A Little Iconic

From templars and Freemason's to the always fascinating Illuminati. Each one is riddled with mystery. But those aren't the only three. They just so happened to be the ones that most people can name, because most secret societies usually fail to pique our curiosity. Take, for instance, a rather obscure order that arose in Bavaria back in sev The Pope had just issued a papal bull forbidding any Catholic from joining the Freemasons, and that just didn't sit well with one

particular group. They wanted to join the elites and the hallowed halls of Freemasons, but the risk of excommunication made them pause. As such, an idea donned on the former Freemason elector of the city of Cologne, a guy named Clemens August of Vittelsbach. It was clemens brilliant idea to subvert this papal bull by creating another society of Freemasons and simply giving it a different name. But they would not lose the selectivity that all secret orders must have.

This one required all aspiring members to possess and I quote, loyalty, trust, discretion, tenderness, sweetness, humanity, in a word, all the qualities that are the basis of love and friendship. Also, according to the doctrine of their club, the qualities of the icon of their order. To make it more official, this new society came complete with their own initiation rituals, many of which were quite progressive.

Men and women alike were free to join, so long as they were Catholic, embodied the traits of their beloved icon, and willing to go through the rather particular initiation rites. On the day of initiation, all aspiring novices would put on a brass color and scratch at the order's door

to be let in. They would then be blindfolded and paraded around the room nine times, and all while the initiated members within barked loudly in an attempt to shake the Novices into giving up their claim to the Order, testing their metal, if you will. But it didn't end there.

If novices passed the gauntlet of noise and humiliation, they would then be required to kiss the backside of a porcelain figure of the group's icon, more specifically, just under the tail, because you see, this Secret Society's mascot wasn't a dead saint or an old world deity, No, it was a porcelain dog. When the dedication was thoroughly proven and unquestionably sound, new members were given silver medallions with the emblem of the Society emblazoned for all to see.

Not exactly subtle, but it did the trick, although they didn't need to do it for long, because the Secret Society's lifespan could only be considered long in dog years. A mere ten years after founding, another branch attempted to start up elsewhere, only to be shut down soon after. A government investigation into the Order and their lodge began in Earnest and all of those secrets started to come

to light. The government wasn't pleased with the fees and the controls that the Order held over its members, so they shut down the new branch of the Order before it was even house trained. According to German records, the Order itself was short lived, with the original group disbanding not long after, although some records in France suggest it might have hung on until nineteen o two. Now back

to the matter of the mascots of this order. All good secret societies require a figurehead of some sort, right, the emblem by which all members hold themselves too. And since the members of this society were so inspired by the Canine, you might imagine they went with a powerful, mighty and intimidating breed. But if you did, you'd be wrong. You see, they called themselves the Order of the Pug.

Life imitates art. It's a saying that has come to signify that moment when something we experience in reality feels inspired by a creative work. For example, the book The Wreck of the titan told the story of a massive British ocean liner hitting an iceberg and sinking in the North Atlantic. It was published in and just fourteen years later, the real life Titanic met the exact same fate on its maiden voyage. But it was Oscar Wilde who said

life imitates art far more than art imitates life. He believed art didn't inspire real life experiences in situations, it changed how we viewed them. For example, when we see fog rolling over a field as something beautiful, it's because painters like JMW. Turner were able to capture that beauty in their paintings. To us, life imitates art because we

view life through a more artistic lens. But there have been occasions when that saying was flipped around, when art in fact imitated life, and one such person to experience that was Thomas Gagan. He didn't know it at the time, but his house was going to inspire several works of art over the next fifty years. In Thomas was working as the District Attorney of Rockland County, New York, just

over thirty miles north of Manhattan. He bought a large Victorian style home in the town of Haverstraw, but it had seen better days. It had been built back in five near a hill overlooking the Hudson River, but had sat abandoned for years. Kids in town thought it was haunted, of course, but that didn't stop drifters from stopping by for a night's rest, often sleeping in the kitchen on a pile of hay. After World War One, Thomas bought the dwelling and renovated it so that he and his

family could live there comfortably. It was three stories tall, with a covered porch and a tower like central section in front that soared above the rest of the house. It boasted a manswered roof common for the era, which sloped twice on each side, The upper slope on top connected to the steeper slope on the bottom, with dormer windows jutting out around its perimeter. Thomas's daughter, Amo, was the oldest of six and slept in a room on the second floor. She could see the Hudson from her window.

One day in while gazing out at the landscape, she noticed a man on the other side of the tracks. He had a small canvas set up on a portable easel, and he was painting something. Little did she know she was watching a legend create what would become one of the most important paintings of the twentieth century. House by the Railroad by Edward Hopper. Hopper's interpretation of the house was smaller in scale. The windows practically covered the narrower

sides and roof, with the interior shades pulled to various heights. Inside, it's bright white exterior popped against the shadow cast by the setting sun, which turned the house's front to a more muddled gray blue color, and across the foreground the artist painted a length of red oxidized train tracks. Hopper's painting portrayed the home as the solitary occupant of a

town so remote even the trains stopped going there. It became iconic, so much so that the Museum of Modern Art featured it in their first American Art exhibition in nine The following year, it was inducted as a permanent part of their collection. But the curators at the Museum of Modern Art weren't the only ones captivated by the house. Three thousand miles away and thirty years later, a film

director was looking for inspiration. He had recently acquired the rights to a scintillating new book that told the story of a lonely man living by himself in a creepy house at the top of a hill. Hopper's painting had been an inspiration to the director, who got to work with his set designers building his own version of the house on the Universal Studios back lot. For his rendition, however, he used parts of the Dowed House from the nineteen

fifty movie Harvey starring Jimmy Stewarts. Most notably, he utilized the front of the home with a round porthole window in the middle of its mansored roof. Like Thomas Gagan's residence back in New York, the towering structure loomed ominously over the rest of the house. The director also had the exterior weathered and darkened. The dilapidated appearance gave the home an even more haunted look, which was exactly what

Mr Hitchcock was hoping for. After all, it wouldn't have been scary for Norman Bates to care for his motel guests in a house that looked all clean and new. Visitors to Haverstraw don't often realize that the Gagan House inspired both Hopper's painting and Norman Bates home in the film version of Psycho, but the resemblance isn't hard to see. Art imitated life, and we're all the richer for it. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet

of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.