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by Ron Rosenbaum
The New York Observer, April 23,
2001
It’s the primal scene of American
power, of Bush family values. For two centuries, the initiation rite of
Skull and Bones has shaped the character of the men who have shaped the
American character, including two Presidents named Bush.
And last Saturday, April 14–for the
first time ever–that long-secret rite was witnessed by a team of
outsiders, including this writer.
Using high-tech night-vision video
equipment able to peer through the gloom into the inner courtyard of the
Skull and Bones "Tomb" in New Haven, The Observer team witnessed:
• The George W. effect: intoxicated
by renewed proximity to Presidential power, a robed Bonesman posing as
George W. harangued initiates in an eerily accurate Texas drawl: "I’m
gonna ream you like I reamed Al Gore" and "I’m gonna kill you like I
killed Al Gore."
• Privileged Skull and Bones
members mocked the assault on Abner Louima by crying out repeatedly, "Take
that plunger out of my ass!"
• Skull and Bones members hurled
obscene sexual insults ("lick my bumhole") at initiates as they were
forced to kneel and kiss a skull at the feet of the initiators.
• Other members acted out the
tableau of a throat-cutting ritual murder.
It’s important to remember this is
not some fraternity initiation. It is an initiation far more secret–and
far more significant, in terms of real power in the United States–than
that of the Cosa Nostra. If the Bushes are "the WASP Corleones"–as the
ever more stingingly waspish Maureen Dowd has suggested–this is how their
"made men" (and women) are made.* It’s an initiation ceremony that has
bonded diplomats, media moguls, bankers and spies into a lifelong,
multi-generational fellowship far more influential than any fraternity. It
was–and still remains–the heart of the heart of the American
establishment.
Further revelations turned up by
the Observer Bones Investigation Unit include:
• The words to the secret Skull and
Bones "death mantra."
• Copies of the Skull and Bones tax
returns, obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, raise
questions about the legitimacy of the secret society’s claim to charitable
tax-exempt deduction status–particularly relevant considering recent
criticism of the Bush tax plan for favoring the privileged few.
• A possible explanation emerged in
the course of the initiation ceremony for George W.’s decision to run for
President in the first place.
‘The Devil Equals Death’
The Observer Mission Impossible
expedition had its inception several months ago with a phone call from
Peggy Adler, the research associate on my previous Skull and Bones piece
in The Observer (July 17, 2000). She is the demon investigator and former
Iran-contra committee staffer who, among other coups, cross-referenced
corporate boards to crack the "RTA code," the corporate shell game by
which the corporate shell of the Skull and Bones society, the Russell
Trust Association, shielded its paper trail from prying eyes by changing
its name to RTA Inc.
Ms. Adler said she had been
approached by a member of the Yale community who wanted to share with us a
remarkable coup of his own: He had found a way last year, in April of
2000, to audiotape the Skull and Bones initiation ceremony. And he wanted
to know if we’d be interested in an attempt to videotape it this time.
And so one afternoon last December,
shortly after the Bush electoral victory had been certified, I met with
the intrepid fellow; he booted up his laptop and let me listen to the
sounds of a ceremony that had been the subject of fevered speculation for
nearly two centuries now.
Of course, there is more to Skull
and Bones than the mystical mumbo-jumbo of its rituals. The rituals are
less important than the relationships–the bonds of power and influence
that develop between Skull and Bones initiates after they graduate. But
the relationships are first forged by the rituals and fact that the
founders of Time Inc. and the C.I.A., as well as several Secretaries of
State and National Security Advisors–the men who made the decision to drop
the Hiroshima bomb, invade the Bay of Pigs and plunge us into Vietnam, the
Tafts, the Bundys, the Buckleys, the Harrimans, the Lovetts–all took part
in this initiation ritual may have something to do with the real world
power of those bonds. The unspoken understanding, the comfort level with
the clandestine, the nods and winks with which power is exercised. The
initiation ceremony begins the process of inculcating into the elect of
the elite (just 15 out of 1,300 in every Yale class) the same mystical
sense of mission that allowed the British Old Boy network to rule a
worldwide empire.
