I don’t believe that the Lodges are a major issue in recruiting in AMORC, but they are probably a major issue in membership retention. The original ads do not really go into the Lodges and they generally seem to want you to sign up first. Their mind control protocol begins with the first ad and rapidly proceeds to the first monograph. If you buy into the beginning of it, the hope is that mind control will help you buy into the rest.

            In most cults, primary human contact brings members in and recruits them. In AMORC, the major effects are generated in your home sanctum where, in my books, I have thoroughly documented how multiple methods of mind control are used.
            Still, in my case, I got involved very early with a lodge, an experience which  I discuss in AMORC Unmasked. In my copy of Cults in Our Midst, I put some notes about my lodge memberships in the section called, “The First Fatal Step,” which is about accepting an invitation- actually two- which seriously affected by life. Here’s a description of my first:

One of the first troubling events occurred after I joined the Martinez de Pasqually Lodge. I joined on a whim, the day I went there to buy incense and candles. Members of AMORC are not officially compelled to join lodges but are usually enticed into the Lodge by the lure of a truly fraternal and friendly environment, a classic entrapping mechanism of almost every cult. I was being hurtled ever deeper into the manipulative world of AMORC, something I would not realize until years later. The event I’m speaking of occurred on initiation day, when a female member turned to me, saying in a sarcastic tone, “Today a member, tomorrow a Master.”

            But later on, this lady would inject not only sarcasm, but some poisonous karma into my life.

Curiously, this lady was to be one of my teachers at Engineering School, a teacher who claimed that I had not turned in a project, which became one of the elements that led me to failing in my second year. I know for certain that I had handed in the assignment and was amazed that my Sister Rosicrucian would do this to me.

But she did. Now I know she was one of the destructive links in the long and torturous chain of AMORC’s poisonous imprisonment. 

I am still puzzled by what ultimately happened in this incident.

            Later on, I would join the Miami Lodge and serve as an officer in that Lodge. This also was a fatal wrong step. Here’s what happened there:

One day, one of my friends, Marie-Marthes, suggested that I try and get some help from the Miami AMORC Lodge, similar to a suggestion that I had received in Haiti. I had planned to do this, but was thinking I should be more settled first. Looking back, I think that joining the Miami Lodge was an example of “manipulation from above,” a form of cultic deception, in which various opportunities and choices seem to emerge from the “mystic” power of the cult. Joining the Lodge only augmented my social isolation. It was an atmosphere filled with intolerant members who looked down at me because of my social class, obvious malnutrition and poverty. Still, I did not look at myself that way, but rather more as a valiant spiritual warrior undergoing a period of severe testing.

            My experience in lodges were not good for me- but, considering my social isolation, I think they were a component in my member retention. I am very sorry I ever attended in even one meeting. But they are not the most important element in AMORC’s mind control system.

            They do serve one important purpose for those who join- by involving the members in secret rituals, ceremonial dress, assigning them designated roles in the Lodge, they serve to do what Singer says: “Some cults also use dress or other external features as visible symbols in converting newcomers to the cult’s ways. If you really want to change people, change their appearance.”
            What is interesting here is that AMORC does nothing to change someone’s appearance in public, but gives them a secret identity, filled with costume, chanting and ritual when they go to a Lodge.  This secrecy empowers the human ego for a Rosicrucian members, making them think they are a part of the “invisible hierarchy” that secretly controls the world.
            AMORC may be, in certain respects, a “horse of a different color,” but it surely fits into Singer’s profiles of cults in many significant ways.