The Owl and The Eye
The Origins of the Bavarian Illuminati and Its Pop Culture Mythos
On May 1, 1776, two hundred and forty-seven years ago, a secret society was founded in modern-day Germany whose infamy might have faded with time had it not been for the political opportunism of the Father of American Geography and an absurd satirical sci-fi trilogy written by two Playboy editors.
The Illuminati is a cringeworthy meme that haunts the bowels of online discourse. It lives rent-free in the minds of paranoid conspiracy-peddlers, Millennialist Evangelicals, and esoteric seekers of Gnosis. Conspiratorially-minded denizens of the Internet contend that the world is managed by a cabal of shadowy businessmen and politicians who seek to replace personal freedom and localized political autonomy with an authoritarian global New World Order. The shorthand name often ascribed to this cabal is the Illuminati. How did a small, anti-clerical book club from southern Germany morph into a Jay-Z-endorsed behemoth?
The Covenant of Perfectibility, later renamed to the Order of Illuminati, was created at the University of Ingolstadt in the Electorate of Bavaria by 28-year-old canon law professor Adam Weishaupt and four of his students with the purpose of spreading the ideals of the Enlightenment in opposition to the censorious clergy and absolute monarchy. The Reformation had raged through the Holy Roman Empire over a century earlier, and Counter-Enlightenment agents of the monarchies and the Catholic Church, spearheaded by the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits, had pushed back against the spread of Protestantism through the suppression of dangerous publications and the inquisition of subversives. The Enlightened Despot and liberal reformer of Bavaria, Maximilian III, had passed away and been replaced by his Jesuit-educated and weak-willed dilettante 12th cousin Charles Theodore. Although the Jesuits had been formally disbanded by Pope Clement XIV in 1773, former Jesuits represented roughly two-thirds of the staff of the University of Ingolstadt.
The early ambitions of the Illuminati were to infiltrate the ranks of academia in order to subvert the Jesuits and introduce students to the works of writers such as Voltaire and Rousseau. The motives of the early Illuminati were couched in lofty stated ideals: freedom of speech, freedom of association, and freedom of religious conscience. Many gullible modern-day journalists and authors will often excuse the Illuminati of any wrongdoing due to its espoused values of toleration and religious liberty. However, behind closed doors, there were more megalomaniacal and revolutionary aims, including the abolition of the monarchy, the abolition of organized religion, and the abolition of property. The model of the Illuminati was that of the pagan mystery cults of antiquity, to confuse new members with the temptation of secret, esoteric knowledge while the inner circle maintains the actual self-serving intentions of the order. The Illuminati was to be an anti-Jesuit, anti-mystic, anti-superstition mystery cult. The ethos of the Illuminati could best be described with the Denis Diderot quote: “Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”
Enlightenment is not an event; it is a process. It is the realization that the world is not ethereal. The world is governed by the laws of God and nature, and can be understood through the power of reason. Enlightenment is the progressive deconstruction of faith in service of truth. The universe is a Newtonian clock whose mechanics can be understood and used as tools for the betterment of mankind.
Voltaire has been likened by Christopher Sandbatch to a “high-tier gossip columnist” akin to Piers Morgan. The threat of the dissemination of Voltaire’s works posed to the God-fearing Catholic Bavarians was the deconstruction of the state-mandated narratives of the Christian and political establishment. Voltaire wrenched apart traditional textual narratives with the historiographic concepts “sacred history” and “vulgar history.” Any supernatural claims or historic miracles were to be deemphasized in favor of vulgar, empirically verifiable truths ascertained with evidence and reason. Voltaire discarded the superstitious Divine Right of Kings. Instead, Voltaire supported absolute monarchy due to its political expediency. An Enlightened Despot can unanimously do more good for his people through reason and virtue than a chaotic republic or an erroneous, superstitious Absolutist monarch. In Voltaire’s view, the clergy retarded scientific inquiry and hampered the political and economic development of the monarch and should be done away with in favor of a professional bureaucracy.
The secret society adopted the symbol of the Owl of Minerva perched on an open book. They developed a system of three degrees — Novice, Minerval, and Illuminated Minerval — overseen by a council called the Areopagus. Each degree came with its own esoteric initiation ceremony featuring the introduction of new signs, passwords, handshakes, and responsibilities. Each member was required to vet new members thoroughly over a probationary period of around two years; require his initiates to read Enlightenment books on sociology, political science, and natural philosophy; and send reports to Weishaupt himself on the activities of other members. Weishaupt used the cyphers, training and recruitment techniques, and verbiage used by the Jesuits to subvert the Jesuits. The original plan of the Areopagus was to introduce higher grades beyond Illuminated Minerval and convert their secret society into a pro-Enlightenment mystery cult based on either the Eleusinian Mysteries or Zoroastrian rites. However, Weishaupt found another way of building his order. Weishaupt was going to infiltrate and coup the most prestigious Freemasonic order in Germany.
