Secret Societies: Part 1 (Introduction)
Introduction
Secret societies have had a profound impact on the course of history and continue to do so. A worldview, with at least a basic knowledge of these influential groups, is necessary if one is to understand what shapes our world today.
In Part 1 of this article we will look at the basics of secret societies and in subsequent articles we will explore some of the key societies whose influence can readily be seen in various national and global trends. Here at Christian Spectrum, for example, we would suggest that some societies play a significant role in the drive towards the establishment of a New World Order comprising political, economic and religious features.
Limited knowledge
Since they are secret what can be known about these societies is to some degree limited, although there are enough disillusioned ex-members ready to break their oaths and to tell all. Also, because their roots stretch back hundreds, if not thousands, of years, it's not always possible to ascribe certainty to our knowledge. With the help of the Holy Spirit however, more and more information is coming to light as the darkness is being pushed back.
General information
Some societies are large with membership running into the millions whilst others are just made up of a few members. The larger societies tend to be organised into small local groups. Most societies require members to go through an initiation process in order to join. After initiation there may be several levels or ranks within a society; these are often called degrees or orders and further processes or initiation may be required to progress through them.
Hidden agenda
The agenda of the secret societies is kept hidden by means of a deliberate subterfuge and various strategies are used. For example, some will limit what knowledge they release to lower degree members, others clothe their ideas in a garment of Christian phraseology and the more influential societies will use legitimate power structures (Presidents, Prime Ministers, church leaders, government officials, oligarchs, bankers, etc.) to implement their secret plans. Only the very highest illuminates (e.g. 33rd degree Masons) within the secret societies, high level neo-pagans and New Agers are likely to be the only ones truly 'in the know.'
Symbolism
Symbolism is at the heart of many secret societies, and may take the form of images, symbolic words, sayings or ritual actions. Initiates of secret societies are often given signs so that they can recognise each other. These can take the form of handshakes or passwords.
Different types of society
Societies differ in their aims and concerns, but many of the best known ones major on personal development, spiritual self-exploration and the study of topics that come under the heading of the mystical, esoteric or occult. They can be classified under various headings such as fraternal, religious, mystical, esoteric, occult, magical, paramilitary, criminal or political.
The roots of secret societies
With religion came spirituality, mysticism, knowledge of the world of spirits and other worldly powers: the kind of knowledge that humans have, throughout history, sought to protect and keep secret. As soon as a group of people know something that others do not, and work to maintain that secrecy, a secret society is born.
From these primitive roots a long tradition stretches down through time. Where pre-history merges into ancient history it is possible to catch the first recorded glimpses of this tradition, in the form of mystery religions, lost cults and the esoteric knowledge of the ancients.
The earliest recorded secret societies have roots in pre-history and reflect prehistoric fertility cults, agriculture and the spirits of the dead. They are known as 'chthonic' meaning 'under the earth' to distinguish them from the gods of ancient Greece and Rome. Chthonic cults characteristically used arcane rituals, sacred spaces (caves) and shamanistic rituals such as ecstatic dance and psychedelia to commune with the other world. Some of these practices were passed down to later secret societies.
Mystery religions
Religious worship in the ancient world was usually a public act, but alongside the conventional exoteric (outwardly displayed) forms there were important esoteric (inner and hidden) traditions. The best known are the Greek mysteria or mystery religions.
The revelation of secret truths about death, and more importantly life after death, seems to have been at the heart of all the mysteries. The whole point of initiation was that it offered a guarantee of some sort of heaven or paradise.
There are many parallels between the ancient mysteries and other secret societies like Freemasonry which suggests that some sort of tradition endured from ancient times to the modern era.
The Eleusinian mysteries
Our word 'mystery' comes from the Greek mystery religions, which were religious experiences and teachings only available to the initiated. The best known are the Eleusinian Mysteries (700BC to 393AD), but there were others, including the Orphic mysteries which probably derived from the myths of Orpheus who travelled to the underworld and returned. The Dionysian rites were based on the myths of Dionysus who came back to life.
The Oracle of Delphi, a related cult which was associated with Apollo, the god of the sun and of prophecy, also made a contribution to later secret societies. Enquirers had to go through a series of rituals before receiving an oracle and Pythia, the high priestess who gave the oracles, was said to go into an ecstatic trance by inhaling psychoactive fume concealed in a sacred space. Similarly the Knights Templars had secrets given by oracle, and Freemasons focus heavily on the symbolism of sacred architectural spaces.
