After the eight Mandamus lessons, the atrium section begins. The atri
um is a kind of anteroom, which the neophyte must pass through before he enters the guarded chambers of the temple, reserved for initiates beyond the neophyte level. There are three atrium levels.
Neophyte Section, Atrium I
In this monograph, AMORC has included "The Rosicrucian Chant."
This monograph carefully cements the foundation for the ultimate spiritual authority of AMORC by instilling in the initiate the belief in the continual presence of the invisible masters. Notwithstanding the invisible masters, it is the visible master of the Rosicrucian order—
that is, the imperator—and other high officials in the order who are the proper intermediaries between God and Man.
The whole world is reduced to the invisible masters of the Rosi- crucians, the visible masters of the Rosicrucians, and the members of AMORC. They are truly the chosen people. Everybody else is an outsider, a second-class galactic citizen. This is the "us vs. them" per
spective fostered by the Rosicrucian system.
Even the most complex cult doctrines ultimately reduce into two basic poles: black versus white; good versus evil; spiritual world versus physical world, us versus them.
There is never room for pluralism. The doctrine allows no outside group to be recognized as valid (good, godly, real) be
cause that would threaten the cult's monopoly on truth. There is also no room for interpretation or deviation. If the doctrine doesn't provide an answer directly, then the member must ask a leader. If the leader doesn't have an answer, he can always brush off the question as unimportant or irrelevant.
Pet devils vary from group to group. They can be political ad economic institutions (communist, socialist, or capitalist), men- tal-health professionals (psychiatrists, deprogrammers), or meta
physical entities such as Satan, spirits, UFO creatures, or just the cruel laws of nature. Devils are certain to take on the bodies of parents, friends, ex-members, reporters, and anyone else who is critical of the group. The "huge conspiracies" working to thwart the group are, of course, proof of its tremendous importance.1 When I was on the street, though homeless and without food, I still thought of myself as a specially chosen person in charge of humanity.
So, in the middle of my misery, I had to be grateful to AMORC and to its leaders for having chosen me to serve.
Having been continually asked to study the Rosicrucian teachings with "zeal," I gave my all. That is why, in spite of the humiliations of my poverty and disenfranchised lifestyle, I was unable to leave. It was a privilege to be the servant of H. Spencer Lewis and his exalted officers.
The ultimate goal of AMORC is clearly to become "illuminated."
Illumination is the moving target that keeps all members hooked, tracking their quarry every day.
The Rosicrucian Initiation Atrium 1 neophyte section begins with a discussion of the ancient pharaoh, Akhenaton, reputed to have initi
ated monotheism in Egypt. Akhenaton is spoken about often in the monographs.
The Atrium 1 neophyte section affirms that the Rosicrucian organi
zation, "our order/' insists on the members' freedom. Still, one cannot help but note the powerful words of identification and indoctrination,
"our order." In time, members will learn to make AMORC their order, too. I remember referring to AMORC as "our order," never realizing how significantly that phrase implied an acknowledgment and accep
tance of the organization as it portrayed itself.
The neophyte is then told by AMORC that he has crossed the great portal that gives access to the three waiting rooms of the symbolic temple of the Rosicrucian tradition. These three waiting rooms are called "atriums" by AMORC. The fortunate neophyte who can suc
cessfully pass through these rooms will eventually be able to access the path of the initiate. AMORC warns that not everyone will make it through the atriums.
Atrium 1 Monograph 1 affirms that as a new neophyte of the or
der, the member should begin the sanctum period by following the appointed ritual.
The ritual that the monograph refers to is the ceremonial washing of one's hands and drinking of a glass of water before making contact with the celestial sanctum. This reminds me of my experience of go
ing to the park office bathroom to wash my hands, and prepare to make contact with celestial sanctum while I was homeless. It was as if I had accepted my sacred duties, while tightly shutting my eyes to the reality of the world around me.
