Al-Kindi

Abū Yūsuf Yaʻqūb ibn Isḥāq al-Kindī (Arabic: أبو يوسف يعقوب إبن إسحاق الكندي‎) (c. 801–873 CE), also known to the West by the Latinized version of his name Alkindus, was an Arab Iraqi polymath: an Islamic philosopher, scientist, astrologer, astronomer, cosmologist, chemist, logician, mathematician, musician, physician, physicist, psychologist, and meteorologist. Al-Kindi was the first of the Muslim Peripatetic philosophers, and is known for his efforts to introduce Greek and Hellenistic philosophy to the Arab world, and as a pioneer in chemistry, cryptography, medicine, music theory, physics, psychology, and the philosophy of science.

Al-Kindi was a descendant of the Kinda tribe which is a well known Arabic tribe native of Najd (present day Saudi Arabia). He was born and educated in Kufa, before pursuing further studies in Baghdad. Al-Kindi became a prominent figure in the House of Wisdom, and a number of Abbasid Caliphs appointed him to oversee the translation of Greek scientific and philosophical texts into the Arabic language. This contact with “the philosophy of the ancients” (as Greek and Hellenistic philosophy was often referred to by Muslim scholars) had a profound effect on his intellectual development, and led him to write original treatises on subjects ranging from Islamic ethics and metaphysics to Islamic mathematics and pharmacology.

In mathematics, al-Kindi played an important role in introducing Indian numerals to the Islamic and Christian world. He was a pioneer in cryptanalysis and cryptology, and devised new methods of breaking ciphers, including the frequency analysis method. Using his mathematical and medical expertise, he developed a scale to allow doctors to quantify the potency of their medication. He also experimented with music therapy.

The central theme underpinning al-Kindi’s philosophical writings is the compatibility between philosophy and other orthodox Islamic sciences, particularly theology. Many of his works deal with subjects that concerned theology, including the nature of God, the soul, and prophetic knowledge. However, despite the important role he played in making philosophy accessible to Muslim intellectuals, his own philosophical output was largely overshadowed by that of al-Farabi and very few of his texts are available for modern scholars to examine. However, he is still considered one of the greatest philosophers of Arab descent, and for this reason is known simply as “The Arab Philosopher”.

Al-Kindi was a pioneer in cryptography, especially cryptanalysis. He gave the first known recorded explanation of cryptanalysis in A Manuscript on Deciphering Cryptographic Messages. In particular, he is credited with developing the frequency analysis method whereby variations in the frequency of the occurrence of letters could be analyzed and exploited to break ciphers (i.e. cryptanalysis by frequency analysis). This was detailed in a text recently rediscovered in the Ottoman archives in Istanbul, A Manuscript on Deciphering Cryptographic Messages, which also covers methods of cryptanalysis, encipherments, cryptanalysis of certain encipherments, and statistical analysis of letters and letter combinations in Arabic. Al-Kindi also had knowledge of polyalphabetic ciphers centuries before Leon Battista Alberti. Al-Kindi’s book also introduced the classification of ciphers, developed Arabic phonetics and syntax, and described the use of several statistical techniques for cryptoanalysis. This book apparently antedates other cryptology references by several centuries, and it also predates writings on probability and statistics by Pascal and Fermat by nearly eight centuries.

Al-Kindi authored works on a number of other important mathematical subjects, including arithmetic, geometry, the Indian numbers, the harmony of numbers, lines and multiplication with numbers, relative quantities, measuring proportion and time, and numerical procedures and cancellation. He also wrote four volumes, On the Use of the Indian Numerals (Ketab fi Isti’mal al-’Adad al-Hindi) which contributed greatly to diffusion of the Indian system of numeration in the Middle East and the West. In geometry, among other works, he wrote on the theory of parallels. Also related to geometry were two works on optics. One of the ways in which he made use of mathematics as a philosopher was to attempt to disprove the eternity of the world by demonstrating that actual infinity is a mathematical and logical absurdity.