The Pythagorean Brotherhood
Pythagoras was a legendary ancient Greek philosopher who was born in 570BC. His potent blend of mathematics and mysticism attracted young men from aristocratic backgrounds to form the Pythagorean Brotherhood (530BC to 450BC), a secret society or cult. According to legend, Pythagoras had acquired his wisdom during his travels in Egypt and the East (similar claims were later made in modern times for Madame Blavatsky and Alistair Crowley) but he also borrowed heavily from the ancient mystery religions.
Candidates for the Pythagorean Brotherhood had to undergo a strict initiation. Versions of Pythagorean mysticism became powerful and politically influential in the Western tradition that led to Hermeticism, Alchemy and Rosicrucianism. It is claimed that the Brotherhood lived on in one form or another to form the roots of many subsequent secret societies, such as the Freemasons.
Gnosticism
This is more a philosophy than a religion which began in Alexandria around the first century AD. It is a form of dualism which influenced the Knights Templar and the Freemasons. At its heart is secret knowledge (the Greek word 'Gnosis' means knowledge).
It separates the non-material realm of light and goodness from the physical realm of darkness and evil. Men and women are separated from 'god' who is seen as the non-material divine essence of pure light and spirit.
Each human being has a struggle against evil and for salvation by struggling to spark the divine essence within. Some Gnostics believe the physical world was created by an evil spirit and it inverts traditional Christian belief in creation since Jesus is seen as Lucifer and Yahweh the evil corrupter.
Some Gnostics believed that the divine spark was imprisoned in their physical body and this led to celibacy. Some saw that the body could not affect the pure spirit within and therefore sanctioned total moral and sexual licence. For this reason Gnosticism was vigorously persecuted and Gnostic beliefs became closely guarded secrets.
Gnosticism is the most effective and widely accepted form of pantheism. It caused havoc in the early church (much of Paul and John’s writings counter this heresy) and is having a popular renaissance today (see our article on the Emergent Church). According to Albert Pike (leading Freemason from 1859-1891 who wrote a Freemasonry manual usually referred to as ‘Morals and Dogma') Gnosticism was an offshoot of Kabbalah (see our article on Religion). In his book he says:
The Kabbalah is the key of the occult sciences; and the Gnostics were born of the Kabbalists.
In essence, Kabbalah was a version of the ancient mysteries designed to deceive the Jews. Gnosticism similarly sought to lead Christians into deception. Together, they composed a kind of occult parallel to the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. This is what Pike said of Gnosticism in his book:
The Gnostics derived their leading doctrines and ideas from Plato and Philo, the Zend-avesta and the Kabbalah, and the Sacred books of India and Egypt; and thus introduced into the bosom of Christianity the cosmological and theosophical speculations, which had formed the larger portion of the ancient religions of the Orient, joined to those of the Egyptian, Greek and Jewish doctrines, which the New-Platonists had equally adopted in the Occident.
It was when a cache of ancient scrolls was found in the Egyptian village of Nag Hammadi in 1945 that many of the Gnostic writings were rediscovered. Versions of Gnostic Christianity are still practised today and Islamic Sufism and Jewish Kabbalism keep the Gnostic traditions alive. Some versions of Gnosticism were significant in the development of secret societies such as the Manicheans, Bogomils and Cathars. Gnosticism takes many forms but all are ultimately united in adoration of Satan and hatred for Jesus Christ.
Mithras
Related to the ancient mystery cults of the Greeks, Mithraism was the worship of the god Mithras. Originally a sun god from the Persian Pantheon, Mithras became very popular in the Roman Empire and the Mithraic religion flourished from the second century AD rivalling Christianity until the latter got the upper hand. The Mithraic cult had many important parallels with modern secret societies such as the Freemasons.
Developments in the West
In the West, the rich variety of philosophy, religion and mysticism in the ancient world gave way to a much more uniform, monolithic arrangement in the post-Classical world, as a Christian orthodoxy took shape and the Church established itself, first as the religion of the Roman Empire, and later as the unifying force of the Dark Age era.
It was in this era that the mysteries, Mithraism and Gnosticism were all suppressed and the exoteric forms of religion (those played out in the open, and publicly accessible to all) largely won out over esoteric forms - those hidden forms available to only a few. But, as the great mythologist Joseph Campbell explained in his magnum opus 'The Masks of God,' published 1959-1968, 'the mysteries, like a secret stream, went underground.'
