Introduction to Adam Weishaupt's Lamp of Diogenes
by Robert Anton Wilson
CHORUS
Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?
--George W. Bush
The only book you've got to read is The Godfather.
That's the only one that tells how the world is really run.
--Roberto Calvi, President, Banco Ambrosiano; stretched, London, 18/6/1982
Adam Weishaupt founded -- or revived -- the secret Order of the Illuminati on
May 1, 1776; that much seems like Historical Fact. All else remains disputed
and heatedly controversial.
Most historians believe the Illuminati originally recruited only high degree
Freemasons, and every generation since 1785 -- when the Bavarian government
discovered and outlawed the Illuminati -- Freemasons have faced the charge that
they remain "under Illuminati control."
They all deny it, of course.
Well, not all of them; a Scotch Freemason, John Robison, in his Proofs of a
Conspiracy [1801], claimed the damned Illuminati had taken over Continental
European Masonry; he wrote chiefly to warn the lodges of England, Scotland and
Ireland against a similar coup.
Ever since Robison, the Masonic/Illuminati debate has included those who think
the Weishauptians have taken over all Freemasoic lodges, those like Robison who
think they've only infiltrated some, and those, including the Encyclopedia
Britannica, who see Illuminism as a "short-lived movement of Republican
free thought" which never had a major influence on Masonry -- or on
anything else.
But the Illuminati debate covers a lot more ground than that.
For example: Kris Millegan in his Fleshing Out Skull & Bones presents that
Yale society as a branch of the Illuminati. In case you don't know, some
prominent Bonesmen have included Bush I, Bush II, Henry Luce of Time, Justice
Potter Stewart, an all-star cast of the Captains of American banking,
publishing and politics, and most of the directors of the C.I.A..... oh, yes,
and John Kerry.
Sure you really want to know more about this?
From another angle, Akron Daraul, in his History of Secret Societies, argues
that Weishaupt did not invent but only refurbished the Illuminati, which he
relates to earlier movements known as the Holy Vehm (Germany), Allumbrados
(Spain),Roshinaya (Persia) etc.; while the more exuberant John Steinbacher in
Novus Ordo Seclorum traces them all the way back to the Garden of Eden! They
were founded, he says, by Cain, the son not of the holy marriage of Adam and
Eve but of an illicit and Satanic coupling between Eve and the Serpent.
How's that for Hot Stuff? Bestiality, Satanism and all the themes for a new X
Files movie......
Meanwhile, Eliphas Levi's History of Magic traces the Illuminati back to
Zarathustra and claims its secret doctrine came down to Weishaupt via
Manichaeism, the Knights Templar and Freemasonry. This places them as part of
the same occult tradition as Giordano Bruno, Dr. John Dee, Aleister Crowley and
the Sufis of Islam.
But on the fourth or fifth hand, a British researcher named Nesta Webster sees
the Illuminati as the brains behind socialism, communism, anarchism, and the
Prussian government from 1776 to 1918. [She wrote shortly after England's first
war with the latter.]
On the sixth hand, J.F.,C. Moore argues that the Illuminati, a secret source of
fascist occultism, inspired such odd birds as Aaron Burr, Adolf Hitler and J.
Edgar Hoover; but Philip Campbell Argyle-Smith clams they are extraterrestrial
invaders from the planet Vulcan. They call themselves "Jews" on this
planet, he adds.
Whether that means all Jews "are" Vulcans or only some of them seems
unclear to me, but the most famous Vulcan, Mr. Spock, "is" Jewish
insofar as being performed by a Jewish actor makes one at least partially
"Jewish," whatever that means.
Maybe Argyle-Smith has looked at too many Star Trek movies.
He also credits the Illuminized Vulcans with managing the Thugs of India, the
Zionists in Israel, the Rothschild banks, the Communist International, the
Theosophical Society, Freemasonry and the Assassins of medieval Afghanistan. I
don't know why he left out George Bush and Al Qaeda; probably he just wrote too
soon.