Alan Turing

Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS (pronounced /ˈtjʊərɪŋ/, TYOOR-ing; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954), was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. He was influential in the development of computer science and provided an influential formalisation of the concept of the algorithm and computation with the Turing machine. In 1999, Time Magazine named Turing as one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century for his role in the creation of the modern computer, and stated: “The fact remains that everyone who taps at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a word-processing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing machine.”  In 2002, Turing was ranked twenty-first on the BBC nationwide poll of the 100 Greatest Britons. His Turing test was a significant and characteristically provocative contribution to the debate regarding artificial intelligence.

During the Second World War, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, Britain’s codebreaking centre. For a time he was head of Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including the method of the bombe, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine. After the war he worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he created one of the first designs for a stored-program computer, the ACE.

Towards the end of his life Turing became interested in chemistry. He wrote a paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis, and he predicted oscillating chemical reactions such as the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction, which were first observed in the 1960s.

Turing’s homosexuality, which was illegal and considered to be a mental illness during his lifetime, resulted in a criminal prosecution in 1952. He accepted treatment with female hormones as an alternative to going to prison. He died in 1954, several weeks before his 42nd birthday, from an apparently self-administered cyanide poisoning, although his mother (and some others) considered his death to be accidental. On 10 September 2009, following an Internet campaign, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for the way in which Turing was treated after the war.

During the Second World War, Turing was a main participant in the efforts at Bletchley Park to break German ciphers. Building on cryptanalysis work carried out in Poland by Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski from Cipher Bureau before the war, he contributed several insights into breaking both the Enigma machine and the Lorenz SZ 40/42 (a Teletype cipher attachment codenamed “Tunny” by the British), and was, for a time, head of Hut 8, the section responsible for reading German naval signals.

Since September 1938, Turing had been working part-time for the Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS), the British code breaking organisation. He worked on the problem of the German Enigma machine, and collaborated with Dilly Knox, a senior GCCS codebreaker. On 4 September 1939, the day after the UK declared war on Germany, Turing reported to Bletchley Park, the wartime station of GCCS.

Within weeks of arriving at Bletchley Park, Turing had specified an electromechanical machine which could help break Enigma faster than bomba from 1932, the bombe, named after and building upon the original Polish-designed bomba. The bombe, with an enhancement suggested by mathematician Gordon Welchman, became one of the primary tools, and the major automated one, used to attack Enigma-protected message traffic.

Replica of a bombe machine

Professor Jack Good, cryptanalyst working at the time with Turing at Bletchley Park, later said: “Turing’s most important contribution, I think, was of part of the design of the bombe, the cryptanalytic machine. He had the idea that you could use, in effect, a theorem in logic which sounds to the untrained ear rather absurd; namely that from a contradiction, you can deduce everything.”

The bombe searched for possibly correct settings used for an Enigma message (i.e., rotor order, rotor settings, etc.), and used a suitable “crib”: a fragment of probable plaintext. For each possible setting of the rotors (which had of the order of 10¹⁹ states, or 10²² for the U-boat Enigmas which eventually had four rotors, compared with the usual Enigma variant’s three), the bombe performed a chain of logical deductions based on the crib, implemented electrically. The bombe detected when a contradiction had occurred, and ruled out that setting, moving onto the next. Most of the possible settings would cause contradictions and be discarded, leaving only a few to be investigated in detail. Turing’s bombe was first installed on 18 March 1940. Over two hundred bombes were in operation by the end of the war.

 

In December 1940, Turing solved the naval Enigma indicator system, which was more mathematically complex than the indicator systems used by the other services. Turing also invented a Bayesian statistical technique termed “Banburismus” to assist in breaking naval Enigma. Banburismus could rule out certain orders of the Enigma rotors, reducing time needed to test settings on the bombes. In 1941, Turing proposed marriage to Hut 8 co-worker Joan Clarke, a fellow mathematician, but their engagement was short-lived. After admitting his homosexuality to his fianceé, who was reportedly “unfazed” by the revelation, Turing decided that he could not go through with the marriage.

