The Illuminati Freemason Conspiracy
"Princes and nations will disappear without violence
from the earth, the human race will become one family
and the world the abode of reasonable men. Morality alone
will bring about this change imperceptibly."
-- Adam Weishaupt (1748-1830)
The Freemasons began as members of craft guilds who united
into lodges in England in the early 1700's. They stressed
religious tolerance, the equality of their male peers,
and the themes of classic liberalism and the Enlightenment.
Today they are a worldwide fraternal order that still
educates its members about philosophical ideas, and engages
in harmless rituals, but also offers networking for business
and political leaders, and carries out charitable activities.
The idea of a widespread freemason conspiracy originated
in the late 1700's and flourished in the US in the 1800's.
Persons who embrace this theory often point to purported
Masonic symbols such as the pyramid and the eye on the
back of the dollar bill as evidence of the conspiracy.
Allegations of a freemason conspiracy trace back to British
author John Robison who wrote the 1798 book 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, collected
from good authorities. Robison influenced French
author Abbé Augustin Barruel, whose first two
volumes of his eventual four volume study, Memoirs
Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, beat Robison's
book to the printer. Both Robison and Barruel discuss
the attempt by Bavarian intellectual Adam Weishaupt to
spread the ideas of the Enlightenment through his secretive
society, the Order of the Illuminati.
Weishaupt was appointed a professor at the University
of Ingolstadt in Germany around 1772 and elevated to
the post of professor of Canon Law in 1773 or 1775 (sources
conflict), the first secularist to hold that position
previously held by clergy. Weishaupt began planning
a group to challenge authoritarian Catholic actions in
1775, the group (under a different name) was announced
on May 1, 1776. This group evolved into the Illuminati.
The Enlightenment rationalist ideas of the Illuminati
were, in fact, brought into Masonic lodges where they
played a role in a factional fight against occultist
philosophy. The Illuminati was suppressed in a series
of edicts between 1784 and 1787, and Weishaupt himself
was banished in 1785.
Weishaupt, his Illuminati society, the Freemasons, and
other secret societies are portrayed by Robison and Barruel
as bent on despotic world domination through a secret
conspiracy using front groups to spread their influence.
Barruel claimed the conspirators "had sworn hatred to
the altar and the throne, had sworn to crush the God
of the Christians, and utterly to extirpate the Kings
of the Earth." For Barruel the grand plot hinges on how
Illuminati "adepts of revolutionary Equality and Liberty
had buried themselves in the Lodges of Masonry" where
they caused the French revolution, and then ordered "all
the adepts in their public prints to cry up the revolution
and its principles." Soon, every nation had its "apostle
of Equality, Liberty, and Sovereignty of the People."
Robison, a professor of Natural Philosophy at the University
of Edinburgh in Scotland, argued that the Illuminati
evolved out of Freemasony, and called the Illuminati
philosophy "Cosmo-politism." According to Robison:
"Their first and immediate aim is to get the
possession of riches, power, and influence, without industry;
and, to accomplish this, they want to abolish Christianity;
and then dissolute manners and universal profligacy will
procure them the adherents of all the wicked, and enable
them to overturn all the civil governments of Europe;
after which they will think of farther conquests, and
extend their operations to the other quarters of the
globe, till they have reduced mankind to the state of
one indistinguishable chaotic mass."
Robert Alan Goldberg, in his book Enemies Within,
summarizes the basic themes of the books by Barruel and
Robison:
"Writing in the aftermath of the French Revolution,
these monarchists had created a counterhistory in defense
of the aristocracy. Winning the hearts and minds of present
and future readers would assuage some of the pain of
recent defeat and mobilize defenses. The Revolution,
they argued, was not rooted in poverty and despotism.
Rather than a rising of the masses, it was the work of
Adam Weishaupt’s Illuminati, a secret society that
plotted to destroy all civil and religious authority
and abolish marriage, the family, and private property.
It was the Illuminati who schemed to turn contented peasants
'from Religion to Atheism, from decency to dissoluteness,
from loyalty to rebellion.' "
The major immediate political effect of allegations of
an Illuminati Freemason conspiracy in Europe was to mobilize
support for national oligarchies traditionally supported
by the Catholic Church hierarchy. Across Europe authoritarian
governing elites were coming under attack by reformist
and revolutionary movements demanding increased political
rights under secular laws. The ideas of the Enlightenment
were incorporated by the leaders of both the French and
American revolutions, and in a sense, these Enlightenment
notions were indeed subversive to the established social
order, although they were hardly a secret conspiracy. The
special status of the Catholic Church in European nation-states
was actually threatened by the ideas being discussed by
the Illuminati and the rationalist wing of the Freemasons.
Several common conspiracist themes emerge from these
two books. The Enlightenment themes of equality and liberty
are designed to destroy respect for property and the
natural social hierarchy. Orthodox Christianity is to
be destroyed and replaced with universalism, deism...or
worse. Persons with a cosmopolitan outlook--encouraging
free-thinking and international cooperation--are to be
suspect as disloyal subversive traitors out to undermine
national sovereignty and promote anarchy.
Shortly after the Barruel book was published, conspiracy
theories about the Illuminati Freemasons were mixed with
antisemitism in Europe. This confluence took place much
later in the US.
Adapted from Berlet & Lyons, Right-Wing
Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort.
Bibliography
Abbé Augustin Barruel, Memoirs Illustrating
the History of Jacobinism, second edition revised
and corrected, English translation by Robert Clifford, (originally
published 1797-1798, reprinted in one volume, Fraser,
MI: Real-View-Books, 1995).
John Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy—against
All the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried
on in the secret meetings of Freemasons, Illuminati
and Reading Societies, fourth edition with postscript,
(originally published 1798, reprinted Boston: Western
Islands, 1967)
Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American
Politics,” in The Paranoid Style in American
Politics and Other Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1965).
Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the
Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders
of Zion, (London: Serif, 1967 [1996].
George Johnson, Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories
and Paranoia in American Politics, (Los Angeles:
Tarcher/Houghton Mifflin, 1983).
Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons, Right-Wing Populism
in America: Too Close for Comfort, (New York:
Guilford Publications, 2000)
Robert Alan Goldberg, Enemies Within: The Culture
of Conspiracy in Modern America, (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2001).
Herm. Gruber, "Illuminati," The Catholic Encyclopedia,
Volume VII, (New York, NY: Robert Appleton Company,
1910).
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