Fraternity rituals

With a few exceptions, most fraternities and sororities are secret societies. While the identity of members or officers is rarely concealed, fraternities and sororities initiate members following the pledge period through sometimes elaborate private rituals, frequently drawn or adopted from Masonic ritual practice or that of the Greek mysteries.

At the conclusion of an initiation ritual, the organization's secret motto, secret purpose and secret identification signs, such as handshakes and passwords, are usually revealed to its new members. Some fraternities also teach initiates an identity search device used to confirm fellow fraternity members.

Julian Hawthorne, the son of Nathaniel Hawthorne, wrote (in his posthumously published Memoirs) of his initiation into Delta Kappa Epsilon:

I was initiated into a college secret society—a couple of hours of grotesque and good-humored rodomontade and horseplay, in which I cooperated as in a kind of pleasant nightmare, confident, even when branded with a red-hot iron or doused head-over heels in boiling oil, that it would come out all right.

The neophyte is effectively blindfolded during the proceedings, and at last, still sightless, I was led down flights of steps into a silent crypt, and helped into a coffin, where I was to stay until the Resurrection...

Thus it was that just as my father passed from this earth, I was lying in a coffin during my initiation into Delta Kappa Epsilon.

A dramatized depiction of a fraternity initiation ritual Meetings and rituals are sometimes conducted in what is known as a "chapter room" located inside the fraternity's house.

Entry into chapter rooms is often prohibited to all but the initiated. In one extreme case, the response of firefighters to a blaze signaled by an automated alarm at the Sigma Phi chapter house at the University of Wisconsin in 2003 was hampered in part because fraternity members refused to disclose the location of the hidden chapter room, where the conflagration had erupted, to emergency responders.

According to Assistant Professor Caroline Rolland-Diamond of the Paris West University Nanterre La Défense, in one ritual popular in the 1960s, born out of frustration to the ubiquitous nascent counterculture, "The men were stripped to their underpants, tied up to a tree, and covered in a nasty mix of food and leaves, remaining there until their fiancées came to free them with a kiss

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