H. Spencer Lewis

Harvey Spencer Lewis (25 November 1883 - 2 August 1939) was an American Rosicrucian writer and mystic, the founder of AMORC. Born in Frenchtown, New Jersey, and raised a Methodist, he worked as a journalist and editor of scientific and research magazines and served on a New York committee investigating Spiritualism.

In 1904 he founded and led the New York Institute for Psychical Research, which specialized in occult studies with an emphasis on Rosicrucian teaching. A meeting with a British Rosicrucian led him to travel to Europe, where in 1909 he claimed to have been initiated into the order in France and granted authority to organize it in the United States.

Lewis founded the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC) in 1915 and led it as its first Imperator until his death. He moved its headquarters from the east coast to San Francisco in 1918, briefly to Florida, and finally to San Jose, California, where he designed and supervised the building of Rosicrucian Park, including an Egyptian-style temple, planetarium, science laboratory, and library.

For the mind-power lineage, Lewis is notable for packaging Rosicrucian esotericism into an accessible, correspondence-lesson format that reached a mass audience, teaching practical methods of mental concentration, visualization, and “cosmic attunement” through which the student was held to harness mind in harmony with universal law. He was succeeded by his son, Ralph Maxwell Lewis.