Ra Un Nefer Amen I, born Rogelio Straughn and trained originally as a concert pianist, composer and music theoretician, founded the Ausar Auset Society in Brooklyn, New York in 1973. Its purpose was Pan-African and explicitly educational: to provide people of African descent with a spiritual and philosophical training grounded in ancient Egyptian, or Kemetic, thought, reclaiming it as an African rather than a purely Mediterranean inheritance.
The curriculum reflects the founder's own range. Members study Kamitic cosmology and ritual alongside meditation, oracle consultation, yoga, herbalism, homeopathy, astrology and African history as one integrated system rather than separate electives, with Amen's own multi-volume Metu Neter series serving as the core text across all of it.
From its single Brooklyn chapter, the Society grew into a genuinely international network, with chapters in more than thirty-five American cities and further chapters in the United Kingdom, Canada, Bermuda, Trinidad, South Africa and Ghana, still headquartered in New York. It is among the oldest continuously operating African-centered Kemetic organizations in the United States.