June 3

The Rose and the Cross in America

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To write honestly about R. Swinburne Clymer—who spent nearly seven decades as the Supreme Grand Master of what he maintained was the oldest Rosicrucian organization in the Americas, and died on this date at the age of eighty-seven in 1966—is to write about a figure whose historical importance and whose personal controversies are genuinely inseparable. And yet, we cover him here because the tradition he represented deserves to be understood.

The more interesting story, in many ways, is not Clymer himself, but the man whose legacy he spent his life championing, often inaccurately but always passionately: Paschal Beverly Randolph, the nineteenth-century African American occultist, Rosicrucian, and sex magic theorist who may have done more to shape the American esoteric tradition than any other single figure—and who remains, even now, insufficiently known…

Bringing the Rose Cross to America

Paschal Beverly Randolph was born on October 8, 1825, in New York City, the son of a white Virginia planter and a free woman of African, Native American, and European descent. His mother died when he was young, leaving him effectively homeless in the Five Points slum district—one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in nineteenth-century America. Of near-genius intellect, Randolph taught himself to read and write, and later worked as a bootblack, a barber, a sailor. By his early twenties, he had traveled widely on merchant vessels, encountered occult traditions in Europe and the Middle East, and begun developing the philosophical system that would make him famous in certain circles—and largely forgotten in others.

Randolph was, by any measure, an extraordinary figure. During his lifetime, he was recognized as a trance medium and clairvoyant who was also deeply suspicious of passive mediumship; he championed the act of conscious will as the central element in occult development, in direct contrast to the Spiritualist mainstream that wanted mediums to surrender their consciousness entirely. He was also an author of more than fifty works on magic, medicine, and philosophy, and was a staunch abolitionist, friend of Abraham Lincoln, and a passionate advocate for the education of freed slaves in the post-Civil War South, for which he founded schools in Louisiana and New Orleans.

He was also, according to A. E. Waite, the founder of the earliest known Rosicrucian order in the United States. In 1858, Randolph founded the Fraternitas Rosae Crucis—“the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross” [FRC]—and established its first lodge in San Francisco in 1858, just was the seeds of the Civil War were being planted on the other side of the country. (According to the most serious historians of American occultism, the organization is, truly, the oldest continuously operating Rosicrucian body in the United States.) Randolph died in Toledo, Ohio, on July 29, 1875, under disputed circumstances, at the age of forty-nine, leaving behind behind an organization that would go through several hands before arriving, in 1922, in the possession of the man who would define its twentieth-century identity—the controversial Reuben Swinburne Clymer.

But first, let’s examine Randolph’s contributions to the Western esoteric tradition: his development of a system of sexual magic that he called Eulis, after the Eleusinian Mysteries, which he understood as mysteries of sacred sexuality. Randolph was, according to most serious scholars of the field, the first person to introduce a systematic theory of sex magic to American occultism. Much like later practices—such as those of Aleister Crowley—Randolph’s system was built on the premise that the sexual act between a committed couple, performed in a state of focused magical intention at the moment of highest physical intensity, could direct creative energy toward specific spiritual and material ends. Unlike Crowley, this earlier theory was explicit about the moral framework; it was practice for married couples, not libertinism, and the power resided not in transgression but in the focused, loving, intentional direction of the life-force that sexual union generated.

Randolph’s European followers—through the partially mysterious channel of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, which disseminated some version of his teachings across Europe in the 1880s—fed into the sex magic theory that would eventually emerge in the Ordo Templi Orientis. Crowley’s version was considerably more transgressive than Randolph’s—and the Fraternitas Rosae Crucis, which has always maintained Randolph’s moral framework, has consistently denounced the O.T.O.’s approach as a fundamental distortion, inspiring a philosophical argument between the two traditions runs even to the present day.

Fraternitas Rosae Crucis Under Clymer

R. Swinburne Clymer joined the Fraternitas Rosae Crucis in 1897 at the age of eighteen, became a Grand Master in under eight years, and assumed supreme leadership by 1922. And for the next forty-four years, he was the dominant force in the organization—its publisher, its theorist, its defender against rival Rosicrucian bodies, and the keeper of what he presented as Randolph’s authentic legacy.

Clymer’s genuine contributions were real; He kept Randolph’s books in print through his Philosophical Publishing Company when they would otherwise have been entirely forgotten, as well as provided the FRC with a stable institutional home at Beverly Hall in Quakertown, Pennsylvania, where the organization remains headquartered to this day. A prolific writer in his own right, he published studies and theories on alchemy, modern nutrition, alternative medicine, spiritual philosophy, and the history of the Rosicrucian tradition. He maintained the FRC’s characteristic restraint—unlike rival organizations, it did not advertise, did not solicit membership, and did not pursue the kind of public profile that most occult orders have always found irresistible.

However, Clymer’s historical accounts of Randolph and the FRC’s lineage were another matter. Scholarly examination (most thoroughly by John Patrick Deveney, whose 1996 biography, Paschal Beverly Randolph, remains the standard work) established that Clymer’s accounts of the order were largely fabricated, and he had invented lineages tracing the FRC to ancient Egypt, concocting connections to historical figures who had no documented relationship with Randolph or his order. His medical career was also controversial: his opposition to vaccination and his various mail-order schemes for medical degrees drew fraud orders from postal authorities. (Yep, he was “anti-vax” a century before such a concept drew a dividing line across the post-Covid epidemic U.S.).

Clymer’s decades as head of the FRC were also marked by a bitter rivalry with Harvey Spencer Lewis, founder of the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis [AMORC], which had established itself as the other major Rosicrucian body in North America. Both organizations claimed to be the authentic heirs of the Rosicrucian tradition, and both accused the other of fraudulent lineage claims. Ultimately, both competed for the recognition of international esoteric federations and actively sought affiliations with the O.T.O. for legitimacy. (In many ways, this rivalry also indicates something important about how occult tradition actually works; every serious esoteric order in the modern Western tradition claims an ancient lineage that scholarly examination finds difficult to substantiate: the Golden Dawn claimed Rosicrucian ancestry through a set of cipher manuscripts whose origins remain disputed, while the AMORC claimed an Egyptian lineage. Likewise, the FRC claimed descent from a tradition Randolph himself never consistently described, and the Theosophical Society claimed Mahatmas in Tibet. These claims are not necessarily malicious fabrications; they’re more of a structural feature of the tradition, the way that genuinely new spiritual movements legitimate themselves by connecting to the perceived authority of the ancient.)

Despite his known embellishments (of which there were many), Clymer preserved that tradition, with all the distortions that preservation sometimes involves. Regardless, he kept Randolph’s books in print, and kept the doors open in Quakertown. Perhaps most importantly, he kept Randolph’s name alive in a period when it would otherwise have been entirely forgotten, preserving the legacy of one of the most important African-American figures in all of Western Esotericism.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)

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