The Birth of the Illuminati…

OK, even though there’s a whole lot of Voynich-related stuff backed up here, I felt I really had to pass on this link to an excellent page on the birth of the Illuminati conspiracy before I do anything else.

Though I already knew a little bit about nutty Adam Weishaupt and his Bavarian Order of the Illuminati (with all its speculative Freemasonesque ceremonies and faux classical code names for initiates), what I didn’t know before reading this is why anybody ever thought the Illuminati were smart enough to dress themselves, let alone control the destinies of nations. So really, where did that all come from? How did the Illuminati make the leap from effete pseudo-Masons to political puppetmasters?

Of course, the answer is that they never did: rather, the perception that they did sprang from a well-respected Scottish Professor of Natural Philosophy called John Robison. His sensational (1797) book “Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe” proposed that the big, unanswerable madnesses of the day (mainly the French Revolution, but plenty of other stuff besides) had all been deliberately orchestrated by a shadowy international cabal – the Illuminati. History was bunk: conspiracy was all: read all about it, then get over it. Thus The National Enquirer was born (in spirit, at least).

Yet behind the scenes, the real story playing out here was that since 1785 Robison had suffered from “a mysterious medical condition, a severe and painful spasm of the groin“, which “seemed to emanate from behind his testicles“: and so he dosed himself up heavily on opium, making him “vulnerable to melancholy, confusion and paranoia“. Good job he didn’t have the option of taking ecstasy, otherwise we’d all now think the French Revolution was some kind of over-enthusiastic love-in. 😉

Even so, the excitement over his whole account might well have waned just as quickly as it had waxed, had it not been for the multi-language publication soon afterwards of Jesuit Abbé Augustin de Barruel’s huge “Memoires pour Servir a l’Histoire de Jacobinisme”. Even more than Robison’s paranoid opus majus, Barruel’s slab-like book was like a relentless encyclopaedia of Illuminati denunciations: the French Revolution had been ‘foreseen, premeditated, plotted, planned, resolved; everything that happened was the result of the deepest wickedness, because everything was prepared and managed by men who alone held the threads of long-settled conspiracies’. Basically, Dan Brown on acid. 🙂

Actually, Barruel was furious at the way the Revolution had unceremoniously chucked the Jesuits out of France: and so the blackest irony of the whole story is that to channel this anger, he co-opted the form and substance of all the anti-Jesuit propaganda of the previous two centuries to slander the Illuminati (where Weishaupt himself was a former Jesuit)… thus the slandered became the slanderer.

In the end, the whole story boils down to a set of conspiracy Top Trumps cards to play with how you like: to me, the unavoidable conclusion is that Weishaupt, Robison and Barruel were all wildly delusional in different ways – but the bizarre Illuminati mythology meme that emerged from them only came about because their respective political, pharmacological and religious delusions somehow overlapped and intertwined, and in doing so took on a composite mad life of its own. Really, you couldn’t make it up, eh Dan? 🙂