083 SMITH JOURNALDESPITE WHAT THEY MAY CLAIM
- OR EVEN BELIEVE – THE AVERAGE
CONSPIRACY THEORIST DOES NOT
FEAR THAT THE WORLD IS BEING
MANIPULATED BY A SECRETIVE
CONFEDERACY OF NEFARIOUS AND
UNACCOUNTABLE PLOTTERS.
..........................................
Rather, the average conspiracy theorist
fears that it is not. Conspiracy theories
flourish, like religions, in that portion of
the human mind unable to cope with the
idea that our existence is a fluke, that our
lives are ultimately trivial, and that our
world is a circus of chaos in which no end
of unfair, unfortunate or downright weird
stuff just happens – and could, therefore,
happen to us.
Religious believers tend to place their faith
in extraterrestrial apparitions: omniscient
gods pulling the levers of fate. By contrast,
the conspiracy theorist insists that human
affairs are orchestrated by yet more humans.
If you’ve spent longer than about five minutes
of your life online, you’ll be familiar with the
usual suspects: the Bilderberg Group, the
Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral
Commission – the list goes on.
You don’t have to wear a tinfoil hat to agree
that these organisations exist, though
evidence for their engineering of the Kennedy
assassinations, 9/11, and the poisoning of Phar
Lap is slight. Stranger than these more or less
orthodox talking shops, however, is the belief
in an entity credited not merely with power
it does not retain, but existence it does not
possess: the Illuminati.As is the case with every conspiracy theory,
evidence for the Illuminati is plentiful –
for those determined to find it. There are
those who see signs of the group’s nefarious
machinations in the eye atop the pyramid
on the U.S. one-dollar bill; in the triangular
hand gestures allegedly made by world
leaders while being photographed at global
summits; and even, some insist, in the
names chosen by Jay-Z and Beyoncé for their
children. (Why an omnipotent cabal of the
globe’s secret rulers would make a habit of
dangling clues about their existence in front
of us remains an open question.)Interestingly, it turns out the very much
made-up-sounding group isn’t entirely
made up. There actually was an organisation
called the Illuminati, founded by the
Bavarian philosopher Adam Weishaupt in- Weishaupt’s Illuminati began life as a
glorified book club for himself and a few of his
colleagues, who were interested in exploring
the ideas of governance beyond monarchy
and church, but who found Freemasonry
a tad stuffy. (Weishaupt was attracted to
practices we might now describe as ‘New Age’,
getting well into arcane Greek mythology, the
Kabbalah, and other spiritual knowledge.)
Like the Freemasons, Weishaupt’s Illuminati
established rites and rituals, replete with code
names (Weishaupt was known as ‘Brother
Spartacus’) and ranks denoting seniority.
Once accepted as a Novice, a new member
could hope for promotion to Minerval, then
Illuminated Minerval and so on. (As is the
way of all bureaucracies, things became more
pointlessly complicated as numbers grew.)Membership of the Illuminati expanded
quickly across Europe into the hundreds,
then the thousands. The group included some
powerful and influential people – Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe was a member, as was
Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, a smattering
of relatively progressive dukes, and Mayer
Amschel Rothschild, the founder of the
eponymous banking dynasty whose surname
has functioned as a bat-signal for fulminating
cranks ever since.>>the true history
of the illuminati
BELIEVERS CLAIM THE SECRETIVE ORGANISATION
CONTROLS THE WORLD. BUT THE TRUTH BEHIND
THE ILLUMINATI IS FAR STRANGER.Writer Andrew Mueller