Secret Handshakes and Signs: How Brotherhoods Recognize Their Own

The handshake, the sign, the grip, the password, the coded gesture in a crowded room — these are the most familiar and most stereotyped elements of any secret society. They are also among the most ancient. Long before there were modern fraternal orders, the Romans, the early Christians, the medieval craft guilds, and the working stonemasons of Europe all developed private physical signs by which an insider could recognize another insider, and by which the unqualified could be excluded. The persistence of the practice across more than two thousand years is the most important fact about it: secret handshakes and signs are not a quirky relic of nineteenth-century fraternalism but a structural feature of initiatory life.

This article examines the classical and medieval antecedents of the practice, its development in Freemasonry, the famous “tap” of the Skull and Bones society, the staged opening ceremony of the Bohemian Grove, and the long cultural afterlife of the fraternal handshake in gangster imagery, in college secret societies, and in modern political movements. For the specific history of the Masonic grip, see the origin of the Freemason’s handshake. For the broader ritual and symbolic context, see the symbols pillar.

The Handshake Before the Handshake

The handshake is, in its ordinary form, a public act. The archaeological record of the gesture in the ancient Mediterranean goes back at least to the fifth century BC, and the Greek vase painters of the period routinely depicted the handshake as a token of trust, hospitality, or contractual agreement. The Roman dextram iungere — “to join right hands” — was a standard component of reconciliation scenes, of greetings, and of agreements, and the same gesture is described in the New Testament as the standard form of Christian fellowship (Galatians 2:9, “they gave to me and to Barnabas the right hands of fellowship”).

What distinguishes the secret handshake is not the gesture itself but the codification of the gesture. A group that has codified a particular handclasp — say, a particular way of interlacing the fingers, a particular pressure on a particular finger — has turned a universal sign of fellowship into a test. The test requires that the second party know the codification in advance. If they do, the gesture identifies them as a member. If they do not, the same gesture is read as an ordinary handshake, and the coded content is invisible to outsiders. The structural elegance of the device is that it is deniable: a member can always make the gesture and claim it was nothing more than a friendly greeting.

Classical and Early Christian Antecedents

Two classical institutions developed and refined the technique in ways that would later be inherited by the modern fraternal orders.

The first was the Roman collegium, the private association of the late Republic and Empire that combined religious, professional, and social functions. The collegia had formal admission procedures, internal grades, periodic banquets, and shared burial arrangements. Their members had private signs that allowed one to recognize another in a strange city, and the collegia of the Roman mystery cults — those of Mithras, of Isis, of the Eleusinian Demeter — extended the principle into the religious sphere. The Mithraic grades, as described in the symbols pillar, had a particular handclasp associated with each rank, and the initiate learned the next rank’s grip as he advanced.

The second was the early Christian church, which developed its own coded signs. The ichthys (the fish symbol), the alpha and omega, and the sign of the cross made with the hand were all used in late antique and medieval Christian practice to identify fellow believers in a hostile environment. More important, the early monastic tradition developed its own password system for access to the monastery: the tessera, a wooden or metal token broken in two and given to a guest, who would present his half at the gate and receive the matching half from the porter. The system is the direct ancestor of the Masonic token.

Medieval Stonemasons: The Working Origin

The most important practical origin of the modern fraternal handshake is the medieval craft guilds of the masons and the carpenters. The working lodges of the late medieval period had a serious problem of imposture. An itinerant craftsman in search of work would arrive in a city where he was unknown, claim the qualifications of a Master, and try to be hired. The local lodge had no way of telling the genuine journeyman from the impostor except by testing him. The test took the form of a private interview, in which the candidate was led blindfolded into the lodge room, was asked to give the word, the grip, and the sign, and was judged on the accuracy of his answers.

The medieval masons had a particularly elaborate system. The grips were a series of handclasps in which the craftsman would press a particular part of the interviewer’s hand in a particular way — for example, the Master’s grip in which the right hand is laid across the back of the brother’s right hand. The signs were silent gestures made with the hand or the body, used when speaking was impossible or dangerous. The words rotated on a quarterly or annual basis, were changed by the incoming Master, and were not committed to writing. A full account of the system is given in the origin of the Freemason’s handshake.

