Adapting to African Esotericisms the Achievements of Harvey Spencer Lewis and his Rosicrucian Collaborators in Creating AMORC: Inspirational Foundations : Part 2
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Adapting to African Esotericisms the Achievements of Harvey Spencer Lewis
and his
Rosicrucian Collaborators in Creating AMORC
Inspirational Foundations
Part 2
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Harvey Spencer Lewis
1883-1939
Founder of AMORC
the Ancient Mystical Order of the Rosy Cross
Shown against the background of the location in France where his initiation into Rosicrucianism took place, mandating him to commence a second cycle of Rosicrucian activity in the US, as this is stated in AMORC history.
The Rosy Cross, AMORC's central symbol, representing the unfolding of the depths of the self, the soul, within the permutations of life, evoked by the cross, is shown poised in luminous elevation above clouds, suggesting the elevation of vision represented by AMORC.
The entire image dramatizes Lewis's emphasis, as in his Celestial Sanctum meditation, on bringing inspiration into effect in human life through the power of imagination.
Inspiration values are suggested in the image through the symbolic identities of the building of initiation and the celestial elevation of the space in which it is located, the luminous clouds above which are poised the rose of ruby and the cross of gold, adapting a formulation from a related Rosicrucian order in The Teachings, Rites and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, edited by Israel Regardie.
Image and Text: The Akhnaton Achievement
AMORC and Jesus Christ
Image and Text: From the Cross to the Rose, from the Rose to the Cross
The Question of the Influence of Ancient and Later Western Mystery Schools
AMORC's Relationship with Great Figures in Western Cultural History
Image and Text: Isaac Newton
AMORC and Claims of Secret Manuscripts Substantiating their Claims of Pre-Modern Ancestry
Image and Text: The Example of Dante Alighieri
The Creativity that Constructs AMORC
Image and Text : Raphael's School of Athens as Incidentally Dramatizing AMORC's Interdisciplinary Vision
Taking Forward the
Flame
Image and Text: Leonardo da Vinci
Vision, Culture and Achievements of Harvey Spencer Lewis
"The cosmic mind does not contain the particulars of human knowledge and experience, but is an exalted level of evaluation".
" The Cosmic mind or universal mind is the consciousness of God, pervading all space in the universe. It is not only the mind of God but the consciousness and mind of all living [human], of all living beings on the earth plane so united as to be a consensus of mind and thought in which every inspiration, idea, and impression of universal importance is registered and may be contacted through proper attunement with this Universal Mind."
So state different editions of The Rosicrucian Manual, described as compiled under the direction of Harvey Spencer Lewis. The first comes from my memory of a 1980s edition of the Manual of which I have not been able to find a copy to confirm my memory and the second is slightly adapted from an entry for "Universal Mind" in a 1927 edition of the Manual.
Mystic as scholar, mystic as person of the world yet beyond the world, mystic as person of culture, mystic as world citizen, mystic as multi-creative entrepreneur, mystic as person of learning, mystic as creator of knowledge and social systems yet sensitive to the rhythms of the soul, mystic as cultivator of social and cognitive structures of learning and fellowship that outlive one, mystic as forward looking adapter of ancient knowledge to new developments, all these Lewis represents for me, in the great achievement demonstrated by both his person and his creation of AMORC with his collaborators in 1915, in terms of a vision continually renewed decades after into a new century.
Harvey Spencer Lewis as scholar and administrator
Picture by AMORC
Eulogy by his son and successor Ralph Lewis:
The Transition of Our Imperator
Raised in Higher Initiation at 3:15 p.m
Wednesday, August 2, 1939
By Ralph Lewis
283-289
Excerpt
I WRITE not of the passing of a man but of an epochal influence. There have been and will be men who by their daring, their conquest, and intellectual achievements, so implant their personalities in the consciousness of their contemporaries that they will live forever in the minds of future men as beings remarkable for their deeds.
The man of whom I write never revolutionized a field of science or hacked a path through a virgin jungle to reveal new lands, nor, perhaps, did he ever build a greater or more skillful device than could some of his fellow men; I instead record the transition of a humanitarian.
H. Spencer Lewis, who found his happiness and success in molding the lives and minds of human beings. His glory, the fame that he has justly earned, is not to be found in the material things which he has erected or established, for their brilliance must diminish with the passing of time.
His distinction will be found instead in the incentive, the vision of life, and the grasp of living he instilled within the minds of the thousands he counselled.
To his credit in the archives of time will be recorded no one amazing deed but ten thousand attainments not yet realized.
Behind unmaterialized ideas in the minds of thousands, which at some later date will win acclaim, is the influence of the precepts he taught, loved, and lived. In the heart of each of these persons there will always exist a debt of gratitude to him for having shown them the way.
His life will not be one to be looked back upon with remorse that it could not have continued longer, for one may perhaps, but need to look at a neighbor to find living within that neighbor his principles and ideals, for he lives in the minds and personalities of all those he so sincerely taught the ways of life, and who devotedly practice what he believed with all his heart.
Every advancement of the Rosicrucian Order of the North and South American jurisdiction, in the service it rendered to its membership and the facilities it afforded them and the advantages it made possible to them, was the result of his planning, his vision, and excellent executive ability.
[ He was] the foundation [ of a] great edifice [resting] upon his genius and brilliance.
