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INITIATION AND RITUAL
To be initiated into the Order of Skull & Bones, one must endure a ritual of selection called "tapping". It is conducted by 15 senior classmen of Yale University who make up the current membership of the secret society. They select 15 members of the junior class to be the Bonesmen the following year. Historically, Skull & Bones kept blacks, jews and all other non-WASPs from its ranks. Within the last 30 years, however, token members from these groups have been occasionally selected to join. Thus, in the most recent list of initiates to the Order, there is one Yalie with a Jewish surname and even one with a Chinese name. According to author Rosenbaum, in recent years, the Order has inducted members of homosexual rights groups on the campus into its ranks.
Among the criterion for selection-apart from family ties to the order, which has always been an important factor-is what is referred to by historians and members as the "Three Ordeals." These ordeals are intended to measure the prospective Bonesman's ability to "make it" in the world beyond the university campus.
The first ordeal is boarding school. The overwhelming majority of Bonesmen, given their wealthy bueblood family pedigrees, attend one of the prestigious New England preparatory schools, i.e, private high schools. (Whereas a large number of the most elite of the Harvard University students attend Groton, a school with close ties to the Anglican-Episcopal Church, where they receive a thoroughly Anglophilic education, the preferred prep schools for the future Bonesmen are the two Puritan Calvinist-sponsored Phillips Academies.)
The second of the ordeals is that of nature. The prospective Bonesmen are judged on their skills as outdoorsmen. Hunting in the New England countryside or, better yet, traveling to distant locations like Africa, the jungles of South America or even the American badlands of the Plains states, is a prerequisite for admission to the Spartan elite ranks of the Order.
The third of the ordeals is war. The experience of combat during wartime is considered to be of special significance for the Bonesmen, who see themselves as the elite of the New England WASP warrior caste. Many Yale Bonesmen of President George Bush's generation, as the result of the outbreak of World War II, went directly from prep school into the military service prior to their entering Yale. For a majority of Bonesmen, the preferred military service has historically been with thc U S Navy. During World II the Naval air corp was a particularly important track for future Bones initiates. In peacetime, participation at Yale in military officer's training is desirable but not essential. The commitment to enter some branch of the military upon graduation is viewed with favor.
After the formal selection of the next group of prospective Bonesmen, there is an invitation followed by a formal initiation ceremony. First the 15 senior class members who are the members of the Order select a group of junior class members who are to be "tapped" for Skull & Bones. A group of Bonesmen proceed to the dormitory room of the "tappee." Upon reaching the door, they pound loudly. When the prospective member opens the door, a Bonesman will tap him on the shoulder and yell, "Skull and Bones: Do you accept?" If the candidate accepts, a message wrapped with a black ribbon sealed by black wax with the skull and crossbones emblem and the mystical Bones number 322 is handed to the "tappee." The message appoints a time and a place for the candidate to appear on initiation night. Candidates are instructed to wear no metal objects or clothing.
According to a 1940 Skull & Bones document, the initiation ceremony involves the following kinds of things: "New man placed in coffln-carried into central part of building. New man chanted over and reborn into society. Removed from coffin and given robes with symbols on it. A bone with his name on it is tossed into the bone heap at the start of every meeting."
Within the Skull & Bones Crypt, also known as "the Tomb," there is what is referred to as a "sacred room" with the number 322, On the arched wall about the vault entrance is inscribed in German: "Who was the fool, who was the wise man, beggar or king? Whether poor or rich, all's the same in death."
This quotation from a German Freemasonic ritual remains a source of controversy surrounding the origins of Skull & Bones. It is one of the bits of "evidence" cited by some of the Order's most ardent critics that the group is "Nazi like" and singularly "Germanic". In fact, the rituals of the Order are very much like the rituals employed by Scottish and English freemasonic lodges.
Some of the mystery and confusion surrounding these occult symbols and rituals is intentionally fostered by the Order itself. Among the principles taught to the members of the Yale secret society are the value of ambiguity and secrecy. These values are not taught as part of a purely mystical or occult quasi-religion. They are taught as valuable tools to be applied by the Bonesmen when they leave the insulated environment of Ihe Yale campus and become officials of government, the intelligence community, the military or the private sector.
A careful study of the often confusing and self-contradictory behavior and public statements of President Bush and his closest advisers throughout the months of the Persian Gulf crisis of last year and war that followed offers a valuable example of how ambiguity and secrecy are applied by Bonesmen.
For the initiates of the Order, the question of whether secrecy and ambiguity are used for the purpose of accomplishing "good" or "evil" is of secondary importance. Secrecy and ambiguity are essential instruments for wielding power. The effective wielding of power is one of the overarching goals of all Bonesmen. The secret ties built up during the Bonesmen's senior year of active membership in the Order are maintained for life. Those ties link each Bonesman to every other initiate, especially to those initiates who were members of the Order in the same year.
Thus, every member of Skull & Bones is, in real and practical terms, part of a small elite group of young Yale graduates-most from wealthy and powerful WASP families-who enter the world of politics, business, finance, intelligence or education and who proceed to make their mark on the world.