In July 1942, Turing devised a technique termed Turingismus or Turingery for use against the Lorenz cipher used in the Germans’ new Geheimschreiber machine (“secret writer”) which was one of those codenamed “Fish”. He also introduced the Fish team to Tommy Flowers who, under the guidance of Max Newman, went on to build the Colossus computer, the world’s first programmable digital electronic computer, which replaced simpler prior machines (including the “Heath Robinson”) and whose superior speed allowed the brute-force decryption techniques to be applied usefully to the daily-changing cyphers.  A frequent misconception is that Turing was a key figure in the design of Colossus; this was not the case. While working at Bletchley, Turing, a talented long-distance runner, occasionally ran the 40 miles (64 km) to London when he was needed for high-level meetings.

Turing travelled to the United States in November 1942 and worked with U.S. Navy cryptanalysts on Naval Enigma and bombe construction in Washington, and assisted at Bell Labs with the development of secure speech devices. He returned to Bletchley Park in March 1943. During his absence, Hugh Alexander had officially assumed the position of head of Hut 8, although Alexander had been de facto head for some time—Turing having little interest in the day-to-day running of the section. Turing became a general consultant for cryptanalysis at Bletchley Park.

In the latter part of the war he moved to work at Hanslope Park, where he further developed his knowledge of electronics with the assistance of engineer Donald Bailey. Together they undertook the design and construction of a portable secure voice communications machine codenamed Delilah. It was intended for different applications, lacking capability for use with long-distance radio transmissions, and in any case, Delilah was completed too late to be used during the war. Though Turing demonstrated it to officials by encrypting/decrypting a recording of a Winston Churchill speech, Delilah was not adopted for use.

In 1945, Turing was awarded the OBE for his wartime services, but his work remained secret for many years. A biography published by the Royal Society shortly after his death recorded:

Three remarkable papers written just before the war, on three diverse mathematical subjects, show the quality of the work that might have been produced if he had settled down to work on some big problem at that critical time. For his work at the Foreign Office he was awarded the OBE.

William Friedman

William Frederick Friedman (September 24, 1891 – November 12, 1969) was a US Army cryptographer (or cryptologist depending on preference). He ran the research division of the Army’s Signals Intelligence Service (SIS) in the 1930s, and parts of its follow-on services into the 1950s. In the late 1930s, subordinates of his led by Frank Rowlett broke Japan’s PURPLE cipher, thus disclosing Japanese diplomatic secrets beginning before World War II era.

Friedman was born Wolfe Frederick Friedman in Kishinev, Bessarabia, the son of a postal worker who migrated to Pittsburgh in 1892. Three years later, his first name was changed to William. As a child, he was introduced to cryptography in the short story “The Gold-Bug” by Edgar Allan Poe. He studied at the Michigan Agricultural College (known today as Michigan State University) in East Lansing and received a scholarship to work on genetics at Cornell University. Meanwhile George Fabyan, who ran a private research laboratory to study any personally interesting project, decided to set up his own genetics project and was referred to Friedman. Friedman joined Fabyan’s Riverbank Laboratories outside Chicago in September 1915. As head of the Department of Genetics, one of the projects he ran studied the effects of moonlight on crop growth, and so he experimented with the planting of wheat during various phases of the moon.

Another of Fabyan’s pet projects was research into secret messages which Sir Francis Bacon had allegedly hidden in various texts during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. The research was carried out by Elizabeth Wells Gallup. She believed that she had discovered many such messages in the works of William Shakespeare, and convinced herself that Bacon had written many, if not all, of Shakespeare’s works. Friedman had become something of an expert photographer while working on his other projects, and was asked to travel to England on several occasions to help Gallup photograph historical manuscripts during her research. He became fascinated with the work as he courted Elizebeth Smith, Mrs. Gallup’s assistant and an accomplished cryptographer. They married, and he soon became director of Riverbank’s Department of Codes and Ciphers as well as its Department of Genetics. During this time, Friedman wrote a series of 23 papers on cryptography, collectively known as the “Riverbank publications”, included the first description of the index of coincidence, an important mathematical tool in cryptanalysis.

