The big secret about secret societies

Step right up, folks, and read the one true guide to Western and Eastern esoteric societies from the Freemasons to the Rosicrucians. Relics, totems and secret handshakes revealed!

By Laura Miller

Read more: Religion, Books, Conspiracy, Laura Miller, Science, History, Scientology, Christianity, Reviews, Book reviews

Illustration by Tim Bower

Jan. 28, 2008 | Why are secret societies so secretive? The automatic assumption is that they're up to no good. At the Bohemian Grove, rich and powerful men convene to hatch plots and direct world events -- or so we're told, by people infuriated at having been excluded from the California campground. But, hey, wouldn't a corporate boardroom or a private dining suite at a pricey restaurant do just as well for that sort of high-level skulduggery -- and attract much less press? On the other hand, it's probably a lot easier to sneak a van full of hookers into a campground than into 30 Rockefeller Center or the Four Seasons.

In either case, their discretion has backfired. It may well be that the activities of the world's most notorious secret societies consist of little more than grown men cavorting in drag and performing dopey ceremonies under the influence of strong drink. Whatever -- the public will never believe it's all innocuous. Secrecy turns out to be the most effective attention-getting, fantasy-inciting trick in the book. Remember how the neighbor kid's previously unimpressive playhouse became instantly and irresistibly fascinating the moment he taped a "Keep Out" sign to the door? If a cabal of evil masterminds really wanted to keep their fiendish plans quiet, they'd cook them up in a Christian Science Reading Room and hand out fliers on street corners.

Of course, Christian Science has its own set of secret doctrines, and once protected them as fiercely as the Church of Scientology now shields its own wacky space-opera theology. Religions were the first institutions to really milk the secrecy gambit for all it was worth. Swear your acolytes to silence and make any violation of the sanctum punishable by death, as the orchestrators of the Eleusinian Mysteries and other ancient cults did, and you cloak your relics, totems and chants in an extra-thick layer of otherworldly glamour. The current presidential administration isn't the first cabal to obsess over controlling "the message," or to realize that sometimes control is the message.

Nowadays, however, it's hard to keep even the most awesome secrets under wraps. Sooner or later, no matter how tight your security or how fearsome your lawyers, a disgruntled apostate will leak your closely guarded scripture to the Web, where, stripped of mystery, it often looks as absurd as middle-aged white guys wearing purple robes and trading funny handshakes. Somehow, the precious sacred writings always turn out to be endless, badly written tracts stuffed with woolly, incomprehensible abstractions. Christian Science and Scientology are among the very few "secret" societies whose beliefs Mark Booth doesn't promise to unveil in his new book, "The Secret History of the World: As Laid Down by the Secret Societies," but in this respect, at least, they fit right in. Booth, an editor at a British publishing house, presents his book as an alternate history of the cosmos and humankind, with the early chapters relating the creation of the world and later chapters devoted to all of crankdom's usual suspects: "Egyptian" hermeticism, Neo-Platonism, the Knights Templar, the pineal gland, alchemy, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry -- you name it. He maintains that his version of the creation narrative, distilled from all these sources, is "a teaching common to Mystery schools and secret societies from all over the world." To have written such a comprehensive synthesis of Western and Eastern esoteric mysticism would be a formidable accomplishment indeed -- if there were any reason to think that Booth's claim were true. For what it's worth, the metaphysics can be summarized thus:

The material universe is an emanation of the cosmic mind, which began to "precipitate" (the central metaphor is of crystals forming in a solution) when the mind (i.e., God) first reflected on itself. The thought of God became more and more "dense," turning to "gas, then liquid and finally solids." Matter continued to pass through a series of stages of increasing density until it formed the Earth, living creatures and finally human beings. Humanity, in turn, continues to evolve toward the ultimate end of the entire process: the universe becoming fully aware of itself. Memorable early milestones in this saga include the stage at which the universe consisted of a "vast vegetable being" and the part where the "fish gods" came along to teach us all how to talk to plants.

From this you might conclude that "The Secret History of the World" is a truckload of drivel, and you would be right. It is a mess of a book, disjointed and rambling, rife with puzzling non sequiturs that are obviously meant to be suggestive or evocative but that more often read like the symptoms of an advanced case of Attention Deficit Disorder. The many illustrations culled from Western art ("Egyptian snake goddess with knives," "Zarathustra with rolled scroll") are largely undated and unsourced, as are most of the colorful but unenlightening anecdotes. We are informed that the 16th-century Swiss alchemist Paracelsus was "a strange, aggressive character" who "seems never to have grown a beard" -- but Booth leaves out his contributions to the world's store of knowledge. (He was the father of toxicology.)

Booth is forever intimating that he's about to explain something important to the reader and then abruptly dropping the subject. He has all the smoke and cymbals of the Great and Terrible Oz, but can rarely muster even the fake disembodied head as a crescendo. He makes a promise, for example, in the caption to a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper" -- "It has been suggested that this painting alludes to suppressed secret doctrines regarding the feminine role in Christianity. We shall see shortly that this is true, but not in the way proposed by 'The Da Vinci Code'" -- that is never fulfilled; he never mentions the painting again.

Furthermore, much of the "information" Booth chooses to supply is either incorrect or, frankly, untrue. Some of these errors seem to be the result of simple ignorance. He has, for example, the idea that the "laws of probability" dictate that "a coin flipped in strict laboratory conditions will ... land heads up in 50 percent of cases and tails up in 50 percent of cases." (Probability only indicates that a coin is equally likely to land on either side on any single toss.) He entirely misconstrues the thought experiment known as Schrödinger's Cat -- not an uncommon confusion, it's true, but since Booth chooses to make "modern science" the villain of his secret history, complaining incessantly that it fails to understand the "deeper" philosophical issues of existence, he should at least make some effort to grasp what it does understand.

Like most writers working this particular vein of mumbo jumbo, Booth traffics in a lot of unsubstantiated stories that have been discredited by historians he dismisses as slaves to "convention." This, of course, doesn't prevent him from flaunting the credentials of academics whose ideas he likes. (Either a professorship lends credibility to a scholar's claim or it doesn't -- make up your mind.) A fringe theory about the chronology of Egyptian dynasties that seems to support the historical basis of the Bible is, Booth approvingly notes, "gaining ground even among the older generation of Egyptologists." But the fact that no Egyptologist would endorse Booth's bizarre assertion that the Great Sphinx at Giza was built around 10,000 B.C. (7,000 years earlier than it was actually built, and long before Egyptian civilization was even founded) doesn't trouble him a whit.

Some of Booth's untrue assertions (such as the claim that the writings of C.S. Lewis are rife with coded "Rosicrucian" symbolism) are clearly examples of wishful thinking. Others are rank misrepresentations: Charles Darwin did attend a couple of séances at the request of his older brother (an enthusiast), but he pronounced spiritualism to be "rubbish" and the medium in question was later proven to be a fraud. Still other errors in "The Secret History of the World" are simply baffling. Why does Booth write that Pythagoras perished in an arson attack in the city of Croton, when the Greek philosopher was instead banished and died in Metapontum?

Next page: Beyond "The Da Vinci Code"