American History Hit - The Illuminati in the US

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

What do Thomas Jefferson and Beyonce have in common? They have both been thought to be members of the Illuminati.But what really is this not-so-secret society? And why was it once called the society of the bee? Don chats to author Michael Taylor about the real Illuminati, separating it from modern day conspiracy theories and assessing its impact on the United States.Michael is the author of Impossible Monsters: Dinosaurs, Darwin, and the War between Science and Religion, and is working on a full length history of the Illuminati.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. Here at Grand Central Terminal in New York City, I'm buying a paper. I dig into my pocket and pull out a few crumpled singles.

Funny how little I use cash these days. It feels almost antique. And yet, holding a dollar bill, there's still something about it. The texture, one-quarter linen, three-quarters cotton, soft and crisp at the same time. Well, until you put it through the laundry. In a familiar sepia green, Washington's unwavering, gaze, the serial numbers stamped in order. Then one Federal Reserve note, the United States of America, basically unchanged since 1963. Then the obverse, the weird side, the great seal, that unfinished pyramid

on a barren landscape. It's 13 steps rising to nowhere, topped by the ever-watching eye of Providence. The design is unsettling as it is comforting and secure, as if it's whispering some truth. Right below, it reads, Novos Ordol cyclorum. New Order of the Ages. Yikes. It's heery.

It's cryptic. No wonder this thing keeps fueling theories, spinning through closed-door conspiracies, all whispered in the same breath as the one name that refuses to die. The Illuminati. And hello, it is American History Hit. I'm Don Wildman,

and we have a fascinating subject to discuss today. Once more, in the face of overwhelming desperation, helplessness and confusion, conspiracy theories are being bandied about that have no basis, in fact, only in speculation, rooted in fear of the unknown, indeed how unknown forces may be at work in our world, pulling the puppet strings to design our fate according to an agenda controlled by, well, unknown forces. Sound familiar? So where did this start? I mean, really? Where did this start? Where did this notion of a star chamber of shadowy figures, a cabal of conspirators weaving their nefarious webs of intrigue at our expense to benefit only themselves? Where did this come from?

So this is an area where history is indispensable, because there is a factual story behind this fiction, specifically to do with a group more often than not cited as the force behind the mayhem, the method behind the madness, the ones called the Illuminati. Who were they? Where'd they come from? What was their grand plan? And is there any chance that somehow, somewhere? They're still meeting in secret and still playing as pawns in their grand chess game. Let us find out today, and quick before they shot us off, with author Michael Taylor, whose new work is entitled Impossible Monsters, Dinosaurs, Darwin, and the War Between Science and Religion, who is at present working on a full-length history of the Illuminati and none too soon. Welcome, Michael Taylor to American History Hit. Nice to meet you. Thanks very much, Don. It's a pleasure to be on the show. I've done some work with your colleagues on this side of the Atlantic. I'm in London at the minute, so it's a pleasure to make my way across to the state as well. Fantastic. Thanks. Okay. Let's start by contrasting the rumor and reality. There's a long list of modern day events that lots of people automatically assume have to do with this select group of manipulators. Top of mind, the Kennedy assassination, moon, Moon landing, Vietnam War, 9-11, 2008 housing crisis. Now even the fires of Los Angeles as they seek to create smart cities, whatever they are. What is the idea of how this group does its dastardly deeds at the most basic version? Well, it's important to state from the very outset that the Illuminati were real. This isn't fantasy. This isn't a conspiracy theory.

Part of the book that I'm writing is going to be based in Bavaria in Germany in the 18th century, where a disgruntled liberal academic who was being frustrated by the Jesuits and the conservatives around him at university and within Bavaria, and he decided to form a secret society through which he could educate young men in the kind of philosophy and politics that he preferred, and then send them off into various organs of government and to commerce into the church, where they would shape the world in the way that Adam Weiss hoped, founder of the Illuminati, wanted. That's all true.

And that basic mechanism has remained the same within the Illuminati conspiracy theory for the best part of 250 years now. The idea is that influential people are indoctrinated by the Illuminati who thereby infiltrate the corridors of power, the councils of state, and who can shape government policy and international policy in the ways that they want.

