THE HISTORY OF SECRET SOCIETIES

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
From wherever you are around the world, around the world.
Welcome to the Circle of Insight, a show that explores
the many facets of human behavior and the wonders of
the human mind. And now here's your host, doctor Carlos.

Speaker 2 (00:43):
Welcome everyone. We have a great episode for you today.
We're going to be talking to doctor Richard Spence about
the real history of secret societies. We talked about the Illuminati,
the Rosie Crucians, Freemasons, and we even got to talk
a little bit about the protocols of the others of Zion.
So if you've heard of any of these groups, this
probably be a fascinating interview today. Now we have to

(01:03):
make we did have some technical difficulties in regards to
your audio and video, so I try to do a
lot of editing to try to help it out. So
hopefully it wasn't too bad, and hopefully you're still able
to see it and hear it and enjoy the video.
I think it's great information, very fascinating stuff. So without
further ado, let's go ahead and watch this interview. Welcome

(01:36):
everyone with me today is emeritus Professor of the University
of Idaho, Richard Spence, and he's got a great series
on the great courses.

Speaker 3 (01:44):
So let's get started.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
He's got the great series called The Real History of
Secret Societies, and it's not waste any more time.

Speaker 3 (01:49):
And welcome to the.

Speaker 2 (01:50):
Show, Professor Richard Spence. Welcome, sir, Hey, it's great to
be on.

Speaker 3 (01:54):
Thank you so much for doing this.

Speaker 2 (01:56):
Can you tell us a little bit about the real
history of secret societies?

Speaker 3 (02:00):
Is it all about? Well, real history is as opposed
to the fake history. I guess that's the idea. If
you say it's the real history. Uh, well, let's let's
sort of start at the beginning.

Speaker 4 (02:11):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (02:11):
Secret societies exist, all right, they've they've always. I guess
One of the main points I try to make in
the course is in some ways to I guess the
term is to demystify secret societies because the general you know,
the general picture that people get about them is that
well they must involve you know, rogued cultists doing something nefarious. Right.

(02:34):
If somebody has a secret society, e, they're up to
something no good, it's something sneaky, underhanded, criminal, diabolical about
it in that sense. Now that being said, sometimes it
is right there there There are secret societies can be
many different things. So it's it's really describes a type

(02:55):
of organization. It's a way that people work together. The
things that I start out with in the course, I
think in the initial episode is that I try to
define what it is that we're talking about, and you
that a secret society has four basic characteristics. So these

(03:16):
are the things that you would want to watch for
the first one and maybe the vote. Membership is by invitation,
so keep in by One of the things about secret
societies is that there's nothing democratic or egalitarious, selective. You
get chosen. That's that is the key part of this.

(03:36):
You are chosen to be a member of this organ
and that is considered to be a privilege. It's one
of the things that you get that other people don't.
So membership is by invitation and recruitably based upon some
kind of specific criteria. That is, you're invited to be

(03:57):
part of a secret society because you meet certain criteria.
He has that itself is often secret. The second thing
is that one show chosen. It requires of initiation that
can be very elaborate, It can go through different stages,
or it can be very simple. But the initiation is

(04:20):
generally takes one of the things that's involved in that
almost always are oaths of secrecy. So, for instance, if
you go out and you look at Masonic initiations in
any of the levels, and those are things, by the way,
you can find online. Even though they're supposed to be secret,
they're really not. But if you look at them, you'll
find out that a candidate for membership is over and

(04:44):
over again carries out these oaths of see that I
will never divulge any of the secrets of the order.
I will never say anything about what happens. And that's
where the secret part comes. And this is why, for instance,
you'll have many Freemasons who will argue that we're not

(05:05):
a secret society or a society with secrets, right because
we don't hide our existence. It really it doesn't. You know,
just about any American town you drive into. As you
drive into town, there'll be generally a little bulletin board
that will tell you whether or not there's a Masonic
lodge in town, or whether there's an Odd Fellow's lodge.
So they're not hiding their existence. The secret part becomes

(05:28):
in what actually takes place within the lodge, within the organization,
the rights in rituals, which which take place, those are,
especially the initiates. There was though I remember asking a
friend of mine who is who had been a Freemason
for many years, and I'll have here, I am not

(05:51):
a member of any secret society and I've never wanted
to be. And we can come back later as to point.
That's the case. See, that's what makes them interesting to me.
That's why they're kind of a bug under a microscope
to me. That's why I'm kind of interested in studying them,
because I'll tell you, at a certain level, I don't

(06:11):
quite get it, Okay. I mean I can see the
kind of networking and the rest of it, but it's
it's my own curiosity about them.

Speaker 2 (06:20):
SI.

