Egyptian Museum on Park Avenue. Two rows of ram-sphinxes flank the enormous copper door. In the center of the court is an eight-foot-tall stone statue of a green hippopotamus. This is Taurt, the great moth-

er goddess ol ancient Egypt. Taurt was a symbol of the star Apet, and in the season
when Apet appeared with the rising sun, the Nile waters rose and irrigated the croprs. The
homely hippo balances on a crocodile tail and stands on the hind legs of a lion. Taurt looks like she could munch the Babylonian devil

gd

in Ghostbusters for breakfast, or mate

with him, or both.

Every.rvhere there are tall old palms, carelully spaced, and thousands of perfect rose bushes, red and white. There is a rare conical dawn redwood from Szechwan Province in China and a caperdown tree whose leaves change magically from pale green in the spring to butter yellow in the fall, and

blue Egyptian lilies, and papari, and pink

fuchsias, and blue petunias and hundreds
more.

It's all lun and funny, strange and peace-

ful, disingenuous and ordered, baroque and

Zen
seem

al

the same time. These Rosicrucians

to believe powerfully in the power of symbol. There is a Byzantine attention to

detail. Every color and shape has meaning, lrom the exquisite pomegranate tree to the hedge in the shape of interlacing triangles, which represent "the infinite and finite
planes."

ARTHUR PIEPENBRINK, CHIEF EXPLORER OF THE SELF AT ROSICRUCIAN WORLD HEADQUARTENS. (A,NOVT) THE ROSICRUCIAN LIBRARY.

The Rosicrucians seem to be saying that

1S

IMAGE/lrarch

15, 1987

date neurology at Berkeley," he says, "people would have had prerequisites in biology and anatomy. This cuts out a lot of creativity and shared experiences. Here the backgrounds of the students are ubiquitous. This ubiquity is a source ol joy and excitement. We are exploring ourselves."

Chief explorer of the self lor the Rosicrucians is not George Buletza but Arthur Piepenbrink, secretary of the board of directors. Arthur Piepenbrink's office is across the tiled plaza fountain from Rose-Croix University.

ol 64 with

Piepenbrink is an avuncularJooking soul

gentle light-blue eyes, thick He is wearing a gray striped shirt and a necktie of three colors,
pouches underneath.

red, white and brown. Piepenbrink is telling

me that you and

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life is like a garden. A properly tended life

can be ordered and channeled. It is hardly a modern idea, but the Rosicrucians are hardly

have contracted MS while doing autopies as a graduate student at Berkeley.

modernists.

No mindless entropy

here.

Theirs is the tao of responsibility. At the corner of Naglee and Chapman rises a great bronze of Augustus Caesar. A robe is thrown over his shoulder. A cherub lounges at his feet. "It is said," say the authors of "A Walk Through Rosicrucian Park," that as Caesar "felt the approach of death in those final moments, he asked for a mirror, glanced at his reflection and asked seriously, 'Have I played my part well?"' Dr. George Buletza's office in Rose-Croix University faces this statue of Caesar. "As a child I prepared for oneness with God," Buletza whispers. "I wanted to join the Rosicrucians when I was seven, but my parents wouldn't let me." Buletza sits at his desk in the Rosicrucian

"My body is unraveling, yet I'm whole," he says. "l'm blessed. I can do work many normally sighted people can't do." Buletza, a
very soft-spoken, very intense man with thick

telephone poles, are all different manifestations of the same vibratory energy. "There is one essen@ out of which everything is formed," he says. "Science is coming closer to this belief. The rate of vibration is what makes things different, wood or flesh. Everything else is illusion. Electromagnetism answers all theories of human behavior. Even the Golden Rule flows from electromagnetics: Every action has an equal and opposing reaction." Piepenbrink suddenly sits up straight at his desk. He's excited now. "This is my pet field. Oh, boy! Electromagnetism has three basic characteristics. First is duality, which comes from the positive and negative forces, attraction and repulsion. Serond, the line of least resistance. This is a dominant problem in human affairs, the tendency to cheat, lie, procrastinate and take the easy way out. Third is fluidity, the tendency for everything to grow and change, for systems to flow and ebb, for the universe to begin with a big bang

and an ethereal smile, is director of research for the Rosicrucians. He prepares and often writes the monographs that elucidate some of the hundreds of "Fascinating Truths" listed in The Mastery of Life. The articles have titles such as "Immortality," "Should We 'Overcome' the Old Reptilian Brain?" "Phantoms and the Aura," "What
glasses

