While hardly claiming that economics and military strategy are supplanted by conspiracy, ceremony, rites and rituals, an understanding of society does require a certain attention - which these pages provide - to the often strange paths taken by secret and ritualistic societies. Freemasonry is a river source of much of what these themes touch on, and it is virtually impossible to understand what might be called aristocracy over the last 300 years without attention to the Royal Craft . Is this a subset of history, or of political science, or of anthropology? Perhaps it is a subject unto itself, peculiar and byzantine. Here and in other volumes in the series, Westphalia Press presents some of the best current scholarship about the ways in which power and rule combine and converse with the cabalism and ceremony of movements whose clandestine flavor has provoked curiosity and concern over the centuries.