In "Rededication", published in the RosicrucianDigest of October 1939 and written by Ralph Lewis shortly after assuming office as Imperator as successor to his recently late father, he further sums up what Harvey meant to him:
Each century is noted for its attainments or its errors, its vision or its blindness, and for its outstanding men.
This century in the long history of the Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis throughout the world shall be indicated for posterity in the archives of the Order as one in which it received a tremendous impetus through the soul and mind of its Imperator, H. Spencer Lewis.
Like an heliacal star that flashes into the eastern heavens periodically, the Order may never experience another like him in this century.
I am thankful to have been his son and also to have been his pupil and intimate associate for sixteen years, and to have been counseled by him—to have learned from him the great need of balance which consists of a respect for the body as well as having an aspiration for spiritual and intellectual development.
I am glad to have learned from him, through working with him, the essential need to strengthen the physical Order, its outer vehicle, as well as to participate in the dissemination of its teachings.
My greatest personal inheritances from him are the dreams and ideals which he had for the AMORC, many of which you have also come to realize, and also the code of life by which he lived.
All of these, then, I, too, pledge to you for the service of AMORC of which we are inseparable parts.
Fact and Fiction in AMORC History
In taking advantage of Lewis's legacy, however, it is vital for me to understand how he and his collaborators constructed AMORC, as different from the claims made by himself and the Order.
AMORC, Ancient Egyptian and Ancient Western Mystery Schools
Is AMORC really a modern development of a school further advanced by the religious and artistic revolutionary, ancient Egyptian pharaoh Akhnaton, building on an earlier foundation by a previous pharaoh, as Lewis claimed and as his successors have sustained, even though, at times in a modified manner, as is demonstrated by this account of the history of the Order from its central website?
In responding to this question, I get the impression that AMORC has subtly but definitely modified its stance over the years, from perpetuating the claim of an unbroken physical succession from ancient Egypt to the different idea of an inspirational, rather than a physical succession from that civilization.
Shortly after assuming office as Imperator, Ralph Lewis declared in "Rededication"in the Rosicrucian Digest, October 1939, (324-26) his first article in that office for that flagship magazine of the Order, that:
Since the traditional establishment of AMORC by its venerable Grand Master, Amenhotep IV, it has never completely ceased to be, for open minds have never ceased to exist at any time in the world’s history, regardless of the gauntlet of persecution ridicule, and ignorance they have had to run.
Great men have become its prominent leaders. They have lent the brilliance of their minds and the force of their personalities that the physical medium of the Order — its body — might grow.
Lewis's previous summations in the same essay, however, provide a more abstract and thus more realistic and historically viable understanding of AMORC as relating to ancient continuities:
Jewels of natural laws, uncut and unmounted, lie scattered along the way of tomorrow waiting but for the human mind to find them and make of them gems of accomplishment to crown some future civilization.
…
[AMORC] membership is composed of inquiring minds — those who look beyond the veil of the present [seeking for knowledge and striving for ends which are ] ensconsed in eternity. As long as some men and women in every age ask the eternal question — why? — there shall ever live, if not by the same name in ages to come, at least in spirit — the AMORC.
A history of the Order, "The Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis" at the website of the English language jurisdiction for the Americas locates AMORC's ancientness within that of the larger Rosicrucian movement, describing these as having roots in ancient Egypt. Mention is made of a pharaoh who started a mystery school operating in terms of principles and methods similar to those of AMORC.
Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, who later changed his name to Akhnaton, is described as inspired by the mystery schools to initiate a revolutionary rethinking of ancient Egyptian cosmology leading to the awakening of a mystical consciousness in this spirituality, planting a seed that has been growing across the centuries.
Beyond the fact of Akhnaton's rethinking of ancient Egyptian polytheism in favour of a sun centred monotheism, the information required to prove those claims about Egyptian mystery schools as well as most of the details of Rosicrucian history at that web page are not within known historical records. I doubt if such information exists in the first place.
I see the following more open ended summation of Rosicrucian and AMORC history on
the same webpage as a more realistic and
historically sustainable presentation:
Today’s Rosicrucian legacy consists of a vast collection of knowledge which has come down to us through many centuries to enrich the cultural and spiritual heritage of AMORC.
To the knowledge passed on by the sages of ancient Egypt were added philosophical concepts expressed by the great thinkers of ancient Greece, India, and the Arab world.
Then, a few centuries later, the mystical precepts of Rosicrucian alchemists of the Middle Ages were formulated, followed by the vast expansion of knowledge which occurred from the Renaissance to the present day.
Its almost impossible for the claim of physical succession to be true on account of there being no evidence of such far reaching historical continuity in spite of claims of hidden records to the contrary, if I recall AMORC'S claims of such records correctly.
Lewis's claim of a direct physical link between AMORC and ancient Egyptian mystery schools is most certainly fictional on account of the unlikeliness of such a long historical chain running from ancient Egypt to the 20th century US, a physical continuity not known to exist for any institutions from ancient Egypt to the present, even from the later civilization, ancient Greece, to the present.
There is thus no known evidence to substantiate what would be one of the great achievements of history, if Lewis's claim were true.
Rosicrucianism, which is the core of AMORC, is a 17th century European emergence of which there are various schools.
Image and Text : The Mystique of Ancient Egypt: The Pyramids
Art Evoking the Arcane Mystique of Ancient Egypt
Is AMORC really descended from an ancient Egyptian mystery school?
