Sunday, 30 August, 2009
UnexplainedMysteries.com
William B Stoecker
The very word "illuminati" can produce strong reactions among true believers and debunkers alike, and the situation is not helped by the many inaccuracies in the film "Angels and Demons." One little known fact: the word has a very specific meaning. It refers to people who are either spiritually enlightened or who claim to be, and it is perhaps significant that many of today's elites refer to themselves as "wise men," and tend to be intellectually pretentious. Mystics have always believed that, by such means as meditation, people can achieve a higher state of consciousness and a oneness with God and with the entire universe. But they have also warned of the "left hand path" to a dangerous partial enlightenment sought (or settled for) by people seeking the supposed paranormal abilities attained in this state, abilities that can be used to obtain temporal wealth and power. Those who believe in the kundalini energy claim that it rises up the spine from the base chakra all the way to the crown chakra, which is when total enlightenment is achieved. It is perhaps significant that the highest level in freemasonry is supposedly the thirty third degree...and most people have 33 vertebrae. This hints that these Masons may be only partially enlightened.
There really was a historical Illuminati, an actual organization, founded by a Bavarian professor of law at the University of Ingolstadt, a man named Adam Weishaupt. Although of Jewish ancestry, his family had become Catholic, and he had been educated by the Jesuits, a somewhat mysterious order in their own right. He joined the Freemasons, and then created the Illuminati as an organization within an organization, infiltrating numerous Masonic lodges and taking control of them, as well as the universities. He created the order on May 1st 1776, and Mayday is a holiday sacred to ancient pagans, and, interestingly enough, to modern communists, and 1776 was the year of the American Declaration of Independence...and many of its instigators were Masons. He chose "Spartacus" as his code name for himself, after the gladiator who rebelled against Rome, and German communists after WWI referred to themselves as "spartacists." Weishaupt preached revolution against all existing social and political order and the destruction of religion, Judeo-Christian morality, and the nuclear family and the institution of marriage. He advocated a global socialist state. He advised his followers to recruit women by telling them that they were oppressed by men. Note that all of these ideas are preached by modern leftists.
In 1782 Masons and other radicals held a conference at Wilhelmsbad in Germany, where Weishaupt recruited German princes and such French Masons as Count Mirabeau, who spread the order to France, recruiting other Masons such as the Duke of Orleans, Danton, and Marat and taking over the Grand Orient Lodge in Paris, as well as the Jacobin clubs. Note the preponderance of well to do individuals and even members of the aristocracy in this movement...rather like today's billionaire radicals and limousine liberals.
These people fomented the French Revolution in 1789, in a nation whose King, though somewhat weak and inept, was anything but tyrannical, and whose economy, despite past wars and the Little Ice Age, was quite prosperous. The Duke of Orleans bought vast amounts of food, creating a shortage, and hired goons (reminiscent of today's "rent a mobs") to foment the bloody French Revolution, which, like most such revolutions since then, was never a true revolution of the people from the bottom up, but a staged revolution by factions within the elite from the top down. The rebels instigated the Reign of Terror, killing hundreds of thousands, mostly peasants, poor workers, and priests and nuns. Like today's leftists, they were obsessed with reducing the human population, although France was hardly overpopulated, having only a fraction of today's population, and Robespierre advocated the butchery of 15 million. Like today's leftists (and the Illuminati), the French revolutionaries hated Christianity and traditional marriage and morality. Acts of torture, vampirism, and cannibalism became commonplace. They sought the destruction of all existing order and the complete remaking of society. Sound familiar?
Meanwhile the Elector of Bavaria had outlawed the Illuminati in 1785, supposedly destroying the order, but, as we shall see, they were merely driven underground.
The French Revolution really established a fascist state, a very special kind of dictatorship, and the first example of one in the modern world, although ancient Sparta resembled a fascist tyranny, and Plato, perhaps inspired by Sparta, described such a state in his "Republic." It is worth noting that every communist government, although preaching an end to private property and disparities of wealth and the withering away of the state, has, in reality, been fascist, with a small elite living in wealth and luxury and controlling or owning all of the property, while the people are impoverished and enslaved, and mass murder, or democide, is a standard practice. Note that Hitler and Mussolini, often considered "right wing," were in fact socialists; both created socialist economies, and Nazi is the acronym for "National Socialist."
So the Illuminati were a historical reality; George Washington even warned the American people against them. We have, then, two questions: do the Illuminati still exist in some form today, and did Weishaupt really found a new order, or merely make public the resurfacing of an ancient evil?
