The Illuminati (plural of Latin illuminatus, "enlightened") is a name given to several groups, both real (historical) and fictitious. Historically the name refers to the Bavarian Illuminati, an Enlightenment-era secret society founded on May 1, 1776. In more modern contexts the name refers to a purported conspiratorial organization which is alleged to mastermind events and control world affairs through governments and corporations to establish a New World Order. In this context the Illuminati are usually represented as a modern version or continuation of the Bavarian Illuminati.
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The movement was founded on May 1, 1776, in Ingolstadt (Upper Bavaria) as the Order of the Illuminati, with an initial membership of five,[1] by Jesuit-taught Adam Weishaupt (d. 1830),[2] who was the first lay professor of canon law at the University of Ingolstadt.[3] It was made up of freethinkers as an offshoot of the Enlightenment and seems to have been modeled on the Freemasons.[4] The Illuminati's members took a vow of secrecy and pledged obedience to their superiors. Members were divided into three main classes, each with several degrees, and many Illuminati chapters drew membership from existing Masonic lodges.
Originally Weishaupt had planned the order to be named the "Perfectibilists".[1] The group has also been called the Bavarian Illuminati and its ideology has been called "Illuminism". Many influential intellectuals and progressive politicians counted themselves as members, including Ferdinand of Brunswick and the diplomat Xavier von Zwack, the second-in-command of the order.[5] The order had branches in most European countries: it reportedly had around 2,000 members over the span of ten years.[3] It attracted literary men such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Gottfried Herder and the reigning dukes of Gotha and Weimar.
In 1777 Karl Theodor became ruler of Bavaria. He was a proponent of Enlightened Despotism and his government banned all secret societies including the Illuminati. Internal rupture and panic over succession preceded its downfall, which was affected by the Secular Edict made by the Bavarian government.[3] The March 2, 1785 edict "seems to have been deathblow to the Illuminati in Bavaria." Weishaupt had fled and documents and internal correspondences, seized in 1786 and 1787, were subsequently published by the government in 1787.[6] Von Zwack's home was searched to disclose much of the group's literature.[5]
Another reorganisation took place in 1780 after the Lower Saxon noble Adolph Freiherr Knigge joined the Illuminati. In 1782 he gave a structure similar to the Freemason lodges to the order that had until that point, as Weishaupt himself conceded, not actually existed anywhere but in Weishaupt's head. Leadership of the order was given to a so-called Areopagus that consisted of Weishaupt, Knigge and others.
This new organisation allowed the Illuminati to recruit numerous Freemasons and infiltrate entire lodges against the backdrop of a crisis that the higher grades of the German Freemasonry were going through after the collapse of the Order of Strict Observance in 1776. This relatively apolitical and romanticising movement claimed succession from the Knights Templars and had enabled Karl Gotthelf von Hund to get the German lodges under his leadership. For years he had been claiming to be in contact with "Unknown Superiors" who had let him in on the deepest secret of Freemasonry. However, after no such "Secret Superiors" contacted the lodges after Hund's death in 1776, the lodge members were perplexed. At the great Freemasons' Convent of the Strict Observance, that was held in Wilhelmsbad from July 16 to September 1, 1782, Knigge and Franz Dietrich von Ditfurth, the second Illuminati representative and a most radical proponent of the Enlightenment, could claim the opinion leadership for their order. The templar system was given up and the Order of the Golden and Rosy Cross, itself trying to succeed the Order of Strict Observance, remained in the minority. The two Illuminati even succeeded in winning over Johann Christoph Bode, one of the leading representatives of the Strict Observance.
As a result, the disagreement between Weishaupt and Knigge intensified so much that it threatened to break the Order apart. Therefore an arbitral tribunal called a “Congress“ was convened in Weimar in February 1784. It came as a surprise for Knigge that the "Congress", in which among others Goethe, Johann Gottfried Herder and Duke Ernst of Saxe-Gotha participated, judged that a completely new Areopagus should be created. Both heads of the Order were supposed to resign from their positions of power. This seemed to be an acceptable compromise. It meant an obvious defeat for Knigge, as the founder of the order would probably still have the same influence even without the formal chairmanship of the Aeropagus. Silence and the return of all papers was agreed upon and Knigge left the Illuminati on the first of July 1784. From this point on he turned away from the "fashionable foolishness" of trying to improve the world with secret societies. Weishaupt for his part handed over the leadership of the Order to Johann Martin Count of Stolberg-Roßla.
While members of societies were quarrelling amongst themselves, secret societies had attracted the attention of the Bavarian authorities. They deemed the objectives of progressive-minded secret societies suspicious because they concentrated on changing the traditional order and on establishing a "rational state" by infiltrating public offices. On June 22, 1784, the Bavarian electoral Prince Charles Theodore consequently prohibited any "communities, societies and associations", which had been founded without his approval as a sovereign ruler. With the insistence of Father Frank, the chancellor Baron of Krettmayr, the Rosicrucian Baron of Törring and other people at court, another edict was released on March 2, 1785, which explicitely mentioned the names Illuminati and Freemason. It banned them for reason of treason and heresy. During house searches various documents of the order that showed further circumstantial evidence for their radical objectives were confiscated. Documents which were found with a deceased courier gave away information about names of several members. In two letters to the bishop of Freising, sent within the same year (June 18 and November 12), Pope Pius VI declared membership of the order to be incompatible with the Catholic faith.
