H. Spencer Lewis

The teaching

Taught from his books for AMORC, above all Rosicrucian Questions and Answers (1929) and Mansions of the Soul (1930).

The order's tradition

He taught that the Rosicrucian order is far older than its name. In his account it began as a school of mysteries founded in Egypt by the pharaoh Thutmose III and raised to its height under Akhenaten; its teaching passed through Greece and Rome, came to France under Charlemagne, and was led in later ages by Francis Bacon among others. The order, he held, lives in cycles of one hundred and eight years in each land, a time of public work followed by a time of silence, and its first American cycle began with the mystics who settled in Pennsylvania in 1694.

That is the order's tradition as he taught it. Nothing written before AMORC's own founding bears the descent out, and the Rosicrucian story itself begins with the German manifestos of the seventeenth century, which the orders art's branch The Rosicrucians teaches.

Lessons at home

AMORC teaches by post. The member receives a lesson each week and studies it at home in a sanctum, a quiet corner or room set aside with a small altar and candles, where the lesson is read, its exercises done and their results noted. The lessons rise by degrees, from the first studies of the neophyte to the temple degrees, and each rests on the last, so that the student tests every principle in their own life before going on.

The Cosmic and the Master Within

Behind all things, in his teaching, stands the Cosmic: the universal mind and order in which every thing has its place and its law. One energy runs through it, which the lessons call Nous. As what they call Spirit, a word they keep for the energy of matter and not for the soul, it builds every atom; as the Vital Life Force it animates living bodies. The soul is something else again, a spark of the universal soul dwelling in each person as the Master Within, whose voice is intuition and conscience. The student's work is to attune the outer self to that inner master, and through it to the Cosmic.

The picture and the release

The lessons teach a method for the affairs of life. The student first makes a clear mental picture of what is wanted, as complete and exact as possible; then, in the sanctum, concentrates on it with feeling for a short time; and then releases it to the Cosmic, without dwelling on it or repeating it anxiously, trusting the inner law to work. The house teaches it as his teaching and promises no result.

The cycles of life

In Self Mastery and Fate with the Cycles of Life he set out a law of periodicity. Each person's year runs from birthday to birthday and falls into seven periods of about fifty-two days, each with its own character, favourable to some kinds of undertaking and not to others, and each day is divided into periods in the same way. The student works out the tide of each period from their own birthday and times their affairs by it, so that the one who knows the cycles works with them instead of being carried by them.

Mansions of the soul

His teaching on rebirth is exact. Each soul personality returns to earth again and again, keeping its identity from life to life, and the average time from one birth to the next is one hundred and forty-four years. A person was meant to live the whole span in the body and then pass almost at once into a new one; but people have shortened their lives by breaking natural law, and so the soul waits in the Cosmic for the rest of the span. One who dies at eighty waits sixty-four years before being born again. Death, in the order's word, is transition.

Karma, in the same book, is the law of compensation, and it is never vengeful. It does not ask an eye for an eye; its purpose is to guide, its methods are to instruct, its working is to redeem. It may lighten a hard trial for the one who sees the justice of the debt and learns the lesson in it, and in this lawful working he finds the true root of salvation by grace and redemption by making good.

The Cathedral of the Soul

The order's members, and anyone else who wishes, are taught to meet in a cathedral that has no walls: the Cathedral of the Soul, a meeting place in the Cosmic to which each turns in meditation at set hours, joining in thought all who attune at the same time. It needs no building and no ceremony, only stillness and the wish to be joined with others for good.

The hidden life of Jesus and the lost land

Two of his books carry the order's lore beyond its walls. The one on Jesus tells of an initiate trained among the Essenes and in the temples of Egypt, from records the order is said to hold; the one on Lemuria, signed with another name, tells of a continent in the Pacific whose people had a sense organ in the forehead by which they knew each other's minds, and of survivors who still live hidden inside Mount Shasta. Both are the order's lore and no history: no such records have been shown, and there is no sunken land in the Pacific. The legend of Lemuria is taught where it began on the lost worlds art's branch Lemuria and Mu.