Episode 206: There Is No Illuminati…

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• ILLUMINATED BREW WORKS
• From The Birthplace of the Illuminati, Matthew Vickery, BBC, 2017: It was on 1 May 1776 that Adam Weishaupt, a professor of law at the University of Ingolstadt, founded the Order of the Illuminati, a secret organisation formed to oppose religious influence on society and the abuse of power by the state by fostering a safe space for critique, debate and free speech. Inspired by the Freemasons and French Enlightenment philosophers, Weishaupt believed that society should no longer be dictated by religious virtues; instead he wanted to create a state of liberty and moral equality where knowledge was not restricted by religious prejudices. However religious and political conservatism ruled in Ingolstadt at that time, and subject matter taught at the Jesuit-controlled university where Weishaupt lectured was strictly monitored. After initially handpicking his five most talented law students to join, the network rapidly expanded, its members disseminating Weishaupt’s goals of enlightenment with radical teachings, while at the same time creating an elaborate network of informants who reported on the behaviour of state and religious figures in an effort to build up a wealth of information that the Illuminati could potentially exploit in their teachings. With the help of prominent German diplomat Baron Adolf Franz Friedrich, Freiherr von Knigge – who helped recruit Freemason lodges to the Illuminati cause – the clandestine group grew to more than 2,000 members throughout Bavaria, France, Hungary, Italy and Poland, among other places.“Weishaupt was in many ways a revolutionary,” journalist Michael Klarner continued. “He liked the idea of teaching people to be better human beings. He wanted to change society, he was dreaming of a better world, of a better government. He started the Illuminati with the idea that everything known to human kind should be taught – something that was not allowed here at the university.” The organisation didn’t evade the establishment for long, however. Just a decade after its creation, the secret society was infiltrated by Bavarian authorities after its radical anti-state writings were intercepted by government authorities. The Illuminati was shut down and Weishaupt was banished from Ingolstadt to live the rest of his life in the German city of Gotha, 300km to the north. Yet the idea of a secret society revolting against the state has captured imaginations ever since, encapsulated in conspiracy theories cooked up by those who believe the Illuminati was never actually disbanded – a claim that has been widely debunked by historians. Even still, conspiracy theorists say that the organisation has been covertly working behind the scenes to subvert authority. https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20171127-the-birthplace-of-the-illuminati 

 

• From On Materialism And Idealism: Collected Works of Adam Weishaupt:  All other things being equal, I am inclined to prefer a system that presents god and Nature as greater and more wonderful. This system assumes that species, classes, and natural kingdoms are real and have their basis in Nature herself. And yet I believe that, as such, there are only individuals, and not species, genera or classes, which are only the creations of man’s inability to think of everything individually, which has forced him to take certain matching characteristics in objects and then to divide and classify them accordingly. Thus, if a hierarchy (which has been invented) were to arise from this explanation then every being would have to run through and become not the classes but all the individual instances then I should have to become everything, and everyone else would have to too! What confusion, what a useless and never-ending repetition of the same old thing! Should we have to go round and round forever in an eternal circle? I too postulate a hierarchy in Nature: the law of continuity demands it. However, I believe it manifests differently. I believe that every being walks its own individual path and develops in its own way according to the circumstances in which it finds itself and which are unique to it alone. This development of each individual being then takes hold as a part of the development of the whole. It is only the law by which this happens that has yet to be discovered. This progression of entities is a more wonderful and diverse idea than we find in the system discussed above, where everything stays within the general region of those forms that we already know: no other, more far-reaching and better ones are surmised. I have proved above that all these configurations and forms of things, even these classes in the realm of Nature, are only for these senses. We continuously carry over this transitory world-form to another entirely different one. In our thoughts we dwell unceasingly among these configurations. In this system Nature seems too poor, too uniform, and yet her law is the greatest diversity in the greatest possible unity. The more a system expresses and demonstrates this property of Nature, the closer it comes to the truth. It is precisely this stronger impression of the new life that enables us to understand why at present we can no longer remember anything about the state preceding our present human life, even if we have gained so much precisely through this prior state that, through the use of our faculty of understanding (perhaps acquired for the first time during this stage) and through the ability there acquired to draw analogical conclusions, we can make very confident inferences about this previous state, even if its type and mode, along with its precise nature, are obscured by the more powerful effect

