in print, it turns up in mainstream bookstores and airport paperback racks, as well as at outlets that cater to evangelicals. Robertson’s secret plotters aim to create a world government, simultaneously attacking Christian religion and American liberties, and setting in motion the final struggle between the forces of good and evil that will bring history to a close.
In the course of laying out this scheme, Robertson presents a picture familiar to readers of Illuminati literature: Weishaupt’s order prepared the way for the French Revolution, then became the source for global communism, eventually producing the Russian Revolution. These efforts were financed at key points by Jewish international bankers: the Rothschilds; the firm of Kuhn, Loeb; Jacob Schiff; and the Warburgs.29
This is scarcely an original scenario. Its significance lies not in its content but in its authorship, for Robertson is the first modern religious and political figure of national stature to embrace a belief in an Illuminatist conspiracy. Oddly enough, Robertson’s views passed nearly unnoticed by the mainstream press for four years, until 1995, when they became the subject of two lengthy and critical articles in the New York Review of Books. The articles’ authors, Michael Lind and Jacob Heilbrun, pointed out that Robertson had drawn heavily on the work of both Webster and Mullins, and that in fact he was recycling their anti-Semitic theory of history. The essays appeared at a time that Robertson’s political organization, the Christian Coalition, was reaching out beyond evangelical Protestants to other “people of faith,” including Jews. Stung by the Lind and Heilbrun articles, Robertson and the coalition’s then director, Ralph Reed, apologized to the Jewish community and denied holding anti-Semitic views. Nonetheless, even as his book continued to circulate widely, Robertson has never explained why he employed sources such as Webster and Mullins.30
Authors such as Abraham, Still, Mullins, Marrs, and Robertson represent a widely diffused form of Illuminati conspiracy theory, but theirs is not the only version. They have done little more than produce variations on the synthesis developed by Webster and Queenborough. Simultaneously with this derivative literature, however, a second form of Illuminati material began to appear—what might best be described as superconspiracy theories. In these theories, a single line of secret-society plotters spawned by Illuminism is replaced by extraordinarily complex structures of plots layered within one another, like Russian nested dolls, or linked together in complex combinations. Beginning in the 1970s, increasingly complex scenarios of Illuminati plots began to circulate, first on the fringes of evangelical Protestantism, and subsequently in some New Age circles. Both varieties, for reasons that will become clear, quickly spread into the radical right.
Among the earliest descriptions of a superconspiracy was Des Griffin’s Fourth Reich of the Rich, which appeared in 1976. While Griffin accepts and builds on the work of Robison, Barruel, and Webster, he gives their traditional attack on the Illuminati a significant theological twist, for he projects the origins of the Illuminati back to before the creation of the world. He accomplishes this by fusing the original idea of an Illuminati conspiracy with the far older story of Lucifer’s rebellion against God.31
Griffin believes the earth was originally populated by Lucifer and his fallen angels, after the failure of their rebellion in heaven—a view held by others on the radical right, such as Christian Identity preacher Wesley Swift. Although Adam had the opportunity to undo Satan’s earthly crimes, his and Eve’s sin in the Garden eliminated that option. A satanic system was eventually institutionalized in Babylon by the shadowy Nimrod (a figure sufficiently obscure to be utilized freely by those seeking to reconstruct the antediluvian past). According to Griffin, Nimrod created a satanic religion that not only survived the Flood but eventually infiltrated and captured the Catholic Church. Griffin owes this strange argument to a Scottish divine, Alexander Hislop (1807–65), who presented an almost identical view in his book The Two Babylons, published in the 1850s.32
The novelty of Griffin’s work lies in his fusion of this version of sacred history with conspiracist explanations of modern politics. Thus, in addition to their seizure of the Catholic Church, he claims that satanic forces also lay behind the founding of the Illuminati, which was to become the master instrument in Lucifer’s scheme to regain full control of the earth. Even the Illuminati’s apparent dissolution in the late 1780s was part of the plan, the better to conceal the conspirators’ nefarious activities: “This lie [concerning the dissolution of the Illuminati] has been perpetuated ever since by ‘historians’ anxious to cover the truth about the Illuminati’s subsequent activities.”33
These activities took familiar forms: the French and Russian Revolutions, the establishment of the Federal Reserve, and the advancement of a global dictatorship. In thus linking the Illuminati with both an obscure Luciferian past and a revolutionary future, Griffin made possible a form of anti-Semitism far more sweeping than that which had appeared in the interwar synthesis. He did so by bringing into prominence a theme that had been subordinate in Webster’s writing about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. While Webster was inclined to regard The Protocols as an authentic document of some kind, she was not entirely sure what kind it was—not surprising in light of the fact that her own book, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, was published only a few years after the forgery had been exposed.34
Griffin, writing more than half a century later, has no such reservations. Indeed, he asserts that The Protocols is none other than “the ‘Long Range Master Plan’ by which this comparatively small group of immensely wealthy, diabolically crafty and extremely influential men [the leaders of the Illuminati] plan to subvert and pervert the leadership in all strata of society in order to attain their goal.” As for the Jews, they are important participants in the plot, but The Protocols was deliberately given a Jewish cast so that its Illuminati origins could be better concealed. Griffin reprints most of The Protocols verbatim—launching what was to become a staple of conspiracism in the 1990s, the idea of the “Illuminati Protocols.”35
At the same time that Griffin was laying out his superconspiracy, tales of an equally involved Illuminati plot were sweeping through churches, mainly Pentecostal ones. From 1976 to 1979, itinerant evangelist John Todd began to present, through personal appearances and audiotapes, a strange tale of Illuminati intrigues. Todd claimed to have been raised by a witch mother and trained as a witch since his early teens. He had allegedly progressed through an occult hierarchy until he was made a “Grand Druid High Priest” and “a member of the Druid Council of Thirteen,” the instrumentality through which he claimed the Illuminati implemented their designs.36
Todd was a shadowy figure who moved around frequently, but the basic outlines of his career as an evangelist have been reconstructed. He appeared first as a storefront preacher in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1968. He was then nineteen and already claimed to have been a witch before his born-again experience. He appears to have been in the army from 1969 until sometime in the early 1970s. He had psychiatric problems in the military, though it is not clear whether they led to his discharge. He reemerged in the Phoenix Pentecostal subculture in 1973 with much-elaborated tales of his witchcraft days. He left for Dayton, Ohio, the next year, where instead of rejoining Christian organizations, he opened an occult store, the Witches Cauldron. He apparently engaged in sex with minors during this period, for which he received a sentence of six months in jail. Released after two months and placed on probation, he quickly violated his parole by returning to the Phoenix Pentecostal community, though he may have continued to dabble in the occult. He next appeared in California as a Christian evangelist. During at least some of this time, he appeared to gravitate toward fundamentalism and attacked Pentecostals. Within a few years, his itinerant preaching and tapes of his sermons began to spread widely among conservative Christians.37
Todd’s superconspiracy was remarkably detailed, so much so that there seemed to be more institutions within the conspiracy than outside it. Todd was less concerned with reconstructing history than with laying out the conspiracy’s structure. In place of discussions of the French and Russian Revolutions, he substituted elaborate diagrams of conspiratorial hierarchies, which he passed out at church meetings. The Illuminati