The most valuable secret of the Illuminati was their own moral system of authority, which was already practiced inside the order, but was now supposed to be applied on the outside world. The deceit and patronizing of the lower-positioned members soon provoked disagreements within the order. This was caused by Weishaupt's aim to perfect the individual by encouraging it to practice more self-discipline and covert leadership. He assumed that for the improvement of the individual the first necessary step was to know its secrets. Probably, he adopted this concept from his arch-enemy, the Jesuits, which were known for their slavish obedience and their gentle but still effective leadership by means of confession. Actually, according to Illuminati-expert Agethen, the order stayed in a dialectic entanglement with its opponents: they used Jesuit methods of investigating the conscience in order to emancipate the individual from the intellectual and spiritual domination of the church; they also used a ranking system and mystical fuss, similar to the enthusiastic irrationality of the Rosicrucians, to further the success of Enlightenment and rationality. They subjected their members to an utterly totalitarian monitoring and psychological techniques in order to ultimately free mankind of the despotism of princes and kings.
This temporary success cannot hide the fact that the Illuminati order mainly consisted of quite subordinate academics who maybe joined the order especially in the hope of more career opportunities. Indeed their hope correlated with Weishaupt’s concept of infiltration. Of course new members were ignorant about those intentions. The order hardly achieved its actual aim, namely to form the intellectual and political elite of society. Apart from the mentioned exceptions (Goethe, Herder, Knigge), all the really important representatives of the German "Spätaufklärung" either completely absented themselves from the order (as Schiller, Kant, Lessing, but also Lavater whom Knigge unsuccessfully tried to convince of joining for a long time) or shortly afterwards quit, just as Friedrich Nicolai did, out of disappointment about the rigid structures within the order. “Bookworm Weishaupt and his companions, utopists in a good and a ridiculous way” were never considered a real threat for the state of Bavaria but “the challenge for the old regimes was of course still too strong, even in this moderate form.”
Between 1797 and 1798 Augustin Barruel's Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism and John Robison's Proofs of a Conspiracy both publicized the theory that the Illuminati had survived and represented an ongoing international conspiracy, including the claim that it was behind the French Revolution. Both books proved to be very popular, spurring reprints and paraphrases by others[7] (a prime example is Proofs of the Real Existence, and Dangerous Tendency, Of Illuminism by Reverend Seth Payson, published in 1802).[8] Some response was critical, such as Jean-Joseph Mounier's On the Influence Attributed to Philosophers, Free-Masons, and to the Illuminati on the Revolution of France.
Robison and Barruel's works made their way to the United States. Across New England, Reverend Jedidiah Morse and others sermonized against the Illuminati, their sermons were printed, and the matter followed in newspapers. The concern died down in the first decade of the 1800s, though had some revival during the Anti-Masonic movement of the 1820s and 30s.[1]
Writers such as Mark Dice,[9] David Icke, Texe Marrs, Ryan Burke, Jüri Lina and Morgan Gricar have argued that the Bavarian Illuminati survived, possibly to this day. Many of these theories propose that world events are being controlled and manipulated by a secret society calling itself the Illuminati.[10][11] Conspiracy theorists have claimed that many notable people were or are members of the Illuminati. Presidents of the United States are a common target for such claims.[12][13]
A key figure in the conspiracy theory movement, Myron Fagan, devoted his latter years to finding evidence that a variety of historical events from Waterloo, The French Revolution, President John F. Kennedy's assassination and an alleged communist plot to hasten the New World Order by infiltrating the Hollywood film industry, were all orchestrated by the Illuminati.[14][15]
In addition to the supposed shadowy and secret organization, several modern fraternal groups claim to be the "heirs" of the Bavarian Illuminati and have openly used the name "Illuminati" in founding their own rites. Some, such as the multiple groups that call themselves by some variation on "The Illuminati Order",[16][17] use the name directly in the name of their organization, while others, such as the Ordo Templi Orientis, use the name as a grade of initiation within their organization.
The Illuminati are often illustrated in famous novels, such as the “Illiminatus” trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, in Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco or in Angels and Demons by Dan Brown. The authors mentioned above do not rely on serious sources which provide well proven historic information about the order, but rather on conspiracy theories which are in circulation about the order. This is why they are described as evil villains as well as mysterious and diabolic conspirators. However this speculative information about the Illuminati is often mistaken as the truth. Neither Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) nor Bernini (1598-1680) was a member of the Illuminati, which they are said to be in Brown's novel, and neither followed the thousand-year old tradition of Celtic druids, assassins and Templers, who had the intention to find the "umbilicus telluris" (lat. hub of the world).
The assumption that the Illuminati had owned certain symbols which they used to prove their existence to insiders and clever symbologists, can be widely found in novels. The following symbols are supposed to belong to those used by the Illuminati.
None of these symbols are historically related to the Illuminati. It is also highly implausible that an internationally operating conspiracy, as which the Illuminati are often labeled, would leave their symbols everywhere. The Illuminati only used one symbol for their "Secret School of Wisdom", the owl of Minerva.