Who Really Runs The World: A Look At Secret Societies

THE ILLUMINATI

Founded in Bavaria in 1776 by Enlightenment-era legal scholar Adam Weishaupt, the Illuminati was a society of European free thinkers and philosophers committed to the elimination of prejudice, theocracy, government oppression, and discrimination against women.

According to dedicated freedom activists like the King of France and the Tsar of All the Russias, these goals were merely a front for the group's real purpose of being evil and doing evil stuff all the time.

THREAT LEVEL: Low. The original Illuminati was forcibly disbanded in 1785 and successor organizations are still squabbling over the rights to the official Illuminati brand. Those looking for the most powerful version of the "new" Illuminati to join should probably go for whichever one it is that Jay-Z and Beyonce belong to.

ORDO TEMPLI ORIENTIS

Gaze into the beady eyes of Crowley and obey the evil commands of his mystical hat! Ordo Templi Orientis began in the late 19th century as a sort of offshoot/copy of Masonry, but when charismatic weirdo Aleister Crowley gained control over the British wing of the organization, he began re-writing the core precepts to center around his Law of Thelema: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law."

OTO retained a Masonic flavor until they attempted to found a chapter in Detroit, only to be accused by the local Council of biting their style. At this point, Crowley decided all the parts of OTO tradition that he could conceivably get sued over weren't really that important and rewrote them.

THREAT LEVEL: Low. After Crowley's death, the society basically fell apart. While members of the few remaining OTO chapters claim remarkable magic(k)al powers, they spend most of their time in court squabbling over which branch of Ordo Templi Orientis is the legitimate one.

THE ROSICRUCIANS

The source of a good chunk of Masonic imagery, the late medieval secret society of Christian Rosenkreuz was said to originally be limited to eight learned doctors of alchemy who were required to do nothing but learn, write, and train a successor.

For centuries these eight men managed to keep a lid on it until the 1607 publication of two anonymous manifestos detailing the Rosicrucian tradition. They generated an enormous wave of interest in the previously secret society that some historians refer to as "the Rosicrucian Enlightenment."

Much of it was driven by the desire of European philosophers and scholars to hang out with this awesome alchemist dudes and it thus led to a fair amount of cooperation and collaboration between followers.

THREAT LEVEL: Low. Nobody actually found the original Rosicrucians and that even some modern Rosicrucian societies consider the original manifestos to have been a clever hoax to stimulate European intellectuals.

On the other hand, if they actually did exist and continue to do so, change that level to "terrifyingly high" based on their apparently superhuman ability to keep a secret alone.

THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR

Despite being officially named The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, the historic Knights Templar were in fact extremely rich. They created the European financial infrastructure to help finance the Crusades and arguably becoming history's first multinational corporation.

After the Crusades stopped being profitable, the Pope noticed that the Templars were sitting on quite a lot of cash that could be used to touch up a few Vatican frescoes and had the order sacked on trumped-up heresy charges.

Persistent rumors of hidden Templar treasures, as well as the Templars' nobility compared to the corruption of the Church, has spawned legends that the Knights Templar were never truly eradicated. Legends that were spurred on by the Masons' adoption of some of the neater bits of Templar imagery in the 18th century.

THREAT LEVEL: Low, despite what the Assassin's Creed game franchise might like you to believe. Knights Templar scholars will have to wait until Assassin's Creed IV to learn whether or not a group of medieval bankers and clergymen were in fact space robots from a pre-human race of humans, or whatever the hell is going on in those games.

SKULL AND BONES

Yale's oldest and snootiest secret society formed when academic fraternity Phi Beta Kappa renounced its secrecy in favor of spreading to other campuses and issuing those weird little keys.

Being an elite society within the existing elite of an Ivy League school, Skull and Bones members (known as Bonesmen) end up occupying positions of major political and financial power pretty much by default, since the sons of Presidents and CEOs rarely end up working the night shift at a 7-Eleven.

Skull and Bones is popularly held to have completely escaped all mainstream media attention, even though the admission of women to the 1992 class was judged notable enough to merit mention in The New York Times.

THREAT LEVEL: Low. Even though both candidates for President in 2004 were Bonesmen, subsequent events demonstrated that neither candidate was capable of running anything more complicated than the night shift at a 7-Eleven.

THE BOHEMIAN CLUB

When most of us imagine a "private San Francisco gentlemen's arts club" we don't typically think of it hosting events regularly attended by George Bush and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but that's the most famous activity of the Bohemian Club.

A super-private two-week celebration of being rich and powerful and peeing outdoors held at their private campground, Bohemian Grove. A combination of arcane ritual, high-level networking, and drinking, the Bohemian Grove event has played host to some of the world's most powerful men, with Nixon claiming that his 1967 Lakeside Speech "marked the first milestone on my road to the presidency."

THREAT LEVEL: Low. Nixon's off-the-record opinion of Bohemian Grove was recorded on the Watergate tapes as being "the most f*ggy goddamn thing you could ever imagine." Numerous journalists have infiltrated the Grove to find what British writer Jon Ronson described as "an all-pervading sense of immaturity," noting a much higher number of Elvis impersonators among the Grovers than he had expected.

COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS

A 1922 think tank formed out of the weirdness and turmoil of interwar Europe, the Council on Foreign Relations has two faces: an extremely public presence that issues press releases, maintains blogs and journals, produces Emmy-winning documentaries on Darfur and the global financial crisis, and then a completely silent inner sanctum that prepares hyper-classified reports and analyses for the CIA and the State Department.

The CFR has been politically bipartisan since its founding and accordingly has attracted criticism from both the right (who see it as a threat to sovereignty) and the left (who are suspicious of its numerous close ties to corporate America).

In response, the CFR published a FAQ on its website which completely fails to satisfy either parties' questions ("Q: Are you guys evil? No, seriously, are you evil?")

THREAT LEVEL: Low for those living in America, extremely high for those living near suspected terrorists and/or people who resemble rocket launchers from a distance of several thousand feet in the air.

It's hard to believe the CFR is a secret tool of corporate America to control government when corporate America seems pretty content with controlling government in an extremely obvious and out-in-the-open manner.

TRILATERAL COMMISSION

Owner of the snappiest logo on this list, the Trilateral Commission was founded in 1973 to coordinate economic, political, and diplomatic activities between America, Western Europe, and Japan, with a special emphasis on the defeat and capture of Mothra and other radioactive monsters.

The Commission got off to a really crowd-pleasing start with the 1975 report The Crisis of Democracy, which argued that the primary crisis confronting democracy was that there was just way too much of it.

This earned it the ire of both Noam Chomsky and Barry Goldwater in what would be the best odd-couple buddy-cop movie ever made about international government policy. The Trilateral Commission was remarkably well-connected with the Carter administration, for all the good that did either party.

THREAT LEVEL: Low for radioactive monsters; Mothra has successfully sought political asylum in Ecuador and continues to release damning indictments of Commission policy through two tiny singing Japanese women. Everyone else is already doomed.