4 Secret Societies

Can You Keep a Secret?

Why would a club want to be secret if it had nothing to hide? The answer is that many clandestine groups do have something to conceal and their whack-job followers live among us.

Other secret societies are just plain loopy and membership might open people up to ridicule.

Ordo Templi Orientis

If you want your secret society to have gravitas, give it a Latin name.

Otherwise known as the Order of the Temple of the East, Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) was founded in 1901 by the Austrian Carl Kellner and Prussian Theodore Reuss. Both men had deep ties to Freemasonry and the core of their society is the Law of Thelema, whose essence is “Do what thou wilt.”

OTO fell into the hands of British occultist Aleister Crowley. He dabbled in many strange, mystical societies. He was involved with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn until his sexual practices led to a parting of the ways.

Crowley's biographer described him “self-confident, brash, eccentric, egotistic, highly intelligent, arrogant, witty, wealthy, and, when it suited him, cruel.” Just the sort of chap you want heading up your secret society, which has been called a “love cult” for aging swingers (wondriumdaily.com).

Crowley's death in 1947 following years of drug abuse heralded internal struggles and dastardly deeds that ripped through the ranks of OTO. Apparently, members are still squabbling over who is Crowley's legitimate heir.

There is not a crime, there is not a dodge, there is not a trick, there is not a swindle, there is not a vice which does not live by secrecy.

— Joseph Pulitzer

Scroll and Key

Yale University has several secret societies and not very much is known about them. Well, there wouldn't be, would there? They're secret.

Scroll and Key, founded in 1842, is probably the wealthiest of the university's clubs.

It is a society for elites—not just people with the “right” bloodlines, but those who excel in their fields and seem destined for greatness.

Each year, 15 senior students are offered membership and given access to the clubhouse, known as a tomb. The building is windowless and looks like a mausoleum; it seems designed to keep whatever goes on inside its walls a secret. Weird initiation ceremonies seem to be a given.

The point of the Scroll and Key club, along with Wolf's Head, Berzelius, Book and Snake, and several other groups at Yale, is networking. And, it's networking among the 0.1 percent.

A glance at the membership yields a list of senators, corporate presidents, ambassadors, state governors, and an outlier such as Gary Trudeau, the creator of the Doonesbury cartoon.

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Strings get pulled and important doors are opened for those fortunate enough to be Scroll and Key members.

Veiled Prophet Organization (VPO)

Former Confederate cavalryman Charles Slayback gathered a collection of businessmen and civic leaders in St. Louis in 1878. The purpose of the meeting was to establish a secret society of local elites.

Slayback and his friends built a myth around a character called the Veiled Prophet of Khorassan, who is celebrated with a ball and parade.

Membership encompassed “the people who run St. Louis and St. Louis County,” and was “a response to growing labor unrest in the city, much of it involving cooperation between white and Black workers” (The Atlantic).

Workers were demanding an eight-hour working day and an end to child labour. The men of importance in St. Louis were having none of that. The annual parade and ball were intended to impress upon the lower orders in the city who was in control.

The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan is shown in early images carrying a shotgun and wearing garb looking very much like the outfits of Klansmen. The leader of the group, chosen annually in a secret conclave, was hooded to conceal his identity in the parade.

In 1972, activist Gena Scott pulled the mask off the Veiled Prophet who turned out to be a senior executive of Monsanto, Tom K. Smith. Scott's house was later vandalized.

The worthies of the VPO took these events to be a sign that they needed to relax their elitist attitudes. In a radical move aimed at severing connections to an unsavoury past, the Veiled Prophet parade was renamed Fair Saint Louis.

The city remains deeply divided between the haves and the have-nots.

The Order of Nine Angels

Here's a bunch that have good reasons for remaining secret—its members are right-wing extremists who are involved in the occult and violence. The Order of Nine Angels (ONA) is based in the United Kingdom but it's active in the United States, Russia, and elsewhere.

Stirred into their evil stew of beliefs are Fascism, Social Darwinism, and Satanism; their aim is to topple Judeo-Christian society. The BBC reports that “Adherents are encouraged to secretly infiltrate organizations such as the military or Christian churches in order to destabilise them from within.”

As with all such underground conspirators, individuals are tasked with forming their own cells of activists that are discrete from one another. This is so that if authorities penetrate one unit, they can't roll up the entire organization and put all members where they belong.

The Order of Nine Angels is a very dark cluster of misfits that celebrates Hitler's birthday and others who ignore society's moral boundaries. They espouse a concept called “accelerationism,” which uses violence to provoke racial and societal conflict creating a space that will be filled with their own malevolent ideology.

Bonus Factoids

• Millions of Americans have become enthralled with conspiracy theories involving secret societies whose aim is to dominate the world. According to an Ohio State University paper, “23% of Americans believe in the Illuminati and New World Order.”
• Late in the 19th century, some Americans grew concerned about the proliferation of secret societies. They held a national convention in Chicago in 1869 to create an anti-secret society movement. Chapters opened in many places but by 1900 most had become defunct.
• Georgia Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has been elected twice despite espousing some far-out conspiracy theories. In an interview on the CBS program 60 Minutes in March 2023, she accused the Democratic party of harbouring a secret group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles. She said: “Even Joe Biden, the president himself, supports children being sexualized and having transgender surgeries. Sexualizing children is what pedophiles do to children.”

If you have to keep a secret it's because you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

— David Nicholls, One Day

Sources

• “Order of Nine Angels: What Is this Obscure Nazi Satanist Group?” Daniel De Simone, BBC News, June 23, 2020.
• “Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO).” Lux Ferre, occult-world.com, March 11, 2018.
• “Phony Secret Societies: The Ordo Templi Orientis.” Richard B. Spence, Ph.D, wondriumdaily.com, December 21, 2020.
• “Tomb Raiders: The Clubhouses of Yale’s Secret Societies.” Robert Khederian, curbed.com, June 21, 2018.
• “A Look Inside Yale’s Secret Societies — and Why They May no Longer Matter." Helen Andrews, Washington Post, September 28, 2017.
• “The Mystery of St. Louis’s Veiled Prophet.” Scott Beauchamp, The Atlantic, September 4, 2014.
• “The Illuminati Conspiracy Theory.” Nisha Krishnan, Ohio State University, February 11, 2019.
• “Eight Secret Societies You Might not Know.” Jackie Mansky, Smithsonian Magazine, March 7, 2016.

This content is accurate and true to the best of the author’s knowledge and is not meant to substitute for formal and individualized advice from a qualified professional.

© 2023 Rupert Taylor