In AMORC, suggestions morph into mandates. The monographs begin by offering the neophyte the option of burning some incense before making contact with celestial sanctum. Later it will be more of a mandate, something like, "You must burn incense." Then we are told to make the sign of the rosy cross, a series of gestures that re
semble, but are different than making a cross in the Catholic church or protestant denominations, as in the brochure The Rosicrucian Initia
tion: The Guide o f the Neophyte.
The ritual supposedly permits you to create a harmonious bond
ing with the egregore of AMORC and the masters that are watching over the Rosicrucian order. The efficacy of this ritual depends on the sincerity with which you approach the sacred study period in your home sanctum.
In this monograph is the first mention of the term egregore, a word that helped intensify my dependency on AMORC during the last twelve years of my membership. In the monograph, we read what appear to be normal, fraternal statements about the order. Nothing in the initial innocent description of the egregore reveals how the con
cept can be used to entrap a member, providing the foundations for a powerful phobia about the world outside AMORC.
AMORC then introduces the subject of reincarnation. This con
cept, along with the concept of spirit, prepares members for the Rosi
crucian belief about when life begins and ends. This will eventually lead to the acceptance of abortion.
Although appearing to be very tolerant of members' individu
ality and freedom, ultimately, as one pursues the Rosicrucian path, AMORC will always be portrayed as being right in its depiction of fundamental issues of science, religion, and economic and social is
sues. Over a period of time, members are led to accept all of AMORC's beliefs and reject any outside beliefs conflicting with the Rosicrucian canon. Like all destructive cults, AMORC affirms, "We are right, and everyone else is wrong."
At one point in the monograph, AMORC affirms that the world as we know it is nonexistent. It all only exists in our own mind. Our vocabulary and use of words do not convey the real nature of things.
This is soon followed by the assertion that "It is possible to modify the manifestation of matter."
Here AMORC lays the foundation to instill in members the belief that they, the select people of this Earth, can change everything.
Practical Application Atrium 1, Monograph 2
The concurrence begins with a quotation taken from the work Le Pas
sage de la Matiere a la Vie (The Passage of Matter to Life) by Emmy Guittes, who contends that the Buddha asserted that life began with the emer
gence of immortalized "spirit units/' which essentially serve to build physical bodies. They are careful to say that her writing bears a rela
tionship to the Rosicrucian idea of spirit but is not identical to it.
We are reminded that the terms cohesion, adhesion, attraction, and repulsion bear a relationship to the four forces manifested in matter due to the action of spirit. Spirit manifests through the universe in the form of vibration.
Again, the monograph affirms the antiquity of its knowledge.
Members soon learn to identify anything good in the world with the Rosicrucian tradition. For example, around 1988, one well-educated frater in Kings Rosy Cross Lodge in Brooklyn told us that Toussaint Louverture (one of the Haitian liberators before 1804) must have been trained by Rosicrucians—the same ones who landed in Pennsylva
nian in the New World. There was absolutely no reason to think this, other than the fact that the man helped liberate Haiti. It was a natural step of logic for someone who believed that Rosicrucianism had a comer on everything real or important.
AMORC details what science says about vibratory frequency, but also states that science does not tell the whole story. Vibration also occurs in the spiritual world, where you need special faculties to per
ceive it. This will be an essential part of the Rosicrucian teaching.
By hinting at special information to come, AMORC retains its members' interest and allegiance. These promises of future disclosure of secret knowledge entrapped me for many years. For instance, the constant trumpeting of AMORC's divine authority and unimpeach
able power suggested to me that my financial problems could very well be the result of AMORC's intentional testing of my loyalty and dedication. Only my loyalty under this extreme stress would prove me worthy of receiving the special information that would change me from being an ordinary man to a Rosicrucian adept.
The rest of this monograph makes AMORC's case that all things
vibrate at certain distinct frequencies. We are living in a world of vibration. The monograph concludes with an observation that the human body, just like all other objects in the universe, is also just a bundle of vibrations in the larger, vaster ocean of vibrations.