The Freemasons were a medieval operative stone masons guild dating back to the reign of Æthelstan (King of the Anglo-Saxons from 924 to 927, and King of England from 927 to 939), whose structure and Biblical symbolism was transformed into an elite English gentleman’s club with the purpose of networking, charitable philanthropy, the consumption of copious amount of alcohol, and the patronage of the liberal arts. In 1717, the Premier Grand Lodge of England was established to oversee all of the Masonic lodges in England. It had three initiatory degrees whose membership included the founders of the Royal Society, prominent Whig politicians, decorated military officers, and magistrates. The creation of the Premier could be seen as an attempt to make a Whig shadow government to support the Protestant legacy of the Glorious Revolution. Meanwhile, several lodges in Scotland claimed to have older degrees that continued the stories told in the first three degrees. This caused a schism in Anglo-American Masonry between the Moderns of the Premier Grand Lodge and Antients of the Antient Grand Lodge of England (founded in 1751). Many of the Antients would kick off the American Revolution by organizing the Sons of Liberty and planning the Boston Tea Party at St. Andrew’s Lodge in Boston.
Following the exile of the Scottish Jacobites to France, Bonnie Prince Charlie’s tutor Chevalier Ramsay introduced the French aristocracy to the Templar mythos. Charles Ramsay gave a lecture to an assembly of French Lodges in December 1736 in which he claimed that the Knights Templar had successful fled the prosecution of France’s King Philip IV and emigrated to Scotland where Robert the Bruce granted the Knights asylum. These Templars allegedly tipped the Battle of Bannockburn in Bruce’s favor and helped maintain Scottish independence from England. According to Ramsay, the Knights Templar passed the knowledge they found in the Holy Land underneath King Solomon’s Temple through the initiation rites of the Freemasons. This myth is also the source of conspiracy theories involving the smuggling of valuable treasures to Scotland. Depending on the theorist, the Templars brought the Holy Grail, the lost bloodline of Jesus Christ, holy relics, or gold to Scotland.
Ramsay’s legend resulted in the creation of dozens of fabricated degrees, rites, and stories. Exiled, bored, and poor Jacobites belonging to traveling Masonic army lodges developed elaborate ceremonial degrees and initiated eager French noblemen into their newly-founded orders for a hefty fee. Naturally, every new order claimed to have been the true descendant of the Knights Templar. These Continental Lodges were gentlemen’s clubs where being initiated into higher-level (and more expensive) degrees meant the initiate would have access to more exclusive social circles. It is estimated that by 1789, there were over a thousand degrees in use, around 1,250 lodges overseen by thirty-six distinct grand lodges, and between 40,000 and 100,000 Freemasons in France.
In 1741, a traveling Silesian army officer named Karl von Hund was initiated into Masonry by several exiled Scottish Knights in Paris. He was supposedly shown the authentic secret initiation rites of the Knights Templar by Charles Stuart and the Earl of Kilmarnock. Hund later founded his own order in 1749 based on the degrees shown to him. The order Hund founded, later renamed to the Rite of Strict Observance, would become the most prestigious and exclusive Masonic order in all of Germany, owing to the authenticity of its degree work and the concentrated number of dukes, princes, electors, and court intellectuals among its ranks.
Adam Weishaupt joined the Rite of Strict Observance in February 1777. Weishaupt was only able to afford the first three degrees due to his meager salary and social status as a mere professor. The Freemasons were the ideal institution for a clandestine anti-Jesuit activist. Within the teachings of Craft Masonry is the explicit condemnation of tyranny, superstition, and ignorance. These three condemnations are often abstracted into condemnations of tyrannies committed by unjust monarchs, unverifiable superstitions expounded by dogmatic clerics, and the stupidity and deliberate ignorance of Philistine mobs of peasants. Weishaupt was unimpressed by the mysteries he had been shown but nonetheless continued to network within the Rite. He even founded his own lodge in Munich in March 1779. The goal of his infiltration was to lure ideologically sympathetic Freemasons into joining his Illuminati with the opportunity of being shown degrees even more authentic than the Rite’s and the chance to assist in political activism against the Jesuits. By this point, there were between 30 and 40 members of the Illuminati, mostly consisting of wealthy university students, and there were only three Illuminati degrees. The Illuminati would experience a tremendous boom in membership following Weishaupt’s recruitment of Adolph Knigge and Johann Bode in 1780.