With the entry of the United States into World War I, Fabyan offered the services of his Department of Codes and Ciphers to the government. No Federal department existed for this kind of work (although both the Army and Navy had had embryonic departments at various times), and soon Riverbank became the unofficial cryptographic center for the US Government. During this period, the Friedmans broke a code used by German-funded Hindu radicals in the US who planned to ship arms to India to gain independence from Britain. Analysing the format of the messages, Riverbank realized that the code was based on a dictionary of some sort, a cryptographic technique common at the time. The Friedmans soon managed to decrypt most of the messages, but only long after the case had come to trial did the book itself come to light: a German-English dictionary published in 1880.

The United States government decided to set up its own cryptological service, and sent Army officers to Riverbank to train under Friedman. To support the program, Friedman wrote a series of technical monographs, completing seven by early 1918. He then enlisted in the Army and went to France to serve as the personal cryptographer for General John J. Pershing. He returned to the US in 1920 and published an eighth monograph, “The Index of Coincidence and its Applications in Cryptography”, considered by some to be the most important publication in modern cryptography to that time. His texts for Army cryptographic training were well thought of and remained classified for several decades.

In 1921 he became chief cryptanalyst for the War Department and later led the Signals Intelligence Sevice(SIS) — a position he kept for a quarter century. In 1929, after The American Black Chamber in New York City was disbanded, its files were entrusted to SIS, and the cryptographic and intelligence services was reorganized to suit its new position at the War Department.

Friedman coined several terms, including “cryptanalysis”, and wrote many monographs on cryptography. One of these (written mostly in his spare time) was the first draft of his Elements of cryptanalysiswhich later was expanded to four volumes, and became the U.S. Army’s cryptographic main textbook and reference. Realizing that mathematical and language skills were essential to SIS’ work, Friedman managed to get authority to hire three men with both mathematical training a language knowledge. They were Soloman Kullback, Frank Rowlett and Abraham Sinkov, each of whom went on to distinguished service for decades. In addition he also was finally able to hire a man fluent in Japanese, John Hurt.

During this period Elizebeth Friedman continued her own work in cryptology, and became famous in a number of trials involving rum-runners and the Coast Guard and FBI during Prohibition.

During the 1920s, several new cipher machines were developed generally based on using typewriter mechanics and basic electrical circuitry. An early example was the Hebern Rotor Machine, designed in the US in 1915 by Edward Hebern. This system offered such security and simplicity of use that Hebern heavily promoted it to investors.

Friedman realized that the new rotor machines would be important, and devoted some time to analysing Hebern’s design. Over a period of years, he developed principles of analysis and discovered several problems common to most rotor-machine designs. Examples of some dangerous features included having rotors step one position with each keypress, and putting the fastest rotor (the one that turns with every keypress) at either end of the rotor series. In this case, by collecting enough ciphertext and applying a standard statistical method known as the kappa test, he showed that he could, albeit with great difficulty, crack any cipher generated by such a machine. Friedman also acquired a commericial version of the German Enigma Machine and developed an algorithm for attacking its cipher which was used years later in the attack on the Japanese Purple Code.

Friedman used his understanding of rotor machines to develop several that were immune to his own attacks. The best of the lot, the SIGABA — which was destined to become the US’s highest-security cipher machine in World War II — was co-invented by Frank Rowlett. At least one patent related to it was finally granted after Friedman had died.

In 1939, the Japanese introduced a new cipher machine for their most sensitive diplomatic traffic, replacing an earlier system that SIS referred to as “RED.” The new cipher, which SIS called “PURPLE,” was different and much more difficult. The Navy’s cryptological unit (OP-20-G) and the SIS thought it might be related to earlier Japanese cipher machines, and agreed that SIS would handle the attack on the system. After several months trying to discover underlying patterns in PURPLE ciphertexts, an SIS team led by Friedman and Rowlett, in an extraordinary achievement, figured it out. PURPLE, unlike the German Enigma or the Hebern design, did not use rotors but stepper switches like those in automated telephone exchanges. Leo Rosen of SIS built a machine — as was later discovered, using the identical model of switch that the Japanese designer had chosen.

