Preface

It has been claimed that Dr. Weishaupt was an atheist, a Cabalistic magician, a rationalist, a mystic; a democrat, a socialist, an anarchist, a fascist; a Machiavellian amoralist, an alchemist, a totalitarian and an “enthusiastic philanthropist.” (The last was the verdict of Thomas Jefferson, by the way.) The Illuminati have also been credited with managing the French and American revolutions behind the scenes, taking over the world, being the brains behind Communism, continuing underground up to the 1970s, secretly worshipping the Devil, and mopery with intent to gawk. Some claim that Weishaupt didn’t even invent the Illuminati, but only revived it. The Order of Illuminati has been traced back to the Knights Templar, to the Greek and Gnostic initiatory cults, to Egypt, even to Atlantis. The one safe generalization one can make is that Weishaupt’s intent to maintain secrecy has worked; no two students of Illuminology have ever agreed totally about what the “inner secret” or purpose of the Order actually was (or is . . .). There is endless room for spooky speculation, and for pedantic paranoia, once one really gets into the literature of the subject; and there has been a wave of sensational “exposés” of the Illuminati every generation since 1776. If you were to believe all this sensational literature, the damned Bavarian conspirators were responsible for everything wrong with the world, including the energy crises and the fact that you can’t even get a plumber on weekends.

— Robert Anton Wilson¹

Conspiracy theories of history are not fashionable. But European history has never known a shortage of conspiratorial societies, conspiracies, or conspirators.

—Norman Davies²

espite the group’s relative obscurity today, the machinations of the 18^th century Bavarian Order of the Illuminati gave rise to the modern “conspiracy theory,” especially the grand theory which postulates a single cabal intent on ruling the world. This secret society was seemingly so pervasive and powerful that Emperors, Popes, Kings and Princes would remain in a condition of paranoia long after it was nearly impossible to establish any proof of its continued existence.

In the form instituted by its founder, the Order of the Illuminati was a relatively brief phenomenon—lasting from 1776-87, and perhaps until the second head of the Order’s death in December 1793. Nonetheless, for the first eleven years of its existence this amazingly successful secret society managed to penetrate nearly every court in the Holy Roman Empire, and had initiated some of the most intelligent and influential adherents of the Enlightenment.

By the early 1780s the Illuminati numbered between 2000 and 3000. It wasn’t until the Bavarian authorities searched the homes of two high-ranking members that the identity of the mastermind behind the Order of the Illuminati was finally revealed: Adam Weishaupt, an obscure professor from the University of Ingolstadt, the head of “that abominable sect, which directly seeks to destroy religion and healthy morals and to overthrow the thrones of rulers.”³ The confiscated documents triggered a state of panic within the Bavarian duchy; the sheer size and sophistication of the European-wide plot was overwhelming, prompting authorities to publish their findings as quickly as possible.

Apart from the initial contemporary accounts of John Robison (17391805) and ex-Jesuit Abbé Augustin de Barruel (1741-1820), a study wholly devoted to the Illuminati has long been neglected in the English language. This situation has aided in the perpetuation of rumor and falsehood.

Since Robert Anton Wilson’s assessment introducing this preface is essentially correct, one can easily appreciate how hard it has been to find reliable information on the subject. One would think that with such a wide range of theories being promulgated, an impartial historian would have issued a definitive study on the Illuminati in English.⁴ With the exception of perhaps Vernon Stauffer,⁵ this has not been the case. In fact, the opposite has occurred. Perhaps out of fear of losing respectability, scholars have distanced themselves from any association with the dreaded word Illuminati. Lacking access to primary source material, most Anglophone authors who’ve even attempted to write about the Illuminati have had little recourse but to hypothesize.

Proofs of a Conspiracy was first printed in 1797. By 1798 it went through at least four editions and was an international best seller.The book was printed both in Europe and America.

In contradistinction to the English-speaking world, Germany has witnessed a renaissance in Illuminati studies since the late 1950s. From the birthplace of the Order itself, its scholars have become the leading experts in the field—and rightly so. Having scoured the dusty archives strewn across the whole continent of Europe, research has taken enormous strides, and a new picture has emerged of one of the most powerful secret societies during the Age of Enlightenment.

