AMORC'S THIRD ADVERTISEMENT

 

This seems to be the third newspaper advertisement to promote the recent AMORC organization that Harvey Spencer Lewis had founded in February 1915 in New York. This article was published in The World newspaper on July 2, 1916, and the text reads as follows:

 

 

 

VISITING THE MYSTIC TEMPLE WHERE IMPERATOR LEWIS

(FORMERLY OF P.S. 16) PERFORMED AS AN ALCHEMIST

 

By Charles Welton

 

As the June convocation of the supreme Council of the Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis [AMORC}, held in the back parlor of the dwelling at No. 70 West Eighty-seventh Street, which is fitted up as a temple. H. Spencer Lewis. Imperator of the Order, performed the mystical transmutation ceremony. He placed fifteen ingredients in a crucible, stirred them with his fingers and at the end of eighteen minutes withdrew a bit of yellow metal. Everybody present was profoundly impressed, believing he had produced a piece of gold.

 

It will surprise some of the boys who were in Principal John Burke's graduating class in P.S. 16 a dozen or so years ago to learn that "Fat" Lewis, as some of them used to call him, is now a high muck-a-muck in the occult business and a Grand Master General and Imperator. It may also surprise some of the people who ten years ago worked with Lewis in the Psychic Investigating League and helped him round up spooks and experiment with hypnotism and telepathy.

 

But there's no going back of the words. Lewis is in the mystic line for fair. He says he isn't out to make money and has nothing to sell.

 

There are strange goings-on at No. 70 west Eighty-seventh Street goings-on full of mysticism and the pungent aroma of Eastern spices. Students of the occult, clad in the robes of the Rosaecrucian Order, are as busy as an alarm o'clock trying to get results in science, electricity and other things by following where so ever the symbols of the ancients direct.

 

Lewis is a short person, with a big, round head, a big round face, a big, round body and a very stouts arms and legs. He is thirty-three years old and talks regular New York. His office is in the front parlor. He and Thor Kiimalehto, Secretary General, sit back to back at roll top desks, Kiimalehto is a printer by trade, Lewis used to go to him with an occasional job and in that way they became acquainted.

 

I called at the temple on Wednesday. Mr. Roth, who is a student of hieroglyphics, and Mr. Callahan, who once explored an Egyptian tomb with me, went along. Two glad hands were extended to us.

 

-         "Will you be good enough, Mr. Lewis," I asked, "to tell us just how you do the alchemy stunt by which you transmute odds and ends into gold?"

 

-         "Stunt is good," replied the lmperator. “Now, to begin remember we may be nuts or bugs, but we don't pretend to have wings growing on our shoulders. On the night of our convocation, which was attended by Torch-bearer and the Vestal Virgin, the twelve other officers and others of the advanced order to the number of thirty seven, I delivered an address saying that for the first time in America I would demonstrate the secret process of transmutation.

 

For hundreds of years the Elder Brothers of our order in Egypt worked at their crucibles and wrestled with the problems of alchemy in an attempt to apply the fundamental laws of our philosophy and science. At last they succeeded in transmutation on the material plane. The members of the Fourth Degree being the most advanced, I felt the call to make the demonstration for the first time in this country.

 

I had directed each of fifteen members to bring a certain ingredient, and I may say that these ingredients were such as might be found in any kitchen – say, saleratus, ginger, etc., but these were not among them. Salt was one. A rose in full bloom was another, although you would not pick a rose in a kitchen.

 

Then we had a bottle full of distilled water and a cube of zinc. As accessories, we were provided with a crucible, fire and a pair of pinchers – all the necessary outfit.

 

Well, when everything was ready I asked the fifteen brothers and sisters to come forward with their offerings. No one knew what the others had. The various ingredients were plated in the crucible with the lump of zinc, which had been tested with nitric acid and carefully weighted.

 

This I stirred with my fingers for several minutes and I might add that I scorched my fingers in the process. At the proper moment I stopped stirring, and with a pair of pincers took from the crucible a bit of yellow metal – the transmuted metal which stood the acid test and was found to be a trifle heavier than the zinc. Every one present saw it. I might add that there is no money in making gold that way. You get only a little bit for all your pains."

 

-         "Was it the regular goods –the real stuff– gold?" I asked.