By 2003,1 was convinced that the Rosicrucian teachings contained many deceptive, incomplete, and wholly unproved assertions, but I could not completely reject the monographs' claims because by then I was a victim of my own cult personality. I put great stock in the infal
libility of these teachings.
Since mind control depends on creating a new identity within the individual, cult doctrine always requires that a person dis
trust his own self. The doctrine becomes the "master program"
for all thoughts, feelings, and actions. Since it is the truth, per
fect and absolute, any flaw in it is viewed as only a reflection of the believer's own imperfection. He is taught that he must follow the prescribed formula even if he doesn't really understand it.
At the same time it is said that he should try to work harder and have more faith, so he will come to understand the truth more clearly.2
For someone who, thankfully, has never experienced thought re
form and mind control processes, it may be difficult to convey the inner conflicts that rage within someone who has been subjected to this type of emotional and mental manipulation. It may be equally difficult to explain the times these conflicts are deadened by the over
riding of one's normal doubts and fears by the extreme domination o f one side of oneself, which I am calling the "cult personality."
The cult personality is formed to direct extreme loyalty and at
tachment to the organization, dedication to its practices, and over
whelming certainty about its beliefs. So sometimes I would be living in conscious conflict, sometimes in extreme certainty. And sometimes there would be moments of unconscious rebellion—and occasionally total unconsciousness, accompanied by missing time, the most ex
treme component of the process.
In my case, at a certain point, I was not able to read a monograph without feeling the extreme dissonance between my critical, rational mind that would raise a number of red flags about the veracity of its content and that part of me that felt obligated to accept the Rosicru
cian claims without questioning. The rational power within me had not found the power to keep the rest of me from surrendering com
pletely to the claims of AMORC.
Practical Application
In the practical application section, the monograph clearly states that the scientist Michael Faraday (1791-1867) was a Rosicrucian. Was he, though? Was every important person of the past a Rosicrucian? If he was, it is certainly difficult to find out. If one does a search on the In
ternet, "Michael Faraday Rosicrucian," his name pops up on a lot of Rosicrucian (AMORC) or AMORC-influenced sites.
It is difficult to prove, one way or the other, that many of these historical figures were Rosicrucians. Saying that a person was a Rosi
crucian may mean either that he or she belonged to an order that was called Rosicrucian directly, or (even more difficult to prove) that he or she belonged to an AMORC tradition. These traditions are ultimately based on a conglomeration of mystical organizations called FUDOSI, whose own authenticity gave it the right to confer authenticity on another organization—clearly a questionable practice.
Atrium 1, Monograph 3
This monograph encourages members to reject their own sensory perceptions.
The doctrine that the perceived world is illusory is a thread of thought in many religious doctrines—including the philosophy of Hindu Vedanta and Christian Gnosticism—in their many varieties and styles of expression. Since this book is not propounding a specific philosophy or belief about the universe, we are merely interested to note that, in the case of AMORC, this doctrine functions to increase
members' dependency on AMORC for fundamental questions, now that their day-to-day sense of reality is being undermined.
Once, while living in a stinking hotel room in Miami, I spent an entire week almost without taking a bite of food. Why? Because I was preoccupied with trying to find out what my intuition was telling me.
My conscious, self-imposed restriction of food wasn't a normal health or religious fast, but an act of self-neglect. I doubted the ideas associated with my physical senses and with the physical plane, and so sought "Higher Guidance" through this extreme method. I want to add that, in my opinion, there may very well be a legitimate role for fasting for health and religious purposes, but not for someone whose basic reality, common sense, and natural reality has been undermined by cult indoctrination, enhanced suggestibility by certain trance-in
ducing processes, and the aura of doctrinal infallibility.
AMORC analyzes the five senses, focusing on the eyes. In its dis
cussion, it utilizes the example of movie projection, citing the scien
tific explanation of the process as correct—but not complete. In this neophyte section, AMORC is preparing its case for the Rosicrucian view trumping the modem scientific worldview, fostering members' belief in its infallible authority.