After the Illuminati were supposedly abolished, there emerged in Germany and elsewhere secret societies advocating the same ideas. In 1788 Baron von Knigge, a surviving follower of Weishaupt's, founded the "German Union," controlling book publishing. After 1815 there appeared a mysterious order called the "League of the Just," who recruited Karl Marx to write the Communist Manifesto. By the 1830s there existed in Germany a club for the wealthy elite called "The Order of Death," whose symbol, appropriately enough, was a skull and crossbones...also an old Masonic symbol. They recruited wealthy American sudents in German universities, who brought the order to the United States, where it became known as Chapter 322 of the order, or "Skull and Bones." Many of America's elite belonged to this charming group of light hearted fraternity brothers, including many in the intelligence agencies, and both the Bushes who occupied the White House. Also, the Illuminati had established "Democratic Societies" in the US during the late eighteenth century. Back in Europe, a radical Italian group called the Carbonari emerged among the Masons, led by such men as Mazzini.
And, of course, the Masons themselves, who first surfaced in Scotland and England in the late seventeenth century, have always been a secret society with a pyramidal, hierarchical structure, secret rituals, and a fondness for occult magical symbols. More secret groups emerged in the US and elsehwere, usually connected with the Masons, including George Bickley's Knights of the Golden Circle, who advocated Southern secession and helped bring about the American Civil War. Supposedly many members of the Confederate Secret Service were members, and, according to author G. Edward Griffin, Jesse James and John Wilkes Booth. After the Civil War, this organization became the Ku Klux Klan.
Various occult societies emerged in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, like the Theosophists. In Germany and Austria, the Order of the New Templars surfaced (I will have more to say about the Templars and their connection with freemasonry later on). The ONT became the German Order, which became the Thule Society, which created the Nazi Party and recruited Adolf Hitler as its leader. Alice Bailey, an English Theosophist, hated Jews and admired Hitler, Mussolini, and Napoleon. She preached that God was a tyrant, and worshipped (her own words) a fallen angel called Lucifer. Moving to the US, she founded the Lucis Trust (Lucifer=Lucis), advocating one world government. This cult and its offshoots include as members such people as Henry Kissinger, and designed and maintain the bizarre meditation room at UN headquarters, with its huge monolith of magnetic ore...resembling similar magnetized monoliths I have personally seen atop an ancient pyramid at Tiahuanaco in Bolivia. Albert Pike, a prominent nineteenth century American Mason, also worshipped Lucifer. Another mysterious cult is San Francisco's Bohemian Club. Sveral people have claimed that at their Bohemian Grove in Sonoma County, its members conduct strange rituals around a stone owl; I have myself seen on the door of their building in San Francisco, a picture of the owl, a crescent moon, and the words "weaving spiders, come not here." Many prominent Americans, including those Bonesmen, the Bushes, are members. And then there are the powerful political organizations, also secret societies, like the Council on Foreign Relations, which does, indeed, control the US, and the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderbergers.
But are these groups (all of which advocate many of the same things advocated by Weishaupt) really branches of the Illuminati? Nineteenth Century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli claimed that, above the political parties, there was a secret group who ran everything. American President Woodrow Wilson stated that there was such a group, and said that it was dangerous even to criticize them. And Winston Churchill, in the 1920's, stated that the Illuminati still existed and that they were behind Marxism.
And did the Illuminati exist before Weishaupt supposedly founded them? Could they have been around in ancient, even in prehistoric, Atlantean times? Ancient priesthoods and Greek and Roman Mystery Religions were secret societies, with hierarchical structures and initiation rites. In the early 12th century among Crusaders in the Holy Land, there emerged a secret cult called the Hospitallers, who exist today as the Knights of Malta within the Catholic Church. Shortly after them, also among the Crusaders, nine French knights founded the Templars, using many of the same magical symbols as the Hospitallers. They gained control of the fiat money banking racket, amassing great wealth and power, and were supposedly destroyed by the French King Philippe the Fair, but their fleet escaped capture and most of their treasure was never found. Many joined the Knights of Malta, and those in Spain and Portugal merely changed their name to "Knights of Christ." Robert the Bruce of Scotland owed his victory over the English to a mysterious body of knights who suddenly appeared on the scene...and later, in Scotland, the Masons emerged. To this day, they themselves claim direct descent from the Templars.
So we lack absolute proof of either the antiquity or the continued existence of the Illuminati, but the evidence, while admittedly circumstantial, is compelling.