FRATERNAL BENEFIT SOCIETIES
One of the many branches of the secret society movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fraternal benefit societies took the benefits system…
Author: Lux Ferre
FRANKLIN, BENJAMIN
American statesman, scientist, and Freemason, 1706–90. Born in Boston to a working-class family, Franklin entered the printing trade as an apprentice to his brother, who…
FIRST INTERNATIONAL
The bête noire of conservatives worldwide for more than a century after 1864, the First International and its two successors have played a huge role…
FERTILITY RELIGION
One of the major eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theories about the origin of religion, the theory of fertility religion proposes that all religion springs from the…
FENIAN BROTHERHOOD
The most famous of Irish revolutionary secret societies, the Fenian Brotherhood emerged after the catastrophic potato blight in Ireland in the late 1840s. The failure…
FALSE FACE SOCIETY
The most famous of the curing societies among the six nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, an alliance of Native American peoples living in what is…
FABIAN SOCIETY
An active force in British and European socialism for many years, and a significant figure in conservative conspiracy theories up to the present, the Fabian…
EXTRATERRESTRIALS
The twentieth century’s obsession with the possibility of intelligent life on other worlds has had a massive impact on the whole range of alternative beliefs…
EVOLA, JULIUS
Italian philosopher, writer, occultist, and Fascist. Born Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola, into an aristocratic Sicilian family, Evola (1898–1974) rebelled against his family’s strict Catholicism in…
EULIS
In the writings of American occultist Paschal Beverly Randolph (1825–75) and several secret societies that trace their descent back to him, a system of magical…