Secret Societies

41 entries. Click any to see everything it connects to.

Initiatory orders and closed societies: Freemasonry, the Rosicrucians, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Ordo Templi Orientis and others. What the group shares is form: admission by initiation, teaching graded in degrees, and an obligation of secrecy about rite and lore. Not every member shares it. The Knights Templar were a medieval military order, held here because later fraternal bodies took their name and claimed their descent; Skull and Bones is a collegiate society with no esoteric teaching at all. Each entry records when and where the body was founded, what it taught or practised, and its documented history. Claims of ancient lineage are common in this material and are usually later constructions; the entries distinguish documented origins from claimed ones.

Facts

Overview

Entries in the Atlas: 41
What Defines This Grouping: Bodies defined by form rather than by doctrine: membership admitted through initiation, teaching graded in degrees, and an obligation of secrecy about rite and lore. What is transmitted differs completely between them; what they share is the manner of transmission. 1

Origins

Place of Origin: Northern and western Europe: the German lands for the Rosicrucian manifestos, Britain for organised Freemasonry, and Britain, France and Germany for the magical orders of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 1

Attestation

Era of Attestation: Organised English Freemasonry is documented from the 1710s and 1720s; recent archival work has revised the traditional account of a single foundation at London in 1717. 2

Status

Standing as a Comparative Category: Contested: secret society is largely a label applied from outside. The bodies grouped here call themselves fraternal, initiatory or magical orders, and much of what is claimed about them, by members and by opponents alike, is unsupported by the record. 3

Sources

The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, 2008
Searching for the Apple Tree: Revisiting the Earliest Years of Organised English Freemasonry Andrew Prescott and Susan Mitchell Sommers, 2017
Encyclopedia of Religion Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), 2005, s.v. Secret Societies

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Initiatory Orders and Closed Societies

This category holds the organised initiatory bodies of the esoteric world: Freemasonry, the Rosicrucians, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Ordo Templi Orientis and others. What defines them is form: membership admitted through initiation, teaching structured in degrees, and often a measure of secrecy about their rites and lore.

Each entry records, so far as the record allows, when and where the body was founded, what it taught or practised, how it was organised, and its documented history, keeping to what can be established.

Some are held here on other grounds, and it is better to say so than to let the definition stretch to cover them. The Knights Templar were a medieval Catholic military order, founded about 1119 and dissolved by papal bull in 1312, with no graded esoteric curriculum of any kind; they are here because Freemasonry and its offshoots later claimed descent from them, a claim the record does not support and which the entry treats as legend rather than history. Skull and Bones is a senior society founded at Yale in 1832: closed and initiatory, and nothing more than that. Neither has a better home in the atlas, and both are kept here with the mismatch stated rather than hidden.

Documented History and Legend

Secret societies attract claims, of great antiquity, hidden influence or sinister purpose, from members and opponents alike, and the atlas is careful to separate documented history from origin-legend and from conspiracy theory. Many orders claim descent from ancient sources the evidence does not support; the Golden Dawn's founding documents, for instance, and the true age of Rosicrucianism are matters where scholarship and tradition part.

The entries describe rather than expose or defend, noting where an order's own account of its origins is unsupported and where genuine controversy is documented. The related mystery cults of antiquity and modern new religious movements are treated under their own categories.