Is Occult Music?" "Cancer-Towards a

Balanced View," "Confidence, the Experience," "Fear, a State ol Mind," "Looking

into Royal Mummies" and "Is There

research laboratory between a complete bound set of the work of C.G. Jung and a
cross section of a human brain. Behind him is

a visualizer, a large closed-circuit television device that allows Buletza to read book. Buletza is legally blind, slowly dying, at 44, ol multiple sclerosis, an incurable disease of the central nervous system. Already his optic nerve is disintegrating. He believes he may

Wonder Water?" When he taught anatomy, neurology and zoology at UC Berkeley, Buletza used stateof-the-art technology. Now, in his parapsychological research, he makes do with donated IBM PCs and a few tables of monitoring devices: EEG meters, galvanized skin response detectors and cardiovascular monitors. Buletza doesn't mind the tiny research

budget. "Here

ask different

questions THE POWER OF SYMBOL: RAM.SPHINXES LINE THE WAY TO THE MUSEUM.
March

-and "If I

have different students.

were conducting a seminar in cor-

15,

l%7

IIMAGE

19

and so forth."

Piepenbrink comes from a Rosicrucian

family in Wisconsin and exudes foursquare Midwestern charm. He smiles nicely. He

gestures innocently. He smoothes his head as he talk. If he weren't paraphrasing modern physics, he would sound flaky.

What is considered flaky

in

America

these days, however, is usually more a matter ofcollege degrees than true weirdness. Think

of the number of hopelessly nutty pychiatrists rodding around San Francisco in new BMWs paid for by anxious neurotics who can't calm down. These Ph.D. shrinks teach relaxation techniques, biofeedback and the like, which have been taught by Indian fakirs of course-for centuries. -unlicensed, All poppycock, Piepenbrink might whisper. (Everybody talk softly around headquarters, especially in this enormous windowless administration building, the knockoff of the great temple of Medinet Habu.) You don't need to see a shrink to find calmness, or fly to India either. The Rosicrucians will teach imperturbability for only

$9.50 a month, the cost ol their dues. "Imperturbability is man's supreme goal,"

explains Piepenbrink. "We want calm, but the advance of life dictates change. Life is a continual process of growing out of balance and returning to a state of calm." I ask Piepenbrink how the Rosicrucians have avoided the abuses of so many California cults. At first he can't quite believe I'm asking the question. Then he says, "The Rosicrucians have no dogma, no personalities, no gurus. We're quiet people. We are a very conservative organization. We do not go off half-cocked---oh, no. We are not a cult." What does he think about cults? The secretary returns to imperturbability. "We don't care. If they're right, we can live with them. If they're wrong, they'll go away. We are not a cult. We are not a religion. We are a nonprofit educational organization." What about their elaborate Egyptian symbols, altars and rituals? The numerology,

A PYRAMID SHRINE TO AMORC FOUNDER H. SPENCER LEWIS.

the fascination with alchemy, the "rosy cross" itself? What about the young girls who dress in white and function as vestal virgins in the temples? "Symbols and rituals serve only to emphasize our thoughts and principles," Piepen-

"We have less growth than fifteen years rimless spectacles and the wispiest goatee ago," Piepenbrink admits. He stares at the since Ho Chi Minh. He could be a fleshy ceiling. He laughs. He doesn't seem to really Turkish uncle to Ahmet Ertegun, the chaircare. "We like to think it's television," he manofAtlanticRecords.Acrosshislapelisa red rose. In the center of his blue silk tie is a says. Kristie Knutson, public relations director, gold triangle with a cross in the middle, three interrupts. "We grow slowly and we have a diamonds on each leg of the triangle, a ruby large drop-off rate. You have to read a in the center of the cross. pamphlet a week. People want instant anResearching Lewis, the first imperator of the Rosicrucian order, is not easy. Little swers. We don't like to provide them." Why not take to television like the evan- information exists. His Rosicrucian biogragelists, who sometimes denounce them as phy tells us that "he was a man of many devil-worshippers because some Rosicru- talents: author, lecturer, artist, world traveler cians believe God is an organizing energy., an{.rnystic-philosopher. . .not only an idealrather than a spear-chucker from the O,l{-.-"rst, a mystic, an esthete, he was also a Testament? ,y'' pragmatist [who] designed the first Ameri"TV is too fast for proper study," says can-built planetarium equipment for astro'
Piepenbrink, shaking his head. "It promotes rote thinking." "We have no need to make everybody Rosicrucian," adds Knutson, a tall, woman in a plain dress. "That's it," says Piepenbrink.
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nomical demonstrations [and]. . .was conver-

a advertising techniques." strong The opposing view was held by one R.

