LIFE Secret Societies

By Meredith Corporation

Mysterious and insular associations are a phenomenon as old as the pyramids. People have formed clandestine organizations, with idiosyncratic rules, rites and practices that have attracted the wealthy, respected, and powerful. From Freemasons and Knights Templar, to Sons of Liberty, Black Hand, and Skull and Bones, these groups have been religious, political, nefarious or just plain silly, and now this special edition from LIFE unlocks the door to these secretive worlds. From those organizations that were hidden behind the Founding Fathers that helped shape the course of history to those that have dabbled in the occult, this beautifully illustrated edition takes you deep inside these fascinating organizations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Meredith Corporation
• Release date: Oct 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781547856404

Book preview

KNIGHTS

Introduction

THE ANCIENT ROOTS OF SECRECY

The impulse to create insular clandestine social associations—for good and ill—is as old as the pyramids

VOLZ/LAIF/REDUX

There are three massive pyramids outside Cairo, Egypt, each of them climbing toward heaven, and one climbing higher than the rest. The Great Pyramid of Khufu is the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the World and the only ancient Wonder still standing. In 2006 stargazers hold a UFO conference in front of the pyramid and try to attract extraterrestrials to earth through their meditation and dance.

On one level, Egypt’s Great Pyramid at Giza is the tomb of Pharaoh Khufu, sometimes called Cheops, purportedly interred there in the 26th century B.C.—though his remains have never been found. Khufu wanted the most spectacular memorial ever seen, so he ordered his people to erect what would become, after some 20 years of toil, the tallest building on earth—481 feet—a distinction retained for nearly 4,000 years. To be sure, the pyramid was built to last; tapering upward from a broad base of more than 13 acres, it can never topple over.

But Khufu’s and other pyramids were more than brick-and-mortar marvels—they were also richly symbolic. The structure resembles a mountain, with suggestions of ascending to the summit for guidance, a recurring theme in pantheistic, polytheistic and monotheistic faiths. In Egyptian culture, the king resting therein was given a leg up in reaching the gods. For the Mayans of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, climbing a pyramid such as the one at Chichén Itzá, might bring spiritual enlightenment. The soaring pyramid seeks to unite the earthly and the divine. The summit is the point of connection. Pagans, meanwhile, viewed a downward-pointing triangle as a symbol of the feminine, and an upward one as masculine. Ancient Greeks saw the shape as an embodiment of the sacred number three—representing family (father, mother and child); for the early Christians, it was the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

While triangular imagery occurs in a number of religions, it was also appropriated by manifold secret societies, exclusive associations with select memberships, sometimes mysterious, even bizarre, rites—and varying degrees of secrecy. Arguably the most celebrated of these, the Freemasons, or Masons—which have included some of America’s most illustrious leaders, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin—have the triangle as their primary symbol. Like all emblems—a national flag, for one—it’s a unifying force binding together the group’s members. Other secret societies took different symbols—the Christian cross was on the mantle of the Knights Templar; a burning cross marks the vilest of American secret societies, the Ku Klux Klan—whose racist-terrorist adherents also adopted the triangular hood.

Indeed, secret societies, whatever their symbology, run the gamut in terms of seriousness, significance, benevolence, malevolence or simply bonhomie. The tradition reaches back to ancient times—in fact, some of the institutions revered today in the cultural, religious or political mainstream grew from societies that were once, by necessity, secret. Including, for instance, the most successful secret society of the first, second and third centuries A.D.—Christianity.

The 19th-century historian Charles William Heckethorn explored this subject in two large volumes of The Secret Societies of All Ages and Countries, first published in 1875. His initial Author’s Introduction remains a useful framing device:

"1. Intelligibility and Nature of Secret Societies—Secret societies once were as necessary as open societies: the tree presupposes a root. Beside the empire of Might, the idols of fortune, the fetishes of superstition, there must in every age and state have existed a place where the empire of Might was at an end, where the idols were no longer worshipped, where the fetishes were derided. Such a place was the closet of the philosopher, the temple of the priest, the subterranean cave of the sectary.

"2. Classification of Secret Societies—Secret societies may be classed under the following heads: 1. Religious: such as the Egyptian or Eleusinian Mysteries. 2. Military: Knights Templars. 3. Judiciary: Vehmgerichte. 4. Scientific: Alchymists. 5. Civil: Freemasons. 6. Political: Carbonari. 7. Anti-Social: Garduna. But the line of division is not always strictly defined . . ."

Indeed, there are many gray areas. The militaristic Knights Templar had a fierce religious component, for example—and the overarching principle that unifies the classifications is, as Heckethorn says, a response to authority and orthodoxy. The secret folk figured they simply had to do this. They were compelled to think and feel this way, and therefore they needed to go underground, because to exist aboveground would have led to an end, or at