Secret Societies
Wolf's Head Society
Collegiate Societies
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Origin from 1883
Wolf's Head Society is a secret senior society at Yale University, founded in the early 1880s and counted, alongside Skull and Bones and Scroll and Key, as the third of Yale's oldest tier of collegiate secret societies, the so-called Big Three. Like its two better known counterparts it admits a small cohort of students each year into lifelong membership, meets in its own windowless society "tomb" on campus, and maintains the same culture of ritual secrecy and close alumni network. It is consistently treated in the scholarship on American collegiate secret societies as a peer institution to Skull and Bones and Scroll and Key rather than a lesser or derivative body.
Facts
Cultural Restriction
Restricted TraditionWolf's Head Society maintains the same culture of ritual secrecy and close alumni network as Skull and Bones and Scroll and Key, disclosing neither its rites nor its membership to the wider public. The atlas records the society's history and structure as published scholarship has established them and does not reconstruct the rites themselves. 1 Origins
Origin Period Place of OriginYale University, New Haven, Connecticut 1 FounderFounded by a group of Yale seniors; no individual founders are commonly named in the sources the way Skull and Bones names its own. 1 Status
Status TodayLiving tradition, practised today 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Objects and Practices of This Tradition
A published novel depicting the real society from outside, as fiction, giving it an invented magical practice; not a work the society itself commissioned or produced.
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