In 1780, the Rite of Strict Observance was undergoing a crisis of legitimacy. The supposed origins of Hund’s degrees came under scrutiny, the liberal order was being infiltrated by the mystical Order of the Golden and Rosy Cross, and members were being poached by the Martinists. The Golden and Rosy Cross were a quasi-Masonic revival of the extinct hermetic alchemical secret society known as the Rosicrucians. The Golden and Rosy Cross predominantly consisted of the Protestant Prussian nobility. The Martinists were a mystical Christian secret society known for their esotericism and hatred of Enlightenment ideals.
Adolph Knigge was a young, promising liberal reformer, author, mystic, and high-ranking member of Strict Observance. Knigge was lured into the Illuminati with the promise of being shown authentic mystical knowledge beyond what he had seen in the higher degrees of Strict Observance. Knigge also leapt at the chance to grant Weishaupt’s network the ability to subvert his hated anti-Enlightenment political rivals. The Golden and Rosy Cross were to Knigge what the Jesuits were to Weishaupt. Between 1780 and Knigge’s expulsion from the Illuminati in July 1784, Knigge would recruit around 500 members to the Illuminati, mostly from Masonic lodges. Although Knigge was initially disappointed that Weishaupt had lied to him about the existence of authentic higher-level Illuminati degrees, Knigge enthusiastically assisted Weishaupt in the creation of three higher Mystery degrees himself. Knigge also served as a moderating intermediary between Weishaupt and the Areopagus, as Weishaupt often alienated his ruling council with his ego, indecisiveness, and attempts to pit members of his inner circle against each another.
Johann Bode was an extremely well-connected member of Strict Observance. Between 1780 and 1783, Bode recruited from highest echelons of German society. Bode successfully recruited famed writer Goethe, famed philosopher Johann Herder, the Duke of Saxe-Weimar (the host of the most prestigious intellectual court in the Holy Roman Empire), the Duke of Saxe-Gotha, the Duke of Brunswick (Grand Master of the Rite of Strict Observance), and the Prince of Hesse-Kassel (Senior Warden of Strict Observance).
The Illuminati reached the height of its power in 1784 after the Rite of Strict Observance was disbanded in 1783. The origins of Strict Observance were revealed to have been inauthentic Jacobite fabrications, resulting in members jumping ship to either the more mystical and religious Martinists or the secular and liberal Illuminati. It was at this time that Knigge was forced out of the Illuminati due to a disagreement between himself and Weishaupt on the development of the Priest degree. The content of Knigge’s proposed Priest degree was deemed too costly to perform and too alienating to Catholic members. Weishaupt replaced Knigge’s elaborate ceremony with a simple dialogue in which the initiator, playing the part of Jesus Christ, confesses that the true purpose of the Christian faith was to abolish the rule of man over his fellow man and to abolish secular governments and the clergy. Knigge bitterly accused Weishaupt of being a crypto-Jesuit and would launch scathing attacks on Weishaupt’s character after the fall of the Illuminati.
The influx of new membership and patronage of the nobility of Germany permitted the Illuminati to replace the Jesuit staff of several universities with their own members, allowing university students to manufacture and distribute reading materials critical of the Catholic Church and monarchy. Illuminati members successfully infiltrated the Bavarian Censorship Board and began censoring the publications of ex-Jesuits. The Illuminati seized control over several institutions of higher learning, gymnasiums, and church congregations. The initiation of several magistrates, judges, and state bureaucrats also corruptly permitted members of the Illuminati to be excused of committing minor crimes. Although many of the original members of the Illuminati supported the overthrow of the monarchies of the Holy Roman Empire in favor of republicanism, there was very little the Illuminati actually accomplish politically. The Dukes that Bode had recruited had very little motivation to overthrow themselves. The Illuminati nobility were perfectly happy with their ability to network and form Enlightened Despotic policy with their Masonic Brothers. The ideal head of state for most German Freemasons and members of the Golden and Rosy Cross was Enlightened Despot Frederick the Great — not a republic.
The rapid rise of the Illuminati resulted in the knowledge of the existence of the secret society being exposed to the public. The open atheism of several Illuminati members and the dissemination of seditious reading materials also drew the condemnation of many powerful HRE princes. In April 1783, Frederick the Great began to send letters to HRE heads of state, including the Elector of Saxony, warning them of the political seditions of the Illuminati. Meanwhile, the Golden and Rosy Cross had also successfully seized the Three Globes Grand Lodge in Berlin. Frederick, a member and patron of many Prussian Freemasons, had many interactions with the Golden and Rosy Cross and even promoted several of their members to the nobility, but he never joined their order. The Prussian government and Prussian Masons no longer tolerated Illuminati membership, and several northern German states began to search for Illuminati subversion. Several low-level Illuminati initiates also publicly bragged in Munich of their supposed legal immunity and of the covert power of their secret masters.
