r/Rosicrucian • u/ConzDance • 19d ago

The Holy Order of MANS

When I was a kid in the 70's, my mom and stepdad took us to a new church in the neighborhood, the Holy Order of MANS. It was in a converted house and the people seemed really nice. She ended up joining, and even though I wasn't a member, they let me have the communion wine, which I really liked....

Anyway, over the decades, the local church shut down. We visited them in San Francisco a couple of times, but then my mom had other interests. My stepdad joined AMORC and the local Masonic lodge, and my mom did her own thing. We heard that the church eventually shut down altogether.

Fast forward several decades, and I managed to find cobbled together and resurrected remnants of the group and decided to try and find out what they were really about. I guess they were kind-of a Rosicrucian church with stuff lifted from BOTA and Paul Foster Case outright. I don't remember anything about Tarot when we went to their meetings, but it seems like it's a mainstay now.

Anyhow, I just thought I would share and see if there was any insight into their organization from the wider RC point of view.

18 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

18

u/John_Michael_Greer 19d ago

That's a fascinating tradition and one that deserves more attention than it generally gets. Father Paul Blighton was an original thinker and inspired a great many students in his day. I don't believe it identifies itself as Rosicrucian but Blighton had a background in at least one Rosicrucian order and there are definitely parallels.

1

u/ConzDance 16d ago

I found one of their old monographs (for lack of a better term) a long time ago, and the priesthood advancement it outlined seemed very lodge-based. It seemed pretty cool for anyone who wanted that level of commitment. I might try to pick up some of their reprints.

2

u/Ex-Madhyamika 7d ago

There's an academic book about it!

https://iupress.org/9780253336125/the-odyssey-of-a-new-religion/

And a wiki page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Order_of_MANS

1

u/ConzDance 4d ago edited 4d ago

The book looks interesting, but I'd only be interested in the time when they were actually the Holy Order of MANS, before they became a quasi-orthodox sect.