The Bavarian Illuminati

A secret society within a secret society.

Portrait of Adam Weishaupt 1748-1830. Source

The Illuminati actually existed but not as we commonly think. The real story is a lot less dramatic than what many people have assumed.  In 1776 Adam Weishaupt had a problem. He had risen rapidly in his youth to become the Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Ingolstadt in modern day Bavaria.

“As Wishaupt [sic.] lived under the tyranny of a despot & priests, he knew that caution was necessary even in spreading information…This has given an air of mystery to his views, was the foundation of his banishment, the subversion of the masonic order… if Wishaupt had written here, where no secrecy is necessary in our endeavors to render men wise & virtuous, he would not have thought of any secret machinery for that purpose.” 1800, Thomas Jefferson [i]

The text of Der ächte Illuminat oder die whren, unverbesserten Rituale der Illuminaten, Edessa (Frankfort-on-the-Main), 1788, includes rituals for the Preparation, Novitiate, Minerval Degree, the Minor and Major Illuminati Degrees. The Minerval Degree text describes the “Medallion” with the owl, as illustrated above. Source

He had shocked many of the University establishment when at 27 he became Dean, the youngest Dean in their history. And his youthful vanity along with a fiery passion for progressive Enlightenment values quickly earned him enemies within a deeply conservative environment.[i] 

The pressures against his career led him to create a secret society in which “in its assemblies the truths of human equality and fraternity were to be taught and practiced” through which Weishaupt thought society could be reformed.[ii] In a modern context Weishaupt’s politics appear quite tame: he called for democracy, equal rights, and secularism; at that time, with witchcraft a crime, kings with the power of life and death and an incredibly powerful Church, this was incredibly radical. Weishaupt chose to christen his organization with the Latin word for ‘Enlightened’ and thus the ‘Order of the Illuminati’ was born.

Despite grand plans and lofty ideals Weishaupt’s Illuminati struggled. It struggled with funding and members and Weishaupt was not a good or inspiring leader, he was quarrelsome and an elitist; he had read Freemasonry documents and considered “the "mysteries" of Freemasonry were too puerile and too readily accessible to the general public to make them worthwhile”[iii] 

Instead Weishaupt wanted to admit only certain members of the Freemasons, making it essentially a secret society within a secret society, the problem was that Weishaupt was not a member of the Freemasons. This all all changed in 1780 when an influential and respected Freemason joined named Adolph Freiherr Knigge which allowed the Illuminati to begin using Masonic lodges as recruiting grounds. The society soon became à la mode of the intelligentsia and aristocracy to be a member and at its zenith the membership swelled to thousands and included several powerful dukes, and the poet German poet Goethe was probably the most famous member.

By 1784 this all came crashing down. Rumours had begun to spread of the Illuminati and its secret aims which were said to be the overthrow of the Church and governments of the world, on top of this internal power struggles had divided the Order. The Bavarian government issued one edict after another against secret lodges that culminated in 1787 with a ruling that any Illuminist caught was to be sentenced to death. By this time Weishaupt had already fled to Switzerland and spent the remainder of his long life defending his Illuminati and railing against the men he felt had betrayed it.

The Illuminati never did overthrow governments or the Church, instead Freemason historian Trevor McKeown views it as: “nothing more than a curious historical footnote....more important than the existence of any illuminati after 1784, was the fear that they existed.”[iv]

[i] Trevor McKeown. “A Bavarian Illuminati Primer.” Grand Lodge of British Colombia and Yukon. 2014. https://freemasonry.bcy.ca/texts/illuminati.html#05

[ii] Vernon [L.] Stauffer, New England and the Bavarian Illuminati. The Columbia University Press, 1918 Chapter III, pp. 142-228. Accessed 24/08/24: https://freemasonry.bcy.ca/anti-masonry/stauffer.html 

[iii] ibid

[iv] René Le Forestier. 1915. Les Illuminés de Bavière et La Franc-Maçonnerie Allemande. p. 28.

[v] ibid