Faced with public scrutiny from rebellious subjects and the distribution of profane reading materials, Elector Charles Theodore of Bavaria officially banned secret societies in general on June 22, 1784, and specifically banned the Illuminati on March 2, 1785. The penalty for continued secret society activities was death.
While Weishaupt and his coworker Jakob Lanz were walking home on the night of June 20th, 1785, Lanz was struck by lightning and killed. Lanz’s satchel was seized by the Bavarian authorities, who quickly discovered that Lanz was carrying orders meant to be mailed to Silesian Illuminati members. Weishaupt faced execution for his violation of Bavarian law, so he fled to the Duchy of Saxe-Gotha, whose Duke was a sympathetic ex-Illuminati member. In October 12, 1786, the Bavarian government raided Sandersdorf Castle and discovered a chest containing 130 letters of correspondence of the Illuminati, membership lists, and the degree work of Illuminati initiations. The documents of this find were published by the Bavarian government. Copies of the original text are still in print to this day, albeit in German. The exposure of the Illuminati’s letters revealed Weishaupt to be a seditious and manipulative conspirator against the state. The documents also exposed Weishaupt’s infidelity. The published documents revealed to the public that Weishaupt had impregnated his deceased wife’s sister and then forced his mistress to abort his child. Weishaupt would spend the rest of his life in disgrace in Saxe-Gotha writing apologetics for the actions of the secret society he founded, publishing excuses for his abhorrent personal life, and arguing with Kant over philosophy. Johann Bode attempted to continue the activities of the Illuminati in secret, but by all accounts, his activity quickly fizzled out after the publication of the Areopagus’s innermost secrets and membership lists. Weishaupt, the lynchpin of the Illuminati, was gone, and Knigge, the Illuminati’s main theorist and recruiter, had been expelled. The Illuminati was humiliated and legally suppressed in most states. There was no reason for anyone in the HRE with any political power to affiliate with Bode. If you are interested in a detailed video on the rise and fall of the Illuminati, I recommend watching Semiogogue’s “Light in Darkness” livestream.
Why do people believe that the Illuminati exists to this day, and why does “Illuminati” symbolism keep showing up on your social media feed?
Two books are responsible, both written after the French Revolution: Volume 3 of Augustin Barruel’s Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobins (1799) and John Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy (1797).
The two aforementioned books located the causal factor of the French Revolution at the feet of Enlightenment-era philosophers, French Freemasons, and foreign Illuminati infiltration.
Many of the figureheads of the French Revolution were Freemasons, most notably Philippe Duke of Orleans (cousin of Louis XVI), Mirabeau (early leader of the Jacobins), Marquis de Lafayette, Joseph-Ignace Guillotin (inventor of the guillotine), and Jean-Paul Marat. Prior to the French Revolution, the Parisian lodge The Nine Sisters served as a networking hub for liberal agitators and intellectuals whose membership includes Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin (Past Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania), and John Paul Jones. In Germany, Masonic lodges resembled esoteric book clubs. In France, Masonic lodges resembled salons.
Augustin Barruel was a French Jesuit priest turned expatriate following the French Revolution. Barruel claimed in his Memoirs that French Revolution was brought about by a conspiracy of German atheists who spread cancerous social contagions among the French Masonic lodges, radicalized the happy French population, and organized social clubs that carried out the Revolution. The Catholic Church and monarch were, of course, framed as an innocent and aggrieved bulwark of order. With the endorsement of Barruel’s friend Edmund Burke, Memoirs sold incredibly well in spite of the innumerable factual errors, unsubstantiated conspiracies committed by German heads of state, and false accusations of Masonic membership attributed to innumerable historic figures. Nasty German foreigners from a disgraced, disbanded, and suppressed secret society were responsible for the dissemination of bad French philosophy to French social circles. Joseph De Maistre, French Martinist and Counter-Enlightenment philosopher, scoffed at the absurd claims of the survival, power, and influence of the Illuminati. Nonetheless, Barruel’s book became the apotheosis of anti-Masonic conspiracy mongering.
Similarly, English physicist and mathematician John Robison independently wrote the book Proofs of a Conspiracy with the main contention being that Weishaupt’s Illuminati and Karl Bahrdt’s German Union spearheaded the spread of Enlightenment literature which came into fruition with the French Revolution. Robison claimed that Johann Bode continued operating the Illuminati network underground and infiltrated two French Masonic lodges. Bode then initiated Jacobin Club leader Mirabeau into the Illuminati, who, in turn, initiated the Duke of Orleans into the Illuminati. The factual basis of Robison’s book is significantly more flimsy than Barruel’s. Large portions of Robison’s book are outright fabrications, and his primary source was a Jesuit affiliated with English intelligence. While Barruel’s Memoirs has retained its notoriety due to its passages being plagiarized in the infamous book The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Robison’s historic claim to fame is his popularization of the Illuminati survival conspiracy theory in America.