The Western esoteric tradition
The result of being driven underground was what scholars of the occult call the Western esoteric tradition. This is the chain of descent of mystical and magical knowledge from the Classical era down to the modern day, a span of around 1700 years.
During much of this period the Western tradition included knowledge that was considered very dangerous, immoral and often illegal, so that those who followed this tradition had to be extremely careful about broadcasting it. Accordingly, much was kept secret or hidden. Occasionally, however, aspects of the tradition would break out into public view and become popular and even commonplace, such as in the case of Tarot and playing cards.
Hermes Trismegistus
Ancient Egypt had a tradition of magic and mysticism stretching back to at least 3000 BC. When Alexander the Great conquered Egypt and a new Hellenic culture took root in and around Alexandria, these ancient traditions were overlain by and melded with Greek traditions such as Pythagoreanism and Platonism.
The Egyptian god of wisdom, Thoth the Thrice-Great (or 'Trismegistus' in Latin) was identified with the Greek god of writing and communication, Hermes, to create a compound figure: Hermes Trismegistus. Writings about magic and mysticism were frequently attributed to his authorship, while at the same time he became a legendary, sub-divine figure - a real person who had existed in pre-biblical times and recorded prehistoric wisdom. In early Freemasonry, for instance, Hermes Trismegistus became the legendary founder of architecture and masonry.
In practice, almost all of the works supposedly by Hermes Trismegistus were written in Alexandria in the first three or four centuries AD. This body, or corpus, of work became known as the Corpus Hermeticum, and dealt with topic such as magic, spells, Gnostic religion, Pythagorean mathematics, Platonic philosophy and alchemy.
Islamic scholars preserved some of these works, and they were rediscovered in the West when an Italian scholar translated a manuscript found in Greece in 1453. Scholars of the period believed they had found a direct line to prehistoric wisdom, and Hermetic philosophy, known as Hermeticism, went on to be enormously influential in the development of secret societies.
Zoroastrianism
Secret societies incorporated many religious ideas from non and pre-Christian sources. One of the most important concepts is dualism which was first expressed through Zoroastrianism. This was the first monotheistic religion based on the teachings of a legendary character known as Zoroaster or Zarathustra, a Persian priest living around 1200AD. The core belief is the fight between Ahura Mazda, the supreme god, and Angra Mainyu, an evil force.
Kabbalah
As with Christianity, so Judaism also had exoteric and esoteric elements. The later are known collectively as Kabbalah. They feature magical and mystical knowledge, including secret names of God that have supernatural power, and theories about the significance of numbers. Because Hebrew letters are also used as numbers, words in Hebrew can be read as numbers and collections of numbers. The study of these numbers, their patterns, relationships and significance, is known as gematria.
Important cabalistic texts were written in the Middle Ages and spread to non-Jewish scholars, so that Kabbalah became an important element of the occult tradition in the West, and fed into the philosophical and spiritual basis of secret societies such as the Freemasons. A well-known element of Kabbalah is the Tree of Life, a diagrammatic representation of the ten aspects of God/creation and the 22 paths that link them.
Magic and alchemy
As well as metaphysics (philosophical musings on the relationship between mankind and God and the nature of reality), the Western esoteric tradition was concerned with magic - the manipulation of nature by paranormal or supernatural means. Magic could include telling the future (divination), communing with spirits (including angels, demons and the dead) and casting spells.
It was governed by laws, such as the Doctrine of Correspondences, according to which there are secret correspondences between different aspects of the universe - for instance, the Sun corresponds to the element Gold. Another law was 'as above, so below,' the doctrine that things on Earth are related to things in Heaven - for example, the zodiacal constellations relate to things and events on Earth. These magical laws were highly influential on the thinking of Rosicrucians, Freemasons, occultists and others involved in secret societies.
A special example of magic was the practice of alchemy, a sort of magical chemistry. Alchemists sought to achieve spiritual and material transformation through manipulation of the elements. Specifically, by heating, distilling and fermenting chemicals, they hoped to find the Philosopher's Stone, which could transmute base metals into gold and bestow immortality. Many of those who played a role in setting up secret societies in the 17th century were also alchemists.
More to come . . .
Secret societies have had a profound impact on the course of history and continue to do so. A worldview, with at least a basic knowledge of these influential groups, is necessary if one is to understand what shapes our world today