chunk: Although the secret society is not named, the narrator is made to take an oath by raising his hand and repeating after a man who acts as his guide, "To all this I most solemnly and sincerely promise and swear, with a firm and steadfast resolution to keep and perform my oath, without the least equivocation, mental reservation, or self-evasion whatever," reminiscent of initiatory oaths of multiple degrees in Masonry. And a man the narrator encounters around the end of the novel says "The future is operative and speculative," reminiscent of "operative" and "speculative" Freemasonry and the "speculative science and the operative art" in Freemasonry.