A Brief History of the Illuminati
The story of an ambitious Bavarian liberal and his organization's legacy
In the grand scheme of history, Adam Weishaupt appears to us as a marginal figure in most respects except one: the vast, extensive paranoia which his brainchild, the Order of the Illuminati, would inspire. The popular conception of the Illuminati, the extensive conspiracy pulling the strings, emerged over the course of centuries from the works of several reactionary thinkers. Although the Order had been effectively liquidated a decade after its founding in 1776, the French Revolution of 1789 and subsequent Jacobin “Reign of Terror” would lead several thinkers to perceive a larger sinister design at work, connecting the secret society’s professed liberal Enlightenment values to those of the Montagnards and Maximilian Robespierre.
In his 1797 work Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, the French Jesuit priest Augustin Baurrel claimed that the French Revolution had been the culmination of an elaborate anti-Christian, anti-monarchist conspiracy. In Baurrel’s view, the beginnings of the conspiracy had been laid out by philosophers such as Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, and Montesquieu, which in turn had been carried out by the Freemasons at the direction of the Illuminati, who he asserted were far more powerful and far-reaching than previously understood. A similar argument was published in the same year by Scottish physicist John Robison in his pamphlet Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, which asserted that Freemasonry had been completely infiltrated by the Illuminati and used to carry out the French Revolution. John Robison’s main source for these claims was Scottish Monk and British intelligence agent Alexander Horn, who was actively engaged in a propaganda campaign against the young French Republic. The ideas in Baurrel’s and Robison’s works would soon begin to circulate throughout Europe and the young United States, where Congregationalist ministers such as Jedidiah Morse spread fears of an Illuminati conspiracy in their preaching.
The second wave of Illuminati paranoia would come over a century later: just as the first had emerged in reaction against the French Revolution of 1789, the second would serve as a reaction against the Russian Revolution of 1917. In 1921, British author and socialite Nesta Helen Webster would publish World Revolution: The Plot Against Civilization, which expanded upon the Illuminati’s control of Continental Freemasonry and role in orchestrating the French Revolution as elaborated on in Baurrel’s and Robison’s works to encompass their role in fomenting socialism and Communism, culminating in the October Revolution and Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia. Webster’s other contribution to the Illuminati conspiracy theory, beyond inventing this direct connection to Marxism, was to assert that it was a Jewish conspiracy broadly similar to the one outlined in the 1903 hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It should come as no surprise that Webster would become heavily involved in the British Fascist movement. Webster’s conspiracy theory would be expanded even further with the posthumous publication of Edith Starr Miller’s Occult Theocrasy in 1933. Like Webster, Miller had been heavily involved in the British Fascist movement and asserted that the Illuminati was a Jewish conspiracy which had brought about the October Revolution, only she also went further by mapping out secret societies stretching back millenia all the way to the mystery schools of antiquity and ancient pagan religions which supposedly survived in Freemasonry. Just as the Baurell-Robinson iteration of the Illuminati conspiracy theory had been propagated and spread by Puritan congregationalist preachers, the new “Judeo-Bolshevik” iteration of the conspiracy theory was spread through the preachings of anti-semitic fundamentalist preachers such as Gerlad Burton Winrod.