This is the working system from which modern Freemasonry inherited its practice. The English operative lodges of the seventeenth century used the same set of grips and signs, and when the lodges began to admit non-operative members in the early 1700s — the so-called “speculative” Masons — the system was carried across almost unchanged.

The Masonic System: Grips, Signs, and Tokens

In modern Anglo-American Freemasonry, the handshake has been refined into a graded system of three grips and three signs, one for each of the three Craft Degrees.

• The grip of an Entered Apprentice is also called the “Real Grip” or “True Grip,” and consists of a handclasp in which the inside of the right wrist is pressed firmly, with the thumb of the right hand on the knuckle of the second metacarpal joint.
• The grip of a Fellow Craft replaces the wrist pressure with a press on the top of the right wrist, with the thumb on the knuckle of the second metacarpal joint.
• The grip of a Master Mason is a pressure of the right hand on the back of the brother’s right hand, traditionally taught as a stylized pantomime of the assistance given to Hiram Abiff at his raising. The exact pressure-point varies slightly by jurisdiction; the most common English form places the thumb across the second knuckle.

Each grip is paired with a word, also a guarded secret. The penal signs of each degree — the gestures symbolic of the punishment that a member has sworn to suffer if he betrays the order — are also taught and are sometimes called the “five points of fellowship” in the Master Mason degree. The five points are (1) hand to hand, (2) foot to foot, (3) knee to knee, (4) breast to breast, and (5) the whisper of the Master’s word. The gesture made by combining all five at once is the image that has become the popular stereotype of the Masonic handshake at the center of the chest.

A full account of the Masons’ password and grip system is given in the origin of the Freemason’s handshake. The system of the higher degrees of the Scottish Rite and the York Rite is structurally similar, with each degree adding a new grip, a new sign, and a new set of tokens.

Skull and Bones and the Tap

Outside Masonry, the most famous private sign in American fraternalism is the Skull and Bones tap, taught to every member of the Yale undergraduate society on the night of his initiation. The tap is a simple gesture of the right hand that, in the order’s lore, identifies a Bones man to another Bones man. Members are encouraged, in the order’s quasi-official instructions, to greet each other with the tap in any context and at any time. The exact form of the tap is one of the most closely guarded pieces of information in American college society, but the practice itself is openly discussed and is described in the Skull and Bones society article. (See also Skull and Bones membership list.)

The function of the Bones tap is identical to the function of the Masonic grip: it identifies an insider to an insider, it is deniable to an outsider, and it is a continuing reminder of the bond formed at initiation. The fact that the practice is so widely rumored and so closely guarded is itself a cultural artifact: a sign that has to be explained is no longer a functional sign, but a symbol.

The Bohemian Grove and the Cremation of Care

A more elaborate public sign is performed each summer at the opening of the Bohemian Grove, the private men’s club that has met annually in Monte Rio, California, since 1872. The first weekend of the encampment is taken up with the Cremation of Care, a staged play in which an effigy of Care is borne to the edge of a small artificial lake, set alight, and cremated in the presence of the entire membership, in their red robes. The ceremony is the order’s annual public performance of its private identity, and it functions, like the Masonic grip, as a marker that distinguishes the inside from the outside.

The Bohemian Grove is not a fraternal order in the strict sense — it is a private club — but the Cremation of Care is structurally an initiation ceremony in everything but name. The members who are present at the first performance of a particular year act as the initiators of those who are present for the first time, and the experience is treated, in interviews with former members, as a powerful group-bonding event. The Cremation of Care is the most public and most-photographed private ritual in American life, and it is the source of much of the popular suspicion that surrounds the club.

Coded Speech and the Double Sign

A handshake is not the only kind of private sign. Many groups have developed a coded speech, in which particular words or phrases carry a private meaning in addition to their ordinary one. The medieval masons used the same technique: a “cow” might be a workman, a “fox” might be a thief, a “house” might be the lodge. The system of coded references, often called canting arms in the heraldic context, is older than the fraternal orders and has been used in criminal and political subcultures for at least as long as it has been used in fraternal ones.