Speaker 3 (06:20):
But I said, I said to this fellow, I said, look,
if I want to, I'm not a freemason. I can
go out and with very little trouble, I can basically
find a complete script to the initiation of the three
different levels. I can find it. So the secrets are there.
He goes, well, that's not the point. So the point
isn't the secrets can't be found. The point is is

(06:45):
that when you are through the initiation, when you were
brought in, you swhere, you as an initiatives where you
will never divulge them. And that's the key point. You
are and your personal integrity, that you will never divulge
to anyone outside of the order. What its secrets are,

(07:09):
the fact that out them out on their own, that
doesn't really matter, because this whole thing is really about
a test of character and honesty of the person who's
been recruited. But while outsiders can find the secrets of
Freemasonry if they really want to without much trouble, the
point is they're not supposed to find those out from
other Masons, so you're small to oaths of secrecy. The

(07:34):
third element you find in secret societies is well, what
do you get out of this? Okay, you get recruited.
You know, you swear that you will suffer a horrible,
grisly death if you ever reveal the secrets of the organization. Well,
the thing that you get is that you're promised some
kind of special knowledge that other people wouldn't have, some

(07:55):
sort of powers or advantages which members have. So let's
take the whole thing down and notched. Remember I said
that secret societies come in many forms. Well, here's one
that many people can't even realize as a secret society,
a college fraternity, or a sorority, they are remember exactly

(08:16):
the things I've described fit them. You are chosen to
belong or you are not chosen. It's selective. There are
then rituals of initiation. They can be simple or they
can be elaborate. What goes on within the fraternity is
supposed to stay within the fraternity and the skill. The
other thing you will find commonplace, a kind of marker

(08:39):
for secret societies is that they're sort of ersatz families.
Because notice that the terminology which is almost always used
for fellow members are brothers and sisters. So when you
are admitted to a fraternity, which is a brotherhood, that's
all that. It means. All the other members become in

(09:01):
a symbolic sense, but in some way an important sense,
your brothers. That is, there's a kind of artificial family
which is created. So the question comes back to you,
why do people join fraternities? What do you expect to
get out of it? Well, you can argue, you know,
fellowship establish friendships, but also think of it this way.

(09:24):
It's really a form of networking, isn't It sounds like
you're going to meet people in colin among your brothers.
And the whole point is that, remember, you're not forming
just a relationship that will last those four years. That's
not what it's about. It is going to be a
lifetime relationship, not only with the people who were members

(09:49):
of your particular fraternity, but with the whole larger body
of it. Because if you join a fraternity, you know,
if you join Delta Delta, delta's not just the guys
that are in your house on campus. You're now part
of this of this larger order. They're all your brothers.

(10:09):
You've never met them, but you're all bound by being
selected and by being initiated and being being sworn into
this select brotherhood, you know. And the simplest way it
boils down to is that maybe in the future that's
going to help you get a job or promotion or
to know the right people. That's generally not you know,

(10:31):
I don't want to reduce belonging to a fraternal order
down to purely mercenary elements, but let's face it, that
generally has has much to do with it in some way.
So that's the same type of thing that you can
find in other secret societies. Is that joining it is
partly about the fellowship or the community that you become
part of, but it's also about the advantages that the

(10:55):
organization will give its members through networking. And I guess
the final thing that you find, We'll go ahead.

Speaker 2 (11:05):
I was gonna say it kind of reminds me of
the Skull and Bones from Yale Bush Family.

Speaker 4 (11:10):
I think it was, yeah, well you know the Bush
there's one, but yeah, And you tend to find that
people are often selected on the.

Speaker 3 (11:26):
Basis of family membership. You know, having relatives in the
organization is often an advantage in membership. So if memory
serves me correctly, for instance, if your father was a

(11:49):
freemason or is a freemason, and I think the term
which he's used in some cases is that you are
a Lewis, which means that you're the son of a Freemason,
which doesn't entitle you to membership, but it helps others
see if other members of your family have already been
chosen for this August position, then that advantages you. It's

(12:12):
what in other cases is called a legacy in some
way because it becomes part of a family tradition in
that regard. So the odd thing is is that I
think I'm actually in that sense a Lewis. But see,
I have no interest because a lot of people on
one side of my family were in Masonic lodges. But yeah,

(12:32):
just never had any interest for me, never went in
that direction. The final thing you'll often find is that
you're supposed to have a certain special loyalty to people
who because these people are are your brothers, this is
the community which you've been chosen, which you have been
honored to be chosen to be a part of, and

(12:53):
therefore you owe them. There is a particular form of
personal loyalty that you owe to other members of the
organization that you would not necessarily owe to others. The
thing is is that's open to a lot of interpretations
to how far that goes, how far does that loyalty

(13:17):
actually extend its becoming in any ways, it's a kind
of individual choice. Well yeah, I mean it's another thing
I try to demystify to some degree is what conspiracies are,
which is simple explanation is all you need are two
or more people. Can't do it on your own, got

(13:38):
to have at least two people to have a conspiracy.
But that's all it takes. It's two or more people
working together secretly. There's the key point. You have to
be working together in secretly, not openly, working together secretly
to attain a common end. Now, I think in legal terminology,

(14:03):
a criminal conspiracy is two or more people working together
to attain an unlawful end, or to attain a lawful
end through unlawful means. But that's a criminal conspiracy, and
it doesn't have to be criminal. One can conspire without
there being anything criminal about it. You know, it can

(14:26):
be unethical or underhanded, you know, sneaky, but it's not
necessarily not necessarily criminal. Give you a very kind of
limited against, kind of a low walk example of what
I mean by that. Let's say you have three people
who are friends or and two of them get together

(14:48):
on their own and decide that they're going to do something,
but they're not going to involve the like, I don't know.
Let's go to Vegas, but let's not bring Bob along.
All right, Let's let's give him some other story that
you know, sort of and we're going to go off
and do these things, but we're going to leave them
out of it in some way. Well, the two of

(15:10):
you have just conspired against Bob. You you to achieve
a common aim, which is going off to Vegas by
yourself and not have to drag Bob along. Now that's
not much of a conspiracy. It's what's been done. And
that's the thing. When you look at it that way,

