Category: Secret Societies

The first important Italian political secret society, the Lega Nera (Italian for “Black League”) took shape around 1796 in the aftermath of the French invasion…

In 1837, as the League of Outlaws was falling apart, several of its members in Paris drew up a new organization, the League of the…

A German revolutionary secret society of the 1830s, the Bund der Geächteten or League of Outlaws was founded in Paris in 1834 by a group…

The most important pro-Southern secret society in the American Civil War, the Knights of the Golden Circle was founded in 1854 by George W.L. Bickley…

Founded in 1923 in Pennsylvania, the Knights of the Flaming Circle was a secret society organized to oppose the revived Ku Klux Klan. Its members…

The premier French occult secret society of the late nineteenth century, the Ordre Kabbalistique de la Rose Croix (Kabbalistic Order of the Rose Cross) was…

Founded in 1851 in Utica, New York, the Independent Order of Good Templars was the most successful secret society in the temperance movement. Its founder,…

The first fraternal secret society original to America, the Improved Order of Red Men traces its roots back to the Sons of Liberty, a political…

The first magical secret society to embrace the late twentieth-century paradigm of chaos magic, the Illuminates of Thanateros was founded in Germany by two chaos…

A leading force in the proto-Nazi underworld of early twentieth-century central Europe, the Höhere Armanen-Orden (Higher Armanen Order, HAO) rose out of the Guido von…