Does hidden knowledge, thousands of years old, emerging at the beginning of high civilization at the time of the pharaohs, rest in AMORC's teachings and archives, knowledge adapted by AMORC to modern needs?
These are the kinds of intriguing perplexities that the early AMORC advertisements, such as this one above, from the 1940s and 50s and a few decades after perhaps, sought to provoke. The central image depicts thinkers gazing at a scene within a mysteriously beautiful triangle. The visionary framing evokes the view as possibly existing within another context of space and time. This other spatial zone is a vista of lush tropical trees and majestic pyramids half hidden in shadow, suggesting mysteriously and alluring grandeur, as the majestic pharaonic figure on the right concretises the significance of the visionary projection as bringing into the present the influences of a glorious past, from a time defined by pharaonic rule in ancient Egypyt. one such pharaoh, Amenhotep IV, described in the text as being the founder of Egypt's mystery schools, an initiative the advertisement suggests AMORC exists in relation to as a kind of continuum of ideas and practices from that ancient time.
Text in the advertisement:
Knowledge that has Endured with the Pyramids
A Secret Method for the Mastery of Life
WHENCE came the knowledge that built the Pyramids and the mighty Temples of the Pharaohs?
Civilization began in the Nile Valley centuries ago. Where did its first builders acquire their astounding wisdom that started man on his upward climb?
Beginning with naught they overcame nature's forces and gave the world its first sciences and arts.
Did their knowledge come from a race now submerged beneath the sea[ the legend of Atlantis], or were they touched with Infinite inspiration?
From what concealed source came the wisdom that produced such characters as Amenhotep IV, Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, and a host of others?
Today it is known that they discovered and learned to interpret certain Secret Methods for the development of their inner power of mind. They learned to command the inner forces within their own beings, and to master life.
This secret art of living has been preserved and handed down throughout the ages. Today it is extended to those who dare to use its profound principles to meet and solve the problems of life in these complex times.
Has life brought you that personal satisfaction, the sense of achievement and happiness that you desire? If not, it is your duty to yourself to learn about this rational method of applying natural laws for the mastery of life.
To the thoughtful person it is obvious that everyone cannot be entrusted with an intimate knowledge of the mysteries of life, for everyone is not capable of properly using it.
But if you are one of those possessed of a true desire to forge ahead and wish to make use of the subtle influences of life, the Rosicrucians (not a religious organization) will send you A Sealed Book of explanation without obligation.
This Sealed Book tells how you, in the privacy of your own home, without interference with your personal affairs or manner of living, may receive these secret teachings.
Not weird or strange practices, but a rational application of the basic laws of life. Use the coupon, and obtain your complimentary copy.
It is more likely that, rather than their activities demonstrating the 20th century emergence on an ancient Egyptian Mystery school which had subsisted across the centuries, Lewis and his co-constructors of AMORC were inspired by ancient Egyptian religion and culture, particularly as this religion is magnificently adapted to Western magic as a philosophical and mystical system by the older and perhaps the most influential modern Western esoteric school, the fellow Rosicrucian order, the Golden Dawn.
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Crowley, however, demonstrates magnificent intellectual power and imaginative range in his grasp of theory and practice in Western esotericism. His grappling with various systems within this vast corpus was enriched in dialogue with non-Western spiritual systems he studied, along with his ranging over non-religious bodies of knowledge, as, through relentless experimentation, he redefined the boundaries of Western magic as they existed in his time, projecting his ideas in what became a library of books covering prose exposition, autobiographical narrative, poetry, novels, plays and short stories and working with artist Frieda Harris in constructing the iconic Thoth Tarot divination system.
His books, particularly the monumental texts, Magick: Liber Aba: Book Four and The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography , are both grand journeys in the exploration of the highways and byways of a spiritual and philosophical quest, windows on the development of a religious thinker and ritual experimentalist, but are also cultural monuments on account of their range of multi-disciplinary knowledge.
Although the ultimate validity of Akhnaton's achievements in this regard are quite controversial, such finer points about his legacy would be immaterial in the light of his being used as an exemplar in the manner in which AMORC develops his image, an inspiringly imaginative manner of constructing a lineage of aspiration and historical continuity through identification with a lofty ancient source.
Image and Text: The Akhnaton Achievement
Ancient Egyptian art depicting Akhnaton, left, and his queen, Nefertiti, right, in a tender domestic scene with their children. They are overshadowed by life giving rays from the sun, evoking Akhnaton's creation, in place of Egyptian polytheism, of a new religion, the veneration of the sun, which he named Aten, and in whose honour he composed an elevating poetic address.
This sculpture shows the tender naturalism that his patronage introduced into ancient Egyptian art. His inspiration of novelties in architecture, along with his religious creativity, also contributed to innovations that have led to his being described as the first individual in history, the first person to develop an individualistic orientation to strategic subjects in relation to which abiding with the communal norm had been the overwhelming tradition.
AMORC and Jesus Christ
How factual is Lewis' The Mystical Life of Jesus, freely accessible at that AMORC link, charting in detail the spiritual development of Jesus Christ within a carefully structured initiatory and teaching system in a school that mandated his mission, an account of Jesus' spiritual development described by Lewis as based on secret manuscripts in the keeping of AMORC, if I recall correctly?
