>>16657257 pb
>order of the rosy cross
in 1968 i scored a perfect score on the SATs. this was long before Kaplan, Princeton Review, and all the other "test prep industry" was commonplace, and at a time when perfect scores were unheard of. our HS guidance councelor wrote to ETS to request info on perfect scores and got the official run-around. they flat out refused to say how many others had ever gotten perfect scores, and suggested that the test was designed to make that extremely unlikely if not impossible.
not famefagging, just providing background. a few weeks after i had gotten the test results, i got an unsolicited letter in the mail. it was from the Rosicrucian Order, from an office in San Francisco, and contained an invitation for automatic acceptance as a member. a one page pamphlet describing the organization was included. as it happens, i had already heard of the Rosicrucian order, because from an early age i had read everything i could get my hands on, especially pertaining to fringe science, suppressed technologies, secret societies, metaphysics, etc etc etc.
my understanding at the time, and confirmed in the letter, is that Rosicrucians were a secret society within a secret society, they were a sect within the Freemasons. it seemed pretty obvious to me that the invitation had to be connected somehow to my SAT scores. why the hell else would they single me out, a 16yr old from a lower middle class family of blue collar workers and farmers in the middle of the rust belt. i gave their invitation serious consideration for a time. the fact that they had somehow been given or acquired the scores only added to my misgivings. having learned from my elders that there is no such thing as a free lunch, i was concerned i might get into something that i would later regret, and find myself unable to get out. in the end, i discarded the letter.
it's said that as we get older, the biggest regrets are not the things we've done, but the things we've not done. i still wonder what "secrets" i might have been "initiated" into had i accepted the offer.
btw, when the georgia guidestones were erected a dozen or so yrs later, it seemed obvious to the tin-foil-hat brigade of the day that the Rosicrucians were behind it.