(15:32):
you know that these things happen all the time. See,
this is one of the main things in the course
I wanted to make about secret societies is that there's
nothing really sort of weird or you know, on the
fringes of human activity. They are a basic form of

(15:52):
human organization. To understand what they are, you'll begin to
see that they're everywhere, That fraternities and sororities are secret societies,
that freemasons are secret societies. I don't know the diabolical
plot of difficultists to run the world. If there is
one is a secret society, they can take many, many
different forms. And in the same way that conspiracy is

(16:16):
just two or more people working secretly to attain a
common end, which can be criminal or can be entirely personal.
And people do that all the time. So there's nothing
really extraordinary about much of this. And I suppose that's
in many ways what I meant about the real history

(16:37):
of secret societies is to understand how you know, groups
like the Illuminati are what people tend to think of this,
it's very mysterious, supposedly all powerful controlling organization or thinks
it is. But they can be things that are just
so garden variety. So every day so next door neighbor
that you don't even notice them. Is that something that

(17:01):
gives them the powers?

Speaker 5 (17:03):
So well, I think of it as experience because somebody
out there is going to find what what you mean by.

Speaker 3 (17:15):
By power. So are there ever secret societies that decided
they get plots to rule the world? Sure there were?
Why not? I mean, that's that's nothing terribly unusual about that.
And so let's let's take what we were just talking about.
You know, one of the most infamous secret societies is

(17:37):
the Illuminati. So what we're really talking about here visibly
if you want to say, okay, where where was there
something actually called the Illuminati? Well, when you start looking,
you'll find out that there were a lot of them. Okay,
there's not just one, there were many. Because all the
term illuminati means is enlighten those who have received the light. So,

(18:05):
for instance, if you went back into the early centuries
of Christianity, when it was basically a semi underground religious
cult in the religious in the Roman Empire. One of
the terms that was used to a Latin term by
Christians for each other, or illuminati, why because they have

(18:28):
been illuminated, they have received the light. That's all the
term itself means. So an illuminatus is a person who
has been illuminated. The question then becomes what was the
light you received into what had been illuminated? So you see,

(18:48):
the term seems to describe something, but it really doesn't.
It's just a kind of general description of having been
illuminated into some kind of particular knowledge. So the organization
that generally gets historically cited as an illuminati occurred in
Germany in Bavaria in the late eighteenth century. In fact,

(19:12):
it formally came into being in seventeen seventy six. So
the appearance of the Bavarian Illuminati directly coincides with the
American Revolution, which is an interesting coincidence. Okay, yeah, well
it's probably not more than that, but you just never

(19:32):
know in terms of these things, but it gives you
ideas what was going on, all right, So again, let's
let's put there something else I do in the courses.
I always try to put these things in context. So
the real connection between the Bavarian Illuminati coming into being
in seventeen seventy six and the American Revolution getting underway

(19:54):
in that period is that it all has to do
with this context of what we call the Enlightenment. So
the eighteenth century is the period of the adlance, strangely enough,
the period of illumination. And what was the Enlightenment. Well,
that's where things like the American Revolution, the French Revolution,
the concepts of democracy, the kind of intellectual and political

(20:18):
challenge to traditional absolute monarchy. Yeah, this is what we
think of We tend to think of them the eighteenth century.
Somehow a lot of people drank a bunch of coffee
and decided they were going to overthrow the king. That's
the French Revolution in nutshell, Okay, frenchmen became over caffeinated
and the next step was a ute starbucks fall. Yeah

(20:41):
it is, you know, but there is that element, So
we associate that with learning and expanse. So that's the
key between them. So one way to think of it
is that the ideas the sort of enlightenment ideas that
were influencing the founding fathers of the American Republic were

(21:01):
elsewhere across the pond in Germany, influencing different types of organization.
And there those those insane Enlightenment ideas influenced a professor
of Catholic canon law at the University of Ingolstadt, and
his name was Adam Weisshaupt. So weiss Haupt is a

(21:26):
he's not a member of the clergy, but he was
a Jesuit educated professor of law teaching it at a
Catholic universitys too. Yes, well, there again, you know, that's often.
I mean, the Jesuits are in a sense a kind
of secret order within the Catholic Church. They have their

(21:47):
own particular leadership, their own methods for recruitment, and there's
that's you know. One of the things you'll find is
that in that period, in fact, it's a good example,
in the period of the late eighteenth century, the Jesuit
order was actually banned by the Catholic Church. So the

(22:08):
Jesuits were banned, and then they weren't brought, they weren't
re legitimized until I think the eighteen twenties, nearly eighteen
hundreds so for years. And why were they banned Because
the argument was that they had achieved too much power
with it. They had they had become a kind of
rogue organization within the body of the church, kind of

(22:32):
like the Templars what they were doing. Yeah, similar to that,
but the Jesuits in some sense actually did what the
Templars were accused of doing, but as far as I
can see, didn't do. But it's a similar sort of
idea that you know. The fear was that the Jesuits
were very powerful, a very powerful order. They controlled a

(22:55):
lot of land and property. They tended to have a
great deal of influence over education. That's why if you
look around to this day you notice how many Catholic
universities are run by the prominent they are in that regard.
They sort of had their own rules and regulations, They
had their own sort of grand master of the order,

(23:18):
which the criticism was that Jesuits obeyed their leader and
not the pope, and the Vatican in the late eighteenth
century was sufficiently sufficiently convinced of that that they banned them,
but then eventually brought them back. So you see, one
of the things that weiss Hoft was trained by His