Swineburne Clymer, chief of a rival organization called the Rosicrucian Foundation and author in 1935 of the two-volume The Rosicrucian Fraternity in America: A Complete Arawer lo Lewis's llhite Book

sant with modern business methods and

dramatic presentation aids memory. Our Egyptian motif is no different than the Greek motif at City Hall." Nothing immoderate? "Moderation in all things," Piepenbrink

brink says.

"A

'''.., In the discreet lobby of the ad-

says quietly, smiling.

It's hard to get a proper rise out of these Rosicrucians. They are not fire walkers, chanting scientologists or followers of the Bhagwan. Freaky fun is just not their middle name. They seem to be, well, just nice quiet

it . oil painting of H. Spencer Lewis, "D"; Being a Thorough Expose of His ' , , ' j-, : founder of the AMORC, which AMORC-a Spurious RC. Order and Frastands for Ancient Mystical Orternal Swindle Operated as a Fraudulent ', ',.' '#.,. . :'t i der Rosae Crucis, and father of Scheme and Family Racket. ' ':::. .it . the recently deceased Imperator Clymer alleged-erroneously, as it 'n
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Ralph Lewis, under whose lead-

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ership the Rosicrucian order

out-that Lewis had launched a Rosicrucian organization in New York in

1915 but "after

grew from 15,000 to 250,000 members.

thoughtful kind ofway. How can they attract followers in today's spiritually glutted environment?

like this picture. Lewis looks like a double-chinned saxophone player with
searching eyes. He's got thick lips, cool-cat

a raid of the New York

police. . .and his [Lewis's] arrest," he ran first

to

Florida, then to San Francisco, then finally to San Jose, where the "malignant

IMAGE/March

15, 198?

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California was first becoming the hot paradise for cult organizations of every candy stripe. The Los Angeles headquarters of a third Rosicrucian group, the Rosicrucian Fellowship, for instance, is still only a few blocks away from the renovated International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, where Aimee Semple McPherson, that red-haired evangelist, railed away with some succss.
always been the sort of loose organization that an enterprising young i.! man conversant in pragmatism' ,ali;i iiif :: mysticism and modern advertis- in8 techniques could build on. One time way back in August '..,,... ,j1.i:q.,,:,t 1623, some predecessors of H. t'., ,.:.. Spencer Lewis papered Paris ".::'t with noticrs that announced: "We, deputies of the principal College of the Brethren of

nonexistent after he could not locate any members, and Gottfried von Leibnitz, the German mathematician who came up with

the theory

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The Rosicrucians have

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the Rosy Cross, are staying visibly and invisibly in this town by the Grace of the
Most High, to whom the heart of the Just
turns. We show and teach without book or masks how to speak the language of every country where we wish to be, to bring our fellow men out ol the error of death."

THI

TAO OT

BESPONSIBIIITY.

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and pernicious. . .swindle" really took off. I quote the logorrheic Clymer: "With high-pressure salesmanship, with nationwide, bombastic advertising, with ev-

According to N. MacKenzie, editor of the book Seoet Societies, a contemporary account had the first response coming from a debt-ridden lawyer who wanted to become invisible to his creditors. He located the Rosicrucians, who agreed to tell him their

different from Arthur Piepenbrink's ideas on electromagnetism, wrote with sadness, "I suspect that the Brethren of the Rosy Cross are a fiction." Both Leibnitz and Descartes are optimistically claimed as order members in the pamphlet Mastery of Lfe, under the heading: "History Relates...These Men Were Rosicrucians." MacKenzie speculates that alter Johann Andrea switched back to orthodox Lutheranism, he abandoned the saga of Christian Rosenkreuz and lelt potential recruits holding the spiritual bag. The situation became a perfect setup for con men. Voltaire relates decades later how the Duc de Bouillon paid to be shown lraternal secrets but received nothing. was an amusing opportunity. People could make themselves Rosicrucians out of nothing, a bit of alchemy. Somewhere along the line, someone thought up the idea ol "active and inactive cycles," which held that the Rosicrucians would be active and public lor a period of 108 years, then would go underground and remain silent for the next 108 years. To cynics this was a nifty way to explain gaps in the order's history.

