5 Secret Societies That Actually Controlled Major Historical Events

Secret societies adore the shadows. They even hold secret meetings in secret rooms, speak in some kind of coded language, and pledge secrecy to their members.

Throughout most of history, the accounts of these groups were not considered by people as anything but a paranoid fantasy.

In history, certain secret societies have actually influenced the turn of events, like overthrowing governments, initiating revolutions, and altering the course of a particular country.

These were not conspiracy theories.

These were recorded organizations that had real members, objectives, and quantifiable contributions to the world.

The distinction between a true secret society and a conspiracy theory?

Evidence. Archives. Historical records. Membership lists. And in other instances, the societies themselves would ultimately emerge out of the shadows and claim credit for what they had done.

Today, I am going to talk about the five secret societies that governed or had considerable influence on significant events in history.

1. The Carbonari

This secret society united Italy.

At the beginning of the 1800s, Italy did not exist.

The Italian peninsula was divided into several kingdoms and the Papal States. But most of them were occupied by other foreign powers, such as Austria.

During that time Italians patriots were seeking independence and unity, but risks were high; talk about revolution, and you could get arrested, tortured, or even killed.

So they went underground.

The Carbonari (Italian: charcoal burners) was a secret revolutionary society that developed in the region of southern Italy in the year 1800. Most likely, they developed out of Freemasonry but had an Italian nationalist agenda.

Their mission: to overthrow the conservative monarchies and establish a united Italian state.

It was an advanced organization. They worked in small cell sknown as vendite (shops), which were scattered across Italy. The rituals, secret handshakes, and coded documents were part of the elaborate practices of the members.

They had St. Theobald as their patron saint and modeled their initiation rituals on the Passion of Christ. In case you were found in possession of Carbonari papers, the punishment was death.

But the secrecy worked. By 1820, there were thousands of members of the Carbonari; some of them were military officers, aristocrats, intellectuals, and middle-class professionals.

They were influential to the degree of changing governments.

The successful revolution in Naples was organized by the Carbonari in July 1820.

King Ferdinand I was compelled by thirty members led by General Guglielmo Pepe to grant a constitution and a constitutional monarchy. For a brief moment, it worked.

The south of Italy was left to the revolutionists.

Austria then had to interfere militarily and crush the revolution, returning the absolute monarchy. Other insurrections of the same type in 1831 in the Papal States, and even in northern Italy, were also unsuccessful, as the Austrian forces intervened.

The positive aspect of the Carbonari was, as the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica wrote, that it united Italians of various classes and provinces, and taught them to cooperate harmoniously in the overthrow of tyranny and of foreign rule.

When the Carbonari ultimately fell, most of them joined another organization known as Young Italy, which was formed in 1831 by a member of the Carbonari, Giuseppe Mazzini.

And then young Italy adopted the Carbonari’s revolutionary spirit, but with articulated, clearer goals. unifying Italy as a republic.

Italian unification came in 1861 as a result of the movement they initiated.

Without the Carbonari, modern Italy might never have existed.

2. The Knights Templar

The movies tend to depict the Knights Templar as the guards of the Holy Grail or custodians of ancient secrets.

The actual Knights Templar were, however, much more interesting and more powerful than fiction would have it.

The Knights Templar was established in the year 1118 as a military order, and it was used to protect Christian pilgrims who came to the Holy Land during the Crusades. Dedication to chastity and poverty were the vows of the original nine knights.

The white mantles they used had red crosses and were vowed to protect Christianity at any cost, which meant their own life.

But they did not remain long in poverty.

The Templars were one of the pioneering global banking institutions of all time.

They established a system in which pilgrims would send money back to Europe and take money out in the Holy Land by the use of encrypted letters of credit, basically having invented international banking. This brought them a lot of wealth.

They also possessed property in Europe, would take donations from the nobles, and would amass gold and treasures.