(23:40):
whole sort of legal and educational training was by a
secret society. And while he was very opposed to the
Catholic Church, he nevertheless admired the way that Jesuits did things.
So there's an interesting argument to be made is that
weiss Hoft modeled his whole Illuminati on the Jesuits. I mean,

(24:04):
you know, you can see you can trust them. You
don't have to believe what an organization does to see
that it has a very effective organization. I guess if
I was going to give a more modern example of that,
I'd say Communist Party back in its heyday in the
early twentieth century. Now, you might detest what Communism stood for,

(24:27):
but you got to give them credit for this. They
put together a formidable organization and they created in intense
loyalty among their members because one of the things as
a as a as a loyal Communist, you were supposed
to do wherever you were, if you were a member

(24:47):
of the Communist Party, what were you most loyal to you?
It's already important too you did what the party told
you to.

Speaker 2 (24:55):
That's really important to Professor because there's a lot of
implications to national security in regards to the safety of society,
understanding their strategies per se of what they're doing.

Speaker 3 (25:13):
Well. It comes back to those basic criterion of a
secret society that I mentioned earlier, and it is really
one of the reasons that in one of the lectures
I tell you that one of the lectures is in
the series is called the Red Octopus, and it's essentially
about the early history of the Communist Party and how
it functioned practically as a secret society. It didn't hide

(25:38):
its existence, but it would often hide who members were.
So one of the highest forms of membership was to
be a member of the party, but to be a
secret member, which meant that publicly you never acknowledged your membership,
and in fact, you were never supposed to do that,
and you were even allowed to go out and say

(25:58):
nasty things about the party publicly, you could pose as
being a militant anti communist. You were never supposed to
acknowledge that if that's what the party wanted you to do.
But your real loyalty was to the party itself. That's
how you would get people to betray their country, because

(26:19):
your country, if you are a true member of the party,
is not a fund is not as important a loyalty
as your loyalty is to the party. Everything had to
be sacrificed to that. So when the party asked you
to do something, you do it. And if that's to
betray your country, if it's to abandon your family, you know,

(26:41):
if it's to kill another party member who has betrayed
their oaths and gotten out of blind, that's what you're
supposed to do without question. And as long as that
kind of discipline could be imposed, as long as you
could inspire people that way, it made it a very
formidable organization. So if you were looking, you know, if

(27:02):
you're looking around as to how to sort of build it,
that that's the kind of model. And I think that's
what weiss Healt saw about the Jesuits. The Jesuits were
a tough organization. They had this very powerful internal discipline,
and that's what he wanted to take, and he wanted
to build a new order that would destroy the one

(27:26):
that it was modeled on, because wece Hou's declared ambition
was to use his order to obliterate every existing political
and religious system on earth and to replace it with
a new universal order rule by an enlightened elite, because

(27:50):
that's what members of the Bavarian illuminati were ultimately promised.
You are going to be founding members of what will
be a new elite that will rule the world. That's
what you're being chosen into. This is why he could
recruit noblemen into that. Because the curious thing, this is
something else if you tend to look at a lot
of secret societies, is that they almost never recruit the poor.

(28:15):
Societies are usually organizations that are built upon the middle
class or the upper classes. That's who they recruit from
first of the people who already have money and position. Right,
So if you were gonna build if you're gonna build
up your brother, who would you want in it? You
want people who have no money or propertation, or would

(28:37):
you rather have one filled with people who have money
and influence and education, people from the right families, with
all who are already who people are already part of
the establishment who want to become more. So the question
then becomes, how could the ba very aluminum one who was,
let's say, a minor German prince, Why would it prince

(29:00):
who rules his own little territory ever want to become
part of an organization whose avowed goal was to destroy
aristocracy and monarchy because it offered him to become something else,
to become something greater. What do you want to be?
You want to be a petty prince over some tiny
little territory in southern Germany, or do you want to

(29:23):
be elected to become part of a new enlightened elite
that will govern the entire world? Now that you can
sell and that's something that weissoff knew that he could do.
And so what he recruits is he goes out and
he largely recruits people from the upper from the most
educated and already from the existing elites of society to

(29:48):
construct them into another one. Now, the thing about the
Bavarian Illuminati, though, is that it visibly lasted for only
about ten years. Really, it's around from around seventeen seventy
six eighteen seventeen eighty six. That's it. It's only around
for about a decade. It attracted somewhere between one thousand
and two thousand members that we know of, which isn't

(30:12):
isn't a lot, So he didn't become massive in some scale.
And then what happened is that around seventeen eighty five
its secret internal documents were essentially leaked. Okay, it's kind
of like an early wiki leaks. What actually happened was
that a disaffected member, see this stuff has been going

(30:35):
on for a disaffected member really ratted them out to
the Bavarian government. They went to the Royal They are
different stories told behind it, but if you really break
it down, what happened is that one fellow, a fellow
with the name of Baron Fone can you get see
he's a baron, objected to Vice House what he thought

(30:57):
was Vice House sort of dictatorial control, and so he
went to the King's men and he said, here's this
whole organization and we're a plodding to overthe overthrough you
and everything else. And all of their documents were published,
all of their grand plans for infiltrating other organizations that
are bringing all of this about. So that, yeah, what
you can argue is that, well, here's some guy who

(31:19):
comes up with some unrealistic grand scheme. It lasts for
about ten years, he gets, you know, several hundred to
a couple of thousand gullible people to join it, and
then the whole thing goes belly up and visibly that's
what happens. On the other hand, here's the follow through

(31:39):
of that. The organization is never destroyed. Weisshelpt is never arrested,
he escapes to another German state where the prince gives
him refuge. He lives until I think eighteen thirty, and
none of the other members of the illuminat era. So
the organization is never destroyed. It is revealed, but it's

(32:02):
not destroyed, which then raises the positibility then well did
they all just stop doing this? Did everybody get bored
and quit being Illuminati? Or did it just continue? Because
one of the things we don't even know about it
is that, remember, Illuminati wasn't really the name of the organization.