It

erflowing and highly gasified propaganda and much ballyhoo and with tons of promo tional literature, all of which is contrary to the practices and ideals of Masonry and Rosicrucianism, this scheme has been used as a contrivance to build a million-dollar fraternal racketeering @n@rn. The royal revenues of this hierarchical racket are derived from initiation fees, monthly dues, the sale of mystical bunk in books, socalled occult and scientific lore in special courses or lectures, specially priced, and a full line of fraternal merchandise. . . ." Clymer challenged Lewis to sue him for libel and slander. Lewis did. Lewis won. "I believe Clymer was a member of AMORC but became hostile when he started his own group," says spokeswoman Kristie Krutson. "Mr. Lewis's New York experience was totally and inaccurately expressed in the press of the time. A tdlegram had been sent from Europe to Lewis as the American grand imperator, but this was during World War I, and someone mistook Rosicrucian terminology for some sort of code and wrongly concluded that Mr. Lewis was a spy. Gosh-a-hemlock, if we were a million-dollar racket, I think it would be a little more
evident by now."

"But they wined and dined beforehand, that when they initiated him by immersing him in the river, he drowned." Most sources believe that Johann Valentin Andrea, an astronomer, philosopher and Lutheran deacon, was the originator of the Rosicrucian order. He is thought to have written the Fama Fraternarls, an account of one Christian Rosenkeuz, after whose fraternal order the Rosicrucian order was modeled. (In German, Rosenkeuz means "rosy crms," which is an old Christian mystical symbol.) Protagonist Christian Rosenkeuz was born of poor but noble parents in 1378 and died 106 years later, after making a long pilgrimage to Egypt and Arabia, where he studied physics, botany, zoology, mathematics, magic and the Cabala. When he returned to Germany, Rosenkeuz formed the Fraternity of the Rosy Cross with seven monls
secret teachings.

him so well

Whatever the hallowed beginnings of Rosicrucianism, some interesting people joined once there was something to join. W.B. Yeats signed on with a British offshoot called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn to learn how to conjure spirits. The most famous Rosicrucian was Francis Bacon. "Father of modern science, remodeler of modern law, editor of the modern [King
James] Bible, patron of modern democracy, one of the lathers of modern Freemasonry, Sir Francis Bacon was a man of many aims

from the monastery where he had

raised. The

been

monk agreed to live in different countries and recruit, to profess nothing excpt to cure the sick for free, to meet
annually in Germany, to nominate successors before dying and to keep the fraternity
secret

for 100 years.

The mud-slinging between Clymer and Lewis can probably best be seen as two rival mystical organizations slugging it out for membership at a time, the 1920s, when

The Fama was addressed to "the learned and great of Europe," but nobody could find the organization. Rene Descartes, the French philosopher who once shut himself in an

overheated closet and later declared, "I think, therefore I am," decided the order was

THE HOMELY HIPPO, ASSOCIATED WITH THE RISING OF THE NILE.

lvfrrch 15, l%7

IIMAGE

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and purposes," Manly P. Hall wrote in 1928.

Halt. in a work enti-

my visit to

headquar-

ters in San Jose, I attended a Sunday lunch at an AMORC temple in Los Angeles. There were young and old here, more men than

tled An Encyclopedic

Outline

of

Masonic,

Hermetic, Qabbalistic
anci Rosicrucian Sym-

bolical Philosophy, asks whether Bacon

might have encoded
the King James Bible with cryptographic al-

women,

a spread of

half black. I took the congregation to be

class.

ages, the group about

to "the secret Rosicrucian key to mystic and Masonic Christianity." This

lusions

sell-educated working We ate slices of

ham, meat balls and

macaroni shells, tossed salad. The beverage was grape juice. Every-

should be disturbing enough to the current

crop

ol King

James THE TEMPLE WHERE MEMBERS AND WHITE-ROBED VESTAL VIRGINS INDULGE A FONDNESS FOR RITUAL (NOT N TTCION). themselves. The king laughs and chews on the bone. lt's only a turkey leg. "Have lun," smiles the king, as his entourage carries him ofL

body was extremely polite and quick to introduce themselves. Betty Jo Lewis was
the master of the lodge.

version Bible thumpers on television, but con-

sider what

it

would

mean to Jimmy Swaggart and Jerry Falwell il the man who edited

She is, she says,

their holy krok lrom Latin to English might also have, as Hall suspects, inlused the Bible "rvith the knowledge ol supernatural power which the pagans possessed." The King James Bible may not be wholly Christian at
all.