What time frame are we talking about the beginnings of this when this man did what he did in Germany? So it was 1776, it was the foundation of the Illuminati. So in the spring of 1776 on both sides of the Atlantic, men filled with the ideas of the Enlightenment and willing to give democratic expression to those ideas, were meeting at great danger to themselves to move on their plans. Obviously, the founding fathers were in Philadelphia, but in Bavaria at the University of Ingolstadt in 7076. That's where Adam Weissop and the Illuminati began. The problem with the Illuminati is that as much as they have all of these great ideas and really high-minded ideas about how they want to shape society in the manner of the Enlightenment, they were completely incompetent. So although they have some success over the next 10 years in recruiting really quite significant figures within German society into their ranks, I think probably Johann Wolfgang von Goethe might be the most famous, maybe the most important figure in the history of German literature. By 1787, they are extinct. They have been hunted down

from 1784. They've been banned two or three times by the Bavarian state. And at every single turn, they have made the wrong decision. So as much as they are gathering their forces to discuss how they're going to revolutionize the world, they're simultaneously finding that there isn't room for everybody. So some, you know, some, you know, some Illuminati are going to have to go and stay with Weiss Haup's mother. They're having fights about who's going to pay for the postage, who wants what meals, at what time. These are men who can't get a grip on their own lives, let alone run the rest of the world. Why here? I mean, why in Bavaria and why at this university? And who was this man, Adam Weisop, that he had this notion? So, Weissau was a young, quite gifted

academic. He was a professor of law. And the reason that Bavaria was such a fertile terrain for this conspiracy was that it was an incredibly conservative place in the 18th century. It's really tempting to look at Europe in the 18th century and think that it is a bastion of the Enlightenment, that all of these new ideas about philosophy and politics and commerce and literature are coursing everywhere from all of the great cities and universities. That's not necessarily the case. Bavaria had been a closed Catholic state, a very conservative state, since the 16th century. And more important to the story is the fact that the Jesuits, the Society of Jesus, had controlled almost all of the important positions at the University of Ingolstadt for 200 years.

So you have this young, maybe even this radical professor who's been appointed in 1773, and three years later he realizes that he's getting nowhere. He can't teach what he wants. He can't say what he wants at the university. And so if he can't do that openly, he decides to do it secretly. A lot of this story will have to do with pushing back against the Catholic Church. At this point, they don't call themselves the Illuminati, do they? No, they don't call themselves the Illuminati until 1778. They begin with the slightly less catchy name of the perfectibilists, because Weissau's great idea is that, given the time and the resources, he will achieve the perfection of man by teaching the right lessons.

And then if his own perfected men are sent out into society, they in turn can perfect everybody else. And there will be this inevitable progress towards the realization of perfection in society as a whole. Then change their name again to the society of the bee, which is an even worse name. But vice-hype's idea there is that the bee is his perfect worker. They will go about their business placidly and silently, always under direction. But if anybody should cross them, there is yet a state. in the tail. Eventually, however, the Illuminati sticks as the name, meaning literally the enlightened ones. At the core of this effort is a really important and charming aspect of life in these days.

You have the emergence of individuals, this idea of this individual spirit. And people like Ben Franklin are writing things like the poor Richard's Almanac. This perfectibility of the individual is a big theme in society in these days. And it makes sense. I mean, as human civilization is becoming more mercantile and people are learning they can make money and there's more of sort of things are breaking up into little guilds and so forth, a little earlier on. This whole idea of perfecting the human, your own self, which is very much what we do today still. This is what's going on in the midst of the Enlightenment. It's an incredibly hopeful message that Vice is trying to proselytize for. He genuinely believes that he can improve people and that people can

improve society, if only they learn the right lessons, if they can be taken away from the strictures of government and the church, especially. It's not a coincidence, I think, that at a lot of this time, there's an idea of stadial theory governing society. So the men of the Scottish Enlightenment, and I looked at quite a lot of this for the work that I've done in the history of slavery, thought that society progressed through very discrete stages, that everybody began as a hundred-room gatherer, and then you became farmers of animals, and you became farmers. of crops, and then eventually the highest stage of civilization was living in towns and cities and trading with other men who lived in other towns and cities. So there's this unceasing sense of

