Divinity Atlas

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A Mystery School Run as a Mail Order Business

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A Mystery School Run as a Mail Order Business

A.M.O.R.C.'s working method is a correspondence course. A member receives monographs by post, or now by download, at a fixed rate, works through them in sequence, and progresses through degrees without necessarily meeting another member. Lodges and chapters exist for those who want them and are not required. This is the model Paul Foster Case also used, and it made an initiatic system available to people who lived nowhere near a temple.

The order built an institution around it. Rosicrucian Park in San Jose, California, holds administrative buildings, a planetarium, a research library and a museum of Egyptian antiquities that is open to the public and accredited as a museum. An order teaching by post financed a collection that Egyptologists use. That is an unusual outcome and it is verifiable in a way most claims in this field are not.

The lineage claim is the part that cannot be checked. Harvey Spencer Lewis said he had received an initiation in France in 1909 that authorised him to establish the order in America, and the order traces itself from there back through European Rosicrucian bodies to the Egyptian mystery schools. No independent documentation of the 1909 initiation has been produced, and the Egyptian descent is a traditional claim rather than a historical one. The institution is real; the pedigree is the order's own account of itself.

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