(32:23):
Vish Heft called it the Order of Perfectibilists. But one
of the things that he would actually say is that
one of the things our order must never be known
publicly under its real name. It's not even clear that
it had a name. Why do you need one? So

(32:45):
I remember, Illuminati simply means those who have been enlightened.
It doesn't necessarily tell you what it was. So if
you don't even know what the name of the organization is,
and how do you know, you've destroyed it. The other
thing about vice health is that he said, look, what
we're going to do is we're not going to operate openly.
We're going to infiltrate other secret societies, and we're going

(33:09):
to use them as recruiting grounds, and we're going to
use them cover for our activities. Now what secret society
did he choose as being the most effective to do that? Yes,
so it's one that was all the Freemasons. And his
argument was, look, there are lots of Masonic lodges around,

(33:30):
and he goes, nobody pays that much attention to them,
do they? I mean, they've become almost kind of commonplace. Also,
they tend to attract again people from the existing elites.
So what we'll do is that And what he ordered
all of his members to do was to go out
and join Masonic lodges, attain positions of authority and influence

(33:53):
within those lodges, and turn them into vehicles through which
our order can operate. Therefore, no one will ever see us.
They'll only see the Masonic lodges which we are operating through,
and even most of the Masons within them will never
know what it is that we're doing. And you know,

(34:19):
I wouldn't necessarily go so far as to call that diabolical,
but I would call that rather smart organizing, so that
your group never actually appears visibly, but it uses other
organizations as a cover for its activity. Now, by that,

(34:40):
keep in mind, I'm not arguing that the Illuminati went
on to take over this and that and continues to
expand you can't prove that, but neither can you disprove it.
I don't know what happened. I know that weishoft had
a plan and plan into effect, but you know they

(35:00):
still be out there. Sure they could. Why not? I
either want to believe that, you don't want to believe again. Yeah,
so it can get I mean, this is this is
where things can get pretty pretty sneaky, and it's it's
one of the things that you're not always sure what
it is that you're looking at. In terms of one organization.

(35:25):
It's a bit like those Russian nesting dolls. You know,
you open up one and there's another one inside that,
there's another one inside that another inside that. Well, sometimes
that's what you'll find, that there's one more secret society
in another less secret society, or that secret societies will

(35:46):
will generate more secretive or it's not secret enough, and
therefore you have to create a new issue. You've been okay,
you've been chosen for the first level, but now, because
you're really special, we're going to choose you for something
that's a secret order within a secret order, but only
for special people. See. That's one of the things these

(36:08):
things do to me again as an outsider, is that
you're special. If you've been chosen, you're special. If you
have been chosen, whether it's a member of the whether
you're being chosen for the Illuminati, or whether you're being
chosen for Delta Delta Delta, you have been chosen where
others have not, and that makes you special. And you know,

(36:31):
what more do we want in life than to be special?
You know, Professor, do you be chosen translates? Do you
think it translates over into the people who just believe
in them? Because if they have this special knowledge of
all these groups and most society.

Speaker 2 (36:49):
Doesn't have, they feel special. Now you've studied it, so
it's different. You're actually focusing on it. But I mean
under the other individuals who we'll start talking about all
these secret groups and what they've done in the building.
Burgers and all this other stuff, and everybody's kind of like,
I never heard of that before, and it gives them a.

Speaker 3 (37:04):
Lot of attention. And I'm not saying it's bad or good.

Speaker 2 (37:07):
It's just interesting to see how this kind of satisfies
some kind of need to feel special.

Speaker 3 (37:16):
Yeah, I think it's what strikes me. You know, I'm
not a psychologist. I don't know, but it just strikes
me that one of the things that makes this appealing
is that it does it appeals to the ego of
the person who's been chosen. Okay, you've been picked for this,

(37:37):
and you now have knowledge or you have a position
that other people don't have. I'm not sure that works
with everybody. I don't know. Apparently it hasn't worked with
me particularly well because I've never found that attractive rough,
but that just be good. There's something who knows. But

(38:00):
it certainly can work with others. I've I've seen it work.
I've seen it around me who've been attracted into these things,
and that I think is is a huge part of
what it comes. Also, this going back to this thing
about the creation of a kind of imitation family. You know,

(38:23):
people want to belong to things, you know, and let's
you know, let's face it, sometimes an artificial family can
be preferable to your real one.

Speaker 2 (38:36):
You know.

