An engaging, humorous and startling look at how fraternal orders and secret societies shaped American life.

"Adam Parfrey is one of the nation's most provocative publishers."—Seattle Weekly "Secret society historian Craig Heimbichner follows the Middle Path to wisdom. He works the graveyard shift in the secret lodge."—Joan d'Arc, Paranoia magazine Secret societies—now a staple of bestseller novels—are pictured as sinister cults that use hooded albinos to menace truth-seekers. Some conspiracy books claim that fraternal orders are the work of serpentine aliens and interbred humans who wish to supplant earth of its energy, and later, its very existence. On the other side of the aisle, books by high-ranked Freemasons—skeptical in tone but no less partisan in approach—protect their organization's public image by denying the existence of its most contentious ideas. Ritual America reveals the biggest secret of them all: that the influence of fraternal brotherhoods on this country is vast, fundamental, and hidden in plain view. In the early twentieth century, as many as one-third of America belonged to a secret society. And though fezzes and tiny car parades are almost a thing of the past, the Gnostic beliefs of Masonic orders are now so much a part of the American mind that the surrounding pomp and circumstance has become faintly unnecessary. The authors of Ritual America contextualize hundreds of rare and many never-before printed images with entertaining and far-reaching commentary, making an esoteric subject provocative, exciting, and approachable. Adam Parfrey is the author of Cult Rapture: Revelations of the Apocalyptic Mind and It's a Man's World: Men's Adventure Magazines, the Postwar Pulps. He is editor of the influential Apocalypse Culture series Love, Sex, Fear Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgment. Craig Heimbichner has recently appeared on a National Geographic documentary about the Bohemian Grove, contributed to the Feral House compilation Secret and Suppressed II, and wrote about the famous occult order the O.T.O. in Blood and Altar.

Introduction: How the book reveals the pervasive influence of fraternal orders on American life and history with the aid of photographs and graphic embellishments. "Hoodwinked": How new members are broken into fraternal organizations with strange and often sadistic initiation ceremonies. Chapter includes outrageous images of hazing rituals and implements."Hidden in Plain Sight": How city planning and architecture is directed through holy geometry."Pomp and Circumstance": Fancy drills, costumes, regalia, parades, floats, titles... "The Lodge Goat, Goat Rides, Butts and Goat Hairs": Masonic-style humor."Sex and Death": What Scottish Rite Temple leader Albert Pike admits about the meaning of the Big G at the head of each lodge temple auditorium. And the philanthropic but strangely obsessive fixation on death ritualism."Twilight Language": Rituals, codes, multiple meaning words, strange iconography."The Grand Cyclops and Knight of the Brazen Serpent, and Fraternal Authority": The odd titles and unusual thought processes behind fraternal gatherings and rituals."Sons of the Desert": The vast pop culture referrals regarding fraternal orgs in movies, television, novels, comic books, poetry..."I Heart Masons / I Hate Masons": Masonic regard and worship in America contrasted with the often belligerent antipathy of the Catholic Church...."From the Brotherhood to Big Brother and Back Again": Fraternal Membership has certainly decreased in recent decades, but there are new ways the brotherhoods will return to power.