The whole phenomenon is rarely
looked into beyond the exotic ritual trappings (although Evan Thomas and
Walter Isaacson talk about the world-wide web of Bones foreign policy
mandarins in The Wise Men). But it’s something I’ve been investigating off
and on for a quarter of a century now. I am the Ahab of Skull and Bones,
pursuing the white whale (or white male) leviathan to the utmost depths.
As an undergraduate at Yale I lived next door to the Skull and Bones Tomb,
and back in 1977 I published the first outsider’s investigation into Skull
and Bones, its rituals and its influence on American political culture (an
updated version of that piece, revised to include my chilly exchange with
George and Barbara Bush on Air Force Two, can be found in my recent
nonfiction collection, The Secret Parts of Fortune).
And so it was momentous for me to
actually hear the sounds of the Skull and Bones initiation on that laptop.
But in listening to it, awe gave way to a mixture of puzzlement and
embarrassment–and an even deeper, unsatisfied curiosity.
In part it was the fact that the
ritual was heard but not seen. My Yale source had found a previously
unexploited perch from which to record the sounds of the ceremonies, but
could glimpse them only incompletely. He reported a figure dressed like
the devil, another one in a hooded-skeleton costume and others in robes.
The thing that stood out for me, listening to it, was what I’ve come to
think of as "the death mantra."
Yes, the death mantra–here it is,
the three-line Skull and Bones initiation-ritual theme that has bound
three Presidents (including the present one) to their secret society:
‘THE HANGMAN EQUALS DEATH!
THE DEVIL EQUALS DEATH!
DEATH EQUALS DEATH!’
Most of the speculative lore about
the Skull and Bones ritual has centered on its death fixation. Beyond the
obvious skull-and-crossbones insignia, of course, the most persistent
story is that initiates spend their senior year in the basement crypt of
the Bones Tomb taking turns lying in a coffin and, in two long, intense,
psycho-drama autobiographical sessions in said coffins, recount their
personal and sexual history to the other 14 chosen ones. The better to
bond for life with those they know best and prepare for their destiny as
stewards of the ruling class.
The death-centered imagery, the
injunction to initiates that they must "die to the barbarian world" and be
reborn in the Elysian company of the elect of "The Order," as they call
it, is what makes Skull and Bones as radically different from a college
fraternity as the Gambino family is from the "hunting and fishing club"
that was their nominal headquarters.
The hangman equals death. The devil
equals death. Death equals death ….
What the hell is going on there? Is
it a puzzle in logic, like "All men are mortal. Socrates is mortal …"?
Does it solve out to "The hangman equals the devil?"
Could one detect a
capital-punishment theme here–the hangman as executioner presaging George
W.’s prolific execution rate as Texas governor? "George W. equals death,"
you might say.
And what about the devil? (Well,
the figure dressed like the devil.) Is that the secret they’ve been
covering up ever since the society was founded in 1832, the offshoot of a
German secret society: devil worship? A fulfillment of the paranoid
fantasies of the fundamentalist right, who believe the Eastern
establishment is a front for Satanic conspiracy.
Probably not, but it made me more
eager to participate in this year’s caper: the attempt to see as well as
hear it, to capture it all on video–for educational, historical and
journalistic purposes to document a defining rite of passage of the
American ruling class.
Oh, yes–before we get to the
night-vision videotape, there was one more thing, the embarrassing part of
the audiotape, the OOGA-BOOGA part. Part of the ceremony on the tape
involved an initiation master ordering the neophytes to fetch bones and
uttering the (I guess) fake Tarzan-movie "native" chant "OOGA BOOGA." It
left me feeling embarrassed for Skull and Bones. Hard to ever take
seriously again anyone whose defining life-mission moment includes an OOGA
BOOGA.