• From Freemasonry in Colonial America, Mark Tabbert, George Washington’s Mt Vernon, 2020: Freemasonry was a phenomenon that was growing in the 1680s through 1720s. The fraternity early on attracted high aristocracy and even members of the royal family, so that just attracted more and more men who might want to join. For somebody like Washington, who is on the edge of the frontier but comes from a well to do family, this is one more means for him to gain entrance into society. When he joined when he was 19 years old,  he presumed at some point in his life he would go to England, socialize in London, and potentially be received in court. The first Masonic book published in the colonies was Benjamin Franklin’s reprint of Anderson’s Mason’s constitution in 1733, and Franklin sent copies of that book to Boston where his family is from and also down to the Carolinas for sale. We also know there were Masonic orations and sermons being published in the colonies in the 1740s and 50s, and the secret work of Freemasonry, the rituals, were being exposed in the 1720s in newspapers. We don’t know exactly what ritual Washington received when he joined in 1752, but there were exposures of rituals in 1760 that were probably very close. The men who supported Freemasonry tended to believe in self-determination, freedom of the press, freedom of religion–very radical ideas in continental Europe. And then the French Revolution, of course, went from relatively peaceful into the Reign of Terror, the rise of Napoleon, and the destruction of the Catholic Church in France, the destruction of monasteries and the slaughter which horrifies Europe to this day. One book by a Scotsman called John Robinson called The Proof of Conspiracies in 1797 allays all these shocking revolutionary things at the feet of the Illuminati, which had attempted to infiltrate Freemasonry. Umberto Eco wrote that  in the absence of a supreme being that you believe is governing the universe and has a plan, when something strange happens human beings chalk it up to some sort of conspiracy, be it a revolution or an assassination or a stock market crash–you name it, we find a conspiracy, and in America because of this history the conspiracies are usually the Illuminati or the Freemasons. https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/freemasonry/freemasonry-in-colonial-america 

• From Darkness Over All: John Robison and the Birth of the Illuminati Conspiracy, Mike Jay, Public Domain Review, 2014: John Robison was a man with a solid and long-established reputation in the British scientific establishment, a Professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh University for over twenty years, an authority on mathematics and optics and a senior scientific contributor on the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, to which he would contribute over a thousand pages of articles. Yet by the end of the year his professional reputation had been eclipsed by a sensationalist book that vastly outsold anything he had previously written: Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, which launched the enduring theory that a vast conspiracy masterminded by a covert Masonic cell known as the Illuminati was subverting all the cherished institutions of the civilised world. The first edition of Proofs of a Conspiracy sold out within days; Robison had hit a nerve by offering an answer to the great questions of the day: what had caused the French Revolution, and what had driven its bloody and tumultuous progress? The power of Robison’s revelation was that it identified within the buzzing confusion of conspiracies a single antagonist and epic struggle between good and evil. The Illuminati became a lightning-rod for the deep anxieties of church and monarchy. 

• Politics had also thrown a long shadow across Robison’s professional life: The physical sciences were in the grip of another evolution after Antoine Lavoisier’s discovery of oxygen, from which he had been able to establish new theories of combustion and to begin the process of reducing all material substances to a basic table of elements. Lavoisier split British chemistry: some recognised that his brilliant experiments had transformed the science of matter, but for others his new and foreign terminology was an arrogant attempt to wipe away the accumulated wisdom of the ages and to eliminate the role of god. Robison had never accepted the French theories, and by 1797 had worked the new chemistry deep into his Illuminati plot. For him, Lavoisier was a master Illuminist, working in concert with Masonic lodges to spread the doctrine of materialism and the new atheist world order where occult priestesses ritually burned the texts of the old chemistry. 