By the end of the eighteenth century, New England was in a religious shambles. The once-Puritan region of the United States of America had moderated. Congregationalist steeples were supplanted with Universalist Unitarian congregations in what has been termed “The Unitarian Controversy.” Meanwhile, news of the French Revolution was drip-fed to a curious American public. The French Monarchy had lent the Revolutionary American government substantial capital during the War of Independence, and many American Francophiles cheered in support of the French Revolutionaries in 1789. Cheers turned into horror as news of the Reign of Terror reached American shores. Horror turned into frustration. The United States government refused to bribe French officials for the privilege of conducting diplomacy, and the U.S.’s refusal to pay off its accrued loans to France resulted in an undeclared naval war. Many Americans had vocally supported the early French Revolutionaries. As tensions between America and French broke out into armed conflict, shipments of the best-selling book Proofs of a Conspiracy by John Robison arrived in America.
Jedidiah Morse is posthumously known as the “Father of American Geography” because of his authorship of the first children’s educational book on geography written in America. Morse was also a firebrand Yale-educated Orthodox Congregationalist pastor. He decried the watering down of Biblical teachings, the downfall of Spartanesque Puritan public morality, and the wickedness of his political opponents, the Anti-Federalists. The original Puritan seminaries, such as Harvard University, had fallen under the control of Unitarian professors, leaving Yale as the only Congregationalist university in New England. Starting on May 9, 1798, Morse would deliver three sermons decrying the infiltration of the American political establishment by agents of the Illuminati, citing the contents of Robison’s book. Morse asserted that Illuminati agents had emigrated from Germany to France and then to America. There were supposedly between eight hundred and a thousand Illuminati members in the highest elected offices and in the most prestigious seminary positions. These Illuminati members included Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. The downfall of Puritanism was not the fault of a waning Congregationalist church; it was the fault of nefarious Francophile Jacobin agents. The specific accusations of Illuminism and their impact on New England discourse are precisely laid out in the 1918 book New England and the Bavarian Illuminati by Vernon Stauffer. Morse energized his proto-Evangelical Puritan congregations with accusations that, if elected to the office of the Presidency, Thomas Jefferson and his vile Illuminati compatriots would, at the signal of the hidden European cabal, “root out and abolish Christianity, and overthrow all civil government.” By July 4, 1798, Timothy Dwight, the President of Yale, delivered a sermon denouncing the Illuminati Federalist interlopers and encouraged his followers to reelect John Adams for the sake of the Republic. In retrospect, the virality of unfounded Illuminati accusations for the sake of political gain does not seem unreasonable in the Age of QAnon.
Although Federalist George Washington reassured his constituents that the Illuminati had not infiltrated the American government, Federalist governor of New York John Jay sent a letter to Jedidiah Morse thanking him for bringing the Illuminati threat to his attention. Thomas Jefferson reacted with confusion. Jefferson had been an admirer of the aims of the Illuminati, believing Weishaupt to have been an “enthusiast philanthropist.” Ironically, many of Freemason Founding Fathers went on to have political careers supporting the Federalists following the American Revolution, such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Marshall, Paul Revere, and John Hancock. Many Anti-Federalists had strong Jacobin sympathies, but very few were Freemasons, and none of them were members of the Illuminati.
The Illuminati scare in Britain and America can be explained by an inability to explain the failures of provincial politics. The Illuminati were an alien bogeyman that could easily become the scapegoat for any political misfortune. The French people were not at fault for the French Revolution; it was the Illuminati. The Puritan church was not in decline; it was under assault by the Illuminati.
Following the election of Thomas Jefferson to the presidency, interest in the Illuminati died down, as shown in the “Illuminati” Ngram above. Interest in activism against Illuminati agents in Washington morphed into the Anti-Masonic movement in rural New York. As the coastal regions of New England moderated and turned to Universalist conceptions of Christianity, the American backwoods erupted into a revivalist frenzy. The Second Great Awakening kicked off in the Burnt-Over District of upstate New York and surged through the Appalachians. This religious movement can be viewed as a reaction against the increasingly secular and deistic politics of Enlightenment-Era America. As part of the movement, early Evangelicals condemned affiliation with the cosmopolitan Freemasons. To this day, virtually every major Evangelical and confessional church in America forbids its members from affiliation with the Freemasons.
Tension between the Freemasons and Second Great Awakening came to a head in the aftermath of the Morgan Affair. In Upstate New York in 1826, failed businessman and ex-Mason William Morgan attempted to publish an exposé of the Freemasonic degrees. Before he could publish his book, Morgan was kidnapped and disappeared, never to be seen again. A month later, a body was discovered washed up on the shores of Lake Ontario in a manner that was reminiscent of a punishment for violating one’s Masonic oaths. It was later discovered that the body was not Morgan’s, but by the time the identity of the body was confirmed, word had spread of a supposed Masonic ritualistic murder.
