Conspiracy: History’s Greatest Plots, Collusions and Cover-Ups by Charlotte Greig Read Free Book Online

in an ever-smaller number of hands, and that the Bilderberg Group is part of that process. It is not so much a shadowy organization of world rulers but an informal group of people whose economic power already dominates our lives, whose brand names are written on almost everything we consume and who wish to further their global interests.

T HE I LLUMINATI
    The Illuminati are one of the great touchstones of conspiracy theory. This is the shadowy group that the conspiracy theorists believe are behind practically everything that takes place in the world – capitalism or communism, Zionism or Catholicism. The British royal family, the American presidency, Freemasons, the Knights Templar, even extra-terrestrials – all of them are bound up with the Illuminati, the secret rulers of the world. And of course the fact that there is no evidence of the existence of the Illuminati is actually proof of their all-powerful nature, rather than of their non-existence.
    So who are – or were – the Illuminati and why are they credited with such extraordinary powers? The first part of this question is easy enough to answer. The Illuminati were a group founded in Bavaria, Germany, in the late eighteenth century by an ex-Jesuit named Adam Weishaupt, a professor of canon law in Ingolstadt, Germany. Much taken with the ideas of the Enlightenment, he decided to form a group of fellow republican freethinkers which would be clandestine, because it was dangerous to hold such ideas at that time. Together with one Baron Adolph von Knigge, he founded his movement on 1 May 1776, calling it the "Perfectibilists". However, its adherents soon became known as the Illuminati. They were also sometimes referred to as the Illuminati Order, the Order of the Illuminati or the Bavarian Illuminati.
    Many of those attracted to the new movement were already Freemasons, which accounts for the perceived links between the two, quite different, movements. Members had to pledge obedience to their superiors and were divided into three classes. The first class was called the Nursery, and it included the offices of Preparation, Novice, Minerval and Illuminatus Minor; the second was known as the Masonry and it embraced the higher ranks of Illuminatus Major and Illuminatus Dirigens; and the third class was referred to as the Mysteries and within it were the Lesser Mysteries, the ranks of Presbyter and Regent and the Greater Mysteries, the highest ranks of Magus and Rex.
    Adam Weishaupt, the eighteenth-century political and religious radical who founded the society known as the Illuminati.
    Philosopher and scientist Roger Bacon, the Tudor mystic Dr John Dee and the mediaeval alchemist Paracelsus, Appoloni and Mohammed are all claimed as illuminati in this seventeenth-century print. The claim is somewhat unlikely, as least as far as Mohammed is concerned.
    The Illuminati managed to start branches in most European countries in the first few years of its existence, with many influential intellectuals and progressive politicians counting themselves as members – among them such luminaries as the great German writer Goethe and the dukes of Gotha and Weimar. The total membership of the group at this point has been estimated at 2,000.
    However, the association's radical ideas soon attracted the dislike of the powerful Catholic Church which, in 1784, persuaded the Bavarian Government to pass a law banning all secret societies, including the Illuminati and the Freemasons. According to all the official accounts this resulted in the disappearance of the Illuminati. The order was already suffering from internal schisms and it was finally wound up in 1790.
    A SINGLE WORLD GOVERNMENT
No sooner had the Illuminati come to an official end than the conspiracy theories began. Just seven years later, in 1797, a French cleric called Abbé Augustin Barruél published a book called
Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism
, in which he set out a conspiracy theory involving the Illuminati,