To continue with this week's theme, which has mostly been about how completely baffling I find the behavior of my fellow humans a lot of the time, today we have: secret societies.
Which may be a misnomer. Most of these societies are so extremely secret that you'd never ever find out about them unless you happened to read the Wikipedia page entitled "Secret Societies." The problem is, if something was truly a secret society, we wouldn't know about it, kind of by definition. But this would defeat the purpose, because then it would have a membership list consisting of one person (the founder), and it wouldn't be a "society" so much as "a single delusional wingnut." So it's got to be secret (and also mystical and esoteric) enough to intrigue the absolute hell out of non-initiates, but also sufficiently well-advertised to attract a few select converts.
Which is a bit of a balancing act.
Anyhow, I did a little digging into what I could find out about the history of secret societies, and lord have mercy, there have been some doozies. And to obviate the need of saying this over and over, I swear I'm not making any of this up.
Let's start with one that was operative in eighteenth-century Germany, but when you hear about it, you will really wish it was still around today. It's called the Order of the Pug (German Mops-Orden), and seems to have been founded to circumvent a papal bull issued by Pope Clement XII in 1738 that forbade Catholics from being Freemasons. So some folks got together and decided to come up with a different secret society, and they definitely pulled out all the stops.
Amongst their beliefs was an emphasis on loyalty, trustworthiness, and steadfastness, none of which I can find fault with. But their rituals were... interesting. During initiation, prospective candidates had to wear a dog collar and gain admittance by scratching at the door and barking. At the climax of the ritual, the candidate had to kiss the ass of a porcelain pug statue. After that, they were taught the society's slogans, gestures, and hand signals, at which point they were allowed to wear the group's medallion (which of course featured the face of a pug).
The whole thing was blown wide open in 1745 when a book was published in Amsterdam entitled L'Ordre des Franc-Maçons Trahi et le Secret des Mopses Révélé (The Order of the Freemasons Betrayed and the Secret of the Pugs Revealed), which resulted in most people responding with nothing more than a puzzled head-tilt. After all, this wasn't the fifteenth century, when saying "I like pineapple on pizza" could get you burned as a witch. So even after their secrets were exposed, no one was all that impressed. The result was that the Pugs kind of fizzled, although apparently there was still an order practicing in Lyon in 1902.
Then we've got the Epsilon Team, which sounds like a Saturday morning superhero cartoon but isn't. This one originated in Greece, and is a mixed-up mishmash of Greek mythology and UFOs and conspiracy theories, with a nasty streak of anti-Semitism thrown in for good measure. The Epsilons were founded in the 1960s by a guy named George Lefkofrydis, who appears to have had a screw loose. He claimed that there's a coded message in Aristotle's work on logic, the Organon, which reveals that Aristotle was an alien from the planet Mu in the constellation Lepus. (The irony is not lost on me that a coded message that sounds like the result of heavy consumption of controlled substances was allegedly encrypted in a text on how to recognize fallacious arguments.)
Anyhow, Lefkofrydis's ideas somehow found favor with other Greeks who apparently spent their spare time doing sit-ups underneath parked cars, and their dogma expanded to include the following:
- the Olympian gods were going to come back and initiate a cosmic war against the Jews, who are actually also aliens
- ancient Peru was visited by the Greeks, who founded the Inca Empire
- the letter E is a symbol of the society and its goals, so wherever it appears in other languages, it was planted there as a subliminal text by the ancient Greeks
This prompts me to point out two things.
First, my wife is Jewish, and thus far I haven't seen any sign of her being an alien. She has also yet to do battle with Zeus, Ares, Apollo, et al., but frankly, if it happens I'm putting my money on her. She's kind of a take-no-shit type, which I suspect would still be the case if she were up against scantily-clad lightning-bolt-hurling ancient deities.
Second, the "E" thing is kind of implausible, and as a linguist, I can say this with some authority. What, bfor th Grks wnt around and distributd thm to vrybody, did popl writ lik this? Sms kind of inconvnint.
Conspiracy theory researcher Tao Makeef writes, showing admirable restraint, that "even amongst Greek neopagans, these beliefs are generally ridiculed."
Next there's A∴A∴, not to be confused with AA, which can stand for Alcoholics Anonymous, American Airlines, the Automobile Association, or a specific bra size. A∴A∴ was founded by none other than Aleister Crowley, the self-styled "Wickedest Man on Earth," whose main interest seems to have been having sex with anyone of either gender who would hold still for long enough. This is not the only secret society that Crowley founded; in fact, he started so many of them that for a while the number of Crowley's secret societies exceeded the number of actual members. The meaning of A∴A∴ was deliberately left ambiguous -- it was said variously to stand for astrum argenteum (Latin for "silver star"), arcanum arcanorum (Latin for "secret of secrets"), Atlantean Adepts, or Angel and Abyss. In Robert Anton Wilson's and Robert Shea's Illuminatus! trilogy, though, they say it doesn't stand for anything; that the true adepts somehow intuit what it means, so anyone making a claim about what it stands for is just illustrating that they're not really a member.
That's how esoteric and secret A∴A∴ is.
To move your way up through the A∴A∴ ranks, you have to do stuff like "acquire perfect control of the body of light on the astral plane" and "learn the formula of the Rose Cross" and "cross the great gulf or void between the phenomenal world of manifestation and its noumenal source, that great spiritual wilderness." Which I think we can all agree sound impressive as hell.
Last, we have the Temple of Black Light, also called the Misanthropic Luciferian Order, founded in 1995 in Sweden by a guy named Shahin Khoshnood as an offshoot of a group called the True Satanist Horde, apparently because the latter weren't batshit crazy enough. The members of the Temple of Black Light believed in "Azerate," the extremely secret "hidden name of the eleven cosmic anti-gods," which became significantly less hidden when Khoshnood published a book about it. The central tenet of the Temple is the worship of chaos, and the claim that God regretted having created the universe with all its laws and scientific principles and whatnot, and wished he'd left well enough alone and stuck with the whole formless and void thing of Genesis 1:1. What we should all be doing, they say, is trying to get back to chaos, and I have to say that at the moment the Republican Party is doing a damn good job of it here in the United States.
Anyhow, the appeal is that unlike our boring old three-spatial-dimensions-plus-time universe, chaos is supposedly "an infinidimensional and pandimensional plane of possibilities." Whatever the fuck that means.
Ultimately, though, Khoshnood was discovered not only to be a wacko cult leader, but a homicidal maniac, and once he was arrested and charged with murder, very quickly the other members of the Temple noped their way right out of any association with him. So I guess we're going to have to put up with our current orderly universe for a while longer, such as it is.
Anyhow, those are just four of hundreds. I encourage you to peruse the Wikipedia page, especially if you want to significantly diminish your opinion of the intelligence of humanity as a whole.
Now, y'all'll have to excuse me, because I need to go work on my anatomically-correct ceramic statue of a pug. Not for any reason in particular, mind you. I just... um... wanted to make one.
Woof.
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