Know Your Memes: The Illuminati

Adam Weishaupt was born in Ingolstadt, Germany on the 6th of February 1748. Educated by the Jesuits, he became Professor of Natural and Canon Law at the University of Ingolstadt in 1775, aged 27, and was initiated into the Masonic Lodge Theodore of Good Council in Munich in 1777. He was a cosmopolitan man who despised the bigoted superstition of the priests at the time.

He decided to establish an enlightened – or Illuminated – society to oppose injustice, and this he did, forming the order that would become The Illuminati of Bavaria on the 1st of May 1776. Originally called ‘The Order of the Perfectibilists’, its objects was to allow the members to team up in order to “attain the highest possible degree of morality and virtue, and to lay the foundation for the reformation of the world by the association of good men to oppose the progress of moral evil.”

In collaboration with a range of other influential figures, including Baron Von Knigge, Xavier Zwack and Baron Bassus, the order was extremely popular, and soon had enrolled up to 2,000 people. Lodges of the Illuminati were located in France, Italy, Poland, Hungary, Sweden & Denmark, Belgium and Holland.

Illuminati: New World Order by Swiss Chemtrails

The Bavarian authorities issued a suppressive Edict of the order on the 22nd of June 1784, repeated again in March and August of the following year. That same year, 1785, Weishaupt was stripped of his professorship and exiled from Bavaria; he moved to Gotha, where he died in 1811. From the point of suppression, the order began to go into public decline, and by the end of the century it had apparently vanished completely. Zwack’s home was illegally raided by the authorities in 1786, and Baron Bassus’ was searched in 1787. Documents seized were used to help suppress the order.

Most serious commentators take this decline at face value. The Encyclopaedia Britannica barely mentions the Illuminati, and the vast majority of historical sources follow suit, judging them insignificant. However, there is a whole raft of conspiracy theory which suggests that the Illuminati disbanded into Masonry and infiltrated like a cancer. Since that time, conspirologists allege, the Illuminati have stayed within the Masons, seizing power and manipulating the whole order.

Fnord.

There are a few hints which appear to suggest that perhaps the Illuminati survived. In 1902, the Freemason William Westcott records receiving membership in the “Order of the Illuminati” in 1902 from one Theodor Reuss. Similarly, the Golden Dawn occultist Eliphas Levi strongly connected the Bavarian Illuminati with Freemasonry in 1913. It is also perhaps noteworthy that the Harvard University Library catalogue shows that there was an Illuminati scare in New England in the 1790s, when their suspected presence became something of an obsession.

In 1906, the British Museum in London received a copy of a manuscript called The Illuminati Protocols. These first appeared in Bavaria in the late 1700s, and parts were used in a 1864 play by Joly. The copy the British Museum received was written in Russian. Coincidentally, both Adam Smith’s capitalist treatise “The Wealth of Nations” and that great democratic treatise the American Declaration of Independence were written in 1776.

Some of the more enthusiastic Illuminati theorists have even suggested that Weishaupt may have been the mysterious Black-Cloaked Man who presented Washington with the text of the declaration. It is also rumoured that the raid on Zwack’s house was spurred on by the chance interception in 1784 by the authorities of a document telling the head of the French Illuminati, Robespierre, how to orchestrate the French Revolution in 1789. Warnings were ignored, and the revolution happened on schedule.

In the 1970s, Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson published a cult set of books called The Illuminatus! Trilogy. This was a trilogy of novels masquerading as the largest conspiracy theory ever seen disguised as a grand exposé of the Illuminati. The books blended Discordianism – the largely fictitious worship of chaos and amusing mischeif in the form of the Greek goddess of strife, Eris, and her Roman counterpart, Discordia – with historical fact and cunning invention. The villains of the piece were the Bavarian Illuminati, revealed as the secret masters of the world; indeed, Shea & Wilson claim that Weishaupt murdered George Washington and took his place, hence the Eye in the Pyramid on the back of a dollar bill, and the 13 steps involved. It is this book – excellent, if off-beat – that has set the Illuminati back in the public mind. Of course, no-one claims it is anything other than a good work of fiction… do they?