MONASTERY SECRETS . . . the Forbidden Knowledge of Tibet . . . Like the streams that trickle from the Himalayan heights to the plateau below, the great truths of these brotherhoods have descended through the ages . .
. Write to-day for . . . FREE Sealed Book, with its amazing revelations about these mysteries of life." Last week this ad, like hundreds of others before it in such respectable publications as the New York Times Magazine Section, was bringing sacks of letters to the headquarters of the Rosicrucians in San Jose, Calif. After receiving their free Sealed Book, some of the ad-answerers would go on to become members of AMORC (the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis) and pay dues of $2.50 a month to learn "through alchemy, metaphysics and cosmology" how to be happy. But many a faithful U.S. Rosicrucian might be jolted by the picture of the San Jose order painted in a lawsuit filed by the widow of the cofounder.
Faith & Finance. Mrs. Myra Kiima-lehto, sixtyish, sued for her late husband's share in what she claims he and his partner had conceived as "a business of conducting rituals, ceremonials, lessons, instructions and the sale of books and periodicals . . ." They founded AMORC, she says, "as a device to disseminate information, lessons and instructions to others for a profit." The take, she contends, is good. According to Widow Kiimalehto, the AMORC membership is now around 2,-000,000 (which Rosicrucian officials claim is a gross exaggeration).
This successful blend of faith and finance, according to Myra Kiimalehto, was at first administered jointly by Thor, her slight, pince-nezed Swedish immigrant husband, and ex-Methodist Harvey Spencer Lewis, former president of an "Institute for Psychical Research." Together they applied modern U.S. selling methods to a potpourri of lore derived from the ancient esoteric Rosicrucian cult which dates back beyond the isth Century. In 1928, the Lewis-Kiimalehto brand of Rosicrucianism found in San Jose a happy combination of favorable weather and favorable authorities. There Lewis incorporated it as a nonprofit organization, and settled down to be "Imperator of the Supreme Grand Lodge." Kiimalehto sold his New York printing shop and came along to San Jose in 1936 as "Sovereign Grand Master."
Mummies & Metaphysics. Today the mosquelike structures of Rosicrucian Park house an Egyptian and Oriental museum (complete with genuine mummies), an auditorium, a library, a shrine dedicated to Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, a planetarium and Rose Croix University, with its Colleges of Fine Arts, Mundane and Arcane Sciences and Humanities.
Lewis died in 1939, Kiimalehto in 1948. Mrs. Kiimalehto, who has not been a practicing Rosicrucian for four years, says that she is not interested in money but in rescuing AMORC from the control of Lewis' son, daughter-in-law and widow. Last week Rosicrucian leaders filed their answer to Widow Kiimalehto's suit: the Kiimalehto-Lewis team, they said, had not been a business partnership. Meanwhile, the checks and money orders continued to roll in from those who yearn to learn about "the system of metaphysical and physical philosophy intended to awaken the latent faculties of the individual whereby he may utilize to a better advantage his natural talents and lead a more happy life."