Thus, by the end of 1940, SIS had constructed an exact analog of the PURPLE machine without ever having seen one. With the duplicate machines and an understanding of PURPLE, SIS could decrypt increasing amounts of Japanese traffic. One such intercept was the message to the Japanese Embassy in Washington, D.C., ordering an end (on December 7, 1941) to negotiations with the US. The message gave a clear indication of impending war, and was to have been delivered to the US State Department only hours prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. The controversy over whether the US had foreknowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack has roiled well into the 21st century.

In 1941, Friedman was hospitalized with a “nervous breakdown”, widely attributed to the mental strain of his work on PURPLE. While he remained in hospital, a four-man team — Abraham Sinkov and Leo Rosen from SIS, and Lt. Prescott Currier and Lt. Robert Weeks from the U.S. Navy’s OP-20-G — visited the British establishment at the “Government Code and Cypher School” at Bletchley Park. They gave the British a PURPLE machine, in exchange for details on the design of the Enigma machine and on how the British decrypted the Enigma cipher.

However Freidman visited Bletchley Park in April 1943 and played a key role in drawing up the 1943 BRUSA Agreement.

Following World War II, Friedman remained in government signals intelligence. In 1949 he became head of the cryptographic division of the newly-formed Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA) and in 1952 became chief cryptologist for the National Security Agency (NSA) when it was formed to take over from AFSA. Friedman produced a classic series of textbooks, “Military Cryptanalysis”, which was used to train NSA students. (These were revised and extended, under the title “Military Cryptanalytics”, by Friedman’s assistant and successor Lambros D. Callimahos, and used to train many additional cryptanalysts.) During his early years at NSA, he encouraged it to develop what was probably the first super-computers, although he was never convinced a machine could have the “insight” of a human mind.

Friedman retired in 1956 and, with his wife, turned his attention to the problem that had originally brought them together — examining Bacon’s supposed codes. Together they wrote a book entitled “The Cryptologist looks at Shakespeare” which won a prize from the Folger Library and was published under the title The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined. The book demonstrated flaws in Gallup’s work and in that of others who sought hidden ciphers in Shakespeare’s work.

At NSA’s request Friedman prepared Six Lectures Concerning Cryptography and Cryptanalysis, which he delivered at NSA. But later the Agency, concerned by the ongoing security hysteria, confiscated the originals from Friedman’s home.

His health began to fail in the late 1960s, and he died in 1969.

Friedrich Kasiski

Major Friedrich Wilhelm Kasiski (29 November 1805–22 May 1881) was a Prussian infantry officer, cryptographer and archeologist. Kasiski was born in Schlochau, West Prussia.

Kasiski enlisted in East Prussia’s 33rd Infantry Regiment on 20 March, 1823 at the age of 17. In May 1824, he was promoted to the rank of Master Sergeant, and eight months later was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in February 1825. It took fourteen years to earn his next promotion when, in May 1839, he advanced to the rank of First Lieutenant. His next advancement was quicker, promoted to Captain in November 1842. Kasiski finally retired from active service with the rank of Major on 17 February 1852.

Between 1860 and 1868 he was the commander of a National Guard battalion.

In 1863, Kasiski published a 95-page book on cryptography, Die Geheimschriften und die Dechiffrierkunst (German, “Secret writing and the Art of Deciphering”). This was the first published account of a procedure for attacking polyalphabetic substitution ciphers, especially the Vigenère cipher (although it is possible Charles Babbage was already aware of a similar method but had kept it secret). The method relied on the analysis of gaps between repeated fragments in the ciphertext; such analysis can give hints as to the length of the key used. This technique is known as Kasiski examination.

