Robert Wilson - The Illuminatus! Trilogy

"I said," Padre Pederastia whispered, "that we're never sure anybody is on our side. Uncertainty is the name of the game."

J.M.:

On the origin of the pyramid-and-eye symbol, test your credulity on the following yarn from Flying Saucers in the Bible by Virginia Brasington (Saucerian Books, 1963, page 43.):

The Continental Congress had asked Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams to arrange for a seal for the United States of America… None of the designs they created or which were submitted to them, were suitable…

Fairly late at night, after working on the project all day, Jefferson walked out into the cool night air of the garden to clear his mind. In a few minutes he rushed back into the room, crying, jubilantly: "I have it! I have it!" Indeed, he did have some plans in his hands. They were the plans showing the Great Seal as we know it today.

Asked how he got the plans, Jefferson told a strange story. A man approached him wearing a black cloak that practically covered him, face and all, and told him that he (the stranger) knew they were trying to devise a Seal, and that he had a design which was appropriate and meaningful…

After the excitement died down, the three went into the garden to find the stranger, but he was gone. Thus, neither these Founding Fathers, nor anybody else, ever knew who really designed the Great Seal of the United States!

Pat

J.M.:

The latest I've found on the eye-and-pyramid is in a San Francisco underground paper (Planet, San Francisco, July 1969, Vol. I, No.4.), suggesting it as a symbol for Timothy Leary's political party when he was running for governor of California instead of just running:

The emblem is a tentative design for the Party's campaign button. One wag suggests that everyone cut out the circle from the back of a dollar bill and send the wholly dollar to Governor Leary so he can wallpaper his office with them. Then paste the emblem on your front door to signify your membership in the party.

Translations: The year of the beginning New Secular Order

Both translations are wrong, of course. Annuit Coeptis means "he blesses our beginning" and Novus Ordo Se~ clorem means "a new order of the ages." Oh, well, scholarship was never the hippies' strong point. But - Tim Leary an Illuminatus?

And pasting the Eye on the door - I can't help but think of the Hebrews marking their doorways with the blood of a lamb so that the Angel of Death would pass by their houses.

Pat

J.M.:

I've finally found the basic book on the Illuminati: Proofs of a Conspiracy by John Robison (Christian Book Club of America, Hawthorn, California, 1961; originally published in 1801). Robison was an English Mason who discovered through personal experience that the French Masonic lodges- such as the Grand Orient- were Illuminati fronts and were the main instigators of the French Revolution, His whole book is very explicit about how Weishaupt worked: every infiltrated Masonic group would have several levels, like an ordinary Masonic lodge, but as candidates advanced through the various degrees they would be told more about the real purposes of the movement. Those at the bottom simply thought they were Masons; in the middle levels, they knew they were engaged in a great project to change the world, but the exact nature of the change was explained to them according to what the leaders thought they were prepared to know. Only those at the top knew the secret, which- according to Robison- is this: the Illuminati aims to overthrow all government and religion, setting up an anarcho-communist free-love world, and, because "the end justifies the means" (a principle Weishaupt acquired from his Jesuit youth), they didn't care how many people they killed to accomplish that noble purpose. Robison knows nothing of earlier Illuminati movements, but does say specifically that the Bavarian Illuminati was not destroyed by the government's crackdown in 1785 but was, in fact, still active, both in England and France and possibly elsewhere, when he wrote, in 1801. On page 116, Robison lists their existing lodges as follows: Germany (84 lodges); England (8 lodges); Scotland (2); Warsaw (2); Switzerland (many); Rome, Naples, Ancona, Florence, France, Holland, Dresden (4); United States of America (several). On page 101, he mentions that there are 13 ranks in the Order; this may account for the 13 steps on their symbolic pyramid. Page 84 gives the code name of Weishaupt, which was Spartacus; his second-in-command, Freiherr Knigge, had the code name Philo (page 117); this is revealed in papers seized by the Bavarian government in a raid on the home of a lawyer named Zwack, who had the code name Cato. Babeuf, the French revolutionary, evidently took the name Gracchus in imitation of the classical style of these titles. Robison's conclusion, page 269, is worth quoting:

Nothing is as dangerous as a mystic Association. The object remaining a secret in the hands of the managers, the rest simply put a ring in their own noses, by which they may be led about at pleasure; and still panting after the secret they are the more pleased the less they see.

Pat

At the bottom of the page was a note in pencil, scrawled with a decisive masculine hand. It said: "In the beginning was the Word and it was written by a baboon."

J.M.:

The survival of the Bavarian Illuminati throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth is the subject of World Revolution by Nesta Webster (Constable and Company, London, 1921). Mrs. Webster follows Robison fairly closely on the early days of the movement, up to the French Revolution, but then veers off and says that the Illuminati never intended to create their Utopian anarcho-communist society: that was just another of their masks. Their real purpose was dictatorship over the world, and so they soon formed a secret alliance with the Prussian government. All subsequent socialist, anarchist, and communist movements are mere decoys, she argues, behind which the German General Staff and the Illuminati are plotting to overthrow other governments, so Germany can conquer them. (She wrote right after England fought Germany in the First World War). I see no way of reconciling this with the Birchers" thesis that the Illuminati has become a front for the Rhodes Scholars to take over the world for English domination. Obviously- as Robison states- the Illuminati say different things to different people, to get them into the conspiracy. As for the links with modern communism, here are some passages from her pages 234-45:

But now that the (First) Internationale was dead it became necessary for the secret societies to reorganize, and it is at this crisis that we find that "formidable sect" springing to life again- the original llluminati of Weishaupt… What we do know definitely is that the society was refounded in Dresden in 1880… That it was consciously modelled on its eighteenth century predecessor is clear from the fact that its chief, one Leopold Engel, was the author of a lengthy panegyric on Weishaupt and his Order, entitled Geschichte des Illuminaten Ordens (published in 1906)…

… In London a lodge called by the same name… carried on the rite of Memphis- founded, it is said, by Cagliostro on Egyptian models- and initiated adepts into illuminized Freemasonry…

Was it… a mere coincidence that in July 1889 an International Socialist Congress decided that May 1, which was the day on which Weishaupt founded the Illuminati, should be chosen for an annual International Labour demonstration?