reply to post by Kapnobatai
I recommend reading more of Eco, as much as you can. Try The Name of the Rose, probably his best novel. It was written, primarily, as a fiction primer
for the study of semiotics.
Eco can be a bit too clever for his own good though, and a critic made a trenchant point regarding Foucault's Pendulum, designating it "intellectual
onanism"...
There are claims that Eco ripped much of the Byzantine, convoluted secret society intrigue and conspiracy lore from Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus
series.
After Eco, try some Borges.
The Lottery in Babylon will
fascinate, I'm sure.
Borges is the shadow thast dogs Eco, the ghost he attempts to exorcise via his fiction. The character of Jorge, the blind librarian, in The Name of
the Rose, is based on him.
Anyway, I veer somewhat off topic. I have no idea if all secret societies have the same forefathers. Many things are possible, but then there are
probably as many of the same sort of clandestine organizations, using many of the same methods, iconography, rituals, and grades, owing to the fact
during the occult revival of the late 18th to early 19th centuries, there was a massive effloresecence of hermetic brotherhoods, with memberships
crossing over between them all; and a bewildering amount of cross polination of ideas and philosophies as a result.
All secret soceities today are born of the original cult of reason, the Freemasons (who also had one foot in with the various "Rosicrucian"
brotherhoods,
the first chemists, it must be held in mind) - an Enlightenment era creation (no, they haven't been around since the dawn of
time, no matter who says so) - and the irrationals, the various cults of anti-reason, that sprung up in opposition to Enlightenment principles
(empiricism, rationalist materialist outlook, etc) typified by the early Freemasons who begun the Royal Society and championed the scientific method.
The latter are best represented by organizations such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, for instance.
You said that 
