Secret Societies

Skull and Bones Society part 1

Warning - All info in this book may not be true or might not be accurate. 

If you want an even more in-depth explanation of the Skull and Bones secret society I recommend you listen to the podcast called

Secret Societies by Parcast Network

This is on Spotify or any other website or app that you can listen to podcasts on

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Skull and Bones, The Order, Order 322 or The Brotherhood of Death are an undergraduate senior secret student society at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. The oldest senior class society at the university, Skull and Bones society has become a cultural institution known for its powerful alumni and various conspiracy theories. The society's alumni organization, the Russel Trust Association, owns the organization's real estate and oversees the membership. The Bones society is known informally as "Bones", and members are known as "Bonesmen", "Members of The Order" or "Initiated to The Order".

The History Of Skull and Bones

Skull and Bones were founded in 1832 after a dispute among Yale debating societies, Linonia, Brothers in Unity and the Calliopean Society over that season's Phi Beta Kappa awards. William Huntington Russell and Alphonso Taft co-founded "the Order of the Skull and Bones". The first senior members included Russell, Taft, and 12 other members. Alternative names for Skull and Bones are The Order, Order 322 and The Brotherhood of Death.

The society's assets are managed by its alumni organization, the Russel Trust Association, incorporated in 1856 and named after the Bones' co-founder. The association was founded by Russell and Daniel Coit Gilman, a Skull and Bones member.

The first extended description of Skull and Bones, published in 1871 by Lyman Bagg in his book Four Years At Yale, noted that "the mystery now attending its existence forms the one great enigma which gossip never tires of discussing". Brooks Mather Kelley attributed the interest in Yale senior societies to the fact that underclassmen members of freshman, sophomore, and junior class societies returned to campus the following years and could share information about society rituals, while graduating seniors were, with their knowledge of such, at least a step removed from campus life.

Skull and Bones select new members among students every spring as part of Yale University's "Tap Day", and has done so since 1879. Since the society's inclusion of women in the early 1990s, Skull and Bones select fifteen men and women of the junior class to join the society. Skull and Bones "taps" those that it views as campus leaders and other notable figures for its membership.

Facilities

~Tomb

The Skull and Bones Hall is otherwise known as the "Tomb".

The building was built in three phases: the first wing was built in 1856, the second wing in 1903, and Davis-designed Neo-Gothic towers were added to the rear garden in 1912. The front and side facades are of Portland brownstone in an Egypto-Doric style. The 1912 tower additions created a small enclosed courtyard in the rear of the building, designed by Evarts Tracy and Edgerton Swartwout of Tracy and Swartwout, New York. Evarts Tracy was an 1890 Bonesman, and his paternal grandmother, Martha Sherman Evarts, and maternal grandmother, Mary Evarts, were the sisters of William Maxwell Evarts, an 1837 Bonesman.

The architect was possibly Alexander Jackson Davis or Henry Austin. Architectural historian Patrick Pinnell includes an in-depth discussion of the dispute over the identity of the original architect in his 1999 Yale campus history. Pinnell speculates that the re-use of the Davis towers in 1911 suggests Davis's role in the original building and, conversely, Austin was responsible for the architecturally similar brownstone Egyptian Revival Grove Street Cemetery gates, built-in 1845. Pinnell also discusses the Tomb's esthetic place in relation to its neighbors, including the Yale university Ary Gallary. In the late 1990s, New Hampshire landscape architects Saucier and Flynn designed the wrought iron fence that surrounds a portion of the complex.

Happy Easter Y'all!