The significance of Kasiski’s cryptanalytic work was not widely realised at the time, and he turned his mind to archaeology instead. The later years of his life were spent at Neustettin (Szczecinek); the 11th edition of Encyclopædia Britannica cited a scholarly article by Kasiski in its entry on the town. Historian David Kahn notes, “Kasiski died on May 22, 1881, almost certainly without realizing that he had wrought a revolution in cryptology” (The Codebreakers)

Marian Rejewski

Marian Adam Rejewski 16 August 1905 – 13 February 1980) was a Polish mathematician and cryptologist who in 1932 solved the plugboard-equipped Enigma machine, the main cipher device used by Germany. The success of Rejewski and his colleagues Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski jump-started British reading of Enigma in World War II; the intelligence so gained, code-named “Ultra”, contributed, perhaps decisively, to the defeat of Nazi Germany.

While studying mathematics at Poznań University, Rejewski had attended a secret cryptology course conducted by the Polish General Staff’s Cipher Bureau, which he joined full-time in 1932. The Bureau had achieved little success reading Enigma and in late 1932 set Rejewski to work on the problem. After only a few weeks, he deduced the secret internal wiring of the Enigma. Rejewski and his two mathematician colleagues then developed an assortment of techniques for the regular decryption of Enigma messages. Rejewski’s contributions included devising the cryptologic “card catalog,” derived using his “cyclometer,” and the “cryptologic bomb.”

Five weeks before the German invasion of Poland in 1939, Rejewski and his colleagues presented their results on Enigma decryption to French and British intelligence representatives. Shortly after the outbreak of war, the Polish cryptologists were evacuated to France, where they continued their work in collaboration with the British and French. They were again compelled to evacuate after the fall of France in June 1940, but within months returned to work undercover in Vichy France. After the country was fully occupied by Germany in November 1942, Rejewski and fellow mathematician Henryk Zygalski fled, via Spain, Portugal and Gibraltar, to Britain. There they worked at a Polish Army unit, solving low-level German ciphers. In 1946 Rejewski returned to his family in Poland and worked as an accountant, remaining silent about his cryptologic work until 1967.

Tin Foil Hat

A tin foil hat is a piece of headgear made from one or more sheets of aluminium foil or similar material. Alternatively it may be a conventional hat lined with foil. Some people wear the hats in the belief that they act to shield the brain from such influences as electromagnetic fields, or against mind control and/or mind reading.

The concept of wearing a tin foil hat for protection from such threats has become a popular stereotype and term of derision; the phrase serves as a byword for paranoia and is associated with conspiracy theorists.

The reasons for their use include the supposed prevention of perceived harassment from governments, spies or paranormal beings. These draw on the stereotypical images of mind control operating by ESP or technological means, like microwave radiation. The effectiveness of tin foil hats is disputable; however, the belief in their necessity is popularly associated with paranoia or mental illness.

Priory of Sion

The Prieuré de Sion, translated from French as Priory of Sion, is a name given to multiple groups, both real and fictitious. The most notorious is a fringe fraternal organization, founded and dissolved in France in 1956 by Pierre Plantard. In the 1960s, Plantard created a fictitious history for that organization, describing it as a secret society founded in the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1099, which serves the interests of the Merovingian dynasty and its alleged bloodlines. This myth was expanded upon and popularized by the 1982 controversial book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, and later claimed as factual in the preface of the 2003 conspiracy fiction novel The Da Vinci Code.

After becoming a cause célèbre from the late 1960s to the 1980s, the mythical Priory of Sion was exposed as a ludibrium created by Plantard as a framework for his false pretention to the French throne. Evidence presented in support of its historical existence and activities before 1956 was discovered to have been forged and then planted in various locations around France by Plantard and his accomplices. Nevertheless, many conspiracy theorists persist in believing that the Priory of Sion is an age-old cabal which conceals a subversive secret.

The Priory of Sion myth has been exhaustively debunked by journalists and scholars as one of the great hoaxes of the 20th century. Some skeptics have expressed concern that the proliferation and popularity of books, websites and films inspired by this hoax have contributed to the problem of conspiracy theories, pseudohistory and other confusions becoming more mainstream. Others are troubled by the romantic reactionary ideology unwittingly promoted in these works.

Skull and Bones

Skull and Bones is a secret society at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. The society’s alumni organization, which owns the society’s real property and oversees the organization’s activity, is the Russell Trust Association, and is named after General William Huntington Russell, who founded the society with fellow classmate Alphonso Taft. Informally, the group is known as “Bones”, and members have been known as “Bonesmen”.