American Freemasonry has had a long history of small-town corruption and cover-ups. When men swear to keep each other’s secrets and swear oaths to provide mutual aid in case of emergencies, many acts of mercy, self-sacrifice, and brotherly love will follow alongside many acts of cruelty in the name of fraternity. The apex of public concern regarding the cruelty of fraternal orders peaked in the immediate aftermath of the Morgan Affair.
The result of the Morgan Affair was the Anti-Masonic Movement and the creation of the Anti-Masonic Party, the first major third party in American history. Membership of the Anti-Masonic Party included the likes of John Quincy Adams, Millard Fillmore, and Thaddeus Stevens. The party’s evangelical voting base was primarily concerned with political nepotism among well-connected gentlemen belonging to secret societies. Alongside its primary policy of opposing Masonry, the party opposed Andrew Jackson’s new Democratic Party. Jackson (Grand Master of Tennessee) and many Democrats until the presidential term of Jimmy Carter were high-ranking Freemasons. The Anti-Masonic party saw some minor success in running candidates in Vermont, Pennsylvania, and New York until it merged with the Whig Party in 1841. From the 1820s up until the Civil War, Freemason membership plummeted. Illuminati conspiracies also virtually ceased in America.
Following the Civil War, there was a boom in the creation of fraternal orders, college fraternities, paramilitary fraternities, business networking fraternities, religious fraternities, sports fraternities, mutual aid societies, and special interest fraternities. This was the Golden Age of Fraternalism. According to the book Secret Societies in America: Foundational Studies in Fraternalism:
In 1897, W.S. Harwood, writing in the North American Review, dubbed the post-bellum period the Golden Age of Fraternalism. He noted that fraternal organizations, then commonly called secret societies, claimed 5.5 million members while the total U.S. adult population was approximately 19 million. At the time, the five largest fraternal groups Freemasons, Odd Fellows, Knights of Pythias, Ancient Order of United Workmen, and Knights of the Maccabees had a combined membership of more than 2.5 million. Albert C. Stevens, compiler of the invaluable Cyclopedia of Fraternities, estimated that 40 percent of all adult males held membership in at least one fraternal order.
This boom had several causes: the necessity of welfare in an age before easily affordable insurance; resistance against the Federal occupation of the South in the Reconstruction Era; ethnic tribalism; and innovations in transportation systems that made access to a fraternal network while traveling across the country into a boon.
In addition to secret societies, universities began to develop senior societies. Highly selective fraternities, such as the Skull and Bones at Yale, used esoteric initiation rituals to impart a deadly sense of secrecy among their elite candidates. Many of these fraternities exist to this day.
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a revival of Spiritualism. Occultic, alchemical, theosophical, and mystical orders that had gone extinct were brought back into Europe and America by worldly explorers in search of knowledge — i.e., wealthy dilettantes with fortunes to burn and yearlong globe-trotting vacations to enjoy. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn revived the Rosicrucians, the Ordo Templi Orientis revived the degrees of the Illuminati (without any of the subversive political ambitions), and the Traditional Martinist Order revived the Martinists. There was no shortage of woo-woo occultism in the Golden Age of Fraternalism.
At the heart of this Golden Age were the American Masonic Rites. Today there are three major Masonic Rites (sorry, Tall Cedars and Grotto): the York Rite or American Rite, the Shriners, and the Scottish Rite.
Whenever you see a Masonic lodge on your town’s main street, it is probably a York Rite lodge. This Rite initiates men into the first three degrees of Masonry — after the third, the candidate becomes a full member — and gives its members the option to partake in higher degrees. These higher degrees are optional but grant access to more exclusive social circles and add to the moral lessons of the first three degrees. The higher degrees of the Commandery of the Knights Templar have historic ties to Nativist movements in Northeastern America, occasionally acting as a Nativist paramilitary force. The Knights of the Golden Circle was a secret society of southern slaveowners who wanted to expand American influence throughout the Caribbean by “filibustering” tinpot colonial governments. This later morphed into a secret society of Confederate sympathizers in the North during the Civil War and then turned into neo-Confederate conspirators after the Civil War. The Golden Circle borrowed its symbolism and organizational structure from the York Rite’s Knights Templar. The Texas Revolution is by far the most famous American filibuster, carried out predominantly by York Rite Freemasons.
The Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine (a.k.a. the “Shriners”) is an American Masonic charitable foundation established in 1870 with the intent of drinking copious amounts of alcohol and raising money for children’s hospitals. The Shriners use the aesthetics of late nineteenth century Moorish Revivalism, although the Shriners have no particular esoteric affinity to Oriental aesthetics. The Shriners just like to wear fezzes and drive tiny cars in parades for publicity. Today, they run circuses and host charity dinners to raise money for their philanthropic endeavors. Conspiratorially-minded citizens of the Internet may attribute malicious child-abusing, adrenochrome-harvesting motives to the philanthropy of the Shriners, but there is no evidence of Masonic child abuse at Shriner hospitals. To the contrary, when Shriners do commit crimes, it is usually public intoxication and transporting prostitutes across state lines. The enemy of the Shriners is PETA, not the Catholic Church.
In May 1801, eleven men in Charleston, South Carolina — local Americans and French Haitian expats — created a system of thirty-three degrees and called themselves the Scottish Rite. These degrees featured Templar dialogues, Kabbalistic elements, Zoroastrian and Egyptian symbolism, Biblical references, and a plethora of worldly mystical aspects. The first thirty-two degrees are accessible to most men, but the thirty-third degree is reserved for members of the Supreme Council and honorarily bestowed upon Masons who have accomplished great feats for the benefit of their community or for the benefit of Freemasonry. The Scottish Rite was a minor faction within the broader American Masonic community, having almost no presence in the North during the Civil War, until Albert Pike singlehandedly revised the sloppy thirty-three degrees into theatrical ceremonies.
Albert Pike was a lawyer and advocate for Indian tribes, Know Nothing Party activist, captain in the Mexican-American War, Confederate Brigadier General in the Civil War, and possibly the Arkansas Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. After editing the Scottish Rite degrees, Pike wrote a thousand-page book detailing his intentions behind the symbology and themes for each of his other degrees. His infamous book is Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry. Morals and Dogma is a dense collection of quotes, sarcasm, contradictions, and eclectic references to world religions that cannot be understood by the reader unless the reader has seen the degrees Pike is discussing. Today, many conspiratorially-minded readers of Morals and Dogma have mined and cherry-picked quotes referring to Pike’s musings on Lucifer and Pike’s claim that the first three degrees are necessarily deceptive. The misuse of these quotes as confirmation of Pike’s Satanic intentions is viewed as both hilarious and annoying by Scottish Rite Masons today.
The most famous conspiracy theory attributed to Albert Pike was the Taxil Hoax. In 1885, renowned French satirist of the Catholic Church Leo Taxil converted to Catholicism. Following his conversion, Taxil immediately denounced the Freemasons as Satanists and wrote several exposés between 1891 and 1897 on a secret society of Lucifer-worshipping Freemasons called the Palladists. These Palladists were led by none other than Albert Pike. The exposés described a grand conspiracy of international Satanic agents bent on destroying the Catholic Church and overseeing the future rise of the Antichrist. Taxil’s books reached an international audience and became instant best-sellers. Taxil’s public conversion and anti-Masonry even enabled Taxil to have been granted an audience with Pope Leo XIII. On April 1897, Leo Taxil held a press conference in which he confessed to have fabricated Palladism for the sake of proving the gullibility and bad faith of the Catholic Church. Although Taxil’s works were exposed as a hoax, many conspiracy theorists and pearl-clutching Evangelicals today unknowing attribute many of Taxil’s fabricated Albert Pike quotes on Lucifer to Pike.
Between the Morgan Affair and the Taxil Hoax, references to the Bavarian Illuminati were scarce in America until the publishing of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1903. Ironically, Protocols was published in English by 33rd degree Scottish Rite Mason Henry Ford. Protocols was a Russian publication that detailed the meeting of a Jewish cabal and their nefarious plan of twenty-four protocols to empower a Jewish Elite, disenfranchise the gentiles of the world, abolish the family, censor the press, eradicate all gentile religions, establish a one-world government based on finance and credit rather than the gold standard, establish an all-controlling Jewish state in Israel, and disintegrate the nation-states of the world. Protocols 9 and 15 implicate the Freemasons as dupes, gentile agents of the Elders of Zion, whose purpose is to spread cosmopolitan, liberal ideals and break down the borders between nations. This accusation borrows from the Illuminati infiltration theories of Barruel and Robison and even plagiarizes passages of the two authors’ works. Protocols quickly became the template for the modern conspiracy theory.
The next mutation in the Protocols conspiracy theory was the replacement of the Semitic Elders of Zion with the older Illuminati organization in the conspiracy-frame mythos. Canadian veteran William Guy Carr wrote several books between 1930 and 1958, most notably Pawns in the Game (1956), on the modern-day Illuminati. Carr adopted the framework and themes of Protocols but claimed that the Illuminati were not explicitly Jewish; instead, the Illuminati were Luciferian Jews and gentiles who belonged to the Synagogue of Satan. Ironically, Weishaupt’s original Bavarian Illuminati banned Jews and Pagans from joining his secret society.