But as it turned out, "OOGA BOOGA"
was not evident in this year’s ceremony, as far as we were able to tell.
Perhaps it was an improvisation, like this year’s impersonation of George
W. ("I’ll ream you like I reamed Al Gore") was.
The Observer Mission Impossible
Force met to plot strategy an hour before sunset on initiation night,
Saturday, April 12. It is not widely known, but Tap Night, which occurs on
Thursday, is not generally the same as initiation night. The good stuff
happens on Saturday night, and already limos are cruising the quiet
streets that crisscross the Yale campus, conveying initiates of other
secret societies to their rituals. Bones initiates come on foot, knock on
the massive triple-locked wooden door of the Tomb and are conveyed to the
first stage of the ritual. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
Let me just mention how much I
admired the intrepid Yale members of the Observer Bones Task Force for
displaying the kind of curiosity, initiative and heretical, skeptical
impulse apparently absent on most Ivy campuses, if you believe David
Brooks’ recent Atlantic Monthly cover story on get-along-go-along
premature careerists. The guys on my team will make more of a real
contribution than any of the smug secret-society types.
First on the agenda was a quick
examination of the Bones income-tax filings, which an outside consultant
to the team had obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests. He
and Peggy Adler pointed out to me a couple of dubious assertions on the
Form 990’s (Return of Organization Exempt from Income Tax), which called
into question certain of the grounds for charitable exemption. In
particular, there was the assertion in the 1997 RTA Incorporated filing
(Part VI, line 80b) that the organization was not "related … through
common membership, governing bodies, trustees, officers etc. to any other
exempt or non-exempt organization."
Contradicting that assertion is
information on the filing of the Deer Island Club Corporation. Deer Island
is the private island of the Skull and Bones Society, located in the St.
Lawrence River. It is the place where Bones members bring their families
for summer get-togethers. It is wholly owned and run by Skull and Bones
members, apparently contradicting Bones’ claim of "no relationship" to
another exempt organization, and appearing to contradict the strictly
educational and charitable mission for which RTA gets its exemption for
Skull and Bones.
The consultant argues in a memo
that the purpose of the 80b question on the Bones deduction claim form "is
to prevent tax exempt charities from undertaking non-charitable activities
by hiding them in another corporation. This is of course precisely what
RTA Inc. is accomplishing through the Deer Island Club Corporation. In
order to conceal this arrangement however RTA Inc. denies its connection
to the DICC." In fact, he goes on, "RTA and the DICC are so closely linked
that for all intents and purposes RTA Inc. does own Deer Island despite
its claims to the contrary."
I’m not going to go into the whole
tax issue here. Perhaps the Bones shell corporation has a good and valid
reason for claiming that it has no connection to the Bones private-island
country club.** Perhaps this sort of thing goes on all the time among the
private charities of the privileged. I don’t think Deer Island will become
George W. Bush’s Whitewater. But one might think that a scrupulous White
House counsel would want to look at the kind of tax information George
W.’s secret society is filing on his behalf.
Particularly since he’s promising
enormous windfalls for the privileged, the tax breaks his secret society
takes should be utterly beyond suspicion. Does the President, I’d like to
know, claim his Skull and Bones dues as a charitable deduction, when the
only charity seems to be providing a club house and country house for the
privileged? The RTA filing claims Skull and Bones exists "for the benefit
of Yale University." But Yale–which celebrates three centuries of luminous
attainments this weekend–ought to question what "benefit" it gets from
chants of "lick my bumhole" and the mockery of Abner Louima.
Anyway, as night came falling and
we choreographed the evening’s caper, I felt that we were carrying on an
old-fashioned, longstanding tradition: the natural reaction of the
democratic (small D) tradition to elitist power that conceals itself
within the cloak of privilege and secrecy. And for me, it was a
culmination of my own quarter-century quest, one that had become
personalized lately by the fact that our Skull and Bones President had
been a classmate of mine at Yale.
