Ssshh, it's a secret

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.

The Rose Cross symbol from the Order of the Golden Dawn [Image is in the Public Domain]

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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Return to Boleskine

There are few figures in the history of magical thinking more famous, or more polarizing, than Aleister Crowley.

He was a member -- eventually a leader -- of esoteric societies like the Order of the Golden Dawn and Ordo Templi Orientis, and eventually founded one of his own.  After all, once you're a member of an esoteric society, you generally find it's not so esoteric after all, and either have to find one even more esoteric or else make one up.

Some time around 1900 Crowley took the latter option, and named his society Thelema, the Greek word for "will" -- as the whole idea of the thing was "do what you will," especially in matters of sex, which fit beautifully with Crowley's apparent obsession with fucking anyone of either gender who would hold still long enough.

Thelema as an abbey (located in Cefalú, on the island of Sicily) was abandoned in 1923 after Mussolini decided that Crowley wasn't exactly the sort of person he wanted in Italy, and had him and his followers deported en masse.  Today it's more or less a ruin, but still a mecca for practitioners of magick and such stuff.  Crowley had a way of leaving behind these kind of sites, and in fact one of them is the reason this whole topic comes up today -- because one of Crowley's centers of operation, Boleskine House on the shores of Loch Ness, Scotland, recently sold after years of standing empty and decrepit for the tidy sum of £500,000 to "three unnamed investors."  The owners, who call themselves the "Boleskine Foundation," are now apparently in negotiation with the Ordo Templi Orientis (yes, it still exists) to bring back Crowley's practices to Boleskine and turn it into a "sex magick retreat."

Boleskine in 1912, right before Crowley sold it [Image is in the Public Domain]

Apparently the house has a bit of a reputation even outside of Crowley's antics.  All the way back in the seventeenth century, there supposedly was a "devious local wizard" who kept reanimating corpses, and the minister of the church that stood on Boleskine's grounds spent most of his time trying to rebury them and get them to stay there.  The church itself burned to the ground, allegedly along with the entire congregation, in the early eighteenth century, and the first bit of Boleskine House itself was built in the middle of that century -- right over top of the graves that the minister had such a tough time keeping intact.  (You can see why someone as conscious of ambience as Crowley was would be attracted to the place.)

So Crowley bought Boleskine, and true to his self-styled title of the "Wickedest Man in the World," engaged in all sorts of depravity and hijinks with his friends for nearly fifteen years.  When Crowley sold the place in 1913, it went through a number of different owners, none of whom stayed there for long.  One supposedly killed himself by blowing his own head off with a shotgun.  It was owned for a time by Jimmy Page, guitarist for Led Zeppelin, although Page apparently wasn't there all that often.  His caretaker Malcolm Dent, however, said the place was haunted.  "One evening," he said, "a small porcelain figure of the Devil rose off the mantelpiece to the ceiling, then smashed into smithereens in the fireplace."  He also said he'd been awakened more than once by the sound of "a huge beast, snorting, snuffling and banging.  Whatever was there, I have no doubt it was pure evil."

To be fair, though, the owners who bought it from Page, the MacGillivray family, scoffed at the whole thing and said their time in Boleskine House was wonderful, and free from any paranormal fooling about.  So maybe the ghosts only appear to people who already believe in them.

Pretty convenient, that.

In any case, the current owners are planning on renovating and reopening the place, and dedicating it to its previous use as a site for practicing the magickal arts.  Their public statement says that they will "promote events and activities that facilitate health and wellness such as meditation and yoga as well as education on Thelema, the spiritual legacy forwarded by previous Boleskine House owner, Aleister Crowley."

No word yet on any kinky sex stuff, although one would have to expect that's to be a part of it if they're striving for historical accuracy.  I'll keep you posted.

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The subject of Monday's blog post gave me the idea that this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation should be a classic -- Konrad Lorenz's Man Meets Dog.  This book, written back in 1949, is an analysis of the history and biology of the human/canine relationship, and is a must-read for anyone who owns, or has ever owned, a doggy companion.

Given that it's seventy years old, some of the factual information in Man Meets Dog has been superseded by new research -- especially about the genetic relationships between various dog breeds, and between domestic dogs and other canid species in the wild.  But his behavioral analysis is impeccable, and is written in his typical lucid, humorous style, with plenty of anecdotes that other dog lovers will no doubt relate to.  It's a delightful read!