 

Kritik und Krise (translated into English in 1988: Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Modern Society). He discussed Freemasonry, and particularly the Illuminati, at length, coming to conclusions about the aims and influence of the Order that seemed to confirm certain long-held assertions of the “conspiracy theorists.” To Koselleck, the Illuminati along with the Enlightenment philosophers and Freemasons, were representative— perhaps the apex—of a continuous ideological process which inevitably led to the cataclysm of the French Revolution.

 

Koselleck had his supporters and detractors to be sure; at any rate, he prompted further research and legitimized scholarly study of 18th century Freemasonry, secret societies, and their very real influence on the emerging public sphere. In 1973, history professor Richard van Dülmen’s “Der Geheimbund Der Illuminaten” (in Zeitschrift für Bayerische Landesgeschichte, 36:793833) was published. Two years later, Dülmen expanded upon his earlier study with a ground-breaking book: Geheimbund der Illuminaten. Darstellung, Analyse, Dokumentation [Secret Society of the Illuminati. Description, Analysis, Documentation] (Stuttgart, 1975).

In Germany today the field is thriving, and important information has continually come to light, primarily through the efforts of Hermann Schüttler, Reinhard Markner, Monika Neugebauer-Wölk, Manfred Agethen, Christine Schaubs and Peggy Pawlowski. Reprinted primary works, membership lists, archival investigations and valuable intellectual studies comprise a large body of work devoted to the Illuminati. The result has been that closer scrutiny of Freemasonry and the Illuminati, in a serious light, has finally become essential to Enlightenment research.

In late 2004, in the wake of the phenomenon that was The Da Vinci Code, something out of the ordinary began to occur. As if a “conspiracy” of its own, strangers from all parts of the globe suddenly, without warning, started emailing me, asking basically the same question: “Is it true what Dan Brown wrote about the Illuminati?”

 

 

 

Dan Brown’s Illuminati was slightly different from the Illuminati I had come to know. His fictional portrayal was of an all-powerful scientistic sect (with a dash of Satanism for effect) whose origins dated back to the Renaissance; Galileo was supposedly a member of the secret society. The true Illuminati—in Bavaria, during the 18^th Century—were only mentioned in passing, and almost as an afterthought. This is probably what irritated me the most. I felt that instead of making up a story just to fit it into the chronology of the mythical Priory of Sion,⁷ and thus tie it into his then-forthcoming Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown should have given the Bavarian Order and Adam Weishaupt their due.

At any rate, the emails were starting to overwhelm me; and since they were all basically the same, I decided to construct a standard reply especially for those zealous fans of Dan Brown. It worked for a while, but gradually I began to question my own understanding. Here I was trying to educate Dan Brown fans on what the Illuminati wasn’t, while at the same time not really being sure of my own grasp of the subject. Gradually, I was forced to admit that the webpage I had constructed on the Illuminati (then many years old) was filled with comparable contradictions and inaccuracies. If I wanted to maintain any sort of integrity, I had better get my facts straight—and fast.

So that’s what I did; I got my facts straight. Barruel, Robison, Stauffer and Billington filled in the missing pieces quite nicely.⁸ In August 2005, the Illuminati page on my site was entirely replaced with a new one:“Illuminati Conspiracy Part One: A Precise Exegesis on the Available Evidence.”⁹ It was quite substantial. I had converted into XHTML a Word doc of over fifty pages.

Then, the very day that I sent a summary of my new site to my newsletter subscribers, TrineDay contacted me with a book offer, and the planned “Illuminati Conspiracy Parts Two and Three” were necessarily put on hold.

Here we are, three years later, and the book in your hands represents an investigation considerably larger in scope. Whereas my initial research had identified around 80 members, the latter half of this book now focuses exclusively on individuals—447 of them, to be exact. Out of the traditional estimate of two to three thousand members, about 1,200 of the original Illuminati have been identified.¹⁰ The fact that I have identified so many members: this is the real progress that has been made. A myriad of standard history texts need to be updated to reflect these new facts.

