Has read voraciously since childhood. · Updated 1y
Are you familiar with the Illuminati?
Yep, loosely.
The Bavarian Illuminati was a fraternity of wealthy
figures in the Enlightenment who were swept up in Neoclassical ideas. They opposed Monarchial government in favor of democracy and they opposed the power of state-churches in Protestant countries and the Catholic church in Catholic countries. In the late 1700s, secret societies of this sort were all the rage in many European countries among wealthier middle class citizens—i.e., doctors, lawyers, clerks, and craftsmen.
The Illuminati were founded in May of 1776 in Bavaria,
and they wanted to put an end to superstition, abuse of governmental power, and religious influence in government—i.e., typical Enlightenment philosophical goals. Their founder, Adam Weishaupt, was a Canon Law professor, and he believed that the goals of the Enlightenment movement would be best achieved by rationalism and a regimen of moral instruction, so a large part of their early meetings seemed to consist of discussion groups and readings groups focused on ethical writings of Enlightenment and Classical philosophers.
They appear to have had about 27 members at the
start of the first lodge, but that blossomed to about 300 members a half-decade later. They opened new lodges (or in some cases, talked Masonic lodges into merging with Illuminati lodges) in six cities—Warsaw, Pressburg, Milan, Tyrol, and parts of Switzerland. They also published materials with contracted printers in Frankfort and Leipzig.
Above: From Wikipedia, Adam Weishaupt, Professor
of Canon Law, founder of the Illuminati club, and snazzy dresser.
At the zenith of their spread, the total number of
verifiable members was 650 initiates (though leaders in the organization sometimes boasted they had 2,500 members, which most historians find dubious given the small size of the lodges and their limited number). The Illuminati got into “pamphlet wars” with other, similar charitable men’s clubs with secretive leanings and rituals like the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons, as such groups often competed with each other for recruits.
However, as in the case with their competitors like the
Freemasons / Masonic Lodges, rumors of the Illuminati being seditionists, atheists, or occultists hurt the spread of their movement. In 1784 or 1785, the Elector of Bavaria, Karl Theodor, outlawed the Illuminati in all parts of Bavarian soil. Unfortunately, this was where their head lodge was located.
By 1787, many European countries outlawed the local
Illuminati branches because they were rumored to be opposed to monarchy and the lodges often held up controversial Enlightenment ideals of reviving Greco- Roman democracy. This caused their numbers to plunge, and they began fading in popularity almost as rapidly as they arose due to that backlash. Their original founder, Weishaupt, had been kicked out of the University of Ingolstadt back in 1784, and he fled the country to avoid governmental arrest for anti- aristocratic politics. By the time he died in 1830, he was a broken man in terms of influence.
Another factor that hindered the spread of the
Illuminati was their obsolescence. Many of the goals they wanted—election of government officials, publicly supported education, and so forth—were already happening. Enlightenment ideals had already spread across Europe in the previous decades even without the Illuminati’s support, so many lodges lost their primary reason for existence. They were advocates of changes—but those changes were already well under way by the time they formed.
One more factor was the Enlightenment’s zeitgeist of
urban fraternity, equality, harmony, rationality, and skepticism. Those ideals were tightly bound to the secret societies, but these ideals being replaced by the new Romantic era’s new values. The Romantics rejected those 18th-century foci; they valued individualism, isolated emotionalism, broody rebellion-for-its-own-sake, and mysticism. We can see those sentiments arising in Gothic novels, in Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, and in the poetry of Wordsworth and Byron (and later in the Transcendentalism of the 19th century in America). New mysticisms emerged in the popular imagination, and the Rosicrucians and other competitors of the Illuminati increasingly emphasized the occult, which fired the public imagination in a way the more practical Illuminati did not. Put simply, the Illuminati weren’t cool any more.
The Illuminati became increasingly unpopular, and in
the 1790s, more and more of their lodges disbanded and public interest turned elsewhere. The original organization’s headquarters was more or less crushed by the Bavarian government, and they stopped all meetings well before the 19th century began. Outlying lodges either went up for sale, or they converted into Masonic lodges, or they turned into guild halls and public schools. As the historian Eberhard Weis suggests in one chapter of Die Weimarer Klassik und ihre Geheimbünde (Königshausen und Neumann, 2003), 100–101, “After Weishaupt's Order of Illuminati was banned and its members dispersed, it left behind no enduring traces of influence, not even on its own erstwhile members, who went on to develop in quite different directions.” [1]
The Illuminati organization still lingered in the public
mind, however, as a mysterious bunch of bogeymen— especially when the new public sentiment rejected the older generation’s emphasis on logic, secrecy, and community. That made the Illuminati an ideal scapegoat for conspiracy-minded writers of fiction or propaganda. When the Revolution broke out in France, sensationalist journalists and writers like Augustin Barruel made the claim that the uprising was all the work of the Illuminati.