But

I think

this ending

Here we come to the heart of Rosicrucianism. Christianity tried to destroy the rituals of paganism, but these were perpetuated secretly during the early centuries of the

would be a little unfair. The parapsychological

research

that

George

Buletza conducts seems

credible enough, seen as exploratory philosophy. One afternoon in Ro-

religion and later became part of Christian symbology, gods and goddesses returning as saints, for instance. These early "mysteries," as the Rosicrucians like to call them, explain how the universe really work, and they may give a certain calmness and power to humans who take the time to learn them. From the perspective of Renaissance popes or modern American evangelists, this sort of individual power and imperturbability are, ol course,
blasphemous. It seems to me that Rosicrucianism has long been a combination of serious science and good old-fashioned fun. We humans love to play with symbol and ritual. It's one of the very few things that sets us apart from the
apes.

sicrucian Park while I

was trying to fathom the

phenomenology ol the concupiscent virgin H.

Spencer Lewis

Southern Baptist from Arkansas. One Sunday when she was younger, Betty Jo Lewis desperately wanted an answer to an unusual question. At her church she raised her hand and asked: "What about ghosts? Are they just stories?" She remembers that "some old geezer" said, "Just that, stories." The congregation laughed at her, and the minister immediately switched into his sermon. After being embarrassed at church, Lewis went into a depression. Then she began to search. She read Edgar Cayce and all about karma. She was convinced lor almost a year that she would burn in hell for questioning her religion. Then she joined the Rosicrucians, where she leels she is allowed to
question everything.

had

mounted atop the Fountain of the Living Waters, I started a conversation with a jolly-looking Spanish man with a round face
and trim beard. He turned out to be J. Martin Ramirez, head of the department of psychology at the University of Seville in Spain and a leading researcher of brain processes. He'd never heard ol the Rosicrucians. He was waiting out his reservation at a nearby restaurant. This was a Rosicrucian moment. We chewed the neuroanatomical lat for a while, and then I asked him what he thought about electromagnetism, depressing rooms with bad memories and the rest. Ramirez cupped his hand sideways over his beard and told me with great excitement how he and others had managed to regenerate the limbs on primitive vertebrates like salamanders by vibrating them with electrical impulses. "Maybe Rosicrucian theory is nonsense," he said, "but if you think about the last century of psychological research, that would all have been considered nonsense. too." All this lrontier science doesn't explain why people join the order, of course. After

There is a favorite scene of mine in The Devils,lhe Ken Russell film, and perhaps we

should end with that. The Devils is an adaptation of The Devils of l,oudon, the Aldous Huxley book about exorcism and political manipulation during the time of Cardinal Richelieu. A convent of nuns, led
by the mother superior, Vanessa Redgrave, is

carrying on as if possessed by Satan. They

are a-raving and a-screeching, spitting, dancing naked, invoking Old Splitfoot. Suddenly, in rides King Louis XIV on a sedan chair.

The nuns continue their rampage. So the king pulls out a bone lrom a silver box and announces that it is a relic from the body of Christ. Conlronted with Jesus's very body,
the nuns immediately grow quiet and cover
IMAOE/lVarch
15, 1987

black, a member of the order for 26 years. "I was a sick man," he says, "gallstones, stomach ulcers. The doctor prescribed me a big bottle of pills and I had them with me all the time, even at work. I was a carpenter. When I joined the Rosicrucians, I learned how to relax and I threw the pills away." Another older black man, also a carpenter, with peaceful eyes and a southern accent, told me, "The Rosicrucians make you happy and take all your troubles away. I'm a big reader. I like the reading and all that you get to do; wherever you go you have friends." He has been in the order lor 30 years. When these men shake hands, I swear there is a little bit ol strange fingering. This must be whal Mastery of Life meant when it said. "You will be instructed in the traditional signs of recognition. and you will be given the passwords and grips which will entitle you to admission into the Lodges and Chapters of the Order throughout the world." Are we having fun yet? tr Steve Chapple wrote about the Hallinan family in the February 22 issue.

Percy Perryman was a big, older man,