President George H. W. Bush, his son President George W. Bush, and the latter’s 2004 Presidential opponent Senator John Kerry are members of Skull and Bones.

Skull and Bones was founded in 1832 after a dispute among Yale’s debating societies, Linonia, Brothers in Unity, and Calliope, over that season’s Phi Beta Kappa awards; its original name was “the Order of Skull and Bones.”

The only chapter of Skull and Bones created outside Yale was a chapter at Wesleyan University in 1870. That chapter, the Beta of Skull & Bones, became independent in 1872 in a dispute over control over creating additional chapters; the Beta Chapter reconstituted itself as Theta Nu Epsilon.

For most of its history, Skull & Bones operated as a peer society with Scroll and Key and, later, Wolf’s Head, two of Yale’s other property-owning senior societies.

Skull and Bones owns a campground island in the St. Lawrence River in upstate New York named Deer Island. “The 40-acre (160,000 m²) retreat is intended to give Bonesmen an opportunity to ‘get together and rekindle old friendships.’ A century ago the island sported tennis courts and its softball fields were surrounded by rhubarb plants and gooseberry bushes. Catboats waited on the lake. Stewards catered elegant meals. Although each new Skull and Bones member still visits Deer Island, the place leaves something to be desired. ‘Now it is just a bunch of burned-out stone buildings,’ a patriarch sighs. ‘It’s basically ruins.’ Another Bonesman says that to call the island ‘rustic’ would be to glorify it. ‘It’s a dump, but it’s beautiful.’”

Yale became coeducational in 1969, but Skull & Bones remained all-male at the behest of the Russell Trust Association. The Class of 1991, however, disregarded the Trust and tapped seven female members for membership in the next year’s class. The Trust responded by changing the locks on the “Tomb”; the Bonesmen had to meet at the building of Manuscript Society. A mail-in vote by living members decided 368-320 to permit going co-ed, but a group of alumni led by William F. Buckley obtained a temporary restraining order to block the move, arguing that a formal change in bylaws was needed. Other alumni, such as John Kerry, spoke out in favor of admitting women, and the dispute even ended up on The New York Times editorial page. A second vote of alumni in October 1991 agreed to accept the Class of 1992, and the lawsuit was dropped. Wolf’s Head Society was the last all-male society at Yale.

Once the pinnacle of the college’s social system, the society remained central to campus life through the 1950s, but since then has lost much of its luster.

Illuminati

Illuminati (plural of Latin illuminatus, “enlightened”) is a name that refers to several groups, both historical and modern, and both real and fictitious. Historically, it refers specifically to the Bavarian Illuminati, an Enlightenment-era secret society founded on May 1, 1776. In modern times it is also used to refer to a purported conspiratorial organization which acts as a shadowy “power behind the throne”, allegedly controlling world affairs through present day governments and corporations, usually as a modern incarnation or continuation of the Bavarian Illuminati. In this context, Illuminati is often used in reference to a New World Order (NWO). Many conspiracy theorists believe the Illuminati are the masterminds behind events that will lead to the establishment of such a New World Order.

Freemasons

Freemasonry is a fraternal organisation that arose from obscure origins in the late 16th to early 17th century. Freemasonry now exists in various forms all over the world, with a membership estimated at around 5 million, including just under two million in the United States and around 480,000 in England, Scotland and Ireland. The various forms all share moral and metaphysical ideals, which include, in most cases, a constitutional declaration of belief in a Supreme Being.

The fraternity is administratively organised into Grand Lodges (or sometimes Orients), each of which governs its own jurisdiction, which consists of subordinate (or constituent) Lodges. Grand Lodges recognise each other through a process of landmarks and regularity. There are also appendant bodies, which are organisations related to the main branch of Freemasonry, but with their own independent administration.

Freemasonry uses the metaphors of operative stonemasons’ tools and implements, against the allegorical backdrop of the building of King Solomon’s Temple, to convey what has been described by both Masons and critics as “a system of morality veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols.”