A particularly interesting class of coded speech is the double sign, in which a phrase that is innocent on its surface carries a private meaning when spoken by a member to another member. “I see you’re from Illinois” may be a simple observation, or it may be the opening of a recognized exchange. The deniability of the double sign makes it a useful tool for groups that are not formally secret but want to maintain an inner circle. The use of the double sign has been widely reported in the Bilderberg Group and in the New World Order literature, although the evidence for any such systematic practice in these modern groups is anecdotal at best.

Walking Canes and the Language of Objects

A final category of private sign is the use of objects that are innocuous on their face but signal membership to a knowing observer. The most common historical example is the walking cane of the early nineteenth-century fraternal order member, which was often cut to a length and weight that conformed to the order’s standard, and was tipped with a metal ferrule bearing the order’s symbol. Two men carrying identical canes might exchange a glance, or might walk past each other with a nod; an outsider would see only two men with walking sticks.

The object-language reached its peak in the fraternal regalia of the late nineteenth century, when almost every order had its own distinctive badge, ring, lapel pin, watch fob, and chain. Members wore these objects in public to identify each other. The practice is closely related to the more general development of the political pin, the sports team cap, and the corporate lapel badge that together make up the modern public vocabulary of group identity. The use of coded objects is treated more broadly in fraternal orders and lodges and in hidden symbols in architecture.

The Cultural Persistence of the Handshake

The fraternal handshake has had a long and largely unacknowledged cultural afterlife outside the formal orders. The handshake in gangster films of the 1930s and 1940s — two men gripping each other’s hands in a particular way, sometimes with a circular motion, sometimes with a final click of the fingers — is a stylized descendant of the fraternal gesture, and the Mafia, the Chinese Triads, the Japanese Yakuza, the Russian Bratva, and the Sicilian Cosa Nostra have all developed handshake and password systems of their own. The fact that the image of the “secret handshake” is so widely associated with the gangster in popular culture is a sign of how deeply the fraternal vocabulary has permeated the depiction of organized crime.

The image has also had a long life in the depiction of college secret societies, in juvenile fiction (the “secret club” handshake is a staple of mid-century American children’s books), in superhero comics (the “secret identity” handshake is a standard genre device), and in conspiracy literature, where the existence of a global elite is often “proved” by the supposed fact that world leaders greet each other in ways that are not on the public script. The most prominent modern example is the pop-music conspiracy literature, in which a particular hand gesture, a particular eye gesture, or a particular pose is read as a sign of membership in a hidden elite, and is treated at length in Illuminati symbols in pop music. The underlying device is always the same: a private code is read by a public audience as a sign of conspiracy, and the deniability of the device is its greatest strength.

Why the Sign Works

The fraternal handshake works, where other forms of secret identification fail, because it can be used publicly and deniably. A member carrying a membership card must produce the card to be identified; a member with a private sign can identify himself to a fellow member at any time, in any context, with no documentary evidence and no risk of being challenged. The same property is shared by other forms of private communication that have become culturally important — the password, the inside joke, the shared glance — and is the structural reason that the fraternal handshake has remained in use for two and a half thousand years, in one form or another, in almost every culture that has had private associations of any importance.

The handshake is also a powerful psychological tool. A member who has been taught a sign, and who has used it to identify another member for the first time, has experienced a small shock of recognition. The sign is a piece of common knowledge shared with a stranger, and the experience of sharing it is the experience of being a member of a group larger than the two people in front of you. This is the underlying engine of the fraternal order: a small piece of common knowledge, exchanged in a private gesture, that identifies a member of a far larger and more durable group.

Sources and Further Reading

The standard scholarly reference is David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry (1988), and for the ritual-symbolism reading of the grip system, Margaret Jacob, Living the Enlightenment (1991). For the Roman and early Christian antecedents, the relevant material is in the Cicero corpus (De Officiis) and in the Mishnah (Berakhot 9:5, on the priestly blessing as the source of the gesture). The cultural history of the handshake itself is treated in the essay by Desmond Morris, “The Magic of the Handshake” (Manwatching, 1977), and in the more academic Handshaking in the Greco-Roman World (2020), ed. Emily Hudson. For the college secret-society and gangster-literature afterlife, the relevant single source is Jon Heinl, The Secret Six (1961, out of print).

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