This monograph explains the physical senses with many common scientific explanations, underlining the limitations of modem science's point of view, which is based on ordinary perception. AMORC claims that its own explanation of the extrasensory perception of spirit, and its vibratory nature beyond the range of the senses, is the real and more complete one. If you want to know more, you are told to stay in AMORC.
The point here is not whether such vibrations or their perception exists, but that when you commit yourself to AMORC, you are com
mitting yourself to a larger view, which includes a specific interpreta
tion and suggested applications of the vibratory nature of reality.
Atrium 1, Monograph 4 Concurrence
This monograph takes its introductory quotation from Nicolas Co
pernicus's book De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, which suggests that the Earth may revolve around the sun. In this excerpt Coperni
cus quotes Virgil, the Latin poet, who speaks of how from a moving ship, land appears to recede in the distance. From the ship, every
thing else but the ship is moving. This provides a good opportunity for AMORC to point out the limitations of people's ability to perceive objectively.
It claims that people are wrong to blindly accept the testimony of their senses. To make its point, the monograph uses Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Galileo, and their various scientific and doctrinal disputes with religious and "scientific" authorities. These controver
sies and the outcome of various new scientific theories like those of Galileo and Copernicus concerning the revolution of the Earth around the sun, illustrate how accepted knowledge is not always true.
Continuing the discussion, the shortcomings of the scientific method are highlighted. AMORC points out that the scientific method can learn from mysticism—meaning the Rosicrucian order, AMORC itself, the world's most perfect template of knowledge.
There is a long-remembered H. Spencer Lewis quotation, "You have to be a live question mark." AMORC directly states that this question must apply to their teaching as well. To me, this statement of the member's right to question, although charmingly permissive of a member's freedom to question the teachings, in fact, provides cover for an all-pervasive authoritarianism.
In The Guru Papers: Masks o f Authoritarian Power,3 Joel Cramer and Diana Alstad catalog a variety of "strong indications of belonging to an authoritarian group." They include:
1. A "party line" or point of view from which no deviation is
al-lowed. Members who deviate from this point of view are made to feel bad for entertaining these rebellious thoughts.
2. The authority is deemed somehow perfect or infallible. It has the moral right to question any kind of deviance.
3. The organization is placed above the members' own judgment.
4. Members are discouraged or prohibited from talking to others outside the group.
5. The leadership is defended, no matter what.
6. Member feels confused and fearful, a kind of general malaise, a condition caused by repression of doubts.
In reality, no member truly questions AMORC. Throughout the order, a compliant slave mentality, rather than a strongly claimed Jef
fersonian rationality, rules the members' approach to the material.
The overall intention is to instill doubt in the members about ev
erything they have ever learned, through a slow, steady "unfreezing"
process. Eventually, reason and critical thinking will no longer pen
etrate a member's actual approach to the monograph. Subtle forces will erode their ability to reason and think freely when confronting the Rosicrucian hypotheses.
By affirming reasonableness and freedom, AMORC creates a psy
chological vulnerability in the minds of their students. Their minds are now completely open to the so-called enlightened Rosicrucian methods. In most cults, there is a strong, seemingly rational founda
tion laid during the early indoctrination phase.
One interesting concept, brought out in this monograph, is the assertion that Rosicrucians have no actual right to property. Any
thing that a member possesses really belongs to the Cosmic. To me, although seemingly idealistic, this doctrine is an attempt to further obliterate personal identity and freedom. In later degrees, AMORC will ask its members to use not 1 but we instead. The we belonging to
what? Perhaps the we of "our order." Slowly, individual conscious
ness is raked over to toward the hive mentality.
Practical Application
AMORC assures its members that their doctrine denying the private ownership of property has nothing to do with communist or socialist theory. AMORC affirms that karmic law is the reason behind the dif
AMORC assures its members that their doctrine denying the private ownership of property has nothing to do with communist or socialist theory. AMORC affirms that karmic law is the reason behind the dif