My First Brushes With the Mystical
In 1995 I found myself wearing a werewolf costume under a fake covered bridge in York, Maine. Occasionally I'd run out into the road and scream at truckloads of people driven through at regular intervals on a haunted hayride. For some strange reason, this was also my first meaningful brush with the occult.
I was personally adrift in life at this time. I had just broken up with my first real long-term relationship, and my ex was taking great pleasure in manipulating my wounds. I also bailed on my first semester of University, having somehow managed to bullshit my way into a music program that I had no business being a part of. I was also coming off the heels of my first dalliance with suicide so it's safe to say that I wasn't really in the most stable place, emotionally. I was definitely searching for something and then I found Brad.
Brad was a fellow werewolf in this nightly routine of hiding behind the bridge, which actually sat flush on the ground, fording no actual river or anything else, for that matter. We had a good deal of downtime when we weren't out in the road shrieking and growling and getting in rider's faces. We would listen to Brad, a heavy metal philosopher, talk about whatever he happened to be into at the moment. Brad was an interesting character, a true genius, I felt. But he was also emotionally unbalanced in a way that made my problems seem primitive by comparison. He was doing MIT coursework for some kind of advanced computer science degree but he simultaneously paid his bills by dressing like a movie monster costumed by the cheapest Halloween store rubber pieces. The guy just couldn't get out of his own way. He and his wife were experimenting with polyamory among their immediate social circle and while it all sounded quite adventurous and interesting, by the next year, this advanced romantic/sexual experiment had gone fully sideways, ruined his marriage and ended a lot of long running friendships that he had with people close to him before they all started fucking.
Brad's endless and endlessly entertaining monologuing served as ground zero for my interest in the occult and it all started with the introduction of The Rosicrucian Order.
I was born Catholic but faith never managed to get its hooks into me the way that legacies of religion tend to do in families. I never understood why. I have friends my own age that were subjected to the same gentle tactics that parents use when introducing their children to God and they're now firm believers that there's a place of endless torment and suffering that they're most likely going to when they die and a VIP section of the afterlife that rewards the faithful and the righteous. In spite of my resistance to church life, I still retained a lot of the fear and fascination of the mysticism and weirdness that comes with the total Catholic experience. This left me wide open to Brad's pitch about the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis.
I was pretty naive about this stuff. I didn't know anything about magic, or shamanism. I hadn't entertained notions of joining The Freemasons yet or cracked The Book of the Law. All I knew about the occult and mysticism I learned through watching horror movies and through my mother's paranoia that Ouija boards and Slayer's Reign in Blood record put my mortal soul at great risk. So, that amounted to fuck all. But Brad painted a compelling portrait of a fraternity of people that were tapping into a current of knowledge that had been hidden but to a privileged few until only recently when the order opened its doors and revealed its secrets to a broader group of initiates. He was in the first degree initiatory phase at the time and had a lot of his facts wrong, as I would come to learn, but there was talk of psychic communication and ritual practices that sounded very magical and forbidden to my mind which was still weighted down by the fears of a religion that I rejected.
The internet at this time was still a very new thing but it had opened up a new world of correspondence to me. I wrote a letter to the LA Cacophony Society because they sounded very funny and they replied in kind by sending me an envelope containing dry macaroni, a pencil eraser, and nothing else. I wrote to the Church of the Subgenius and received membership information even though I hadn't asked for it. I wrote a letter to Damien Echols of the West Memphis Three while he was still in prison and received a very depressing letter in return from a man resigned to die by lethal injection. But I also used the internet to find the contact information for The Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis and asked for information about joining and they repled in kind with a quick letter thanking me for my interest and they included a short and very dated pamphlet which explained who they are and what they were up to.
It occurred to me recently, that I had stuffed it into a box of comics years ago and wondered if it was still there and lo! It was. And so I present to you, Mastery of Life, in PDF format. It's their recruitment document. You can download the latest version from the AMORC website nowadays but I feel that this is a very interesting occult relic from a bygone era.