According to several sources, President George Bush to this day frequently consults with several of his fellow Yale Bonesmen, and has, on occasion, called upon Skull & Bones members to carry out secret diplomatic missions for the White House.
THE SPARTAN MODE
These rites of passage into the upper ranks of the WASP Establishment are capped by the expeirence the Bonesmen go through in their final year at Yale-the year in which they actively participate in the Order. For the vast majority of the initiates, the process of inculcation with the ideas of WASP supremacy, an American Calvinist version of what British imperialist writer Rudyard Kipling called the "White Man's Burden," began at prep school.
According to the biographical accounts of a number of the leading Bonesmen, the prep school experience is paramount. At prep school, intellectual pursuits are encouraged, but special emphasis is also placed on athletic performance. Future Yale Bonesmen are expected to excel in some team sport, such as baseball and football, both American inventions. (Members of Skull & Bones were involved in the development of both games.) Team sports supposedly prepare the future Bonesman to accept leadership responsibility, and more importantly, teach him to "respect the rules of the game."
According to one biographer, when George Bush was a Yale undergraduate he was a member of the university baseball team. Although he was apparently not a very good baseball player, he eventually became captain of the Yale team. One day during the Yale baseball season, he excitedly visited his mother to proudly proclaim that he had hit his first home run. She reportedly looked back at him with patrician coolness, and asked, "Yes, George, but did your team win the game?"
The particular emphasis on team sports during the prep school and Yale years is, according to several historians, part of the Spartan training that is so essential to the Skull & Bones philosophy. In the world of Skull & Bones, one of the greatest virtues is the ability to steer the nation into war and to successfully prosecute the war.
To the Bonesmen, the use of military power is a natural and essential corollary to political power. The Bonesmen are taught that, although ideas have their place, to truly transform history, military force is almost always required. Critics of the Order have pointed out that this philosophy of power and the imperial use of military force comes straight from the chronicles of the Roman Empire-especially the Roman Empire during its phase of decline and collapse.
The criticism may prove to be most prophetically true of the current generation of Bonesmen who are leading the United States under the presidency of George Bush. During the final phase of the Roman Empire, legions were deployed out around the world to conquer and subjugate vast territories, while back in Rome, there was a breakdown, a crisis in which the entire social and cultural fabric of the early Roman republic was eroding and giving way to something akin to the drug, rock-sex counterculture of today. The Roman imperial policy of attempting to gloss over the decadence at home-by engaging in constant wars of expansion led ultimately to the total collapse of Rome.
In this regard, the Spartan-Roman imperial outlook of the American WASP warrior caste, exemplified by Skull & Bones, cannot be precisely compared to the Japanese samurai code of Bushido. The Japanese Bushido code emphasized honor among the warriors and presumed a fundamentally moral or ethical vision of the world.
No such emphasis on morality and honor exists in the code of Skull & Bones. On the contrary, the Skull & Bones philosophy, according to several of its most astute critics and historians, emphasises the "double-cross system." The "double-cross" is symbolically represented by the crossbones on the emblem of the Order. According to this philosophy, anyone who is not an initiate is inferior, and can be lied to and manipulated to further the power of the WASP Establishment. To the extent that Japanese leaders view their American WASP counterparts as men of honor whose word is sacred and wbose intentions are presumed to be virtuous, they will miss the fundamental character of the American imperium. This is of special importance today, with a leading member of the Skull & Bones system occupying the White House.
Skull & Bones philosophy first manifested itself at the American national political level in the late l9th century. At that time, the men of the Order adopted all the critical features of the British imperial system, especially the belief in the Anglo Saxon God-given right to rule over all the other races. Even countries like Japan, which were never colonial possessions of the Anglo-American combination, were viewed as inferior nations to be treated no differently from the colonies in Africa. India or Latin America.
In 1898, President William McKinley, one of the last of the American presidents to manifest any of the early republican (anti-British imperialism) traditions of the Founding Fathers, was under enormous pressure from the Skull & Bones-led American imperialists Eventually, he went to war against Spain to "free" Cuba and seize the Philippines This was the first time that the United States entered a war through devious manipulation and purely in order to expand its territories It marked the beginning of a new epoch in American history which would forever alter the vision of the United States. It was the first evidence that the men of the Order were at the helm of the ship of state.
President McKinley's capitulation to the WASP warriors would prove to be fatal to himself and, some would say, for his country, too. The Spanish-American War of 1898 catapulted the Skull & Bnes crowd into a position of dominance within the Republican Party. At the 1900 party presidential nominating convention, McKinley was forced to accept Teddy Roosevelt as his vice presidential running mate. The McKinley-Roosevelt slate was swept into office, in part as the result of the jingoist climate built up by the just-concluded Spanish-American War Those circumstances were not all that-different from the mood that prevails in America in the aftermath of the Gulf War of 1991.
Within months of his inauguration of 1901, President McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist while traveling through Buffalo, New York. Thus, Teddy Roosevelt became president, and the Order of Skull & Bones for the first time moved into the White House. Roosevelt surrounded himself with Bonesmen. His successor in 1908, William Howard Taft, was himself a second generation member of Skull & Bones.
Posted 4-11-01
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