{"id":22513,"date":"2013-10-11T12:34:54","date_gmt":"2013-10-11T17:34:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=22513"},"modified":"2013-10-11T12:34:54","modified_gmt":"2013-10-11T17:34:54","slug":"the-truth-about-the-illuminati","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/10\/11\/the-truth-about-the-illuminati\/","title":{"rendered":"The “truth” about the “Illuminati”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jesse Walker<\/a> is invited to free-associate on a series of words or phrases by the staff of TNB<\/em>. One of the terms they just happened to mention was “Illuminati”:<\/p>\n

The Bavarian Illuminati \u2014 the actual historical organization, not the all-powerful cabal of legend \u2014 were founded by Adam Weishaupt in 1776 and suppressed about a decade later. They weren\u2019t the first group to call themselves Illuminati, and they weren\u2019t the first Illuminati to appear in a New World conspiracy theory. In Chiapas in the 1580s, a bishop became convinced that some of the local Indians were \u201cgiving cult to the Devil and plotting against our Christian religion.\u201d The secret sect\u2019s beliefs, he added, resembled those of the Spanish heretics known as the Alumbrados, or Illuminati.<\/p>\n

But the Bavarians were the biggies. Their alleged machinations set off a panic in Federalist circles at the end of the 1790s. The New England minister Jedidiah Morse sermonized that he had \u201can official, authenticated list of the names, ages, places of nativity, professions, &c. of the officers and members of a Society of *Illuminati* \u2026 consisting of *one hundred* members\u201d; among other things, the plotters allegedly had a plan \u201cto invade the southern states from [Haiti] with an army of blacks \u2026 to excite an insurrection among the negroes.\u201d Another Federalist writer warned that Thomas Jefferson was an agent of the cabal. The order entered pop culture, too. In Sally Wood\u2019s novel *Julia and the Illuminated Baron*, published in 1800 and set in prerevolutionary France, a lady Illuminatus describes their initiation ceremony: \u201cdisrobed of all coverings except a vest of silver gauze, I am to be exposed to the homage of all the society present upon a marble pedestal placed behind which sacrifices are to be offered.\u201d She adds, \u201cThis sect increases daily. They will in a few years overturn Europe and lay France in ruins.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the 20th century the Illuminati became stock villains on the far right, appearing alternately as a revolutionary force and as the secret rulers of the world. In the 1960s they started cropping up in countercultural and leftist tales too, thanks partly to some pranksters who thought it would be fun to seed the underground press with stories about Illuminati activities. A couple of those pranksters wrote the cult novel Illuminatus!<\/em> in the 1970s, and that helped re-inject the idea into mass culture. These days, of course, the Illuminati are everywhere. Er, I mean *stories about* the Illuminati are everywhere.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

All of these theories are quite clearly mistaken or deliberately fraudulent … unlike the shadowy Council of 300<\/a>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jesse Walker is invited to free-associate on a series of words or phrases by the staff of TNB. One of the terms they just happened to mention was “Illuminati”: The Bavarian Illuminati \u2014 the actual historical organization, not the all-powerful cabal of legend \u2014 were founded by Adam Weishaupt in 1776 and suppressed about a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,7,28],"tags":[127],"class_list":["post-22513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-history","category-media","tag-conspiracytheories"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5R7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22513"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22513\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22514,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22513\/revisions\/22514"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}