As an account of Jesus' life the book is a work of fiction, very different in spirit from the individualistic revolutionary and even anarchic drive of Jesus. It succeeds, however, in depicting the structured system of initiation and learning of AMORC and of esoteric schools generally, and may thus be seen as vehicle for Lewis's ideas.
However, AMORC's emphasis on personalized, individualistic development through individual study and practice of its ideas and exercises enables a personal creativity, that, to some degree, balances its generalized teaching across members of the same level of exposure to its study materials in its weekly lessons called monographs.
Image and Text: From the Cross to the Rose, from the Rose to the Cross
These correlations of the cross and the rose are beautifully discussed by Live Soderlund in in "Vitalis Rosae Crucis: The Vital Rose on the Cross" from the Vol. 97, No. 2, 2019 issue of the Rosicrucian Digest and also expounded in "Robert Fludd’s Rose and Cross" from Vol.13 of the Rose + Croix journal.
The Question of the Influence of Ancient and Later Western Mystery Schools
The existence of mystery schools in ancient Greece is well known, in spite of secretiveness. That of Egypt is more speculative, from my admittedly quite limited exposure to the work of Schwaller de Lubicz, whom my passing acquaintance with the subject identifies as the most prominent investigator of this subject.
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This magnificent image
employs a particularly striking synergy between visualization and verbalisation in dramatizing
one of the central conceptions of AMORC, the self depicted in terms of the
tender beauty of a red rose, shown here unfurling in the context of an
elegantly configured line by former Imperator, head of AMORC, Ralph Lewis,
standing out in orange against the red background,
describing the self
as the "key to all mysteries and the source of all illumination".
The elegant dynamism of the unfolding rose, amplified by a suffusion of deep
red, is framed by AMORC symbols.To the right of the inscription, in bright white contrasting sharply with the visual landscape of red, is a downward facing triangle, symbolizing the unity of contraries in creating new possibilities.
These contraries are represented by the two linked points constituting the base of the triangle. The new possibility they actualize is indicated by the apex of the triangle where the lines rising from the two points of the base converge.
At the top of the rose is a dazzlingly multi-coloured image of wings unfurled in flight, at the centre of which is ensconced the AMORC triangle and at the top of which are the acronym of the Order, the entire structure suggesting both dynamism and aerial mobility, evoking creativity and penetration of unconventional possibilities, suggested by the idea of flight, evoking movement through elevation above the downward pull of gravity.
At the bottom of this visual structure is a rendition in gold, a universally traditional colour evoking precious value, of the globe of Earth, foregrounding Africa, the AMORC jurisdiction on whose website this image is placed, an image suggesting both AMORC's global presence and international and intercultural cognitive aspirations, as realized through adaptations to particular geographically located communities represented by each AMORC jurisdiction, in this case, Africa, as a line in blue below the globe welcomes the viewer/reader to the Order.
At the top right is a vertical listing, in beautiful blue and white, of icons directing the viewer/reader to the various social media accounts of the particular AMORC jurisdiction represented by this visual display.
The balance of contrastive colour complementarities is exquisite, in harmony with the structural elegance and evocative range of the forms constituting the design, complex harmonies making it endlessly delightful for contemplation, even for a person unacquainted with the precise symbolic values of the images constituting the work, as these images are understood in the AMORC lexicon.
Beauty is thus dramatized as a central value of the configurations actualized by the unfolding self, a quality demonstrating those cosmic harmonies AMORC explores, rhythms of possibility, understanding of and relationship with which enable self actualization in the context of the unfolding universe, a cosmos expanding both in metaphysical and physical terms.
The rose and the cross foregrounded by this image are in line with AMORC's focus on cosmic laws, represented by the cross framed by the symbolic triangle, in relation to the unfolding of the self, the self highlighted by the Lewis quote in this image, the self evoked by the image of the rose at the point where the horizontal and vertical arms of the cross meet, .
Within this context, the cosmos itself may be seen as akin to an unfolding rose as
its potential achieves increasingly greater actualization.
This actualization of possibilities may be understood as emerging in the development and configuration of matter and energy and the consciousnesses enabled by the existence of these material empowerments.
These developments themselves point to the question of the integration and transcendence of matter, energy and consciousness by an ultimate source of being from which the cosmos issues and within which the self is grounded, an ultimate root enabling access to possibilities making the self the "key to all mysteries and the source of all illumination", as stated by Lewis, correlative with the following elaboration of a similar idea by the Indian Chhandogya-Upanishad, Book VIII, Part 1, translated by W.B.Yeats and Sri Purohit Swami in The Ten Principal Upanishads:
In this body, in this town of Spirit, there is a little house shaped like a lotus, and in that house there is a little space. One should know what is there.
What is there? Why is it so important?
There is as much in that little space within the heart, as there is in the whole world outside. Heaven, earth, fire, wind, sun, moon, lightning, stars; whatever is and whatever is not, everything is there.
AMORC's Relationship with Great Figures in Western Cultural History
The AMORC vision is one of a steady permeation of society by creative influences represented by such figures in European cultural history as the writer Dante Alighieri and the philosopher and scientist Rene Descartes, a line of Western thinkers, artists and scientists AMORC describes as past Rosicrucians.
Were such illustrious figures truly Rosicrucian, figures AMORC invokes as Rosicrucian forebears dramatizing the imprimatur of AMORC's elevated foundations?