Another Cosmic Illuminati theory appeared in the East Village Other June 1969;
it included Skull & Bones, the Rothschilds, the Nation of Islam
["Black Muslims"], Richard Nixon, the Black Panthers, the Bank of
America, the Rosicrucians, the Holy Vehm, the Federal Reserve and the Combine's
Fog Machine. That one must contain some hidden jokes [I hope].
According to the RogerSpark, a radical Chicago newspaper [July 1969] Weishaupt
actually murdered George Washington and served in his place for his two terms
as president.[Then who wrote Weishaupt's books? Hegel maybe; they sounds like
him at times......]
The John Birch Society, of course, has a different slant on all this. According
to Gary Allen, the editor of their news magazine, American Opinion, Adam
Weishaupt "was" a "monster" but the Illuminati only got
really monstrous after its capture by English adventurer/billionaire Cecil
Rhodes, who used it to establish British domination of the world. The Council on
Foreign Relations acts as its most important "front" in the U.S.
today, according to Allen.
Sandra Glass, however, thinks of the Illuminati as a group of clandestine
pot-heads [cannabis abusers] which included the medieval Assassins, Weishaupt,
Goethe, Washington, the first mayor Richard Daly of Chicago and Ludvig van
Beethoven.
"Beethoven?" you may gasp. Well, oddly enough, a recent, scholarly
and non-conspiratorial biography of the great Ludwig van, by Maynard Solmon,
says Mr B wrote some of his music under commission from the Illuminati and had
many friends in the Order itself. Solomon doesn't mention the pot, though;
maybe Ludvig, like a recent president with a perpetual hard-on, didn't inhale.
Then again, Adam Gorightly in The Prankster and the Conspiracy claims that all
recent Illuminati research [post-1960s] has become confused and chaotic because
of a hoax conspiracy, also called the Illuminati, founded by one Kerry
Thornley, a man accused of involvement in the JFK assassination by New Orleans
D.A. Jim Garrison. According to Gorightly, this neo-Illuminati aims only to
bedevil and mock the efforts of sincere conspiracy researchers, and he even
accuses the author of this essay [me, R.A.W.] of involvement in this Fiendish
Plot!
I, of course, refuse to dignify this absurd charge with a denial, which nobody
would believe anyway. Besides, as Rev. Ivan Stang of the Church of the
Sub-Genius says in Maybe Logic, "Well, if I was a member of the
Illuminati, I wouldn't say so, would I?"
ANTICHORUS
We are not victims of the world we see, we are victims of the way we see the
world.
-- Dennis Kucinich
I think God is sending us a message: "If you can't take a joke, go fuck
yourselves."
--Woody Allen
What does this book reveal about the "real" Adam Weishaupt and the
"real" Illuminati?
A book works like a mirror, somebody said once: when a monkey looks in, no
philosopher looks out. I can only tell you what this book seems to me; others,
I feel certain, will find other things in it -- including coded references to
Vulcans, Skull & Bones, Zarathustra, the Holy Vehm, communism, Mary
Magdalene, the Federal Reserve, the Combine's Fog Machine et.al.
To me, this book seems to support the most cautious and conservative of my
sources, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and old Adam looks much like a weary
defender of "Republican free thought," 18th Century style. In other
words, he seems a distant relative, philosophically speaking, of Adam Smith,
Hume, Voltaire, Jefferson, Franklin, Tom Paine -- i.e. of all those libertarian
ideas currently as unfashionable in this country as in the Bavaria in
Weishaupt's day. I know why he seems weary to me: trying to teach liberation to
people who feel reconciled to their slavery can really grind you down, in 1804
or 2004...
I also think I see an influence of Kant, and perhaps a foreshadowing of Hegel,
in the semantic structure used continually by Weishaupt -- "X seems true;
not-X also seems true; we'll have to think more about that." Aquinas did
the same trick, but always comes down on the side of safe orthodoxy, Papist
flavor. Weishaupt throws the ball back to the reader,although you may not
always catch him doing that.
