Secret Society Christmas Quiz
These are all from the "Encyclopedia of Secret Societies", which may be a source of much blogging from me next year:
1. Dressed in full regalia, in turn-of-the-century America, how would you tell the difference between a member of the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows and a member of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows?
2. What was the declared purpose of the Order of Anti-Poke-Noses? What was its actual purpose?
3. Where is the world headquarters of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry?
4. The Priory of Sion; The Palladian Order; The Bavarian Illuminati. Which is the odd one out?
5. At the height of the craze in the 19th century, what proportion of the population of the USA (including men, women and children) belonged to at least one secret society?
OK answers, as I am now popping off for a drink.
ReplyDelete1. It's nothing to do with the regalia. Odd Fellowship was segregated, and the GUOOF in the USA was a black organisation (it got its charter from the English GUOOF; the IOOF was a domestic American, white-only version of Odd Fellowship, which desegregated in the 20th century).
2. Declared "to be against all those organisations which attend to everybody's business but their own; actually, it was the anti-Ku Klus Klan society in Arkansas.
3. Charleston, North Carolina. It's basically got nothing to do with Scotland.
4. All three of them have had major hoaxes constructed around them, but the Palladian Order is the only one which was entirely ficitious; there were small secret societies called the Priory of Sion and the Bavarian Illuminati but there was never a Palladian Order of Masonry at all.
5. 20%. Fifty per cent of adult white males. The size of the secret society craze is really quite impossible to understand from the 20th century perspective; it is only partly explained by the economic base, which was that many of the fraternal orders acted as social insurance companies in the absence of a welfare state.
Damn. I was looking forward to dressing in full regalia to answer question 1.
ReplyDeleteFrom
ReplyDeleteDr. P. Radhakrishnan
Professor, Sociology
Madras Institute of Development Studies
79, 2nd Main Road, Gandhinagar, Adyar
Chennai 600020, INDIA
Dear Colleague,
I read your blogs while browsing the Out of the Crooked Timber blogs. I find them very creative. You may like to have a look at my home page.
http://www.mids.ac.in/prk.htm
I have also started blogging, though I still do not have a clear idea of using tags and html. I also do not have the kind of facilities which your website seems to show. You can access my dashboard using the following blog on Counterfeit gods.
http://prk1.blogspot.com
I also take the liberty of drawing your attention to a petition on the petitiononline.com on defending academic freedom. I am giving the URL below.
http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?Mozangvi
You can copy and paste it to your browser. The web page has links to the text of the petition, current signatures and comments.
It will be nice of you, and in larger academic interest to endorse the petition and post your comments. You can even create a blog on the petition and the several comments on it!
Best wishes and Seasons Greetings
P. Radhakrishnan
Dr. P. Radhakrishnan, does your university happen to have $50 million in the name of a dead colleague by any chance? I have a UK bank account I can let you use for a per centage.
ReplyDeletehmmm, as far as I can tell Prof. Radhakrishnan is a real professor and although I must admit that I'm not hugely keen on people using my comments section to randomly promote unrelated blogs, he does at least have a go at Ravi Shankar on his website for being a buffoonish purveyor of ersatz spirituality, which means he gets a pass from me as I also think that Ravi Shankar is a charlatan (Ananda Shankar, however, I like; I have no fixed opinion as yet on either Norah Jones or Anoushka Shankar).
ReplyDeleteIn related practical news, if you have a labour dispute with your college faculty, a lawsuit or industrial tribunal is almost certainly a better bet than petitiononline.com
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