systems, government bureaus such as the State Department, and a myriad of private organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations.”14
So much mythology has encrusted the Illuminati that their actual history has been obscured, even by scholars. This is a case of the image having achieved greater prominence than the reality of the organization itself—an ultimate though dubious tribute to the influence of the genre begun by Robison and Barruel. Distinguishing the image from what it purports to represent is made more difficult by the Illuminati’s own penchant for secrecy, its small size, and its brief lifespan. Nonetheless, the broad outlines of its history are reasonably clear.
The Bavarian Illuminati (formally, the Order of Illuminists) was established by a Bavarian canon-law professor, Adam Weishaupt, on May 1, 1776. Utilizing organizational models taken from both the Jesuits and the Masons, Weishaupt created a secular organization whose aim was to free the world “from all established religious and political authority.” An elaborate apparatus of secrecy and ritual was designed not only to protect the organization from state penetration but to mold its members into an elite capable of achieving Weishaupt’s grandiose objective. By the early 1780s, it had acquired a peak membership of approximately twenty-five hundred, most in German-speaking areas. The organization’s aims and its clandestine methods (for example, the infiltration of some Masonic lodges) attracted unwelcome government attention, which proved potent enough to bypass even the order’s security measures. By 1787, the Illuminati had been dissolved, but its sweeping goals, attention to secrecy, and insistence on unswerving personal dedication made it a model for a sizable number of early-nineteenth century revolutionary organizations, much in the manner of the Paris Commune in the next century.15
In short, the Illuminati influenced subsequent revolutionaries, albeit indirectly, even though the organization seems on the most reliable evidence to have lasted no more than eleven or twelve years. Yet the irony is that if its sympathizers were eager to preserve its legacy and to achieve the total liberation that had eluded Weishaupt, its enemies were even more eager to keep it alive. 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. The fact that the order had been dissolved even before the French Revolution began made allegations of its survival all the more attractive, for how better to explain an unprecedented upheaval than by fastening on an unprecedentedly cunning cabal? Hence by an act of reductionist self-deception, opponents of the revolution could both explain its occurrence and resuscitate the Illuminati. And so began the convoluted tale of an evil conspiracy that was said to move from country to country, and century to century, setting off revolutionary conflagrations wherever it appeared.
The Illuminati in the Twentieth Century
Illuminati literature took a major leap in the interwar period of the twentieth century, when the legend of Weishaupt’s group came to be placed within a far more complex and ambitious conception of history. This transformation was mainly the work of two English writers, Nesta Webster (1876–1960) and Lady Queenborough, also known as Edith Starr Miller (d. 1933), each responsible for remarkably similar syntheses of the Illuminati literature. It is scarcely hyperbole to say, as Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke does, that without Webster “few Americans today would have heard of the Illuminati.” The women shared an unshakable faith in Robison’s and Barruel’s notion that the Illuminati were responsible for the French Revolution, and like the earlier authors, they insisted that the Illuminati had not disappeared in the late 1780s but had gone on causing mayhem for decades thereafter. More important, Webster and Queenborough added two ideas that turned out to be immensely influential in later years: first, that world history could be correctly understood only as the product of the machinations of secret societies; and second, that Jews were central to these activities. By elevating secret societies to the role of prime movers in world history, they left the French Revolution behind, extending the Illuminati’s field of action into the present, including above all a catalytic role in the Russian Revolution. By linking Illuminism with the Jews, Webster and Queenborough gained access to a whole new body of conspiracy ideas, which they quickly appropriated.16
The problem they both confronted was that of fitting an organization that had not been founded until 1776 and that appeared to have fizzled out in about 1787 into a conspiracist historiography. Building such a theory, while at the same time giving the Illuminati their due, required them to sweep in a whole raft of other organizations as ancestors, successors, affiliates, or subsidiaries of the Illuminati. In the end, Webster and Queenborough included, among many others, the Knights Templar, the kabbalists, the Rosicrucians, and the Carbonari, postulating or claiming to demonstrate all manner of linkages among dozens of clandestine groups. Thus was born the concept of a kind of interlocking directorate of conspirators who operate through a network of secret societies. The fact that there had actually been secret societies that had played a modest role in channeling European political dissent from about 1790 until the middle of the nineteenth century gave a surface plausibility to some of these claims, but scarcely provided justification for the wildly inflated charges made by Webster and Queenborough.17
Webster, writing in 1924, concluded that the world’s ills were attributable to anti-Christian Illuminati, to “Pan-German Power” (she was, after all, writing shortly after World War I), and to “the Jewish power.” She was unsure exactly how these three forces were intertwined, but proposed the following scenarios:
If . . . one inner circle exists, composed of Illuminati animated by a purely destructive purpose it is conceivable that they might find support in those Germans who desire to disintegrate the countries of the Allies with a view to future conquest, and in those Jews who hope to establish their empire on the ruins of Christian civilization. . . . On the other hand it may be that the hidden center consists in a circle of Jews located in the background of the Grand Orient [Masonry] working in accord and using both Pan-Germans and Gentile Illuminati as their tools.
She ended up unsure which was the more likely, though she clearly leaned toward the second possibility. In any case, who was using whom scarcely mattered, since the three forces differed only marginally in their capacity for evil.18
Lady Queenborough’s view of the world was much the same: a complex of secret societies acted in concert to control the world and corrupt its values through their domination of the arts, political parties, the press, crime, and a host of other forces. But for her the ultimate lever was money, because money could buy control. “This power,” she concluded, “is wholly in the hands of international Jewish financiers.” She had less difficulty than Webster in figuring out the relation between the Illuminati and the Jews; as far as she was concerned, the Illuminati was simply one tentacle of the Jewish world conspiracy: “Illuminism rep-resented the efforts of the heads of the powerful Jewish Kahal [sic] which has ever striven for the attainment of political, financial, economic and moral world domination.”19
Webster’s and Queenborough’s ideas quickly crossed the Atlantic. Once again, the main channel for their dissemination in America appears to have been Gerald Winrod. His 1935 pamphlet Adam Weishaupt, a Human Devil drew explicitly on Webster and Queenborough, as well as on Barruel and Robison. Paraphrasing Queenborough, Winrod concluded, “The real conspirators behind the Illuminati were Jews.” As far as he was concerned, communism in the Soviet Union was merely Illuminism’s most recent manifestation. “Karl Marx . . . edited [sic] his teaching out of the writings of Adam Weishaupt.” As if that were not sufficient, Winrod proceeded to lay out a series of resemblances between the Illuminati and the Bolsheviks, ranging from alleged ideological parallels to their common penchant for changing their names. He concluded “that the Illuminati was Jewish. In like manner the Moscow dictatorship is Jewish.” Hence to fight Jews was simultaneously to fight both communism and the Illuminati, who now merged into a single entity.20
Anti-Illuminism thus became a staple of the American