The people you’ll read about in this book (now identified as Illuminati) are some of the most important figures of the Enlightenment. As you will see, their influence—for good or ill—had a major impact on the 20^th century. How they will influence the 21^st remains problematic.

Terry Melanson November 2008

Endnotes

1. In Cosmic Trigger Volume I: Final Secret of the Illuminati (1977), New Falcon Publications ninth printing, 1993, p. 4. That short excerpt is perhaps the most honest and succinct (probably the most humorous) introduction to the Illuminati you’ll ever come across; so it is more than a bit ironic that Wilson, throughout the rest of the text, proceeds to perpetuate and expand upon similar myths, and in the process manages to take it to a whole new level. The Cosmic Trigger“reality tunnel” is hard to describe to those who haven’t read Robert Anton Wilson. The Final Secret of the Illuminati is an accounting of Wilson’s experiences in the 1960s and 70s: the retelling of numerous episodes of psychedelic experimentation; the practicing of Crowleyan occult techniques; weird and spooky synchronicities involving the number 23; the prospect of immortality through futurist research; UFOs, contactees, quantum mechanics, multiverses, astral travel; and the apparent communication with “higher intelligences,” mainly from Sirius—by himself, and his associates—culminating in an unique theory of just who or what the Illuminati really are.

1. Norman Davies, Europe: A History, Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 352.
2. Bavarian Elector Karl Theodor; quoted in Jeremy Black’s British Foreign Policy in an Age of Revolutions, 1783-1793, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 185.
3. The standard authoritative history of the Bavarian Illuminati (in any language) today remains René Le Forestier’s Les Illuminés de Bavière et la Franc-Maçonnerie Allemande [The Bavarian Illuminati and the German Freemasons](Paris: 1914). Quoted passages in English are my translations.
4. In New England and the Bavarian Illuminati (1918), Stauffer concentrated mostly on the Illuminati scare in America at the turn of the 19^th century. Less than a hundred pages in Chapter 3, however, are devoted to a strictly historical survey of the Bavarian Illuminati proper; hardly thorough, yet still a valuable contribution in its own right.
5. URL: http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/.
6. For conspiracy theorists who’ve constructed an entire edifice (books, DVDs, lectures, etc.) based upon the notion of a tangible secret society called the Priory of Sion, it is a hard pill to swallow. Sorry, but the fact is that the authors of Holy Blood Holy Grail were duped. The whole thing is a fairy tale, a scam—beginning to end. See http://priory-of-sion.com/.
7. Despite the fact that scholars may insinuate to the contrary, Barruel and Robison are still the only means of getting as close to primary source material on the Bavarian Illuminati as exists in the English language. Barruel and Robison have been favorite whipping boys of various historians in academia trying to disprove or deride the plot-theory of the French Revolution. However, the fact remains that large excerpts from the Original Writings of the Illuminati are reproduced judiciously in Barruel, especially, and Robison. Up until the book presently in your hands, the average English reader interested in historical information on the Bavarian Illuminati—not fluent in either German or French—necessarily had to consult the contemporary accounts of Barruel and Robison. Le Forestier, who wrote the standard unsurpassed work on the Order, grudgingly gave Barruel his due when it came to the reliability of the quoted/translated passages from the Original Writings: see Le Forestier, op. cit., p. 687; and the introduction by Stanley L. Jaki in the reprint of Augustin Barruel, Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism [1798], Real-View-Books Classics Reprint, 2002, p. xxiv.
8. URL: http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/NWO/Illuminati.htm.
9. See Hermann Schüttler, Die Mitglieder des Illuminatenordens 1776-1787/93 (Munich: ars una 1991). The reader should know that Schüttler has since retracted some of these identifications; so the total number is more tenuous than in the early 1990s. And there’s the added problem that Prof. Schüttler has not updated his book. Perhaps it is because the book itself, by listing so many members at once, is akin to a database of sorts. Asthat is the case, it is also true that the data redundancy throughout the book is extremely high (different views of the same information, etc.), making it a nightmare to change anything at all. Before a new edition can even be contemplated, the members listed (along with the biographical information) in Schüttler’s book first need to be entered into a relational database; my guess is that they haven’t been..