I don't think so because such accounts are not supported by the historical record and, even though Rosicrucianism was partly secretive in its early emergence in 17th century Europe, the time span for its existence being claimed by AMORC goes further back than that, as with the example of Dante, making the AMORC timeline for the existence of Rosicrucianism look more opportunistic than factual.
This is a strategy of anchoring AMORC, not only within the larger Rosicrucian conception but concretising this conception in terms of figures who are the finest fruits of Western and particularly European artistic, intellectual and scientific culture.
This strategy facilitates AMORC's shaping of an image of aspiration, of cultural synthesis, represented by the diverse achievements of those historical figures.
This ideal is reflected in the contents of AMORC's monographs, its private teachings to its students as well as in its public publications, such as the Rosicrucian Digest.
The monographs and the Digest are constructed as inter-disciplinary organisations of knowledge drawn from across cultures and temporal zones, though grounded in Western cultural history, a unity of cultural foundations reworked in terms of the vision of a modern movement.
Image and Text: Isaac Newton
Sam Falconer's magical visualization, above, of scientist Isaac Newton's life and works is deeply in the AMORC spirit of the allure, esoteric and yet accessible to the dedicated mind, of the mystical quest as a unification of diverse streams of knowledge, correlating cosmic mind and human mind.
It is a panoramic evocation of Newton's life and work and its continuing impact into the future, centuries after his time, a multi-level panorama generating a spatial sequencing of the temporal progression of his life and work and its impact.
This begins from the lowest compartment evoking Newton's earlier days trying to herd sheep in his family's farm even as he was distracted by his passion for study, suggested by the book holding figure leading the sheep in beautifully shaped fields.
This
level also shows a figure in the foreground standing by a tree at the
bottom of which is a red fruit, evoking the famous story of Newton being
alerted to the puzzle of why the apple does not rise up rather
than fall down as striking him as he stood under a tree from which an
apple fell as he was home when school was closed during the 1665 Great Plague in his
undergraduate years at Cambridge, creating leisure within which he laid the foundations of his scientific discoveries, a puzzle that ultimately led
to his discovery of the theory of gravity decades later, a
theory encapsulating the apple, the earth, the moon, the sun and all
celestial bodies, a cosmological unity dramatized in the
third level through the balance of moon and earth in relation to
space travel, cosmological unifications grasped and journeys in outer
space made possible significantly through Newton's work.
The lowest level thus encapsulates the roots of Newton's movement from country youth to cosmological genius, suggested by the book reading sheep herder and the tree gazing figure, and as focused through the ladder reaching from the Newton family home in the lush fields to a pedestal high up in the air on which seats an open book, like a sacred text on a lectern, suggesting perhaps Newton's devotion to science as a means of penetrating the workings of the divine intelligence that shapes the cosmos, a vision explicitly demonstrated in the closing section of his greatest work, on gravity and the laws of motion, the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.
From the text on the 'lectern' pedestal, a tower of thought, crowned powers of reflection, adapting expressions from W.B.Yeats' "Blood and the Moon", mathematical calculations and elegant mathematical diagrams flower out like a plant's blossoms to provide a base on which stands the second level of the panorama, evocations of the work of his mature years, in optics, the famous prism experiment in the family home shown in the painting, through which he discovered the conflation of various colors in white light.
The outflow of mathematical visualizations from the book, in consonance with Newton's decisive demonstration of the power of mathematics in mapping nature may also evoke the words of his near ancestor Galileo Galilei in the epochal shaping of modern science in 17th century Europe,from his essay "The Assayer", "Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth" as quoted, among other texts, in Geoffrey Gorham et al's, The Language of Nature: Reassessing the Mathematization of Natural Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century.
The background of this second level is evocative of the networks of stars as seen from the earth, suggesting moving towards the achievements represented by the third level, a level emblematised by a telescope akin to that built by Newton through which he studied the celestial bodies, facilitating his arriving at the understanding of the finely tuned gravitational forces holding the celestial bodies in relation to each other, represented by the near concentric circles uniting earth and moon, the moon on which the telescope is positioned facing the earth in an imaginative inversion of history since Newton watched the moon from the earth, an inversion suggesting the expansions of perception Newton's work has contributed to enabling, enablements dramatized by the depiction of astronauts walking on that moon, space explorers who are beneficiaries of Newton's gravitational laws in relation to his laws of motion that enabled them to make the calculations facilitating their escaping earth's gravity, reach the moon and operate successfully within its very different gravitational environment, achievements unthinkable for many in Newton's time or understood as pure fiction in the unlikely event they were so imagined.
Again, the background of the third level is the starry depths of outer space, suggesting the ascent of Newton's historical impact, beginning from his life on his family's farm and country home to professional scholar dealing with universal physical phenomena, such as light and celestial configurations, as a natural philosopher, the kind of science practiced in Newton's 17th century Europe, a philosopher whose work continues to shape understanding and action and most likely will always do so in relation to humanity's engagement with the cosmos as long as anyone exists who understands his work and how to apply it.
This panoramic evocation of Newton's life and work, an evocation of time in terms of space, within the mind of the figure depicted, as suggested by the entire panoramic progression taking place with a silhouette of his head, incidentally suggests the AMORC focus on what, in another context, the literary scholar Isidore Okpewho describes as the 're-creative, reconfigurative power of the human mind expressed in various degrees of intensity' in "What is Myth?" in African Literature Today: Myth and History and in Myth in Africa.