• In an overheated political milieu where accusations of treason were hurled from both sides, Proofs of a Conspiracy was seized on eagerly by the Federalists as evidence of the hidden agenda that lurked behind fine-sounding slogans such as democracy, the abolition of slavery, and the rights of man, and Jefferson was publicly accused of being a secret member of Weishaupt’s Order. But such charges were never substantiated; the ‘Illuminati Scare’ petered out and the Federalists lost power, never to regain it. Yet the episode had touched a nerve deep within the American political mindset; the doyenne of modern conspiracy theory, 20th century British author Nesta Webster, swallowed this theory whole, but then came to believe the Illuminati were a smokescreen: the true conspirators were the ‘Jewish peril’ whose agenda had, she believed, been accurately exposed in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/darkness-over-all-john-robison-and-the-birth-of-the-illuminati-conspiracy/ 

• From Conspiracy, Pornography, Democracy: The Recurrent Aesthetics of the American Illuminati, Gordon Fraser, Journal of American Studies, 2018: United States democracy has long been characterized by fantasies of totalizing, all-powerful enemies, of sexual subjection, and of inescapable racial violence. The particular politics of such fantasies are historically specific, and yet their aesthetics are surprisingly recurrent. In the 1790s, as anti-Illuminati writers began to feel increasing pressure to substantiate their claims, they more fully articulated the specific racial dangers faced by the new United States. During this period, countersubversive writers speculated about whether the “sooty sons of Africa” would collaborate with foreign subversives against the United States. That a conspiracy theory in the United States quickly transformed into a narrative of racial paranoia should be relatively unsurprising: The crisis emerged, after all, in a representational economy already structured by the subjection of black people. When William Brown suggested that French revolutionaries would join self-emancipated black men in “the impure and shocking death-dance of Africa,” he was (perhaps inadvertently) calling attention to an economy in which white men operated at the center of power and discourse; Brown’s promise that the prerogatives of white American men would be upended in favor of black men and foreigners traded in fear, just like Brown’s promise that black men would let loose their “demonic lust” upon white “virgins” likewise allowed readers and listeners to indulge in a fantasy of racial humiliation. 

• The fantasies of racial subjection enabled by the Illuminati crisis in the United States were unlike anything seen during the same paranoid crisis in Europe. The sexuality of black men would be instrumental to the desires of foreign revolutionaries, they imagined, just as the sexual subjection of black women [by whites] would prefigure the sexual subjection of white women. For these counterconspiratorial fantasists at the intersections of whiteness and masculinity, the sadomasochistic fantasies of racialization provided critical aesthetic terrain upon which to organize themselves in relation with the larger world. The Illuminati, recall, were of a piece with the Enlightenment-era project that produced US democracy in the first place. Adam Weishaupt’s intellectual society embodied the “Spirit of 76 ” just as readily as did the Sons of Liberty. To these writers, black and foreign bodies were at once an ongoing threat to political cohesion and an object of aesthetic desire that could be consumed. While many of the counterconspiratorial writers of the Illuminati crisis favored the abolition of slavery, they were nonetheless implicated in an economy that trafficked in the subjection of black bodies.

• • From Raising the Devil, Bill Ellis, 2000: Anti-Semitism did not strike as deeply into American culture as it did in Europe. Likewise, anti-Masonic rumors were not especially prevalent or influential during the early part of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, scattered allusions to the Illuminati myth appeared with the American Communist Scare. In 1953, at the depth of the McCarthy investigations, government agencies such as the California State Senate Committee on Education were learning that “So-called modern communism is apparently the same hypocritical and deadly world conspiracy to destroy civilization that was founded by the secret order of the Illuminati in Bavaria on May 1, 1776,” according to a presentation by conspiracy writer Jordan Maxwell. The most influential source in creating the American Illuminati demonology was Canadian William Guy Carr. Like his predecessors, Carr argued that the Illuminati were only the most recent agents in a cosmic struggle originating with Satan’s rebellion. Jesus Christ was incarnated, according to Carr’s theological vision, to denounce the money-lenders and false priests as the Illuminati. In a remarkable argumentative twist, he argues that the Illuminati managed Jesus’ execution so that the Jewish people would appear to have been responsible for his death. This led to persecution, which in turn allowed the Illuminati to “use the hate, engendered amongst the Jewish people as the result of persecution to further their secret totalitarian ambitions.” According to Carr’s scenario, the Illuminati were founded not by Weishaupt but by a group of rabbis and high priests according to “inspirations given by Lucifer.” The conspiracy thus founded was controlled by a “Supreme Council” of specialists in Jewish doctrine, rites, and ceremony. Asked how he came to know such secrets, Carr explained that much of this information was included in documents being carried by an IIluminati courier in 1785. A bolt of lightning, directed by God Himself, struck the courier dead, and the documents he carried fell into the hands of the Bavarian government. Many of these developed Carr’s Anglophile distrust of United States politics, which he saw as irretrievably contaminated by Illuminati influences. Abraham Lincoln, for example, was assassinated to prevent financial reforms he had planned, and while John Wilkes Booth pulled the trigger, the Rothschilds had given the orders. 