Carr claimed the Illuminati used Freemasons around the world to overthrow traditional monarchies, spearhead Communist revolutions, and orchestrate the two World Wars. Carr even claimed that Albert Pike sent a letter to Italian Nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini mentioning three future World Wars. The letter Carr cites has never been seen by anyone other than Carr himself and Chilean Cardinal Jose Rodriguez. Conveniently, Rodriguez neglected to mention the existence of World War III Illuminati letters even though Rodriguez wrote several anti-Masonic tracts. To Carr, international finance and international communism were both systems controlled by one cabal of Illuminati, Rockefeller, Rothschild, and Masonic Satanists hell-bent on the destruction of liberal democracies.
The writings of Carr demonstrate the increasing paranoia and schizophrenia of the Illuminati craze. The Illuminati had morphed from a real-life secret society — with historically identifiable members and plausible culpability in sending copies of Voltaire’s books across national boundaries — to a faceless, omnipresent behemoth. The final form of the Illuminati was the ascension of the once-real secret society into a parody of itself.
The Illuminatus! Trilogy is a satirical counter-culture science fiction book series written by Playboy magazine editors Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson between 1969 and 1971. The series is a Manichean tale of the struggles of New Age Discordian truth-seekers and their fight against the Illuminati. The plot revolves around two detectives uncovering the reasons behind the assassination of real-life historic figures, only to uncover a sinister world of Illuminati cultists and godlike sci-fi horrors. The Freemasons are out of the narrative, but cryogenically frozen Nazis under Ingolstadt, Bavaria, are in. The Illuminati entered the pop culture lexicon through the lampooning of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the works of William Carr. No one seriously believes in the continued existence of the Illuminati, but the counter-culture movement believed in the ever-present oppression of the rotten status quo. Real politicians are assassinated, and real corporations conspire to control markets and minds. The Illuminati are an anthropomorphized abstraction of the perceived grievances of frustrated teenagers. Only paranoid schizophrenics in niche online chatrooms believe in the continued existence of the Illuminati. To most, the historic Illuminati survival conspiracy theory has ascended to the memetic status of self-parody, as exemplified in the Illuminati depicted in the villains of the Deux Ex video game series or the Netflix adult cartoon series Inside Job.
The Eye of Providence was originally a Renaissance symbol for the Trinity with the watchful eye of God at its center. Symbolically, it is an appeal to virtue, as God is always watching. Similarly, on the back of the $1 bill, the Eye of Providence on top of a 13-step (13 original Colonies) has the label Annuit Coeptis next to it. This Latin motto translates to “He favors our undertakings.” The implication of the symbolism is that God is watching the United States of America with approval as long as Americans act virtuously.
The Eye can easily become conspiracy bait if you replace God with a Satanic Cabal that is secretly controlling the world and always watching you. The Illuminati never used the Eye of Providence for one of its symbols… until the Illuminatus! book The Eye of the Pyramid anachronistically made it into the primary symbol of the fictionalized Bavarian Illuminati. Since the 1970s, every cultural artifact and symbol attributed to Freemasonry — senior societies like the Skull and Bones, turn-of-the-century occultists and theosophists, and every assassination attempt and active war — becomes semi-ironically attributed to a faceless evil named after a long-dead Bavarian secret society.
Whenever I scroll through TikTok, Twitter, Telegram, Instagram, or Facebook, I see “Illuminati confirmed” clickbait posts. No, Jay-Z, Beyoncé, and Rihanna are not members of the Illuminati just because they make a triangle with their hands. The triangle hand gesture is Jay Z’s symbol for his record label Roc-A-Fella Records. No, the number 33 does not have any particular symbolic meaning in common parlance beyond the fact that it is an honorary degree of the Scottish Rite. Numerologically reducing news article headlines to the value “33” does not mean that the Masons were orchestrating the subject matter of the news headline. At the height of their power, the Illuminati were able to censor their ideological opponents, distribute transgressive literature, and get out of parking tickets. They didn’t sacrifice babies, and they certainly didn’t leave Scooby-Doo clues around university campuses.
On the anniversary of the founding of the Bavarian Illuminati, it is in the interest of every denizen of the Internet to avoid overly-simplistic, good-versus-evil concepts of governance and to recognize the value of studying and joining real-life fraternal organizations.
The Freemasonic square and compass are living symbols that wish to impart two sage, solemn reminders. The square is a reminder to square your actions. It is a symbol of rectitude in life and conduct. The compasses are a reminder to circumscribe your desires within the moral bounds of a reputable life. It is a symbol of restraint of passions, intemperance, and excess temper. This guidance is simple, but it has more practical value than every conspiracy video on Bitchute combined.
Ok so can I join my grandpas lodge now?
Great work! Thank you for this!