322 Skulls & Bones with Mark Steeves (My Family Thinks I'm Crazy) & Mario Garza
Mark Steeves of My Family Thinks I'm Crazy returns to Vibe Rant to talk about his research into the Yale no-so-secret-anymore society known as Skull & Bones. Mario Garza of Symbolic Studies will also be joining us tonight, to add his illuminati symbolism studies to the analysis.
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In this episode
Core themes
Rumors of a March 22 heart ritual
Chance noted that Skull and Bones used the number 322, his birthday, and Mark Steeves said he gave a tour in New Haven on that date. Mark relayed a rumor from his friend that members ate a piece of a heart at sunrise atop the tallest building, and he stressed that it was only rumor and unconfirmed in the books he had read. Chance tied the idea to organs having their own character, drawing on his work with energy fields, and another panelist linked the date to Aries season and sacrificial symbolism.
Puritan alchemy and the roots of Yale
Mark argued that Yale and Harvard began as schools for ministers, in a world where alchemy, divination and mineral medicine could sit comfortably beside Christianity. He pointed to John Winthrop the Younger as an alchemist governor and suggested the pharmaceutical era grew from that quick cure mindset. A panelist added that gatekeeping healing resembled gatekeeping spiritual life. Mark also described Native American missions and the William Morgan affair as the backdrop for the rise of secret societies.
New Haven's grid, green and pentagram paths
Mark showed slides arguing that New Haven's nine square plan, its three churches facing east and the paths across the green formed deliberate symbols. He described two pentagram shapes beside an eight sided fountain and a mass grave beneath the lawn. Panelists suggested that one star resembled a broken pentagram or a universal hexagram from the Thoth deck, and one read the Hebrew letters for the town initials as Nebo. Mark also proposed that the nine square grid worked as a Saturn magic square.
Death, rebirth and the skull symbol
Mark described the cemetery gateway as Egyptian in design, linked it to Hermopolis and the ancient eight, and said the founders of Skull and Bones spent a summer in Germany with Hegel. He argued that Hegelian death and rebirth shaped the order's coffin initiation. Mario said the sphinx, the tower and the obelisk carried funerary meaning, and that occult groups encoded how to die in their art. A panelist wondered if the skull and crossbones reflected a prima materia of destruction and regeneration.
Tongues, language and the word for skull
Chance connected the Hebrew word for skull to the word for birth and to crowning, then asked whether ritual body part consumption echoed a second birth. The conversation moved to Shiva lingam and lingua, then a chat viewer's mention of the Kechari mudra led the panel into the tongue frenulum and its penile counterpart. Mario tied the hermit card and veil symbolism to Virgo, and Gabe tied Arcturus to the lunar calendar.
Quotes
“Mark knows way more about this. I honestly am kind of offended by them because they had the audacity to steal my birthday and make it their special little club number. So I don't like that very much.”
“Allegedly, rumors have it that on 322, Skull and Bones may conduct a sort of cannibalistic ritual of some kind. That's just rumor. I haven't seen that in any books about Skull and Bones, not that that's the only source of info.”
“I think I kind of want to gear the next little bit for a while around analyzing the symbolism that we can evidently see that doesn't require any kind of speculative thing. We're just going to look at this as the symbols that are there, and then we can speculate about those with what we know about symbolism in our panel here.”
“The word club is a symbol of fire. And fire is symbolic of an ultimatum. It means you can come warm up, you can come get close, you can join us, or we can burn your city down. So the club in and of itself, that's what Orion is carrying.”
“The serpent is in Genesis and is said to be the devil himself. But when you get later in the stories to Job, the devil is up in heaven making deals with God. Satan is making deals with God about Job. So there's a contradiction of the chronology.”
“That's a part of the culture of Calvinism, this sort of group of Christians that settled New Haven. They were Calvinists and they believe in this idea that everybody is kind of damned by birth to sin, except for this chosen few. And how do you know you're chosen? Well, if you're wealthy, that's a sign that God favors you.”
“I always look at the sphinx as being a combination of Virgo and Leo. And so my understanding was that some people think back in ancient Egypt that the beginning of the astrological year for them was Virgo, then they go through the whole year and then they end at Leo.”
“As a matter of fact, the founders of Skull and Bones, Alphonso Taft and William Huntington Russell, spent their summer prior to founding Skull and Bones in Germany, getting buddy buddy with Georg Hegel, the professor at the University of Berlin.”
“This is the most prolific upside down one I know of. It's the Hangman card on the Thoth Crowley deck. And I just did a fun decode on this particular card. It is very powerfully correspondent with Harry Houdini.”
“Apart from the skull as a symbol representing wisdom, you know, it does do that. You have Odin with the skull of Mimir. You have again, like that Templar mythos of them with the skull of John the Baptist. In fact, many words in the ancient languages mean both head, which is your skull, and wisdom.”
“Saturn eats its children, oftentimes is holding either a sickle or a scythe, and then the wheat definitely corresponds with Virgo. I've gone on and on about the weeping virgin illustrations from Freemasonry.”
“I'm kind of under the opinion that there's a lot of occult groups that are actually encoding within their artwork and teaching each other or passing down the tradition of death, how to die. How do we transition properly? What are the steps? What happens after death?”
“The art of war is a 13-chapter book. Anytime I hear 13 nowadays, I'm thinking, aha, they're speaking lunar, they're speaking in the subconscious, and the darkness in the underworld.”
Gabriel, known on air as Slick Dissident, co-hosts InnerVerse's Vibe Rant show and is a longtime recurring guest on the podcast. He teaches occult symbolism and tarot on his YouTube channel, ranging across the Major Arcana, the esoteric Enneagram, mythology and archetype, mystic linguistics, and the symbolism hidden in popular film. He is best known for Tarot-tories, his own system mapping the 22 Major Arcana and zodiac archetypes onto the geography of the United States.
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