11 Mysterious Secret Societies That People Know Very Little About

11 – Skull & Bones

In terms of powerful secret societies, the Bilderberg Group is top of the pile, but if it’s a combination of secrecy, weirdness and status that you’re after, then the Skull & Bones might well top the lot. On the surface, the Skulls & Bones might just be a silly game played by spoiled students at one of the world’s most prestigious universities, Yale, but look a little deeper and you had found an alumni that certainly suggests something a little more sinister. There are three Presidents – William Howard Taft plus the two Bushes – two Supreme Court judges (three if you count Taft again) as well as several Secretaries of Defence, media tycoons and corporate leaders aplenty.

The origins of the Skull & Bones are, by the standards of the United States, ancient. They were first convened in 1832 by William Huntington Russell, a founder of the Republican Party, and Alphonso Taft, father of William Howard and himself once a member of the US cabinet. They scurried along barely noticed until the 1870s when a former Yale student wrote of it in his autobiography. The rituals of the society that are known somewhat cryptic: they use Yale’s “Tap Day” to invite a select group of 15 men and women whom they suspect will be notables in later life or on campus to become members. Once invited, the inductees are taken to The Tomb, as the meeting place of the Skull & Bones is known.

Members have never been anonymous – the society releases the names of the new invitees every year – but what takes place within the four walls of The Tomb and on the society’s private retreat, Deer Island, is to this day shrouded in secrecy. Members are required to take on society pseudonyms, usually taken from antiquity and classical literature, and use a complex numerical code by which clocks are set to 5 minutes ahead of the real-time and special importance is placed on the number 322.

The origins of this are unclear, though speculation holds that it is something to do with the Lamian War in Greek antiquity or an original founding chapter of the organization that existed before the Yale group was created, possibly in Germany. Wilder conspiracy theories have it that the society holds several famous skulls in The Tomb, with former President Martin van Buren, Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa and Native American leader Geronimo are just some of the skulls speculated.

Indeed, there are some that hold the Skulls & Bones to be the first incarnation of the American branch of the Illuminati. Aside from the timings – the Illuminati went into abeyance in 1785 and the Skulls & Bones did not come into existence until 1832 – there seems to be little to link the two, other than that they have both had some seriously influential people come through their ranks over the years. What seems more likely is that it is a simple student society at a university that already has a lot of students who go on to great things – it is, after all, hard to see a group that includes the likes of Paul Giamatti and Michael Cerveris among the alumni to be too dangerous…

Sources For Further Reading:

NYTimes – The Secret World of Opus Dei

History Channel – 7 Things You May Not Know About Freemasons

Business Insider – 14 US Presidents Who Were Members Of One Of The Most Mysterious And Powerful Secret Societies In History

The Atlantic – What It’s Like to Join the Freemasons

News Week – Shadows in The Shadows: The Rosicrucians, A Fake Secret Society, Had A Real Impact on The World

The National Archives – The Templars’ ‘Curse’ On the King of France

The Connexion – The Knights Templar – A Christian Military Force Crushed by A French King

America Magazine – Opus Dei in the United States

World History Encyclopedia – The Assassins

Encyclopedia Britannica – Gavrilo Princip

Smithsonian Magazine – The Origin of the Tale that Gavrilo Princip Was Eating a Sandwich When He Assassinated Franz Ferdinand