• LaVey called his Church of Satan operation mainly “showmanship .. . nine parts outrage and one part social respectability” that allowed participants to channel their “demons” into “a ritualized hatred that finally absorbs the hate itself, rather than turning it loose in such meaningless, antisocial outbursts as the Tate massacre.” As for his religion, he called it “just Ayn Rand’s philosophy, with ceremony and ritual added,” and he actually looked forward to the arrival of a “benign police state.” But the sex-and-ritual-murder pattern had now been set in the California media after the Mansion Family killings, and it would henceforth be difficult for any non-standard religion to detach itself from that reputation. Other conspiracy elements were quickly added on. The September 1970 issue of American Opinion, the publication of the right-wing John Birch Society, featured a lengthy article referencing Crowley, Manson, LaVey, Roman Polanski, all demonstrating that Satanism, “next to Communism, has become the fastest growing criminal menace of our time.” The article, using a variety of popular sources, traces occult movements through Weishaupt’s Bavarian Illuminati, the members of which, he claims on the strength of 1790s pamphlets, drank human blood, worshipped Satan, and conducted the Black Mass on an altar of human skeletons. The article concluded with an interview with an unusually cooperative “radical socialist” LaVey, who was happy to inscribe a copy of The Satanic Bible for a member of the John Birch Society and show him his extensive library of titles by “identified Communists.” Yes, Weishaupt was indeed “a practicing Satanist,’ LaVey proudly confirmed, and the Illuminati were “quite a powerful force for evil.”

• • From The Illuminatus Saga Stumbles Along, Robert Anton Wilson, 2007: Bob Shea and I began the Illuminatus series in 1969, inspired directly by our work as co-editors of The Playboy Fo­rum. The Forum deals with civil liberties, the rights of the individual, and abuses of government power. Natu­rally, in addition to a great many intelli­gent letters from people justifiably indignant about real cases of unconstitu­tional behavior by judges and legisla­tors, the Forum – especially in those days – received a lot of paranoid rantings from people imagining baroque conspiracies. One day, either Shea or I­ – we don’t remember which-asked whimsically, “Suppose all these nuts are right, and every single conspiracy they complain about really exists?” Thus, the Illuminatus saga was born. The idea was simple-a novel, perched midway between satire and melodrama, and also delicately balancing between “proving” the case for multiple con­spiracies and undermining the “proof.” Of course, if Shea andI  had any real sense of the market we would have real­ized that such a deliberately ambiguous work was not going to have immediate commercial appeal. But once we got started, the writing was so much fun we simply forgot about it. We had created an unsolved (perhaps unsolvable) mystery that was not merely puzzling like Agatha Christie but dumb­founding, flabbergasting, and more than a bit unnerving. The commercial results were not quite as bad as you might expect. It took over five years to get such a weird book pub­lished, true-and the refrain “I can’t understand that dammed thing” was heard from Senior Editors, but when it finally got into print, in 1975, the tril­ogy received almost uniformly good re­views everywhere. We even earned fairly decent royalties the first year In-jokes referring to the trilogy creep into other novels, movies and music videos. We have created some kind of “underground classic.” We were writing for neo-pagans, witches, Futurists, space colony advo­cates, longevity and vitamin freaks, and a lot of psy­chologists, psychiatrists, radical M.D.s, and other professionals concerned with the illnesses of our nation. There are also a lot of people who don’t want the Feds taking their dope away, and an assort­ment of anti-IRS cranks. As far as I can make out, the one bond uniting all these diverse groups-and separating them from others with simi­lar convictions-is a deep conviction that the government lies a lot, combined with a refusal to buy into any orthodox school of radical analysis. That is, they believe that any Ideology which claims to explain “what is really going on behind the lies” is just guess-work, and they feel that the jokes, insane exag­gerations and surrealistic twists of Illuminatus are about as plausible, and about as implausible, as the sober, seri­ous, and totally humorless critiques of the New Left, the New Age or any other organized Counter-Culture. I don’t know that this is the best path for a writer, but it seems to be the only possible path for me. The books have a sales chart that goes up, and goes down, and goes up and down, but eventually finds a loyal audience.

