Secret Societies: Rise of the Esoteric

What do the Dharma Initiative, Skull and Bones, the Mafia, and Al Qaeda have in common? They are all secret societies with great allure (And yes, at least one of the aforementioned groups are fictional. Can you guess which one?)

The impulse for individual human beings to band together to form a larger “support” group is rooted deep in our DNA–and in many respects, secret societies are, at their core, esoteric support groups. Such groups can be as simple as “clicks” in schools to memberships in local churches or, for the rarefied few, memberships in clandestine groups, such as the Masons or the Rosicrucians.

Sometimes such social formations can veer into self-destructive and violent dysfunction, as in the mass forced suicide of Jonestown 1978 when over 900 cult members and their children were forced to down cyanide cocktails. Of course, not all stories are tragedies.

“The value of of secret societies such as the Mason’s or Yale’s Skull and Bones, for instance,” writes Amy D. Bernstein in A Short History of Secret Societies in U.S. News & World Report, “is that they create closed, supportive environments which down-play competition in favor of an intense group-focused mentality”.

U.S. News and World Report adds, “Those of our progenitors who could affiliate and be mutually dependent were more likely to survive than those were alienated.  Affiliating with a larger group is not just a coincidental phenomenon–it is basically inherent in our biology” (Marc Galanter, professor of psychology and practitioner at New York University Medical Center).

Secret societies give us the luxury of forming political alliances in our personal and professional lives; however, groups like the Masons, the Illuminati and others also help germinate a deep-seated fear into the hearts of mainstream society because of their intense secrecy and utter “otherness”. Many attribute Satan worship at the heart of higher levels of such groups and others assign to them the apex of key political conspiracy theories, such as the Abraham Lincoln or John F. Kennedy assassinations.

Famous Masons include our First American President, George Washington, and other famous historical icons as Founding Father Benjamin Franklin,  Presidents Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, and in our lifetime, Gerald Ford.  Barack Obama? No, he is not purported to be a Freemason, nor were the Bushs (although W was a member of the Skull and Bones Society).

There is no doubt that secret societies have played a role in our history–but exactly what kind of role and how much of one remains speculative. What is certain is that humans are social creatures with genuine needs. They thrive in intimate communities and require, from time to time, groups of like-minded peers to give them a hand; when mainstream society or the normative system of support around an individual–whether family, church, or friends–is unstable or uncontrollable, microcosms of society emerge as alternatives to fulfill the desires that macrocosms of our culture cannot.

Mainstream society functions to address the needs of the masses; by definition, they serve “the people”–all the people. Smaller groups, churches, fraternities, sub-cultures, and in more unique circumstances, secret societies, address the powerlessness of individuals by setting into motion the promise of power within an ordered hierarchy.

One, perhaps ought to have a healthy respect for such communities, a sort of fear in the Biblical respect. They are the ecclesiastical schism which separates their members from mainstream social and political culture.

The danger, of course, lies in the very mechanism that protects such groups and binds their members so intricately close: genuine enablement through cohesive, community–albeit in the form of pure, and by nature, corruptible, estoric power.