Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/496

 similar limitations, we observe within secret societies the structure of the ritual. Here also their peculiar emancipation from the prejudices of historical organizations permits them to build upon a self-laid basis extreme freedom and opulence of form. There is perhaps no external tendency which so decisively and with such characteristic differences divides the secret from the open society, as the valuation of usages, formulas, rites, and the peculiar preponderance and antithetic relation of all these to the body of purposes which the society represents. The latter are often guarded with less care than the secret of the ritual. Progressive Freemasonry emphasizes expressly that it is not a secret combination; that it has no occasion to conceal the roll of its members, its purposes, or its acts; the oath of silence refers exclusively to the forms of the Masonic rites. Thus the student order of the Amicisten, at the end of the eighteenth century, has this characteristic provision in sec. I of its statutes:

The most sacred duty of each member is to preserve the profoundest silence with reference to such things as concern the well-being of the order. Among these belong: symbols of the order and signs of recognition, names of fraternity brothers, ceremonies, etc.

Later in the same statute the purpose and character of the order are disclosed and precisely specified! In a book of quite limited size which describes the constitution and character of the Carbonari, the account of the ceremonial forms and usages, at the reception of new members and at meetings, covers seventy-five pages! Further examples are needless. The rôle of the ritual in secret societies is sufficiently well known, from the religio-mystical orders of antiquity, on the one hand, to the Rosenkreutzer of the eighteenth century, and the most notorious criminal bands. The sociological motivations of this connection are approximately the following.

That which is striking about the treatment of the ritual in secret societies is not merely the precision with which it is observed, but first of all the anxiety with which it is guarded as a secret—as though the unveiling of it were precisely as fatal as betrayal of the purposes and actions of the society, or even the existence of the society altogether. The utility of this is probably