BURLESQUE DEGREES
A feature of American fraternal secret societies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, burlesque degrees were humorous ceremonies enacted for the entertainment of…
Author: Lux Ferre
BUONARROTI, FILIPPO
Italian revolutionary and secret society leader, 1761–1837. Born at Pisa to an aristocratic family, Buonarroti spent his childhood in patrician circles, serving as a page…
BRUDERS SCHWEIGEN
A violent revolutionary secret society that flared and burnt out in early 1980s America, the Bruders Schweigen (German, “Silent Brotherhood”) was the brainchild of Robert…
BROTHERING
In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and Scotland, ceremonies used to welcome new servants to a household or new apprentices and employees to a business were…
BROTHERHOOD OF THE SNAKE
According to a handful of late twentieth-century conspiracy theorists, the oldest secret society in the world, founded in prehistoric times to carry out a diabolical…
BROTHERHOOD OF LUXOR
According to the early writings of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy, a secret society active in America and elsewhere that sponsored the Theosophical…
BOHEMIAN CLUB
One of dozens of private clubs in American cities that cater to the needs and interests of America’s economic and political elites, the Bohemian Club…
BLUE LODGE
In the jargon of Freemasonry, a lodge working the three fundamental Masonic degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft, and Master Mason. Blue is the symbolic…
BLACK SUN
The central symbol of contemporary neo-Nazi occultism, the Black Sun first appeared as a symbol in the writings of Erich Halik, a member of the…
BLACK LODGES
In the occult scene of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a term for occult secret societies devoted to the study and practice of…