In 1139, Pope Innocent II declared a papal bull exempt the Templars from paying taxes and put them under the direct papal authority, without being answerable to a king or a bishop.

They were a state within states, or, to speak more accurately, they were military, financial, and religious authorities without anyone to whom they were accountable, except to the Pope.

At its prime, the Templars had about 20,000 members, owned hundreds of properties, and exercised influence over Europe and the Middle East.

Their strength was so great that even kings would take loans.

King Philip IV of France was no exception.

By the early 1300s, Philip had owed the Templars huge debts that he was unable to pay. And on Friday, the 13th of October, 1307, Philip had all Templars in France arrested. They were accused of heresy, devil worship, and obscene rituals, accusations which were certainly fabricated.

The Templars were subjected to torture to confess to whatever their interrogators wanted. Many were burned at the stake.

Philip pressured Pope Clement V, and in 1312, the order was officially disbanded. The king nationalized their property and wealth and thus defaulted on his debts.

Over the last 200 years, the Knights Templar had amassed a lot of wealth and power in terms of military in Europe.

It was not their secret wickedness that caused their fall, but they were so powerful that a king had to do away with his creditors.

They still live in the contemporary Freemasonry, which borrowed numerous Templar signs and practices, and in an infinite number of conspiracy theories of esoteric knowledge and unknown treasures.

3. The Oracle at Delphi

The secret societies were not necessarily violent or revolutionary. There is another form of controlled history: prophecy.

The most significant oracle in ancient Greece was the Oracle at Delphi, which was at its greatest influence between the 8th and 6 th centuries BCE. The Apollo temple was located in the center of Delphi sanctuary.

But on nine days annually, it was more than that: it was the gathering place of the most influential members of the ancient world to find divine guidance.

The process was elaborate.

The preparation would be made by a woman known as the Pythia; she was usually a youthful lady, she was always of Delphi, and she would drink and bathe in sacred water. She would then go to the inner sanctum of the temple, the adyton, where she would sit on a chasm.

Greek historian Plutarch claims that some mysterious vapors were emitted out of this chasm, and the fumes led to a state of trance. The Pythia had no voice of her own. Rather, she would convulse, writhe and make weird sounds. The priests would then interpret these utterances and give the supplicants who paid handsomely to hear the utterances, prophecies.

It is interesting at this point: the Oracle’s prophecies influenced significant historical choices. Kings used to consult Oracle before going to war. City-states required advice on where they could find colonies. People were questioned on business endeavors, and political offices.

Oracle informed King Croesus of Lydia that by attacking Persia, he would destroy a great empire. He assaulted and ruined his own empire rather. Oracle encouraged the people of Athens to believe in wooded walls, which they understood as the navy, and thus they won the battle of Salamis with the Persians in 480 BCE.

Was there really goddess-visions happening to the Pythia?

The scientists found the temple located above a geological fault line whereby the hydrocarbon gases of ethylene, methane, and ethane naturally oozed due to the seeping cracks in the rock.

These gases would definitely result in the state of euphoria, disorientation, and trance.

The control of the Oracle, the interpretation of the prophecies, and the influence on the choices of the most influential individuals in the ancient world were controlled by the priests of Apollo over the span of centuries.

They influenced history, whether they believed that the prophecies were the work of God, or they were aware that they were dealing with gas induced fantasies.

4. The Tiandihui

The Tiandihui (Heaven and Earth Society) or Hongmen, a Chinese organization, emerged in the Qing Dynasty, presumably in the late 17th or early 18th century.

It began as a mutual aid society assisting the members in seeking employment, as well as offering financial aid and guarding the interests of the Chinese.

However, it soon developed into a revolutionary group of people who believed in the rule of the Qing Dynasty (manipulated by the Manchu people, invasion by foreigners by many Han Chinese) and the restoration of Ming Dynasty.

Their motto: dethrone Qing, reinstate Ming.