Speaker 3 (38:37):
I'm sure we all have wonderful families, but not everybody does.
You know. Families can be can you They can also
be abusive and manipulative and unpleasant. You know, not all
siblings get along. Yeah, that's that's the sad reality of
human existence is that families can be very problematic, you know,

(38:59):
and you can't choose them. Here's a way to think
of it. Your family is a kind of secret society
that you're born into, and it's a I've sometimes half
jokingly said that every family is a kind of cult
and you know, I use this in the case of

(39:21):
my My wife comes from a rather large family. Okay,
I come from a very small one, and she comes
from a large family, and they're all wonderful people, but
you know, for my aspect, it is kind of cultish sometimes.
You know, they have their own little particular rituals and
there are ways of doing things, and you know, it's
the in law type of thing. You meet these people
and you go, what earth are they doing? You know,

(39:43):
I mean, this is you know, it's not what it
is that you're so they're all of these little individual customs,
and then the whole set of complicated relationships between siblings
that are often difficult to to h to establish each other. So,
you know, in some cases, if you could escape your
biological family and then join another family that chooses you

(40:07):
and rewards you just because you're you, then that's something
that many people, I think would go for. It's a
way of belonging, the sense of being part of some organization.
It's interesting.

Speaker 2 (40:20):
It's almost like we're all kind of mini Ivie hops
in a way, obliterating.

Speaker 3 (40:25):
Our own cold to going through another world. I don't
know how many people at some point or another heaven.
You know, imagine, you know, the world would be so
much a better place if only I could run it.
If I could run, things that would work out. Well.
You know, I can realize that there's probably a huge

(40:46):
logical somewhere, but nevertheless I don't. I guess your choice
is this, would you rather live in a world that
you run or the reality is living people run not
thinking about your best interest at all. And so the
idea of rather than be you know, a tiny little

(41:08):
cog in a gigantic machine controlled by someone else, would
you rather be the person controlling the machine? You would
at least like to fantasize that in some way, And
so something, you know, what Weishut was sort of offering
to his followers was to make them that to elevate
them of importance and control beyond anything that they had

(41:32):
at the time. And that is for a lot of people,
that's a tremendously deductive idea. I think in some cases
it's almost irresistible for them to have. I know, we
only have a few minutes left.

Speaker 2 (41:44):
I wanted to know, is it possible to cover the
rosy Crucians and the protocols of the Elders of Zion.
I know, the rosy Crusians are kind of an interesting
group to me because you don't know much about them,
and everybody's always trying to figure out who they are.

Speaker 3 (41:58):
And a lot of times because we don't know much
about them, they make more out of them. Yeah, the
raw Secrusions, it's all connected there. Again, there are many
different orders of raw Secrucions. So there's number one. So
the one that you'll hear most about today is the
one that I think is still headquartered in San Jose, California.
But that was a version of the Raw Secrucians that

(42:20):
was really founded in the early nineteen fifteen by enterprising Americans,
you know, based upon older orders. One of the ways
I describe it in the Real History of Secret Society's
courses that raws Secrucionism is one of those things is
about everything and nothing, and it means that it's in

(42:41):
order that basically promises to sell you the secrets of
the universe. So if you want to know all the
secrets of the universe, the secrets of mental power, of reincarnation,
of arcane knowledge, you know, all of this really cool
stuff that will make you a that will illuminate you
then and that's what raw Accrucianism can offer. It's a

(43:02):
kind of one stop shopping place for enlightenment mystical doctrine.
But you have to join in order to get those
secrets revealed. But you're never really but they're quite good
at the fact of never sort of revealing precisely what
it is that you learn. That's the problem. But you

(43:27):
can't do that, you know, if it's like a mystery
grab bag, there you go, So, okay, here's here's the
mystery grab bag that you have all the knowledge secret
knowledge of the universe is in here, but you have
to join the order and be admitted and go through training.
The way you did it in the sort of you know,
modern American twentieth century mass market raws, Accrucianism is that

(43:50):
you answered an ad or the back of a magazine
and you sent in a dollar for these various lessons
that would gradually reveal it to you. It was a
money making scheme. I don't know, it was probably maybe
you learned the secrets of the universe, but you had
to pay for them a dollar at a time, So
that was one way to do it, or you know
you could do that. What would you rather do? Pay

(44:11):
for them a dollar at a time a correspondence course
to enlightenment, or do you want to go to Tibet
and spend five years in contemplation and then go see
the Dalai Lama? Okay? Which is easier to do to
afford in this case, So there are different methods to it.
Ross Accrucianism, again is based on the idea that there
is there is a mystical doctrine that people who have

(44:36):
the mental and spiritual qualifications can achieve if you are chosen.
And here's one of the first places it really appeared.
In the early sixteen hundreds in Paris. Placards just showed
up around town. You know, people put up bills on

(44:59):
walls saying basically that the Raw Secrusi Order has appeared
and we are looking for eligible members. Okay, if you
want to know the secrets of the universe, if you
want the mysteries of time and space reveal to you,
then you want to become a Raw Secrucier, so they advertised.

(45:21):
Now the point is, as far as I can tell,
they never told you where you were supposed to apply.
How do you do that? Then, now we're here, we
are among you, and we're looking for new brothers. Well,
the only way you did it issues just began to
express You began to advertise it for them. Mill you
go to someone you had a coffee shop and go

(45:42):
You're seeing these placards about the Raw Secrusis. I'd really
like to know the secrets of the universe. I wish
they would come and talk to me. Well, maybe they did,
so you would never really know. And then, of course,
once you're admitted, you're immediately sworn to secrecy. So someone
was putting up the placards, maybe somebody was advertising, but

(46:03):
how many people actually answered the ads? What the organization became.
I mean, the raw Secrucion, those roseecutions were very opaque.
You never see them. They never appear publicly other than
to say that we are here and we're looking to
recruit more people. So there's this whole the element of