‘Run, Neophyte, Run!’
At last, zero hour approached. For
two centuries, the outside world had wondered and fantasized about what
was about to happen, what actually went on in the fabled Skull and Bones
initiation. There’s a long tradition of Yale secret societies (including
Bones) raiding other secret societies to capture their ritual artifacts.
In the 1970’s, an all-woman break-in team published photographs of the
Bone’s Tomb’s interior. But tonight, for the first time ever, we would
attempt to capture the actual secret initiation ritual and bring it to
light for anthropological study. Our team’s equipment included three
night-vision-capable digital-video cameras, one tape recorder, a
stepladder and two walkie-talkies. (I could never get mine to work.)
Because of a recent injury which limits my mobility, I was stationed at a
listening post with my tape recorder while the video-cam team proceeded to
their more perilous perch at the forward base (as those of us in special
ops call it). We planned to rendezvous afterward for me to view the tape.
We split up just as the whoops and
groans, the screams and moans began to emanate from inside the Tomb and
the masters of the Skull and Bones initiation began establishing the posts
they’d man for the occult psycho-drama to come.
From my post, I could see through
an open window shadowy figures walking very close above my head. Later
I’ll put my audio impressions together with the video-cam record the other
team obtained for a more complete picture, but first let me transcribe
some of the notes I made from listening in. Fragmentary as they are, they
capture some of the strangeness, and perhaps the kind of disorientation
the initiates themselves experienced there in the courtyard of Skull and
Bones.
First, there was the guy posing as
George W. He seemed to be a bit disgruntled at being given this role–a
feeling he expressed by calling out in his George W. drawl to another
"Patriarch" (as they’re called): "I got the power to bomb the crap out of
China and they give me this station."
Then someone–one of the
initiates?–called out "Uncle Toby!" (Many Bone ritual personae are taken
from Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy– you gotta give them credit there
for good taste.)
"Uncle Toby!" the cry repeated.
"Shut up, neophyte."
"Take that plunger out of my ass,
Uncle Toby."
Presumably, this mocking Louima
reference was a ploy to scare initiates into thinking Uncle Toby was going
to give them the plunger treatment.
That cheerful rectal theme was
followed up by:
"I’m gonna ream you like I reamed
Al Gore!" from the George W. imitator.
Followed by "Help me! It’s the
devil!"
And then "George W." really getting
into it: "I’m gonna kill you like I killed Al Gore."
Silence. Then a door opened.
Voices–half of them, it seemed, women–were screaming: "Run! Neophyte! Run,
neophyte!"
(The neophytes are, of course, the
new initiates.)
From my post, I could only see
hooded figures racing about in the darkness above my head, accompanied by
cries of:
"Run, neophyte!"
"Find the femur!"
And (again): "Take that plunger out
of my ass, Uncle Toby!"
Then silence for awhile. The
neophyte seemed to have gone back inside the Tomb. After which one of the
Patriarchs complained, "We ought to get better blood than this ****** ’
syrup, man."
It was only later that I learned
what the blood was for: the whole throat-slitting "barbarian" tableau
after the skull-kissing.
But first there was a different
kind of kissing being referred to. There were cries of "Lick my bumhole,
neophyte!" "Lick my ass, neophyte!" "Do you like my bum, neophyte?"
(Despite these heartfelt pleas, we did not witness any of those acts being
consummated.)
The bumhole tribute was followed by
more cries of "Get the femur!" and at least part of the death mantra I’d
heard before: "DEATH EQUALS DEATH."
Following which, "George W." chimed
in with "I’m the President of the motha-f*ckin’ U.S.A."–apparently just
for the sheer pleasure of saying it. (He was sounding more like the real
George W. all the time.)
It began to be clear that what was
going on outside in the courtyard was the climax of an initiation ceremony
that began inside the Tomb. There, it’s reputed, the initiates must first
enter into a coffin and "die to the barbarian world," to the world of
"savages" (all but the Skull and Bones elect), in order to be reborn as a
member of "The Order." Then comes the skull-kissing and the
throat-slashing.