The first two “waves” of the Illuminati conspiracy theory have clear parallels. In both instances, the theory is propagated by reactionaries to blame the advent of a seismic left-wing revolution on sinister conspiratorial manipulations by the supposedly dissolved Bavarian order which survived through a network of Masonic lodges. The primary difference between the two was that the second wave would use tenuous connections to link the Illuminati to the anti-semitic conspiracy theories of the time in order to revise the organization’s nature to fit with the particular prejudices of early 20th century reactionaries. The distinctly reactionary nature of the conspiracy theory in these first two phases would be transformed by the third “wave” which would take place in the 1960’s and 1970’s. In this instance, the propagation of the Illuminati conspiracy theory would not come from dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries, but instead countercultural, left-leaning libertarians engaging in a Situationist prank. Kerry Thornley, the founder of the satirical religion of Discordianism, would collaborate with Playboy editor Robert Anton Wilson to publish a series of letters popularizing elaborate and deliberately absurd conspiracy theories about the Illuminati, ranging from their involvement in the still recent assassination of John F. Kennedy to Adam Weishaupt having replaced George Washington before serving two terms as America’s first president. Wilson would later go on to write the Illuminatus Trilogy in collaboration with Robert Shea, setting the trend for later pop culture depictions of the organization ranging from Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco to Angels and Demons by Dan Brown. With each phase the Illuminati becomes increasingly unrecognizable from its original incarnation, to the point that by the late 20th century it had become a generic term for any conspiracy with powerful membership and grand ambitions. The Illuminati is now to the conspiracy as the Xerox is to the copy machine or the Kleenex is to tissue paper.
As deranged and bizarre as the theories and rumors surrounding the Illuminati would become, the true story of the Bavarian secret society is a fascinating narrative in itself. We begin in Ingolstadt, Bavaria in 1748 with the birth of Adam Weishaupt, the son of a well-to-do lawyer and professor. Weishaupt would receive an extensive Jesuit education from a young age, and over the course of his studies would become strongly influenced by the intellectual tendencies of the Enlightenment and philosophical empiricism. He would graduate from the University of Ingolstadt in 1768 with a doctorate in law before becoming a professor of law in 1772. In his background Weishaupt was not dissimilar from many young men in the legal profession at the time who found themselves sympathetic to the emergent politics of liberalism and would serve as the champions of bourgeois revolution in the decades to come. The primary difference between Weishaupt and these other liberal professionals would be in the curious way that the former sought to affect social change.
In 1775, Weishaupt had begun writing the outline for his idea of a “School of Humanity,” which synthesized his Enlightenment ideals with his interest in Rosicrucian secret societies. This draft would contain many of the components of what would become the Illuminati, most especially the emphasis on mutual assistance among the membership and the requirement that each member keep an extensive journal on their personal thoughts accessible to their superiors in the organization. With some adjustments, Weishaupt and four of his students and close disciples would form the “League of Perfectibilists” on May 1, 1776. The name of the organization referenced their fundamental belief in the “perfectibility” of humanity, which they saw as having the potential to constantly improve and advance to higher stages of understanding and social order. In his role as leader of this cryptic organization, Weishaupt would take on the codename “Brother Spartacus” in reference to the Thracian gladiator who led one of the largest slave uprisings in Roman history. This choice of name reflected Weishaupt’s vision and personal understanding of his organization’s mission: to liberate humanity from its shackles.
The structure of Weishaupt’s League of Perfectibilists was partially derived from that of the Society of Jesus, the Catholic religious order which had been responsible for his childhood education. In 1773, just shortly after Weishaupt had become a professor of law, Pope Clement XIV had issued a papal brief suppressing the society due to the supranational power and influence in politics which the society wielded. As an Enlightenment empiricist to his core and skeptic of organized religion, Weishaupt had no love for the Jesuits, but did admire the ability of the organization to wield such considerable influence and he hoped to adopt this ability towards his own ends. In emulation of the Jesuits, the first stage of membership in the Perfectibilists would be a “Noviciate” which was obtained without ceremony and involved extensive reading and self-critique - the primary difference being instead of religious texts, these Perfectibilist Novices were expected to study secular classical and modern Enlightenment texts.
By 1778, as his organization was slowly spreading through Bavaria among young intellectuals, Weishaupt had decided to reorganize the League of Perfectibilists into the form that they would become best known as, the Order of the Illuminati. The organization would adopt the Owl as its symbol and give the title of “Minervals” to its junior members in reference to the Roman goddess of wisdom, Minerva, reflecting the organization’s reverence for the acquisition of knowledge. By this point the Order was taking shape in the way that Weishaupt had envisioned his “School of Humanity” in 1775: Minervals were attracted by the promise not only of higher knowledge and self-improvement, but also the charitable assistance promised among members, including free medical care, travel expenses coverage, mutual insurance, and access to investment capital.
