Secret Societies

They swore their members to silence on pain of death. The record survived anyway.

For some thirty-five centuries, men and women have gathered behind closed doors to share what the world was not permitted to know. Initiates at Eleusis descended into darkness and returned changed. Templar knights, warrior monks, ended as defendants in one of medieval Europe's great trials. Victorian poets learned to summon angels in London temple rooms. Carbonari conspirators swore their oaths in charcoal burners' huts while Austrian informers worked to penetrate their cells. And in 1981, a membership list seized from a villa near Arezzo brought down the Italian government.

Secret Societies traces the hidden orders that shaped the visible world: the mystery cults of the ancient Mediterranean, the lodges of the Enlightenment, the revolutionary brotherhoods of the nineteenth century, the occult circles of Victorian London, the initiation societies of West Africa and Polynesia, and the quiet institutions where influence still gathers, from the Tomb at Yale to the redwoods of Bohemian Grove. Twenty-five illustrated entries draw on the documented record, with a bibliography for every chapter, and each account says plainly where the evidence ends and the legend begins.

Every oath was sworn to keep the story shut. Trials, confessions, and archives opened a good many of them.