• From How Did He Get So Famous? Illuminati and the Pop Star, ELISSA R. HENKEN, University of Georgia, 2013: In Spring of 2012, two UCLA students of film and design told me that, according to at least one of their friends and to lots of messages on electronic media, the singer/actress Jennifer Hudson had made a deal with the Illuminati, including the 2008 murder of her family, in exchange for fame and weight loss. Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Kanye West, Lil Wayne, Rihanna, Eminem, Lady Gaga, and many, many others all reportedly joined the Illuminati, and the signs are to be found in their gestures, their lyrics, and their clothing as well as in their rapid rise to fame. Uncertain how much their location in Los Angeles and their interest in film and music (one is a deejay) might have affected their awareness of these legends, I asked my own students in Georgia what they had heard. Perhaps a quarter of each class had learned about it aurally; far more had seen something about it on the internet. The Illuminati are popularly understood in this context to be a secret society engaged in a conspiracy to control world affairs and create the New World Order, which itself is understood to entail replacing the established Christian order of Western nations with “an atheistic, socialist, global government.” Most of the related folklore takes the form of rumors—simply stating that some particular star is a member of the Illuminati. One claim making the electronic rounds is that Whitney Houston had to die in order that Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s daughter Blue Ivy, a true Illuminata, might live. Most people with whom I have discussed this intersection of the Illuminati and pop stars have immediately made a connection to Robert Johnson and his Faustian bargain with the devil at the crossroads. The preponderance of black artists said to owe their success to the Illuminati suggests some doubt that black artists—men or women— could achieve such success on their own, but there is not enough demographic material on those who either purvey or respond to that material to make any definitive or overarching statements about the racial undertones of these legends. Marc Lamont Hill, a journalist and scholar of African American studies, with a particular interest in hip-hop culture, points out that, “By accepting conspiracy theories as true, we can make sense of other people’s success without having to accept our own shortcomings.” Lack of talent, no matter the artist’s or the narrator’s race, is certainly one of a variety of themes behind these rumors. One white student reported that when she first noticed Justin Bieber—she kept hearing one song over and over—she asked classmates about him and was told that he was Illuminati.

• • From Cultivating Ethical Gameplay Through Illuminati, Rebekah Shultz Colby & Steve Holmes, Journal of Computers & Compositions, 2022:  The card game we examine in this article, Illuminati, constructs a satire of conspiracy theories with its artwork and procedural rules as players are meant to socially form alliances or cabals (some secret) and then ruthlessly break them. While few players take the game’s satirical conspiracy ideology seriously, the rules and mechanics offer a productive case for studying player’s material ethical habits. To procedurally simulate the paranoia of conspiracy theories, the game rules have unbalanced player role mechanics that make it much easier for some players to win over others and encourage players to cheat to compensate. In our study, we interviewed players before and after a play session of Illuminati, asking the same questions for each player. Ideologically, players either did not take the game’s parody of conspiracy theories seriously or implicitly agreed with the ideology behind the parody so unproblematically that they did not reflect on the game’s ideology in the meaningful way. For instance, the player who chose to play as the Discordian Society did not take the game seriously enough to see this as an ideologically motivated decision. As Jesper Juul argues in the paper “Half-Real”, digital and non-digital games exist on a continuum between being rule-bound systems comprised of rules and game mechanics and representing a fictional world through graphics, music, and narrative. Consequently, Sicart argues that games exist in a dialectical tension between being purely rule-based systems and, because of their narrative worlds, also representing a real ideological system and interpellate players by positioning them as a particular type of subject within an ideology. Our study illustrates that the players’ process is much more complicated than the process Sicart defines and will always change depending on different play contexts, especially as they are driven by attractors such as rules or gameplay. Nevertheless, this case study of Illuminati shows how material attractors form a space for certain dispositions which over time construct ethos. Even when the rules allowing cheating for instance, players can still resist these actions, choosing actions that construct dispositions they’re more inclined toward.