In 1780, the Illuminati would gain one of its most important and influential members, Baron Adolph Knigge, who would play just as prominent a role in the direction of the order as Weishaupt. Knigge would become one of the order’s most prolific recruiters and administrators, become involved in writing the rituals and ceremonies for many of the higher degrees, and transform the Illuminati from a quasi-masonic association into a full Masonic body. Weishaupt, who had been a Freemason since 1777 and took some influence from the fraternity’s structure, accepted this transformation of his system. However, he would make his displeasure with many of Knigge’s decisions and alterations to the Order known in a number of private correspondences to other Illuminati. Nonetheless, Knigge’s decision to transform the Order into a masonic body would expand its influence considerably as it began infiltrating and taking power in lodges throughout Bavaria and other parts of Germany.
By 1783, the Order of the Illuminati was at the height of its influence, having spread across a considerable part of Germany and including many prominent noblemen and intellectuals in its ranks, and had evolved into a byzantine system of degrees and ranks which were still being expanded upon by Weishaupt and Knigge. The order’s members would include the great writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, and the Dukes Karl August of Saxe-Weimer and Saxe-Eisenach and Ernest II of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, the latter being a direct ancestor of the House of Windsor. Within the next few years, however, the Order would quickly suffer from a rapid decline and cataclysmic end.
The tension beneath the surface between Weishaupt and Knigge over the direction of the Order would come to a head in 1784, breaking into open disputes between the two and a power struggle that would end with Weishaupt forcing Knigge, the Illuminati’s most valuable asset, out of the organization. The Illuminati’s fortunes would only worsen in the following year. Despite its cryptic nature the order had failed to conceal its existence from the general public, and as a result the government and church soon became concerned with the power which the Illuminati had obtained through their networking each other into positions of power. As a result in 1795, Prince-Elector of Bavaria Karl Theodor would issue an edict outlawing all secret societies, including Freemasonry and the Illuminati. The Illuminati was effectively dissolved, and Weishaupt would be driven out of Bavaria and forced to seek refuge in Gotha under the protection of Ernest II. Weishaupt would remain in exile for the rest of his life, defending the intentions and actions of the Illuminati until his death in 1830.
Centuries of conspiracy theories have distorted what the Illuminati had originally set out to do, something which is not made any clearer by the internal conflicts between Weishaupt and Knigge over the exact nature of the order. Nonetheless, major elements of the underlying philosophy and political aims of the Illuminati can be made clear by studying the lectures, written by Weishaupt himself, for the “Higher Mystery” degrees of the Docetists and the Philosophi. The former details the peculiar philosophical understanding of the world that Weishaupt had reached, veering far from conventional Empiricism, while the latter makes clear the political ideology of the Illuminati, radically to the left of almost any mainstream view in the same time period. These original essays by Weishaupt can be found in The Secret School of Wisdom, edited by Josef Wäges, Reinhard Markner, and translated by Jeva Singh-Anand, along with the details of each of the lower degrees of the order.
The name of the first of these higher mysteries, the Docetists, is derived from a heterodox Christian doctrine which was labeled heretical at the Council of Nicaea. Docetism is the belief that Jesus Christ did not possess a physical body, but instead merely appeared to us in an illusory form, and is found in a number of Gnostic strains of Early Christianity. This reflects the philosophical position which the Docetist Illuminatus is instructed to take: that the world which can be perceived by the senses is a world of mere appearances. The material world does not exist in and of itself, but only in relation to the senses of an individual to whom others appear only as effects, with each individual’s “world” serving as shells for the true world of unperceived forces beneath. To this end, the physical body is not identical with one’s “self,” nor is death necessarily the end of perception, but instead a transformation of the senses into another form. The absolute truth of reality is only perceivable by God, the divine mind which operates on senses totally alien to humanity and detects forces we cannot possibly perceive. This is the “natural religion” at which Weishaupt arrived from his studies and considerations, ultimately arriving at a Gnostic perception of the material world.
