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As had also been the case with the
Freemasons, however, the Illuminati attracted
the suspicions of people who feared it had
become something more than a means for
pompous rich blokes to get away from the
wife for the occasional evening’s chinwag. In
1785 the Illuminati was outlawed on pain of
death. Weishaupt fled Bavaria and spent his
days teaching philosophy at the University of
Gottingen, where he composed embittered
tracts about his beloved society’s persecution,
thus pioneering the role of the modern
conspiracy theory bore.
Yet the idea of the Illuminati never entirely
disappeared. Rather, its legend drifted
through the ether for nearly 200 years before
attracting, in the 1960s, the antennae of a few
wayward bohemians, who lent Weishaupt’s
secret society a new life.
..........................................
In 1964, two underground writers named
Kerry Wendell Thornley and Greg Hill self-
published a book titled Principia Discordia.
Though a feat of creativity, today Principia
reads like an exercise in laboured zaniness,
the kind that was presumably amusing at
the time, but which has rendered so much of
the period retrospectively unbearable.
(To give you an idea, the book was subtitled
How I Found Goddess and What I Did to Her
When I Found Her, and the authors named
themselves Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst
and Malaclypse the Younger.)
The doctrine the book espoused, known as
Discordianism, was based on disruption and
prankery – what might now be known as
‘culture jamming’. Indeed, Thornley and Hill
spent much of their spare time messing with
‘the Establishment’, principally by writing
prank letters. Their methods may have
been juvenile, but there was a serious cause
underlying the tomfoolery. Thornley and Hill
were worried the world was becoming too
closed-minded, and they wanted to bring
a little chaos back in to shake things up.
Spreading misinformation, they thought,
might help the cause.An early target was Playboy magazine,
to which Thornley and Hill sent letters
claiming to describe a depraved, secret
society they had uncovered, known only as
the Illuminati. The prank proved an astute
decision, for two reasons. One was that the
correspondence columns of Playboy were not
known for their exacting standards of truth,
filled as they often were by the dispatches of
sweaty fantasists relating unlikely tales of
nymphomaniac hitchhikers.The other was that Playboy’s letters pages- specifically the Playboy Adviser columns,
which addressed the concerns and queries
of readers – were edited by Robert Anton
Wilson and Robert Shea, two journalists who
were Discordians in spirit, if not yet by formal
induction. They cheerfully printed Thornley
and Hill’s fervid witterings about the
Illuminati, and concocted a few of their own.
A typical letter, from one “R.S.” of Kansas
City, said they’d heard about the Illuminati
from an elderly family friend, and sought
further information, finishing with several
pertinent questions: “Are the Illuminati part
of the Masons? Is Aga Khan their leader? Do
they really own all the banks and TV stations?
And who have they killed lately?”The last question was key: the assassination of
President Kennedy in 1963 seemed to many
Americans an act so monstrously jarring that
it could not possibly have been occasioned by
something so trivial as a small man’s grudge.
People wanted explanations – or, rather,
explanations more satisfactory than the truth- and Wilson and Shea were happy to provide
them, or at least an airy facsimile of one.
Their response to “R.S.” – presumably Robert
Shea, not working overlong on his nom de
plume – made reference to Adam Weishaupt’s
original Illuminati, but concluded, cunningly,
with the kind of chortling dismissal most
likely to inflame the incredulous. “The belief,”
they wrote, “that the Illuminati survive in the
modern world and are responsible for most of
our evils is about the fourth most common form
of organised paranoia extant (its three more
popular rivals are the Elders of Zion conspiracy,
the Jesuit conspiracy, and the notion that we
have already been invaded by outer space, our
governments in the hands of Martians).”Wilson and Shea decided there was still
more fun to be had with the idea. In time
off from goading the readers of Playboy, the
pair wrote the Illuminatus! trilogy, a novel
in three volumes – The Eye In The Pyramid,
The Golden Apple, Leviathan – which was