Steven Sora - Rosicrucian America: How a Secret Society Influenced the Destiny of a Nation

To my wife and best friend, Terry, and to Aria, Isabel, Jackie, Jordan, Millie, and Wyatt

ROSICRUCIAN
AMERICA

Soras informative new book is a must for those eager for the truth about the secret roles played by the medieval Knights Templar, the Rosicrucians, and Freemasonry in the founding of the New Atlantis. Now more than ever the world needs the truth about the individuals and the tenets they held dear, which was the secret blueprint for the founding of America. What was long hidden in plain sight, Sora skillfully brings into the light.

SCOTT F. WOLTER, FORENSIC GEOLOGIST, HOST OF THE TRAVEL CHANNELSAMERICA UNEARTHED, AND AUTHOR OF CRYPTIC CODE OF THE TEMPLARS IN AMERICA: ORIGINS OF THE HOOKED X SYMBOL

Steven Sora has done it again. Following up on his immensely popular The Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar, Steven has woven another tapestry of well-researched, entertaining narrative, which provides America with many of the answers that the nations collective psyche currently seeks so desperately. Indeed, Rosicrucian America offers its readers a glimpse into the spiritual inspiration and alchemical transformation that provided much of the basis for the founding of the United States of America.

WILLIAM F. MANN, SUPREME GRAND MASTER OF THE SOVEREIGN GREAT PRIORYKNIGHTS TEMPLAR OF CANADA AND AUTHOR OF THE LAST REFUGE OF THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR AND TEMPLAR SANCTUARIES IN NORTH AMERICA

What fun I had reading this book! Steven Sora has connected so many of my favorite topics into one woven talea real page-turner. For 50 years Ive been studying the German Pietists of provincial Pennsylvania, the authorship question of William Shakespeare, the far-reaching influence of Sir Francis Bacon and Dr. John Dee, and William Penns hidden reasons for coming to America, among other topics in this book, but it took Stephen Sora to flesh it all out with the latest research and put it all together in one brilliant volume. Like the alchemical goal of a Rosicrucian, this book will transmute your appreciation for the destiny of America.

ROBERT R. HIERONIMUS, PH.D., AUTHOR OF FOUNDING FATHERS, SECRET SOCIETIES

... explores ideals that evolved through the Crusades, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. Both known and unknown adepts worked to weave together the threads of intellectual, philosophical, and spiritual principles that gave birth to a unique new nation: conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. That Rosicrucian vision survives to this day and is well presented in these pages.

JAMES WASSERMAN, AUTHOR OF THE TEMPLARS AND THE ASSASSINS AND THE SECRETS OF MASONIC WASHINGTON

Textbook versions of early American history comprise little more than a propaganda veneer obscuring the occult forces that really drove the British colonization of our continent. Nowhere are these sub-rosa influences more credibly exposed and their leading conspirators better identified than by Steven Sora in his latest book, Rosicrucian America.

FRANK JOSEPH, AUTHOR OF POWER PLACES AND THE MASTER BUILDERS OF ANTIQUITY AND ADVANCED CIVILIZATIONS OF PREHISTORIC AMERICA

INTRODUCTION

THE INVISIBLE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

History, as we have been taught it, implies an America born from the grassroots movement of a large populace striving for freedom of worship as well as freedom from high-handed taxation. The truth is that a very small handful of individuals with lofty goals was the party responsible for seeking these freedoms. This group consisted of alchemists, geomancers, and philosophers, many of whom met in secret and risked everything on their new venture.

From its humble beginnings in a college in sixteenth-century England, this small circle of individuals has played an unusually great role in the history of the world. This true secret society has influenced politics, science, and the very foundation of the United States. The circle has been known by more than one name, but its most fitting name is the Invisibles.

History is written by the victorious, so it should always be considered suspect. Europe before the seventeenth century was backward, illiterate, and unhygienic. People rarely bathed, drinking water was of very poor quality, and sanitation was at a minimum, allowing disease to be rampant and life expectancy to be short. It was not uncommon for whole families to sleep in one room, often with farm animals. Even royalty did not enjoy the standard of living we insist upon today. The masses couldnt read, and if they could, they were often forbidden to read even the Bible. The priests were only slightly more literate yet somehow had been given the privilege of interpreting the word of God.

Then came the Enlightenment and the Renaissance, wherein men of science began to study astrology, astronomy, cartography, medicine, and metallurgy. No bell was rung to herald the advent of the Renaissance. There was no immediate signal that the bushel of ignorance that covered the light of learning had been lifted. The esoteric sciences, once known to the ancients yet subverted and forbidden during the Dark Ages, were not reintroduced without the vicious reaction of the church. Its monopoly on learning was broken, but not in an instant. The price for bending the rules was torture and even death.

For example, the sixteenth-century friar, philosopher, and mathematician Giordano Bruno believed that the sun was one of many stars in the universe. For refusing to recant this idea, the Roman Inquisition burned him at the stake. His colleague the polymath Galileo fortunately was spared execution because he recanted his theory that the planets circled around the sun. He was sentenced to house arrest. Earlier, Copernicus had been credited with the heliocentric theory of the universe but had refused to allow his work to be published until he was safely in the grave. Even Columbus had been brought before the Inquisition for proposing an adventure into the Atlantic.

The catalyst for the Renaissance was due in part to the maritime trade that connected the cities of the Italian Peninsula with those of the East. More dramatically it was due to the Crusades. Although these wars failed to take back the Holy Lands, the crusaders were able to bring back works of Greek astronomers and Islamic mathematicians. An unenlightened church and a less than intellectual royalty had brought about the Dark Ages. Ironically war, specifically the Crusades, broke that intellectual chokehold. Seeking to divert European princes from constant warfare, the church directed that a crusade be waged against the Muslim invaders who had taken Jerusalem. The Crusades, which took place over centuries, made East-West contact a necessity. They opened the floodgates of the arts and sciences as well as the writings of Greeks, Romans, and Egyptiansand variations on religion never before seen in the West.