14 Secret Societies That Sound Like JV Hogwarts Houses
Nice, you got into Slytherin? Yeah, they put me in the Concatenated Order of Hoo-Hoo. It’s supposed to be just as good!
‘Book and Snake’
This started as a super secret frat at Yale, but later dropped its Greek letters and incorporated so they could buy and sell property. In modern times, it’s just one of Yale’s dozens of “senior societies” — particularly, the one that most sounds like J.K. Rowling needed a name, couldn’t think of anything racist, and quickly glanced around at objects in her backyard.
‘Concatenated Order of Hoo-Hoo’
This club started in the late 19th century as a lobbying group for the American lumber industry. They originally wanted to call it the “Independent Order of Camp Followers,” which sounds more like those guys who follow the Grateful Dead around to sell acid in the parking lot. “Concatenated” means linked together like a chain, and “hoo-hoo” was a nickname for lumber workers.
‘Cowbellion de Rakin Society’
Okay, first you need to know what “mystic societies” are — they’re groups who organize parades and parties for Mobile, Alabama’s Mardi Gras celebration. The Cowbellion was the first to throw an organized parade when its founder, a cotton salesman, got a bunch of people to march through the streets with farm tools and cowbells.
‘Improved Order of Heptasophs’
If at first you don’t succeed, start your own club and tell everyone you’re better than that other club. The Order of Heptasophs was a New Orleans-based frat whose name meant “the seven wise men,” and was made up of powerful Southern folk in the mid-1800s. A couple decades into their tenure, the organization split over whether or not members should receive life insurance, essentially. A bunch of chapters calved off and called themselves The Improved Order.
‘Independent Order of Odd Fellows’
The Order of Odd Fellows is an international frat based in London that was founded in the early 18th century. The Independent Order of Odd Fellows is the American offshoot that was kinda started in New York City, but officially started in Baltimore in the early 19th century. It was, if you can believe, racist and sexist as hell. It did become the first American fraternity to allow women in 1851, through the grimace-inducing “Beautiful Rebekah Degree,” which made the all-female Daughters of Rebekah like their official little sisters.
Frat Dorks Can’t Get Enough Owl Shit
“The O.W.L. Society” was a tiny, frat-adjacent literary society founded at the University of Virginia in 1887 for school newspaper editors to pat each other on the back. Harvard’s “Owl Club” was founded in 1896 after the school banned official fraternities but dudes still needed an excuse to rock. In 1904, grown adult men created the “Order of Owls”: Their motto starts with “Owls do good, speak kindly…,” but it was a whites-only club until at least the ‘80s, and they sued a group of Black men who founded the “Afro-American Order of Owls.”
‘Order of Chosen Friends’
This is a fraternal benefit order, a type of club that exists more to provide mutual aid and insurance to its members than to facilitate keg stands. Specifically, some Freemasons and Odd Fellows teamed up to form an organization that would pay old age and disability benefits. Party on.
“Order of Gimghoul” v. Gethard
In 1833, some random University of North Carolina student named Peter Dromgoole failed out of school and joined the army. Decades later, a bunch of bored students whipped up some lore about this kid dying in a duel over his lady love, Miss Fanny. They tweaked the name of their club from Dromgoole to Gimghoul “in accord with midnight and graves and weirdness.”
Comedian Chris Gethard whipped up his own intentionally batshit lore about the secret society, which seems to have rattled them, as their Wikipedia page insists Gethard “has filmed several ‘exposés’ on the order, none of which have substantiated any of the show's allegations.”
‘Porcellian Club’
It sounds like a euphemism for taking a dump (“I gotta go check in at the Porcellian Club”), but it’s one of Harvard’s clubs for upperclassmen. It has remained proudly racist and sexist, since the late 1700s and for as long as legally possible — one book on Harvard’s history says, “The Porcellian took an occasional Jew and in 1983 (to the horror of some elders) admitted an African-American.” An author once called them a “hotsy-totsy final club,” and they’re still really psyched about it.
‘QEBH’
QEBH is the oldest of the University of Missouri’s secret societies. The acronym has big-time “Jeb!” energy, but only its members know what it stands for. Their symbol looks exactly like a golden snitch.
‘Royal Arcanum’
This sounds like a spell that would make electricity jump from a transformer up the ass of the nearest member of the Royal Family, but it’s another one of those fraternal benefit orders.
‘Secret Society of Happy People’
This group was founded in 1998 explicitly to promote toxic positivity. Founder Pamela Gail Johnson went fuckin’ nuts on Ann Landers in 1998 after she wrote a column about how you should cool it with the bragging in your yearly holiday cards. People dogpiled on Landers and essentially forced her to retract her column. They went on to start shit like “Admit You’re Happy Day,” and pressure 19 U.S. governors for a Proclamation of Happiness.
‘The Sons of Lee Marvin’
Director Jim Jarmusch “founded” this (mostly fake) secret society for people who look a lot like actor Lee Marvin: “If you look like you could be a son of Lee Marvin, then you are instantly thought of by the Sons of Lee Marvin to be a Son of Lee Marvin.”
‘Independent Order of the Sons of Malta’
This is another joke frat, this time from the mid-1800s, when secret societies were all the rage. There are tons of newspaper announcements about the Order’s charitable works and Grand Assemblies across the country — it’s just not clear whether they actually happened, or if they were a series of hoaxes. It also accidentally inspired the KKK with its “ludicrous initiations, the baffling of public curiosity and the amusement for members.”