The entire tableau of dazzling colours, vividly realized scenic shifts yet held as a simultaneous display delighting the eye with its visual and evocative force, a symbolic mirror opening to the viewer in terms of not only its beauty but through an understanding of the Newton story in its near mythic resonance, a life lived in time but significantly reshaping time through making possible the otherwise impossible in the management of space and its relationship with time, evokes the magic of this epic yet intimate and yet public story.
Falconer does not present explicit evocations of Newton's deep involvement in alchemy and Christian theology, which, along with what is now known as science, constitute the tripartite scheme of his mutually inspiring research agendas, his quest for "mysterious wisdom won by toil", within the solitary concentration represented by a lofty tower window illuminated as the thinker works within, as Yeats depicts such visions in "Phases of the Moon, adapting Milton's thinker in "II Penseroso" aspiring to "let my lamp at midnight hour/Be seen in some high lonely tower/ Where I may out-watch the Bear [ a constellation of stars] With thrice great Hermes"[ founder of Hermeticism, allied to alchemy] , references correlative with Newton's explorations in arcane knowledge and recondite sacred lore.
Such evocations would have rounded off Falconer's visualization of Newton's inspirational streams, bringing his picture of Newton explicitly into alignment with the map of knowledge developed by AMORC.
AMORC's cognitive configurations run from such Western esoteric systems as alchemy and its relation to Hermeticsm, to intellectual, artistic and religious cultures across space and time, even as the AMORC vision in its study of cosmic laws is correlative with the resonant summation from the Emerald Tablet, the originating Hermetic text, "As Above, So Below", a conception of celestial and terrestrial, spiritual and material correspondences which might have influenced Newton's thought.
Netwon's development of the theory of gravitational force in constructing a conception of celestial and terrestrial alignments may be seen as a development from occult conceptions of action at a distance without intervening agents of transmission, a seemingly magical idea which he precisely quantified and thus made into a science, as Richard Westfall seems to argue in his 1992 print and current online Encyclopedia Britannica article on Newton, a distillation of his Newton biographies, Never at Rest : A Biography of Isaac Newton and the shorter The Life of Isaac Newton.
AMORC and Claims of Secret Manuscripts Substantiating their Claims of Pre-Modern Ancestry
A book so precious, its contents so arcane, it has to be not only hidden from sight, but, through a custom made lock, kept inaccessible except to a few.
The book rests on a compass, evoking mathematical sciences of precise measurement, suggesting intellectual activities in investigating reality.
In the background are visible further symbols of arcane knowledge, the mortar and pestle of the alchemist, a practice midway between science and the occult.
Further shaping the visual space is an hourglass, evoking both a means of measuring time as well as being another image of human quantitative creativity as the compass.
The ancientness of use of the hourglass, however, evokes both cultural penetrations into a distant past and the mysteries such a past enfolds.
A globe of the earth in the background suggests aspiration to universally valid knowledge, to unifying breadth of understanding of terrestrial phenomena through human cognitive faculties.
A spider's web dominates the background of this collection of objects, suggesting knowledges hidden in ancient spaces.
The art's evocation of the allure and hiddenness of the arcane thought that AMORC promotes is amplified by the explicit expressions of such arcana in the accompanying verbal text.
AMORC and the Mystique of French Culture
Was Harvey Spencer Lewis really initiated by Rosicrucians in France, as is claimed for him in such texts as his son's biography of him, Cosmic Mission Fulfilled, and mandated to carry on the work of Rosicrucianism in the modern US, a work also related to older Rosicrucian immigrants on US soil?
I am sceptical of the
French connection and even more so of the US Rosicrucian one, the latter not
being supported by known history, to the best of my knowledge. Those
likely fictional historicisations are useful, however.
The modernizing innovations of AMORC break significantly with previous Western esotericism as I understand it, developing a pragmatism and an adaptation to modern living in a middle class context, that look more like the fruit of its US origin than of any strong link with older orientations emerging from Europe.
Lewis' invocation of a French initiatory root for AMORC looks to me more like the questionable claim of a similar German background by the founders of the older Rosicrucian school founded in England, the Golden Dawn.
France, in the earlier years of the 20th century when AMORC was founded, was better associated with images of refined and mystical cultures than the newer, more commercially correlated US where AMORC was born, and was thus a helpful frame for the values of worldly refinement within transcendental aspiration that AMORC cultivates.
These values are developed in the context of the effort to depict AMORC as less of a new creation in the brash modernity of the US but a modern development of ancient wisdoms passed on through the selfless dedication of devotees across cultures, spanning the earliest emergence of civilization, as it was understood in Western thought of the time, in Egypt, to its later manifestation in Europe and now in the US.
Image and Text: The Example of Dante Alighieri
An evocation of the cosmic vision of Dante Aligheiri's epic poem the Divine Comedy,a universe much of which he traverses with the help of his guide, Virgil.
Esoteric schools such as AMORC may depict the study of their ideas and practice of their exercises as facilitating the aspirant's quest on a philosophical and spiritual journey with cosmological undertones, dramatizing a more subtle equivalent of the journey of refinement of self and expansion of vision Dante undergoes in his poem.