The second higher mystery, and highest degree of the Illuminati conceived, was the Philosophi. In his lecture, Weishaupt makes several key aspects of his political philosophy explicitly clear: that history is defined by progress towards enlightenment and perfection, and that the driving force of this progress was the growth of population. The multiplication of humanity is, in the Illuminist view, responsible for both the development of technology, innovation and moral philosophy and the emergence of conflict, oppression, and inequality as human beings are brought out of their primitive Rousseauvian state. As the population grows and despotism emerges in the metropoli, masses emigrate out in search of more sparsely populated lands which they can inhabit, take, and conquer, advancing the cause of civilization and culture across the globe even as it spreads tyranny and inequality. Weishaupt implies that this global wave of civilization will occur at least twice, binding humanity together further each time as the population expands further and further until every inhabitable space will have been filled. It is at this point where humanity has expanded as far as it can that he foresees a transformation: without the release valve of expansion, the crowded conditions that human beings find themselves in will compel a redistribution and leveling of property, such that each sovereign individual will live on enough to sustain themselves by their own labor. Weishaupt envisions this future brought about by the vast expansion of the human race as a utopic golden age free from all inequality or hierarchy, in which “the whole earth becomes a garden.” Weishaupt preempts any critics that assert that the population will grow beyond carrying capacity by asserting that instead this enlightened, self-governing population will choose to “enter into marriages at a more mature age” and refrain from childbearing as soon as such actions appear impractical. For this reason, Weishaupt saw procreation and population growth as the best means to affect positive social change.
Taken altogether, the ideas of Adam Weishaupt and the Order of the Illuminati are far stranger than most conspiracy theorists have typically presented. The Illuminist ideology constructed from the Higher Mysteries combines Gnostic immaterialism with the conception of the “end of history” as a global egalitarian utopia achieved through the growth of the human population. What can we take from the eclectic ideology of this ambitious Bavarian? Certainly if we squint we can arguably see a parallel or two with the ideas of Georg Wilhelm Friedirch Hegel, such as with the articulated telos of history and the rudimentary form of phenomenology, but it is highly unlikely that Weishaupt had any direct influence on Hegelian philosophy despite the claims of some conspiracy theorists. The closest we can see to a direct connection between Hegel and Illuminism is likely found in Johann Gottfried Herder, who had been a member of the order and influenced Hegel’s teleological conception of history. This doesn’t suggest Herder’s conception of history was derived from as it was operating within the same schools of thought as other 18th century German Enlightenment thinkers, but does indicate the Illuminati were part of a broader intellectual movement which would play a decisive role in Hegel’s philosophical development.
The truth is that Adam Weishaupt’s ideas are something of a deadend in terms of their influence: his primary legacy is unfortunately playing the boogeyman rather than any impact on German philosophy or politics. Certainly Illuminism is worth studying as a branch of the developing German schools of thought which would eventually produce Hegelianism and in turn Marxism and an influence in the lives of Proto-Hegelians like Herder and Goethe. Weishaupt’s Illuminati can be understood as a noble experiment, a grand political project admirable in its lofty goals and extensive scale but ultimately limited and doomed to failure because of its egocentric nature: in the end Weishaupt drove away his most valuable ally, Knigge, in order to preserve the idiosyncratic nature of his project and failed to build a movement which could truly survive the full force of the state. As one of the first modern radical organizations then, it is useful for modern revolutionaries to understand the limitations of the Illuminati’s model, while identifying those salvageable aspects and throughlines which would go on to be incorporated in more successful organizations. The contemporary Perfectibilist should take heed of how petty egos and insufficient operational security can destroy an organization, but also understand that even in their failures they can help lay the foundations for their movement’s development.