This special issue of Ritual, Secrecy and Civil Society, among other things, questions and explores the ways in which the secret initiatory societies interface with political and social history. It would be a great mistake to think that organizations such as Freemasonry are confined to metaphorics and mythologies. Through the years, as the articles in these pages make clear, rule by ritual is more the norm than the exception. Rather than by gunpowder, many moments in history have been determined by the cadences of rite and ritual. Flags carry armies into battle. As Pierre Mollier well remarks...

This volume, full of significant work on Freemasonry and kindred subjects, is the result of a bold effort to make the best in articles about fraternalism appearing in tongues other than English available to the English-speaking scholarly world. The productivity and sophistication of researchers in Europe has meant that important progress in the field has been neglected because of the language barrier. Bridging that gap, Pierre Mollier has brought to the editorship of the series his enormous knowledge as museum director, rare book librarian, and top archivist. The ecumenical goal of the...

While hardly claiming that economics and military strategy are supplanted by conspiracy, ceremony, rites and rituals, an understanding of society does require a certain attention - which these pages provide - to the often strange paths taken by secret and ritualistic societies. Freemasonry is a river source of much of what these themes touch on, and it is virtually impossible to understand what might be called aristocracy over the last 300 years without attention to the "Royal Craft." Is this a subset of history, or of political science, or of anthropology? Perhaps it is a subject unto...