Tiandihui was conducted using a high level of rituals, codes of secret, and hierarchy. Initiation of the new members was done through initiation and oaths of blood and symbolic death and rebirth. They identified each other by means of secret hand signs, coded language, and poems. In the society and to one another, members took an oath of absolute loyalty.

The impact of society was gigantic. It increased to millions of members in southern China and extended to the Chinese communities in Southeast Asia.

The group inspired other secret societies such as the Triads which is currently amongst the largest organized crime syndicates in the world.

The actual effect of the Tiandihui however was the participation of its members in revolutionary movements. Sun Yat-sen, the father of the modern China and first president of the Republic of China, had been a member of the Hongmen. And so was General Chiang Kai-shek, the founder of Taiwan.

The Tiandihui and other secret societies were instrumental in various rebellions against the Qing Dynasty such as the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) which came close to overthrowing the government and killing 20–30 million people. The Qing Dynasty managed to survive this rebellion but it was crippled forever.

The Xinhai Revolution, which was helped by the members of the secret societies, eventually toppled the Qing Dynasty in the year 1911 and formed the Republic of China. The success of the revolution was partially due to the fact that the secret societies had invested decades of time to form networks, recruiting members and plotting resistance against the government.

An underground group that had started as a mutual aid group contributed to a 268-year-old dynasty and the reconstitution of Chinese history.

#5. The Sons of Liberty

Ask most Americans about the sons of liberty and they will explain that they were patriots who were against British taxation. That’s true. They were also an organized secret society, they employed coded messages, secret meetings and organized violence in attaining their objectives.

The Sons of Liberty was an organization that was created in reaction to the stamp act in 1765, that had taxes on American colonies without any colonial representation in parliament.

That organization began in Boston but soon extended to all the thirteen colonies and created a network of local chapters that kept in contact with each other via clandestine correspondence.

Key figures such as Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Paul Revere, and Patrick Henry were among the members, yet most of the members were covert members who did not want to be apprehended on the charge of treason.

Their significant symbols included the Liberty Tree and the Liberty Pole, which served as the meeting and rallying points.

The Sons of Liberty held demonstrations and boycotts of British goods. But they intimidated and used violence, too, as well. They burned effigies of British officials, damaged the residence of tax collectors, tarred and feathered tax loyalists, and even burnt buildings.

The best known one: the Boston Tea Party of 1773.

To protest against the Tea Act, members of the Sons of Liberty disguised themselves as Mohawk warriors, boarded British ships, and threw 342 chests of tea, about 1.7 million dollars in modern-day money, into Boston Harbor.

This wasn’t random vandalism. It was a plan of action by a secret society that had definite political ambitions. The Sons of Liberty had networks of riders (including Paul Revere) to organize activities in colonies.

They spread propaganda by the press, newspapers, and pamphlets. They established militias and readied themselves to go into war.

The Sons of Liberty did not die out when the Revolutionary War broke out in 1775; the members of the organization made up the top command of the Continental Army and the new American government. The secret society was turned into the government.

The American Revolution was successful due to the fact that the Sons of Liberty had taken ten years to establish an organizational structure, recruiting people, organizing resistance, and training the colonists in the notion of independence. They were revolutionaries who employed the secret society tactics to dethrone British rule.

With the achievement of independence, a good number of Sons of Liberty joined Freemasons, where their organizational capabilities and secret society heritage were moved into another environment.

References

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Carbonarihttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonarihttps://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Carbonarihttps://www.history.com/articles/secret-societies-freemasons-knights-templarhttps://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/history-magazine/article/influencing-history-one-secret-handshake-at-a-timehttps://www.britannica.com/topic/secret-societyhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unification_of_Italyhttps://historycollection.com/30-secret-societies-that-shaped-history/https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/eight-secret-societies-you-probably-havent-heard-of-180958294/https://study.com/academy/lesson/carbonari-history-origins-legacy.html

Previously published on medium