Gary Valentine Lachman on Secret Societies

Over at The Daily Grail, Gary Lachman, author of the excellent Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius and co-founder of Blondie, posted his fascinating short essay looking at the common themes within historical secret societies, from occult symbols to conspiracies. He wrote the text as an "audio essay" for the exhibition Geheim Gesellschaften (Secret Societies) that's just opened at the CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux in France. Lachman also wrote two pieces for the exhibition catalog, available for pre-order on Amazon. From The Daily Grail:

The theme of a sunken, subterranean, and secret chamber is found in many secret societies. In the myth of Christian Rosenkreutz, founder of the 17th century esoteric society the Rosicrucians, his uncorrupted body is discovered more than a century after his death, hidden in a seven sided underground vault, lit by a miniature sun, and surrounded by occult symbols. This image of a sun hidden in the earth – light sunken into darkness – was carried by the underground streams of esoteric thought into western literature, and appears, for example, in that remarkable compendium of secret knowledge, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, by the eccentric 18th century Polish Count Jan Potocki. Potocki himself was involved in several secret societies; among them the sinister Illuminati. In his highly esoteric work, structured like the Arabian Nights (itself a treasure chest of secret lore), after confronting the sheik of a secret Islamic sect, his hero finds himself descending into a subterranean cave, illuminated by innumerable lamps, where he extracts from the dark earth the precious Rosicrucian gold of enlightenment.

Some secret schools, such as the ancient Magi, devotees, like the followers of Mithras, of a form of Zoroastrianism, performed their initiations in the open air, on mountain tops, without temples, altars, or images, and with the entire cosmos as a backdrop. Others, like the Druids, sought out hidden fields and woods, a preference shown by the renegade French surrealist Georges Bataille. Fascinated by the idea of human sacrifice ( a practice associated with the Druids) in 1936 Bataille formed a secret society (as well as a journal) named Acéphale – 'headless' – whose symbol was a decapitated Vitruvian Man, a mutilated version of Da Vinci's famous drawing, holding a dagger, with stars for nipples, exposed entrails, and a skull in place of the genitals. Their meetings were held in forests and woods and Bataille, whose headless man depicts Dionysian frenzy and excess, planned for one member to become a human sacrifice. The ritual murder would link the others in a pact of blood, but plans for Bataille's gory initiatory crime were aborted shortly before the outbreak of World War II.