The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

Rumours that the Illuminati lived on were rife, however, and were boosted by the arrest of the occultist «Count» Cagliostro in Rome in 1789. Under interrogation by the Inquisition, Cagliostro loquaciously confessed the secrets of the Masons and the Knights Templar and, warming to his theme, declared that the Illuminati were plotting to oust both the Holy See and the Bourbons. At overthrowing the ancien régime of France the Illuminati were, according to the Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (1797) by Abbe Augustin Barruel, 1797, successful; the French Revolution was an experiment in «Illuminism». Within a decade, the Illumanti had become premier bogeymen in the fetid, fevered minds of conservative Europe: Professor John Robison fingered them in his Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free-Masons, Illuminati and Reading Societies (1798), while Johann August Starck, in his Triumph der Philosophie in Achtzenten Jahrhundert (1803), considered the Illuminati the poisonous bloom of a conspiracy that could trace its roots to the Ancient Greeks.

That there was no evidence for the continued existence of the Illuminati bothered none of these writers, just as it failed to trouble the British writer Nesta H. Webster, whose Secret Societies and Subversive Movements (1924) detected the hands of the Illuminati in the recent Russian Revolution. Webster’s book enjoyed some influence in her home country, but was really taken to be conspiracy gospel by the US far right. Today, the Illuminati are Public Enemy Number One for the John Birch Society, the militias and the Christian fundamentalists, who claim to have detected the Illuminati’s real goal: a single, authoritarian, Satanic global government — the New World Order.

There is a secret sign of America’s special role for the Illuminati: the motto Novus Ordo Seclorum (to be translated as «New World Order») on the US dollar bill. Alas, a better translation is «New Order of the Ages» or even just «fresh new start». This is typical of the evidence posited for the Illuminati’s existence beyond the 18th century by Robison, Starck, Webster and modern epigones such as William Cooper, which is without exception either specious or self-referential.

There is, then, only a difference of degree between «exposes» of the Illuminati and pure fictional potboilers such as Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons and the Robert Shea/Robert Anton Wilson Illuminatus! Trilogy. In both genres, the Illuminati are useful stock bad guys.

Secret society the Illuminati is intent on global control: ALERT LEVEL 2

Further Reading

William Cooper, Behold a Pale Horse, 1991

Arkon Daraul, A History of Secret Societies, 1961

John Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, 1798

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DOCUMENT: THE FOUNDATION OF THE ILLUMINATI, FROM CHAPTER 2 OF JOHN ROBISON’S PROOF OF A CONSPIRACY AGAINST ALL THE RELIGIONS AND GOVERNMENTS OF EUROPE