One of the most interesting secret societies are the Rosicrucians, an allegedly ancient sect of initiates endowed with wisdom so advanced that members have had to keep their knowledge and community hidden.
But, they have a settlement in Bucks County, Pennsylvania — with actual pyramids! — and if it wasn’t on private property, I’d definitely go on a field trip.
The Rosicrucians first appeared in the early 1600s in Germany, with the appearance of documents claiming that a man living 300 years earlier had travelled to the Middle East, learned a bunch of esoteric wisdom, and came back to Europe to found the “Fraternity of the Rose Cross”. This foundation myth engendered a trend that attracted many 17th-century people to either pretend to belong to the order and/or to start up actual Rosicrucian groups.
By the middle of the 1800s the Rosicrucians had intermingled in the United States with the Masons, and in 1858 the “Fraternitas Rosae Crucis” was founded by the occultist and author Paschal Beverly Randolph (a friend of Abraham Lincoln, bi-racial, advocate of birth control, and practitioner of mystical sex rituals who deserves his own entry).
The land owned by this Rosicrucian sect in Bucks county has three pyramids, a hall named after Randolph (“Beverly Hall”), and some lovely gardens. Rosicrucian symbolism in the structures includes the famous pyramid with the floating eye (that appears on the American dollar). Locals talk about how the aging members still chant in secret rituals around the summer solstice.
Source(s): @atlasobscura.com, “Rosicrucian Pyramids of Bucks County,” photo by “namaste9737”. _Weird Pennsylvania: Your Travel Guide to Pennsylvania’s Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets_, Matt Lake, Sterling Publisher, New York, 2005, pp 54-56.