(46:24):
mystery which is still included in that. But that's one
of the things that then into the you know, into
the nineteenth century and even into the twentieth allowed many
other people to come along and essentially found what were
called ross Accrucian orders and start the whole thing over
and over again. So it's a kind of it's a

(46:45):
kind of generic term as opposed to a trademark, you know,
the same thing. By the way, it's true for freemasonry,
nobody owned there's no form of freemasonry that owns the
rights to the name. Anybody can call them that if
they want to. You can go out right now. I'm
not suggesting that you do, but you can go out
and you can form your own rows Acicrucian order. Nobody

(47:08):
owns the name. Nobody can can stop you from from
doing that. The other thing you'll last about before you've
run out of time is, you know, one of the
most insidious and also one of the most persistent secret
society stories is are the the Elders of Zion? Okay,

(47:29):
what that boils down to is, you know what's generally
called the international Jewish conspiracy, Right, I just never got
the idea that there are there's some sort of Jewish
plot in order to rule the world. In other words,
it's it's a it's the idea of a Jewish illuminati.
That's what it comes to see. It's just using it's

(47:51):
recycling the stuff that Visovs came up with. Now, the
interesting thing about this is that this whole story that
there's some sort of order of the Elders of Zion
appears I in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century,
and there are lots of stories about how it appears,

(48:12):
most of them wrong. So what you'll generally hear about
and again I also have a there's an episode in
the course where I go and I try to deconstruct
the background of this. So what you'll generally hear is that, well,
there was this kind of you know, crazy Russian mystic
named Saragei Nilas and he wrote the story, or he

(48:32):
got it, or it was written. The most common one
is that it was the creation of the Tsarist Russian
secret police. And you'll get this, you know, you'll actually
get these descriptions of you know, someone comes in. There's
a woman who claims she went in and saw the
head of the of the Zara's secret police in Paris
with another guy, and they were writing on a piece
of paper with a blue stain, and they were coppering
from one book to another. And that is the simplest

(48:55):
way I can put it. Total bs right, which is
another thing you run across a lot of this stuff.
It didn't happen because those people weren't even in that
place at the time. And the woman who told the
story was a pathological liar. Okay, all right, wow, so
she just made it up with that story. But it

(49:20):
leaves this mystery. The first version, which describes the interesting
thing is that what is actually described if you look
at the protocols, the various forms of what are called
the notes of a meeting of the Elders of Zion,
that's what that's supposed to describe. So the protocols of
the Elders of Zion are supposedly the notes that were

(49:42):
taken at a meeting of this secret society and its
plan to rule the world. Question number one, Why do
you take written notes of a plan to rule the
world if you're a secret society. I mean, the basic
rule here is you never write things, and they just
don't take notes. They take notes which are like these, bah,

(50:06):
and this is how we're going to do this. Oh,
and then we're going to get them this way. Why
would you do that? It makes no sense. That's one
of the big problems you look out there. If you
got your plan to rule the world, keep it a secret,
don't write it down. But where this appears, So you've
got this what purports to be the notes of a

(50:28):
meeting of a secret society and his planned for world domination.
It first appears in an obscure right wing Russian newspaper
in nineteen oh three, and nobody paid much attention to
it at the time. It's kind of serialized in this newspaper.

(50:50):
And it's also very clear if you look at it
that what is being described here is very clear is
a Judeo Masonic plot. I mean, that's still in fact.
If you even look into later versions of this, you'll
always notice that we're going to use freemasonry as a
vehicle to spread or kids. What does that sound like

(51:13):
what we were just talking about. That's exactly what it
was that Adam Weisshaupt wanted his Bavarian Illuminati to do
back in the eighteenth century. So what you have at
the beginning of the twentieth century are the purported notes
of a secret society which is using a method identical

(51:33):
to what had happened before. Now does that mean it's
the same organization or does it just mean that somebody
read about the Bavarian Illuminati and copied That could be
either one. But the mystery in this to me is
that we still do not know in this day who
came up with this original story. Where did that story

(51:55):
that appeared in this Russian newspaper come from? And that's
still unknown. It's not the story. It wasn't written by
members of the Russian Secret Police, because that whole story
was supposed to have taken place in nineteen oh four
and nineteen oh five, And you can't invent something that

(52:17):
already existed a year before you supposedly invented it. So
here it was, and it changed at the time, little
bits and pieces, but no one knows where it came from.
Well giving too much way, I have a theory about
its origins, and I think those basically go back to France,

(52:41):
and it's connected. If you go back to France in
the eighteen nineties, there are a lot of interesting things
that are going on. One of the things, you have
the Dreyfust case, all day Jewish army officer that was
accused of trees, you know, that goes into the whole
Dreyfus case Devil's Island, and he's convicted of trees and

(53:02):
the eventually he's all right. But the other thing that
was happening was a thing called the Taxil Hoax t
A x I. L. Bill Hoax was this kind of
big deal because it was a series of books that
had been published over years that alleged that there was
a Semsonic conspiracy. All right, so Freemasons, devil worshipers, okay,

(53:30):
And the guy who supposedly is that his pen name
was Leo Taxil, wasn't his real name. But and what
Taxil did is he created this whole sort of you know,
literature story about Satanic Freemasons, who, by the way, were
headquartered in South Carolina, so they were like devil worshiping

(53:55):
Freemasons are out to the world. And he built this
up into such a big deal, and then eventually what
he revealed is that it's a hoax. He publicly revealed
all of his work as a hoax and basically said that,
you know, I just did this to make fools out
of the Catholic Church, who of course gombed on to this,

