TRAPPED IN A MASONIC WORLD

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Engineering, and Sigma Xi for Scientific Research. Phi Kappa Phi claims to initiate approximately 30,000
new members annually, and to have a total of more than 1 million members since its creation, from over
300 college-based chapters in the United States, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. The Society claims to
have 100,000 current active members.
‗Mortar Board‘ is a national honour society, the Cornell University Der Hexenkreis chapter is the oldest,
and was founded in 1892 and predates the national society‘s founding in 1918. Though many of the
traditions within the society are secret, the membership of each chapter is public, which differentiates
Mortar Board, from many of the secret societies that were formed in the late 19th century. Mortar Board
has 226 chartered chapters nationwide and 19 alumni chapters, and since 1892, more than a quarter of a
million college seniors have been initiated into the group.
The Order of Omega was formed in 1959 and is an undergraduate Greek society recognising fraternity
for men and women. At present, the Order maintains approximately three hundred chapters at colleges and
universities in the United States and Canada.
Delta Kappa Epsilon [ΓΚΔ]; also pronounced D-K-E or Deke, is a fraternity founded at Yale College in
1844 by 15 men of the sophomore class. DKE has over 64 chapters and has initiated over 85,000 members
across North America. DKE is inextricably linked to the history of the United States of America, as its
members have included five Presidents of the United States: Rutherford B. Hayes, Theodore Roosevelt,
Gerald Ford, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush. [20]
Writer Julian Hawthorne, the son of Nathaniel Hawthorne, an American novelist and short story writer,
who later added a ―W‖ to make his name Hawthorne was an ancestor of John Hathorne, a judge during the
‗Salem Witch Trials‘ which were a series of hearings before local magistrates followed by county court
trials to prosecute people accused of witchcraft in the counties of Essex, Suffolk, and Middlesex in
colonial Massachusetts, USA, between February 1692 and May 1693. Julian Hawthorne entered Harvard
College in 1863, and wrote in his published Memoirs of his fraternal initiation: ―I was initiated into a
college secret society - a couple of hours of grotesque and good-humoured rodomontade [pretentious
behaviour] and horseplay, in which I cooperated as in a kind of pleasant nightmare, confident, even when
branded with a red-hot iron or doused head-over heels in boiling oil, that it would come out all right. The
neophyte [initiate] is effectively blindfolded during the proceedings, and at last, still sightless, I was led
down flights of steps into a silent crypt, and helped into a coffin, where I was to stay until the
Resurrection...Thus it was that just as my father passed from this earth, I was lying in a coffin during my
initiation into Delta Kappa Epsilon.‖ Meetings of active members are generally kept private and not to be
discussed without the formal approval of the chapter as a whole.
For the first time in more than 20 years, on the 7th January 2009, the outgoing President George W.
Bush, alongside President-elect Barack Obama, hosted a historic reunion of former US Presidents at the
White House. George H.W. Bush became a member of the Phi Beta Kappa fraternity at Yale University in
1948, as did Bill Clinton at Georgetown University in 1968, and Jimmy Carter became an honorary
member at Kansas State University in 1991. [21] So obviously, George W. Bush‘s link with his father is that
they were both ‗Bonesmen‘. Whereas not so obvious as a link, is that Barack Obama‘s father, who shares
the same name; Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., was a member of Phi Beta Kappa secret society at the
University of Hawaii, Manoa, in which he joined in 1962. In fact seventeen US Presidents and seven of
the nine current US Supreme Court Justices have been Phi Beta Kappa members.
Acacia Fraternity is originally based out of Masonic tradition. At its founding in 1904, membership
was originally restricted to those who had taken the Masonic obligations. Within a year, four other
Masonic clubs received Acacia charters, which led to a rapid expansion in the following years. Today the
bonds with the ‗Free and Accepted Masons‘ vary amongst Acacia chapters, for some the tie is more distant
and informal while others work closely with their local Masonic lodge[s]. Acacia distinguishes itself from
other fraternities by being one of three inter-national fraternities that uses a word instead of Greek letters.
[22]
FarmHouse Fraternity International, Inc. is one of the other three, and is an all-male international
social frat, founded at University of Missouri on the 15th April 1905. Today FarmHouse has 34
chapters/colonies/interest groups in the United States and Canada. Many of the rituals in the pledging and
activation ceremony cite Christian Scripture. The Founders had deep faith and sought to build their faith
as they built other bonds. The fraternity is certainly open to members of other faiths, but encourages a
Masonic belief in ―Something greater than oneself.‖ [23]