The Creativity that Constructs AMORC
In sum, having gained a little but foundational exposure to AMORC, as an active member for about a year and reading their literature in comparison with others across a broad spectrum of Western, Asian and African esoteric and other spiritualities and philosophies, AMORC looks to me like the work of very creative people, expert builders of cultural connections, with a keen eye for a balance between depth, simplicity and effectiveness in developing and presenting mystical and occult ideas and practical techniques in a manner readily assimilated by the person active in the modern world of work and immersion in society, an individualistic society based on the modern Western template where science, rationality, imagination, the arts and spirituality forcefully coincide.
This originating vision leads to the pragmatic AMORC model of philosophical, mystical and occult texts received through the mail and now through the Internet, studied in the privacy of one's home with the option of group interaction with other members in lodges named after inspirational figures in the Order's understanding of the history of mysticism and esotericism, though the focus remains on individual study.
Buddhism, Hinduism, various aspects of Western and other cultures, all these are seamlessly integrated in AMORC's style of teaching, rich but never burdensome for the reader, always correlated with practical exercises in contemplation, meditation, breathing and ritual, in a system that is contemplative and scholarly, practical and ritualistic, artistic and philosophical.
This synthesis is AMORC's own
contribution to a vision initiated by the mysterious emergence of the 17th
century Rosicrucian manifestos, the Fama Fraternitatis Rosae
Crucis ( The Fame of the Brotherhood of the Rose Cross, 1614) and the Confessio
oder Bekenntnis der Societat und Bruderschaft Rosenkreuz( The Confession of the Laudable Fraternity of the Most Honorable Order of the Rosy Cross, also known as the Confessio Fraternitatis, 1616) announcing
a hidden fraternity exploring the arts and the sciences in the name of
transforming society, a fraternity whose founder, Christian Rosenkreuz, had gained his knowledge through studies in Damcar, Arabia and Fez, Morocco, after spending a short time in Egypt, eventually returning to Europe to spread the knowledge he had gained of a philosophy which reaches back to Adam, the first man as understood in Biblical history, and from him to other Biblical ancestors Moses and Solomon.
This cognitive harvest gained through wide journeying by Rosenkreuz, who gave his name to Rosicrucianism, is described as a sphere of harmonious knowledge,"whose total parts are equidistant from the center", a unity of knowledge drawn from Africa, the Arab world and Europe, reaching into the beginning of humanity's emergence on Earth.
AMORC may be understood as contributing to giving concrete, though imaginative form to this vision of an ancient, multicultural synthesis, ancient yet updated to meet contemporary needs in various cultures as Christian Rosenkreuz could have done on returning to Europe with the knowledge he had gained on his distant journeys.
The authors of the Rosicrucian manifestos have never been ascertained and the existence of the fraternity they announced has never been confirmed. Rosenkreuz is often described as an allegorical figure by later respondents to the manifestos.
The proclamations of the manifestos, however, inspired various
exploratory activities in emulation of the initiatives they announced, initiatives that, as has come to be acknowledged after the
pioneering scholarship of Frances Yates, have a part of a stream of knowledge, the Western esoteric tradition, strategic
to Western spiritual and secular history.
AMORC takes forward these initiatives in terms of a quest for comprehensive knowledge, integrating East and West, North and South, past and present, the physical and the spiritual, the terrestrial and the cosmic, the human being and the enveloping universe, invoking all human faculties in a synthesis of body, mind and spirit, cultivating moral and cognitive perfection in the context of an oscillation between the finite and the infinite, time and eternity, within rhythms that embrace both terrestrial continuities and the vision of an ultimate convergence of all possibilities, as the aspirant of the Rose Cross moves from the cross to the rose, from the rose to the cross.
Image and Text : Raphael's School of Athens as Incidentally Dramatizing AMORC's Interdisciplinary Vision
Italian Renaissance master Raphael's 1511 The School of Athens, a visualization of ancient Greek philosophers and scientists grouped in relation to the central figures of Plato, left and his student, Aristotle right, the current cover image of the Rosicrucian Order AMORC Facebook page, is used here to evoke the sense of harmony of inspiration from diverse sources that AMORC, within the tradition of the Rosicrucian manifestos, develops in appropriating for its own history a constellation of cognitive luminaries, thinkers, artists and scientists, from ancient Egypt to the present, as stars in the Rosicrucian story converging in the modern manifestation that is AMORC.
The regally conceived figures are positioned within a majestic architectural space as they are engaged in various kinds of activity, the image vivified by a magnificently harmonised play of colours.
These actions range from earnest or quiet discussion, as some eagerly gaze at a book someone is holding or avidly watch another person draw mathematical figures, evocative of Archimedes who calculated the number of grains of sand on the earth or Euclid, whose Elements is foundational for geometry, to a figure in the lower centre foreground sprawling in apparent carelessness, evocative of such a thinker as Diogenes, known for a carefree lifestyle dramatizing his own philosophy, "sleeping and eating wherever he chose in a highly non-traditional fashion[ declaring] himself a cosmopolitan and a citizen of the world rather than claiming allegiance to just one place", a "simple lifestyle and behaviour...grounded in a disdain for what he regarded as the folly, pretence, vanity, self-deception, and artificiality of human conduct" as described at the Wikipedia essay on Diogenes.
Others stand alone in dignified alertness or sit on their own in thought, one such solitary figure, in the lower left foreground, hunched over writing instrument and paper as he ponders, while others in the centre of the painting congregate around the two supreme figures of ancient Greek thought, and, as time has shown, of Western philosophy.
