John Michael Greer - The Conspiracy Book: A Chronological Journey through Secret Societies and Hidden Histories

This is the real history of secret societies in the Western worlda fascinating tapestry of forgotten struggles and lost causes, of hidden groups of men and women who pursued agendas that would one day triumph, and of others laboring just as hard for agendas that would end only in oblivion.

John Michael Greer, from the Introduction

Conspiracy is as old as the human race. A million years ago, when our distant ancestors were still adapting to the vast climate changes that forced them down out of the trees, ambitious young pre-humans doubtless made plans to go out hunting with a dominant elder and put a spear through his back. The plot hatched in secret, the arrangements made out of sight of watchful eyes, the sudden act that no one but the plotters expects: these are in our bones and our blood, part of what it means to be human.

The organized secret society, though, is a far more recent thing. The Roman senators who plotted the assassination of Julius Caesar in 43 BCE, for example, didnt found a society that met in secret for years afterward; they planned Caesars death, carried out the plan, and then tried and failed to seize power openly. A long series of events, beginning in the Middle Ages, was needed to lay the foundations for the rise of secret societies as a significant historical reality. Then, when the conditions were right, it took an improbable collision between two very different thingsa mens social club with an exotic origin, and an exiled royal house scrambling for a way back into powerto kick-start the golden age of secret societies.

The mens social club was Freemasonry: the Ancient and Honorable Society of Free and Accepted Masons, to give it its full title. Freemasonry started off in the Middle Ages as a craft guild in the building trades, not much different from the guilds of butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, and other trades that managed economic life in medieval Europe. Guilds had initiation rituals, regular meetings, and oaths of membership that bound initiates not to reveal certain trade secrets to outsidersall features that would be useful in the secret societies of the future.

Economic changes at the end of the Middle Ages swept most guilds into oblivion. The stonemasons guild survived in Britain by turning itself into a social club, inviting men who were not stonemasons to join as Accepted Masons. (We would call them honorary members today.) By 1700, most members in most of the stonemasons lodges in Britain were Accepted Masons rather than builders, and the lodges had begun to attract wealthy and influential members, who found Freemasonry a useful source of social connections.

That was when the other ingredient in the rise of secret societies entered the mix: the House of Stuart, the former royal house of Britain, thrown out of power in a revolution in 1688 and replaced by the House of Hanover. Supporters of the House of Stuart were called Jacobites after Jacobus, the Latin version of the name of the deposed King James II. All through the first half of the eighteenth century, they carried on a campaign of subversion and propaganda against the new Hanoverian government, and twicein 1715 and 1745launched rebellions in the name of the Stuart cause. After the defeat of the 1715 rising, the Jacobites set out to use every available means to undermine the House of Hanover, and in the process they infiltrated Freemasonry and launched several new branches of it as a cover for their activities.

Lithograph of Freemason emblems and symbols, c. 1872.

The Jacobites failed, and Freemasonry soon returned to its enduring role as a charitable and social society for men, but the idea of using secret societies to overthrow unpopular governments caught on. Over the course of the eighteenth century, secret societies sprang up all over Europe. The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 threw this process into overdrive, and for the next centurythe golden age of secret societiesconspiracies from every point on the political spectrum pushed their own agendas using the classic toolkit of the secret society.

In the United States, secret societies found a home early on. The Revolutionary War was launched by two secret societiesthe Committees of Correspondence and the Sons of Libertyand plenty of other conspiracies and secret organizations tried to promote their causes and undercut their opponents from that point on. It was quite literally true for many years that for every secret society, there was an equal and opposite secret society.

The fear of secret societies rose in parallel with secret societies themselves. Not all the fears that were splashed over eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mass media were based on realities, though. Demagogues at various points on the political spectrum discovered the uses of whipping their listeners into a panic over the supposed activities of secret societies. Outright frauds and fabrications also won their share of public attention.

One ironic result of the rise of antisecret-society agitation was a vast exaggeration of the power, effectiveness, and age of secret societies themselves. From the beginning, secret societies had been claiming to be bigger, older, and stronger than they actually were, since this helped them attract members. The opponents of secret societies found similarly that it was easier to attract members to their crusade if they exaggerated the size, age, and power of the secret societies they were fighting. By the late twentieth century, as a result, bestselling books and widely watched documentaries splashed around wild claims about secret societies and conspiracies, and succeeded mostly in obscuring the fascinating reality behind the claims.

The plot hatched in secret, the arrangements made out of sight of watchful eyes, the sudden act that no one but the plotters expects: these are in our bones and our blood, part of what it means to be human.