RETROSPECTIVE RECRUITMENT
One of the primary methods used by secret societies to conceal their actual origins, retrospective recruitment was defined and satirized by a famous passage in…
Month: December 2022
Reptilians
One of the features of the 1980s UFO scene was a series of attempts to categorize the entities reported by people who had encountered UFO…
RENNES-LE-CHÂTEAU
A small village in the hills of southern France, located between the walled medieval city of Carcassonne to the north and the slopes of the…
REJECTED KNOWLEDGE
The precise equivalent of religious heresy in today’s secular scientific culture, the field of rejected knowledge consists of all those beliefs, ideas, and systems of…
RANDOLPH, PASCHAL BEVERLY
American occultist, spiritualist, physician, politician, author, and founder of secret societies, 1825–75. A leading figure in nineteenth-century American occultism, Randolph was the illegitimate son of…
RAMSAY, ANDREW MICHAEL
Scottish Freemason and Jacobite, 1686–1743. The son of a baker in the Scottish town of Ayr, Ramsay attended Edinburgh University, then worked as a tutor…
RAINBOW CITY
At the extreme end of the contemporary alternative-realities spectrum is the claim that an ancient Martian city, made of multicoloured plastic blocks, lies hidden somewhere…
CELL SYSTEM
The basic structure of political secret societies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the cell system was pioneered by Italian secret societies in the very…
RAGGI
A major secret society in early nineteenth-century Italy, the Raggi (“rays” or “radii”) emerged in northern Italy sometime in 1797 in the aftermath of the…
PYTHAGOREAN BROTHERHOOD
Among the most widely known secret societies of the classical world, the Pythagorean Brotherhood was founded by the Greek philosopher Pythagoras (c.570–c.4<95 BCE) in Crotona,…