Category: Miscellaneous

In 1947, Bedouin shepherds found a jar containing seven old scrolls in a cave in the desolate area of Qumran in Jordan, near the northwest…

Shortly after its 2003 publication, Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller list and stayed…

A medieval city in Yemen, on the southwestern corner of the Arabian Peninsula, now called Dhamar. Damear has been an important center of Muslim theological…

A Christian monastic movement in Ireland and Scotland, the Culdees (from Gaelic celi De, “servant of God”) emerged in the seventh and eighth centuries within…

According to a ritual text anonymously published at Berlin in 1770, the highest order of ancient Egyptian initiation, consisting of seven degrees. The ancient Egyptian…

Among the most prestigious of American think-tanks, and the centrepiece of most recent speculations on the New World Order, the Council on Foreign Relations was…

One of the oddities of American fraternalism, the Concatenated Order of Hoo-Hoo was founded in a train station in Gurdon, Arkansas in 1892, by businessmen…

An important system of secret brotherhoods in late medieval and early modern France, the institution of Compagnonnage emerged among journeymen of a variety of French…

“A specter is haunting Europe,” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels claimed in the ringing opening lines of The Communist Manifesto: “the specter of Communism.” The…

The last major Gnostic movement in the western world before the nineteenth century, the Cathars (“pure ones”) or Albigensians (“those from Albi”) emerged in northern…