Two hours later, after all 15 of
the initiates had burst out to be harangued and scared, I approached the
rendezvous point with the night-vision camera team. This was the moment of
truth: The night-vision team wasn’t sure what their digicams had picked
up. With their own eyes they’d gotten evocative glimpses, but the playback
on the camera’s swing-out view screens would be the first time, so far as
we knew, any outsider had really seen the legendary ritual. A ritual three
Presidents, a few Supreme Court justices, maybe a dozen Senators
(including 2004 Democratic Presidential contender John Kerry–which would
mean a head-to-head, Skull-to-Skull smackdown with George W.), several
Secretaries of State, literary and cultural luminaries including John
Hersey and William F. Buckley, had all undergone.
The footage was ghostly, it was
grainy–but from the angles of the night-vision cams, we were able to piece
together a narrative of what happened when the initiates emerged one at a
time from the preliminaries inside the Tomb.
First they were led forward by a
figure in a devil costume. Not really a sinister, Satanic-looking figure
but, as one of the team put it, "More like Satan’s Little Helper."
A shrill, menacing and sometimes
blood-curdling chorus of cries and screams and imprecations accompanied
the emergence:
"Hurry, neophyte!" "Run, neophyte!"
"Find the femur, neophyte!" Along
with the occasional "Lick my bumhole!" "Remove the plunger!"—type
outcries.
The devil figure pulled them into a
white tent in the courtyard where, we think, they found their femurs and
emerged with what looked like a thigh bone, although it was impossible to
tell whether it once belonged to a human or not.
When they reemerged from the tent,
they were led to the centerpiece of this part of the ritual.
They were forced face-to-face with
a shocking tableau: a guy holding what seemed like a butcher knife,
wearing a kind of animal-skin "barbarian" look, stood over what seemed to
be a woman covered in fake blood and not much else. The neophyte then
approached a skull a few feet away from the knife-wielder-and-victim
tableau. The neophyte knelt and kissed the skull, at which point the guy
with the knife knelt and cut the throat of the prone figure. (Well,
pretended to cut the throat.)
I’m not sure what it all means.
I’ve yet to decode the mystical significance of this, although I do love
to think of former President George Bush kissing the skull. Obviously, it
has something to do with subservience. Kiss the skull of power. Bow down
to The Order. But what about the "barbarian" cutting the throat of his
victim?
Does it mean "One dies to the
barbarian world"? Does it mean "Death to the barbarians"? Does it endorse
cutthroat tactics? Is that how they enforce silence and secrecy?
I plan to continue my relentless
study of the hermeneutics of the Bones rituals, myths and symbolism based
on these new revelations, and perhaps with the help of a Bones graduate
who feels the time has come to lift the veil on the silly (and no longer
even secret) symbolism of their society. (Contact me privately c/o The
Edgy Alliance, 577 Second Avenue, Box 105, N.Y., N.Y. 10016.)
All that death imagery, though:
Maybe it’s meant to be a first ritualistic confrontation with Mortality,
the skull as a memento mori designed to instill in the "neophyte" a sense
of the gravity of one’s mission in life. In that regard, consider the
direct relevance of at least one aspect of the ritual to George W. That
recurrent phrase: "Run, neophyte, run!"
Think about it. When George W. was
first considering the fairly serious shift from baseball-team owner (whose
major achievement was trading away Sammy Sosa) to governor of Texas, or
when he was considering the shift from one-term governor of Texas to
President of the United States, what decided him–what made him think he
could pull it off, despite years as a semi-permanent neophyte? Could it be
that what he heard, echoing in his brain, down the corridors of the years,
was the injunction from that long-ago April night when he was a Skull and
Bones initiate? When he bent down to kiss the skull and heard, resounding
in his ears, the command: "Run, neophyte, run!"
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