(54:15):
and everybody else who believed it, and you're all a
bunch of idiots for believing this story to begin with. Now.
The thing about it, though, what you noticed is that
it worked very well because what did taxl what made
his story saleable. It was saleable because it told a

(54:35):
lot of people what they were already willing to believe. So,
just in case any of you out there want to
start your own conspiracies or this is the way you
have to do it. You have to kind of sell
something that already touches a nerve. You know, people are

(54:56):
kind of halfway to believing this already. What you're now
going to do is given the whole story and to
frame it up. So the point was is that in
France of the eighteen nineties, a lot of people mistrusted
Freemasons and a lot of people were afraid of devil cultists,
and all he did was to combine them together, and
it worked. And that's why it took off. Because he

(55:19):
was telling people what it was they already halfway believed.
So here's what I think happened. Someone, some mysterious person
or persons took Taxel's idea and they just tweaked it
a little bit. So instead of having a Satanic Masonic conspiracy,

(55:41):
they turned it into a Jewish Masonic conspiracy, and they
spun it the same way, and it worked exactly the
same way because there was already widespread prejudice and mistrust
of those two groups, and that worked together. So the
Taxil hoax simply taken and it was turned into the

(56:02):
Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But by who still
don't know. Fascinating stories. Fascin stories, I can see you'd
be a lot of fun and a part. It's well,

(56:23):
thank you so much, professor. It's like Reddit, It's the
rabbit hole. It's how far down this rabbit hole do
you want to go, because that's often what you find.
You go down and then there's another on something else
takes off, and something else takes off, you know, and
pretty soon well sometimes it's you know, it's not all
that complicated. There are cases it is maddeningly complicated, and

(56:53):
in many cases ever knowing what you're looking at is
real or whether it's fabrication. That's the other thing that
you know. I've come across in yes, generally as an historian,
also in a lot of the of the topics other
than the secret societies I work on. Here's a mental
fundamental thing is that people lie all the time. I mean,

(57:18):
we don't admitted that we can do and repeatedly, and
some people lie habitually, and some people lie much better
than other ones. And this is why you know, this
is today we call this fake news or disinformation, but
that's what it is. It's lies. But lies can often

(57:39):
be better than the truth. You know, probably most people
have had some experience with this. If you told the truth,
they never believe you. See, the truth can be messy
and it cannot make any particular sense. The truth can
in many cases be fundamentally unnew. But you see, a
lie is a story constructed for a particular purpose so

(58:03):
it can be more believable and more palatable than the truth.
Is that's why we tell people lies when telling them
the truth would be painful. And I think most people,
if you admit it, you've done that at some point
you have told someone a lie because to tell them
the truth would simply be painful, and the lie is

(58:25):
easier for them to swallow. A quote about it, you know,
needs you had a quote about that.

Speaker 2 (58:35):
People don't want to destroy their illusions because then they
have to face the truth or something of that nature.

Speaker 3 (58:41):
Maybe not a lot of the same lines, but yeah, true,
you know it's you know, you know, did your dog?
You know you're going to tell the kid did the
dog died? Or you're going to tell them they went
somewhere else. Okay, they went to they went to a
special place. And you see, it served presumably a youth
of this and but that's that's the thing that becomes

(59:04):
so insidious about lies in a way, is that they
can function so well. And then what you have, as
people begin to construct whole movements and whole organizations around
these things, it's going always going to be and also
the idea of a greater good. I mean the type
of thing again. You know what what international communism was

(59:25):
always selling was a future world that would be a paradise, right,
paradise on earth where there would be no no utopia.
But to get to that utopia, you know, we're going
to have to you know, there's going to be some
tough times. So you know, people will have to be killed,
Oaths will have to be broken, countries will have to

(59:46):
be betrayed, the existing order will have to be destroyed ruthlessly.
But once all that's done, comrade, you see, the end
result will be paradise for everyone. But in the meantime,
you're gonna have to murder this person. Yeah, and it's
funny how people would give or or is it simply

(01:00:09):
the great lie which is told to justify all of
these other crimes in the meantime.

Speaker 2 (01:00:15):
That's interesting because I know, I wrote a book a
couple of years ago on isis the terrorist group and
their recruitment strategies, and I mean it just resembles it
so much. You're part of the secret group with you're
you're the one who's got this secret knowledge about the
prophecy and all this other stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:00:29):
It was fascinating. Then you've been chosen, you know, and
you're even more chosen if you're chosen to become a
suicide bomber. You you have been chosen for a great role.
And this will gain you admittance into paradise immediately, and
you know you would have to wait in line, you'll

(01:00:50):
be able to to go ahead. All of these wonderful
things will be available to you because you have been
chosen for this purpose. And the thing is is that
it works. It doesn't work work on everybody, but it
works on a lot of people. That's all you need.

Speaker 5 (01:01:04):
That's all you need.

Speaker 2 (01:01:05):
Professor Spence, thank you so much. That's why a secret
society there you go. Absolutely, thank you so much for
doing this. We truly appreciate it.

Speaker 3 (01:01:18):
It's been my pleasure and I hope it's it's enlightening
in some way at leasy mystifying enough so that people
will try to find out more.

Speaker 2 (01:01:28):
Absolutely, and folks make sure to check out the Great
Courses of the Real History of Secret Societies with Doctor
Richard Spence. It's a great series. I highly recommend it,
lots of fun. Thanks again everyone for joining us.