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The disappearance of Bruno

UFO enthusiasts are currently in a tizzy over the disappearance last week of a university student from Rio Branco, Brazil, who left behind a bizarre video about 16th century philosopher, scientist, and theologian Giordano Bruno and a room whose walls are covered with esoteric symbols.

The student's name is Bruno Borges (I wondered if his first name was in honor of Giordano, or whether it was a coincidence; of course, in the minds of the UFO conspiracy theorists, nothing is a coincidence).  He apparently had a reputation as being a bit of an odd duck even prior to his disappearance.  He was obsessed with aliens, and his fascination with the earlier Bruno came from the fact that the Italian philosopher/scientist was one of the first to speculate that other planets -- even planets around other stars -- might harbor life.  Borges hinted that Bruno's execution at the hands of the Inquisition was to keep him silent about the reality of aliens, when in reality it was just your average charges of heresy.  The church made eight accusations, claiming that Bruno was guilty of:

• holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith and speaking against it and its ministers
• holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith about the Trinity, divinity of Christ, and Incarnation
• holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith pertaining to Jesus as Christ
• holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith regarding the virginity of Mary, mother of Jesus
• holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith about both Transubstantiation and Mass
• claiming the existence of a plurality of worlds and their eternity
• believing in metempsychosis and in the transmigration of the human soul into brutes
• dealing in magics and divination

Given the intolerance of the time, any one of these would be sufficient, but the Catholic Church is nothing if not thorough.  Bruno was sentenced to be burned at the stake, and supposedly upon hearing his fate made a rude gesture at the judges and said, "Maiori forsan cum timore sententiam in me fertis quam ego accipiam" ("Perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it"), which ranks right up there with Galileo's "Eppur si muove" as one of the most elegant "fuck you" statements ever delivered.

I suppose it's understandable that Borges thought Bruno was a pretty cool guy.  A lot of us science types do, although that admiration might be misplaced.  Hank Campbell writes over at The Federalist:

Bruno only agreed with Copernicus because he worshiped the Egyptian God Thoth and believed in Hermetism and its adoration of the sun as the center of the universe.  Both Hermes and Thoth were gods of…magic. 

The church and science did not agree with Bruno that pygmies came from a “second Adam” or that Native Americans had no souls, but they were also not going to kill him over it.  There is no evidence his “science” came up at any time.  He was imprisoned for a decade because the church wanted him to just recant his claims that Hermetism was the one true religion and then they could send him on his way.  When he spent a decade insisting it was fact, he was convicted of Arianism and occult practices, not advocating science.

So right off, we're on shaky ground, not that this was ever in doubt.  In any case, between Borges's devotion to Bruno and his fascination with aliens, he apparently went a little off the deep end.  He left behind over a dozen bound books, mostly written in code, and only a few of which have been deciphered.  Here's a sample passage from one of the ones that has been decrypted:

It is easy to accept what you have been taught since childhood and what is wrong.  It is difficult, as an adult, to understand that you were wrongly taught what you suspected was correct since you were a child.  In other words, if you fit into the system, your behaviour will be determined, making you at the mercy of beliefs already provided and well established in dogmas and rituals, with the masses.

Which is standard conspiracy theory fare.  He wouldn't tell his parents or his sister what he was up to, only that he was working on fourteen books that would "change mankind in a good way."  Besides the symbols painted on his walls, he also had a portrait of himself next to an alien:

Borges's apartment wall, showing the symbols, writing, and the portrait of him with a friend

Borges has now been missing for over a week, and his family is understandably frantic.  The UFO/conspiracy world is also freaking out, but for a different reason; they think that Borges knew too much (in this view of the world, people are always "finding out too much" and having to be dealt with), and either the people who don't want us to know about aliens, or else the aliens themselves, have kidnapped him.

But the whole thing sounds to me like the story of a delusional young man whose disappearance is a matter for the police, not for Fox Mulder and Dana Scully.  It's sad, but I'm guessing that aliens had nothing to do with it.  Of course, try to tell that to the folks over at the r/conspiracy subreddit, where such a statement simply confirms that I'm one of "the two s's" -- sheeple (dupe) or shill (complicit).  I'll leave it to wiser heads than mine to determine which is most likely in my case.