The mythology of the secret societies has many different specific embodiments, religious, and non-religious, liberal and conservative, but it always an example of the 'puppet theory' of politics. Claiming that the real makers of events are not the statesmen who strut before the public, but secret directors who manipulate them, sometimes with, sometimes without, their knowledge. These manipulators use their puppets as the instruments of great and usually sinister designs.
The most popular from of the myth is to identify the enduring secret societies as primarily the agents of political and social revolution. Their great aim, it is asserted, is to sap the stabilizing certainties of society (Church, State, Morality, Property, the Family) and set up a new order.
In Western Europe in the half-century before 1848 there were indeed real secrety societies at work with political aims; they were most important, and most celebrated and feared, in Italy, and Frace. Some of them owed much in their organization, tradition, and procedure to a much older movement which had already attracted public attention and distrust. It has always provided the most important and enduring themes in the mythology of the secret societies. Through almost the whole history of the myth, from the prurient suspisions of what really went on at 18th century masonic suppers to their condemnation by the 19th century Papacy and the attacks on the movement launched by the Nazis and the Bolsheviks, the freemasons are given a special role and emphasis. Although most of the story now to be unravelled runs through an unreal twilit world of legend, fancy, nightmare, and parnoia, its beginnings lie in the comonsensical, enlightened world of the early English freemasons. It is with them that it is best to begin....
