The Secretive Origins of the Illuminati

If someone mentions the Illuminati in everyday conversation, no doubt fabulous and fabulist things rush to mind: pyramids with eyeballs, James Bond-level clandestine evil, tinfoil hats or erudite ritual. And while the name “Illuminati” can refer to any number of real or invented groups over the past few hundred years, the original society of that name got its start in 18th-century Germany as something much smaller: a philosophy club.

Adam Weishaupt joined the University of Ingolstadt in 1772 as a law professor, after spending time as a student and tutor there. He was made dean of the law faculty in 1776, at only 27 years old. But tensions developed quickly. The Jesuit faculty, who had long controlled curriculum at the German university, were peeved by his rising star and high salary, not to mention his subversive views toward religious doctrine and hierarchy.

Weishaupt, for his part, disliked the Jesuits’ level of organizational control and religious influence. Weishaupt viewed himself as a leader and free speech advocate, someone whose influence was needed to spread Enlightenment values such as reason, individualism, liberty and consent of the governed. He decided that “Only by a secret coalition of the friends of liberal thought and progress could the forces of superstition and error be overwhelmed,” wrote historian Vernon Stauffer in New England and the Bavarian Illuminati (1918).

At first, Weishaupt considered joining a local branch of Freemasonry, a fraternal society whose members met to promote Enlightenment values. But he was limited by time, money and station in terms of joining up with a Masonic lodge; so he decided to strike out on his own with a clutch of five favorite students. The Order of the Illuminati was founded in Bavaria on May 1, 1776, and aimed to break religious control over knowledge and social development.

Members had code names (Weishaupt was “Brother Spartacus”), used the Owl of Minerva as a sort of logo and originally considered the name Perfectibilists before Weishaupt settled on “Illuminati.” There were three original levels of membership—Novice, Minerval and Illuminated Minverval—that guided young learners through study of equality, brotherhood, reason and morality.

They were also heavily encouraged to recruit others. A later association with Freemasonry came courtesy of nobleman and Freemason Baron Adolph von Knigge. He brought class status, ritual and governance to the order, and incited an uptick in membership within German Masonic circles.

At its peak in the 1780s, Weishaupt’s Illuminati had as many as a few thousand members and solid influence in Masonic power circles. Internal squabbling and external politics largely led to the order’s decline, though. In addition to the fact that Weishaupt, Knigge and the order’s governing council had large egos and frequent arguments, they also faced external political pressures. Charles Theodore, elector of Bavaria, issued edicts generally condemning secret societies and specifically the Illuminati in the 1780s. In October 1786 and 1787, authorities raided the homes of leading members, seizing internal documents and membership lists, which were then made public.

That could be the end of the story, if you consider the Illuminati just a philosophical club with pyramid scheme-like recruiting and esoteric trappings. Not long after, Weishaupt was exiled from Bavaria, and the society seemed to have been dissolved. But others insisted the group was, in fact, a devious, unkillable secret organization hoping to destabilize church, government and society in their own interest.

Scottish scientist and philosopher John Robison declared in 1798 that despite its demise at the hands of the elector, the Illuminati had reformed under new names and “spread into all the countries of Europe.” He also believed the secretive Masonic fringe group had influenced the French Revolution. As historian Mike Jay explains, Robison viewed the Illuminati to be “in the process of subverting all the cherished institutions of the civilized world into instruments of its secret and godless plan.”

Around the same time, people were concerned the European Illuminati had traveled over the Atlantic to America. Stauffer recounts a sermon by the Reverend Jedediah Morse in which the clergyman warned that covert Illuminati sought nothing less than civil and religious overthrow. “My only aim,” he said, “is to awaken in you and myself a due attention, at this alarming period, to our dearest interests.”

Illuminati conspiracy theories did not go away. Into the 20th century, expansive theories of global influence became a staple of antisemitic, anticommunist, segregationist and religious right-wing politics. In the 1930s, two English women named Nesta Webster and Edith Starr Miller (a.k.a. Lady Queensborough) engaged in the study of secret and occult traditions, including the Illuminati. They connected secret fraternal societies to the idea of a nefarious occult and predominantly Jewish one-world government cabal. In 1935, fundamentalist activist Gerald Winrod called Weishaupt “A Human Devil” and warned that the Illuminati not only still existed but sought “THE BREAK DOWN OF THE WORLD.”

Over time, symbols associated with Freemasonry—such as the Eye of Providence—became widely conflated with the Illuminati in popular culture, amplified by modern fiction like Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. With increasing globalization and social complexity, people turned to the idea of the Illuminati to explain the unexplainable or to create a faceless “Big Bad.”

Author Michael Barkun points out that, ironically, the anti-Illuminati crowd might have done more for the group than its 18th-century adherents: “They insisted that it had never died, that its dissolution was only apparent, and that in the ultimate act of clandestinity, it had survived its own death.”