He and John Robison published books in which they
made wild claims about the Illuminati having secret lodges all across Europe and America, and these books were often later plagiarized, translated, or republished by a variety of presses in America in the early 1800s. Robison went so far as to accuse Weishaupt of being a “human devil,” and he claimed the goal was purely evil overthrow of European society. In particular, the Reverend Seth Payson’s blood-curdling accounts of sinister conspiracy made for fantastical reading. More serious historians and researchers in the early 1800s, such as Jean-Joseph Mounier, largely debunked these earlier claims point by point—but it’s difficult for hard-headed, sober historical analysis to beat out highly entertaining conspiratorial theories that tickle the public fancy and raise vast fortunes in their book sales.
You ended up (as is the often case in conspiracy
theory publications) of “circles of proof” in which Writer “A” claims for his evidence the writings found in Writer “B,” who cites as his sources the claims found in Writer “C,” who in turn quotes Writer “A” for his evidence.
In this case, Robison and Barruel’s disproven claims
made their way to New England publishers in America, where the Reverend Jedidiah Morse took them as gospel truth and began to publish sermons condemning the existence of the Illuminati. Once Morse’s sermons were widespread, a Scottish Presbyterian preacher, the Reverend John Erskine, received copies of Morse’s publications, and used them as evidence that the Illuminati had permeated American society. He in turn gets used as a source by Timothy Dwight in 1799, and Timothy Dwight publishes diatribes spreading wild stories of lurid secret rites that are picked up by Robison, Barruel, and Jedidiah Morse to use as “evidence” supporting their claims that had earlier been debunked.
So, the cycle of citogenesis is complete….. It’s like a
bad Wikipedia article making an incorrect claim, which some other bad researcher picks up and uses as a source when the author writes a book, and then an encyclopedia uses the author as a credible, published source, and then Wikipedia editors finally go back and cite the encyclopedia as proof of its original claim.
Today, many, many organizations have formed using
the word Illuminati in their name, and they often claim to be the remnant of the Bavarian organization or a descendant of that organization. None of these current groups to my knowledge have offered any convincing proof they are older than around 1920, which makes such claims of antiquity all the way back to the 1790s extremely dubious.
Many modern esoteric orders also treat the Illuminati
as a subset of the Freemasons, thinking of them all as being a single organization, some sort of ancient order stretching back to King Solomon’s Temple, or to the Pyramids at Giza, or to Atlantis. No legitimate historians that I know of treat the claims seriously, though many conspiracy theorists do.
Many other secretive organizations or fraternities use
the term “Illuminati” not to describe themselves but rather as a label for a particular rank in their own internal hierarchy.
Likewise, many conspiracy theorists such as Mark
Dice (The Illuminati: Facts and Fiction, 2009) argue that the Illuminati still persist until this day. Antisemitic groups equate the Illuminati with hidden Jewish conspiracies to manipulate the world, and Apocalyptic religious believers equate the Illuminati with satanic cultists conspiring to bring the Antichrist into the world and usher in the Reign of the Beast. Others imagine some sort of modern Illuminati as media moguls and billionaires that cooperate to manipulate society. QAnon groups claims they are pedophile child-murderers who wear masks of human skin and who meet with Democrats to do depraved acts in the basements of pizza parlors!
Because such societies were so secretive in the
1700s, and because the Illuminati were disbanded and no longer exist as an organization today to defend themselves, the Illuminati have become a giant Rorschach ink blot—a vague outline onto which readers and media consumers can project their own fears and anxieties. There’s no evidence any current criminal group or current political group is actually “the” Illuminati, though some fever-dreams of paranoia lead conspiracy thinkers to believe so.
Trust me, there’s surely sufficient skulduggery and
manipulation and power-hungry people in the world already, and they would make the Illuminati redundant. Real-world conspirators in industry, in tobacco farming, organized crimes, and in dark money politics are plentiful enough that Occam’s Razor doesn’t necessitate these groups are part of a single global conspiracy, or that they are part of the Illuminati, or that they stretch back over 250 years historically to a disbanded men’s club in the 1780s.
Today, the Illuminati are a dark bauble, a bit of
distracting phantasmagoria from folklore and whispered conspiracy nonsense. They are a political fever dream.
Below: The Minerval Insignia of the Illuminati on one
of their pamphlets, published 1788 in Frankfort, from Wikipedia.
Footnotes [1] Illuminati - Wikipedia 313.7K views · View 101 upvotes · View 12 shares 1 of 9 answers
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