 

-         "Gold transmuted from other metals," said Lewis, making a statement instead of a reply, "is the purest of gold. Now about the order. It was established way back in the dynasty of Thutmose III, who was the husband of Isis. The obelisk in Central Park, one of the two erected in Egypt by Thutmose III, and intended to stand some day in the country where the eagle spreads its wings, bears the cartouche or seal of the order as well as many other authentic and Rosaecrucian signs.”

 

I told Lewis that, while I was not familiar with all the symbols and cartoons on the obelisk, his word that they were there was good enough for me.

 

-         "When I went to Toulouse, France, in 1909 to secure permission to found the order in this country, I was informed that it soul be not until 1915, and so I waited and studied and fitted myself for the work, and on April 1, 1915, the charter was drawn up and signed, and the order took its place in the country where the eagle spreads its wings."

 

At my suggestion we were permitted to enter the temple proper, which is the third room back on the parlor floor. The room was heavily curtained. The crucible stands in front of the Imperator's desk. An electric bulb is inside the bowl, and when the current is turned on lights of several colors show. The crucible has a circular pan around its edge. This was filled with what looked like powdered dried leaves.

 

Kiimalehto stepped into a closet, and, returning with a bottle, pour some of its contents into the pan and touched a match to it. Immediately the temple was filled with an odor like a combination of cayenne pepper, myrrh, sweet marjoram, terebinth and other things.

 

The thick smoke rose from the pan, spread out over our heads and formed in a thin cloud which floated to the ceiling and dispelled some of the darkness.

 

There was then disclosed the presence of a very tall and straight figure, garbed from neck to heels in a bright red garment and topped with a turban. He stood at the curtained window before an electrician's desk.

 

-         “May I ask what you are doing" I inquired, and the figure turned and looked at me through big round glasses.

 

-         "I am a student," he replied, "and I am busy with the wireless."

 

I asked his name and he said he was Harry Koenig, a theatrical electrician. He used to work at Cohan's Theatre and also at the Winter Garden, but was out of a job at present.

 

While he was telling me these things the faint click of the instrument could be heard.

 

-         "We do not do any sending here," said Koenig, "but we cut in and pick up bits of news. It is rather dull to-day."

 

While Roth and Callahan were breathing the fumes of the burning incense at the other end of the room I slipped the wireless receivers over my ears. Koenig was right. It was a dull day.

 

The instrument was not adjusted properly, so student Koenig turned a thumbscrew on a keyboard arrangement and, what to my untrained ears, sounded like a High School of Commerce boy communicating a baseball result to a friend in a Manual Training, clicked down the wire.

 

Koenig was not the only student at his task. There is an average of dozen men and women – at work. It isn't absolutely necessary that they all wear robes, but most of them do. The different degrees have different robes – some red and others blue or white.

 

The chemical laboratory is just back of the temple, in what used to be the butler’s pantry before the Imperator moved in. The vibration and philosophy departments are in another part of the building.

 

Getting back to that yellow bit of metal that the Imperator said he had transmuted, it can be said with authority that all suggestions that it might be sent to the laboratory of Columbia University for examination or assayed will be turned down The metal will be kept in the Eighty seventh Street Temple as a prized jewel of the order.

 

The Imperator will not again give a demonstration of transmutation. Following the long established custom, the fifteen members who delivered the raw material to him are to keep their individual shares of the secret. No one individual knows the mixture, but collectively they own the formula. In the event of the passing of the Imperator the fifteen may come together three years thereafter and repeat the ceremony.

 

Probably the next function of real importance in the temple will be the christening of little Earle Cromwell Lewis. The date of this ceremony has not been fixed, but the Grand Lodge will be present. Earle Cromwell is the youngest of the Imperator's three children.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DRAWINGS

 

Below I put an enlargement of the drawings that accompany the article.

 

 

The text reads: "The odor of aromatic herbs came from the crucible when Thor Kiimalehto touched a match to it."

 

 

 

 

The text reads: " Harry Koenig, a former  electrician at Cohan's Theatre, on his radio as an wireless student [of AMORC]."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

OBSERVATIONS

 

In this interview Harvey Spencer Lewis continues to repeat the false story that he made up of the Rosicrucians, continues to make his students do useless activities, and furthermore claims to have transmuted those ingredients into gold through an alchemical occult procedure. But given the enormous charlatanism that Lewis showed, it is most likely that this feat was just another lie invented by this individual.