There is an opinion that secret societies rule the world, and the history of the world is the history of the confrontation of secret unions and societies. All of them have existed for centuries. The very fact of their secret activities informed these organizations of a halo of the supernatural and mysterious. The book of the historian Boris Sokolov tells about prominent figures of secret unions and societies of the world, ranging from the legendary founder of the Order of the Rosicrucians Christian Rosenkreuz to the Freemasons of various lodges. A lot of unexpected things await the reader, since sometimes famous people turn out to be members of secret societies, whose belonging to one or another organization would be difficult to imagine: Count Saint-Germain, James Anderson, Ivan Elagin, King of Prussia Frederick the Great, Nikolai Novikov, Russian commanders Alexander Suvorov and Mikhail Kutuzov, Kondraty Ryleev, George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt t, Harry Truman and many others.