This conjunction of architectural splendor and dynamic yet harmonious activity dramatizing cognitive pursuits, may evoke the AMORC Celestial Sanctum meditation, centred in visualizing an inspiring space chosen by the meditator. This imagined space represents a window though which the self looks out upon the Cosmic, the magnificent source and focal point of all positive thought of which humanity is capable, in the words of Charles Dana Dean, in a 1930 edition of the AMORC booklet, Liber 777: The Celestial Sanctum: Its Origin, Purposes and Program of Services.
The sublime adaptation of this meditation by AMORC luminary Raymond Bernard in his Messages from the Celestial Sanctum dramatizes the conjunction of inspiring personages and glorious architecture also actualized centuries before in Raphael's School of Athens, doing this in a manner that projects central AMORC symbols and values.
Bernard's visualisation combines splendidly the universal idea of inspirational lineages, inspiring precursors, various conceptions of the idea of ancestors, evoked by the Raphael painting, crystallising this motif through the sublimities of Gothic architecture.
He thus synthesizes an image of grand architecture with images of inspirational figures, as Raphael also does. The architectural metaphor is traditionally used in promoting the Celestial Sanctum meditation, visualizing it as a Gothic cathedral while encouraging those who use the meditation to adopt any image they find inspiring.
Bernard builds on the cathedral motif, in conjunction with figures who represent the AMORC vision of what Paul in his Biblical "Letter to the Hebrews", describes as a great "cloud of witnesses", "bygone wayfarers [who] cleansed...await the seeker...promising from far to slake immortal thirst" as Soyinka evokes a similar idea in "O Roots", figures inspiring the seeker in their quest for the point of intersection of the eternal and the temporal, the finite and the infinite.
Bernard visualizes a space representing a point of convergence of the highest human aspirations, imagining it terms of his preferred picture of sublime sacred space, a Gothic cathedral:
...in my visualization, the Cathedral of the Soul [ or the Celestial Sanctum as this space is also called in AMORC terms] assumes the appearance of a cathedral, but each person may choose his own conception of it, as long as it responds to his own deep aspiration and arouses in him the emotion and inspiration which will produce a perfect and effective visualization, as precise as will be the description, in this chapter, of my cathedral.
He proceeds to build the image in terms that conjunct architectural grandeur with spiritual aspiration:
Together, my readers and I will see it erected in space, high above the Earth, immense and integrated in the solar light which completely outlines its contours and which, at the same time, conceals it completely from the gaze of man.
There it is, shining with brilliance purer than pure diamond. From a distance it seems transparent, and careful scrutiny is necessary to distinguish the architecture. The concept of the building is prodigious.
…
To this general view, add the innumerable high, stained glass windows, the designs of which cannot be distinctly seen from the outside, and the immense finely carved rose window. Carry the entire structure to infinite proportions, and you will have a very general idea of its magnificence.
Having concretised this image in elaborate architectural specificity, he proceeds to further imagine it in terms of visual evocations of great spiritual figures:
At the top, another notched triangle raises its upper point to halfway up the two spires, partly hidden by a wall with 144 inches which shelter many statues, symbolizing the guardians of the edifice.
Whom do they represent?
I only recognize a few. I am led to think that they perpetuate the memory of the great founders of religions and the most advanced adepts of all time.
Just below the centre of the rose window, twelve statues are seen in gigantic niches carved with a thousand symbols, among which the constellations of the zodiac shine with a special brilliance; and I understand that they emphasize the basic cycles of humanity, with each statue personifying someone who has fulfilled his mission in one of the cycles.
There are Ram, Mithra, Abraham, Jesus, Mohammed, and others whom I cannot distinguish.
Lower down, in seven other niches, are the greatest Masters [spiritual figures active in human life but not ordinarily visible to human beings] concerned in the initiatory evolution of our Earth [ evolution in terms of the unity of body, mind and spirit ], and I am filled with emotion on recognizing them.
An intercultural and ecumenical spirit prevails:
The moment to enter has come. Like a breath upon our soul, strange music with unknown rhythms coming through the great portal greets us.
Others enter at the same time as we do, and it is impossible to exactly define their race or their nationality. However, by the signs which certain ones make, we recognize their beliefs.
Here is one who, after genuflecting, makes a sign of the cross. Here is another who covers his head, here is a third, making the homage of his faith to Allah. There is a visitor making a traditional gesture, and a great many like myself making the Rosicrucian Salutation to the East [ the "place of Divine Illumination and Resurrection” as adapted from the sun rising in the east, as described in the 1918 edition of the Rosicrucian Manual, p.13-14] before entering.
Bernard's work is one of the finest expressions of the AMORC spirit.
Image from Victoria Pazzer on Pinterest
Taking Forward the
Flame
I am emulating the vision of AMORC, among other inspirational sources, in my development of classical African esotericisims, within the broader context of African and other systems of thought.
Image and Text: Leonardo da Vinci
How may one Leonardo da Vinci, great artist and visionary scientist and engineer, shown above in a contemporary recreation of the 15th century European figure with one of his engineering models, his enigmatic creativity perennially engaging, is invoked in at least one AMORC advertisement shown earlier in this essay, as demonstrating a hidden knowledge that enabled his mysterious creativity, a mysterious achievement of a kind that is linked in that advertisement with the also mysterious creativity represented by the pyramids of Egypt, the mode of building those elegant colossi still unknown after centuries.