Much ado about very little, it might be said. Explanations, however implausible, are somehow reassuring." Underground control suggests order and order suggests reason. is that they need causality in much the same way they need a God. Her clear and clear-headed summation comes near the end of the book: "Perhaps one of the reasons people are so fascinated with conspiracy theories. may simply serve as skullduggery to mask the society's biggest mystery, or lack thereof." "Skull and Bones is," she writes, "at its core, equivalent of the Wizard of Oz, the puny but cunning man hidden behind a curtain of mystique, projecting images that inspire awe and terror in order to expand himself into something great and terrible. She believes that the majority of the rumors and conspiracy theories have been planted by Bonesmen themselves, to raise them in the sight of others, or in playfulness. She finds them less sinister and vulgar than some other reports have - many of which would better please my conspiracy-culture friends. Robbins describes in intricate detail the "tapping" - selection and invitation - and then the initiation ceremonies. But cumulatively, the details provide some keen insights into the culture, breeding and background of the Skull and Bones elite. There is probably more detail in this book about Yale's origins and quasi-official institutional development than anyone but a participant is likely to want to know.
Women were first allowed in in 1991.īones has gone through shifts of emphasis from literary talent to general scholarship to athletic prowess to primary attention on social and prep-school origins. Many others took Greek letters as their names. Literary societies arose from the 1780s onward, with the beginning of Phi Beta Kappa as a secret society. Robbins presents a delightful history of undergraduate pranksterism at Yale - ritualized, often pompous, almost always absurd - gatherings, events, elections of such offices as "College Bully" and "The Wooden Spoon Man." "The Burial of Euclid" ended the geometry semester. Its early history was dominated by severe Congregationalist orthodoxy, which slowly eroded into a sort of caste system. The core of the book begins by tracing the origins of Yale itself, an upstart competitor of Harvard, begun as the Collegiate School of Connecticut in 1701. But all were men of convincing credentials. Bush made significant appointments of fellow Bonesmen. Presidents to three (William Howard Taft - 1878 - was the other), there is new fuel for the fire of paranoia about the group. Now with two Bushes, father and son, raising the number of Bonesmen U.S. After graduation, the members, who are known as "knights" while at Yale, become "patriarchs," but have no formal duties. House servants prepare meals, but no other outsiders are allowed in the building. No alcohol is drunk within the building, except on extremely rare occasions, Robbins reports, when there has been celebratory drinking of wine. What is Skull and Bones, indisputably? A self-perpetuating group of 15 members of each senior class in Yale, who for that final undergraduate year meet twice a week, in intense secrecy, in an almost windowless, Gothic, tomb-like edifice.
Her conclusions, built on what appears to be very sound, probing reporting, find Yale's most prominent secret society, finally, to be more ridiculous than threatening, more pathetic than powerful. She presents those conspiratorial charges - and more - as an examination of the legend. Robbins does not mean them to be taken as true. Those three sentences come from a new book, Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power, by Alexandra Robbins (Little, Brown, 240 pages, $25.95).
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