"Adam Parfrey is among the nation's so much provocative publishers."—Seattle Weekly
"Secret society historian Craig Heimbichner follows the center route to knowledge. He works the graveyard shift within the mystery lodge."—Joan d'Arc, Paranoia magazine
Secret societies—now a staple of bestseller novels—are pictured as sinister cults that use hooded albinos to threat truth-seekers. a few conspiracy books declare that fraternal orders are the paintings of serpentine extraterrestrial beings and interbred people who desire to supplant earth of its power, and later, its very existence.
On the opposite aspect of the aisle, books by means of high-ranked Freemasons—skeptical in tone yet no much less partisan in approach—protect their organization's public photo through denying the life of its so much contentious ideas.
Ritual America finds the largest mystery of all of them: that the effect of fraternal brotherhoods in this nation is tremendous, basic, and hidden in undeniable view. within the early 20th century, as many as one-third of the USA belonged to a mystery society. And notwithstanding fezzes and tiny motor vehicle parades are virtually something of the prior, the Gnostic ideals of Masonic orders at the moment are quite a bit part of the yank brain that the encircling pomp and condition has turn into faintly unnecessary.
The authors of Ritual America contextualize hundreds and hundreds of infrequent and plenty of never-before revealed photos with unique and far-reaching observation, making an esoteric topic provocative, interesting, and approachable.
Adam Parfrey is the writer of Cult Rapture: Revelations of the Apocalyptic Mind and It's a Man's global: Men's experience Magazines, the Postwar Pulps. he's editor of the influential Apocalypse tradition sequence Love, intercourse, worry dying: the interior tale of the method Church of the ultimate Judgment.
Craig Heimbichner has lately seemed on a countrywide Geographic documentary in regards to the Bohemian Grove, contributed to the Feral apartment compilation Secret and Suppressed II, and wrote in regards to the recognized occult order the O.T.O. in Blood and Altar.