Good article looking at
Skull
and Bones, the elite American WASP fraternity/secret society: (via Robot
Wisdom)
But the superspooks of Skull and Bones had nothing on the all-girl break-in
team, which managed to outwit their security, slip into the tomb and take
pictures of each and every sacred ritual room. Including that dread enclosure
I call the "Room With the License Plates of Many States."
Every year the society, the oldest and most secretive and (once) most
exclusive of the dozen or so secret societies at Yale, selects or "taps"
15 members of the junior class for cultlike initiation whose ritualistic
coffins, skeletons and mystical oaths derived ... from the mumbo jumbo of
some early 19th-century Masonic lodges in Germany. (If you're familiar with
the Bavarian Illuminati, you know the drill.)
It may have served some eugenics purpose in the founders? vision: a
sharing of birth control and self-control methods to minimize the chance of
a future steward of the ruling class being trapped into marriage by a
fortune hunter or a working-class girl-the way the grand tour for an
upper-class American youth always included an initiation into the secrets
of Parisian courtesans so that, once back home, the young man wouldn't
elope with the first girl who let him get past second base."