I do not see any conclusive proof that the Illuminati plotted anything
nefarious or even illegal, except insofar as free thought itself remained
illegal in southern Europe. But I also don't see any conclusive proof that they
wouldn't and couldn't and didn't do nasty things. As a secret society hidden
inside the secret society of Freemasonry, the Illuminati will always remain
somewhat mysterious, and pedants and paranoids will argue about it until the
last galoot's ashore.
Perhaps Tom Jefferson got it right, when he said that secret societies seemed
necessary in Europe, haunted by monarchy and Papism, but not in the United
States. Certainly, when the Constitution remained the law of the land [i.e.
before the Supremes (s)elected Bozo] no sane person would feel the need for
secret societies here. Do I dare add "But now with the Constitution in
cryonic suspension --"?
No: I better not....better safe than sorry....
On the other hand, not just secret societies but secrecy itself or even privacy
seem increasingly impossible under the reign of George III.
They have hidden cameras everywhere.
They bug our phones.
If they want to, they can "read" every keystroke on my computer,
including this one:
They can even pry into the contents of our bladders, in random tests explicitly
forbidden by that wonderful, moribund Constitution. Sweet grieving Jesus,
there's no place we can escape or hide or feel alone, is there?
Sometimes, tossing and trying to sleep in the wee hours, I explore the ideas
rejected by my skeptical waking mind. Maybe the most paranoid fantasies about
the Illuminati contain some truth. .. maybe....
Maybe the All-Seeing Eye on the dollar bill does represent the totally fascist
state those bastards want.
Maybe all those Internet rants about Skull and Bones serving as a recruiter for
the Illuminati have some foundation in fact, after all.
Maybe we should really worry when the choice in the next election remains
limited to two rich Bonesmen...What is it Weishaupt wrote?-- "Whoever is
rich -- very rich -- can do anything...."
Maybe we should regard "Illuminati" as a generic term, or a metaphor?
Maybe every Power Structure acts a lot like the most paranoid fantasies about
the Illuminati, especially when it feels threatened.?
No, no -- that way lies madness, schizophrenia and Usenet trolls. After some
sound sleep, I wake, the shadows flee, and I remember that "all's for the
best in this best of all possible worlds."
Voltaire didn't intend that as sarcasm, did he?
Robert Anton Wilson
Deep Underground
Somewhere in Occupied U.S.A.
23 February 2004
Recommended Reading and viewing:
Argyle-Smith, Philip Campbell -- High IQ Bulletin, Colorado Springs 1970, IV, 1
Bauscher, Lance -- MaybeLogic, http://www.maybelogic.com
Daraul, Akron -- History of Secret Societies, Citadel Press NY, 1961.
Ellul, Jacques -- Violence, Seabury Press, NY,1969.
Glass, Sandra -- "The Conspiracy," Teenset, March 1969.
Gorightly, Adam -- The Prankster and the Conspiracy, ParaView Press, NY, 2003.
Gurwin, Larry -- The Calvi Affair, Pan Books, London, 1984.
Knight, Stephen -- The Brotherhood, Grenada, London, 1984.
Levi, Eliphas -- History of Magic, Borden Publishing, Los Angeles, 1963.
Millegan, Kris -- Fleshing Out Skull & Bones,Trineday, Walterville, OR,
2003.
Moore, J.f.C. -- "The Nazi Religion," Libertarian American, August
1969.
Morals, Vamberto -- Short History of Anti-Semitism, Norton, NY, 1976.
Robison, John -- Proofs of a Conspiracy, Christian Book Club, Hawthorn, CA,
1961.
Solomon, Maynard -- Beethoven, Schirmer Books, NY, 1977.
Vankin, Jonathan -- Conspiracies, Cover-Ups and Crimes, IllumiNet Press,
Lillburn,GA, 1996.
Webster, Nesta -- World Revolution, Constable, London, 1921.
Wilgus, Neal -- The Illuminoids, Sun Press, Albuquerque NM, 1977.