progress that lots of people who were conscious parts of the Enlightenment believed that they were participating in that very process. Who are the members of this cabal? And is it fair to call them a cabal? I mean, how were they advertising themselves? Well, they advertised themselves very discreetly because it's important to remember not only that the messages that they were promulgating. So these ideas about slightly more democratic, slightly more secular, much more liberal ideas about society were in themselves incredibly dangerous in a conservative religious state like Bavaria. But even by forming a secret society, and this was a danger which the Masons had to confront as well, they were creating a world

in which the authority of the state of the Duke of the Church was not recognized. Whenever you joined a Masonic lodge, whenever you joined a chapter of the Illuminati, in theory, people were not supposed to pay any attention to your rank and to your status in the outside world. So you were creating a separate sphere of government and of separate social world. And that terrified authorities. I don't understand why. What was so dangerous about this to them? Well, it was a world that they couldn't control. And if you're an absolutist monarch in 18th century Europe, the idea is that you get to control practically every facet of everybody's life. And so for this to be a separate world in which people could talk about their own ideas and respect different authorities, that was

theoretically terrifying. Because if people could develop those ideas in secrecy, in safety, what was to prevent them then perfecting their own schemes and then spreading the society? And there would be a clash, they feared eventually, between these enlightened ideals of the Illuminati and the much more conservative ideas of the Bavarian government. But it did catch on and over a large geographical area, right? I mean, who are the more famous people that we know belong to this group? I mentioned Goethe, who is the literary rock star of 18th, the early 19th century, Germany. And he joins the Illuminati in Weimar in the 1780s.

Some of the bigger names of the time, though people like Friedrich Schiller, who is, again, one of the more famous men of 18th century lady in the censored Germany, he rejects the Illuminati. They try really, really hard to recruit him because they think he would be an incredible catch. But Schiller in the end says, no, you know what, I don't actually like the way that you're running this.

Because Vice-Oct, as much as he's trying to preach this relatively liberal politics, is a dictator within the society himself, and Schiller recognizes that. There are, again, some pieces of circumstantial evidence that Mozart knew about the Illuminati whenever he was in Salzburg and Vienna, but the evidence that he actually joined

joined them is not particularly clear. We know that things like Masonic symbols and imagery play a big part in his music, especially in the magic flute. But I'm not sure we've got the documentary evidence to prove that he was a key member of the Illuminati. What we do have, however, are hundreds, if not thousands of educated, literary, wealthy Germans who occupy positions of influence within state governments all over the place. And this really matters because in small absolutist states, where the monarch, as much she would like to, you can't really control everything. Things are delegated directly to these kinds of people. So they are the men who are setting the syllabus for schools. They are the men

who are distributing money throughout the state. They're the men who are censoring what books people can read. So if the Illuminati can have as many of them within their ranks as possible, this is the way they hope to transform Germany. Did they view it as a seditious act? I mean, were they, so much of it sounds like to be focused on the individual and the betterment of mankind. How do they feel about their place in the state? So later they will be accused of being revolutionaries. They will be accused of sedition and blasphemous sedition. They didn't really see themselves embarking on that kind of crusade.

They wanted to change the world imperceptibly, very, very gradually. They knew that it was dangerous, but at the same time, they weren't atheist. They were liberal Christians, both Catholics and Protestants, but they didn't want to overturn the church, nor did they want to destroy the state and set up something new. They just wanted to shape government in the way that they thought would be best for everybody. It is very similar to what you learned. One learns about the guilds and how they were training their members in secret because the church did not like that, you know, and especially the low countries and all these scary places up there. and also against the state. I mean, this time frame is really about this emergence, as I'm saying, and this is an important theme to hang our hat on, that this is a time. The Enlightenment is about the individual emerging from what has always been a group mentality. And there's education. There's, as I say, people are making money. This is what is naturally happening in and we are part of that continuum today. They're joining in on this and sort of ramping things up. Is that a fair way of looking at it? They are certainly self-consciously part of the Enlightenment. They didn't necessarily refer to in those terms because Kant had only really asked the question Vasis Afklerun relatively recently.

So it's a term that historians like to apply to this to make sense of these whole phenomena. But they are definitely reading books and vice-like sets a very, very strict curriculum for all of the people that he wants to teach. What should you read? And all the stuff at the start is about Stoic Philosophy and 18-Sept. century philosophy, which is about knowing and understanding the self. So Alexander Pope's essay on man, Marcus Aurelius, Epictatus, all of these people are about being able to understand the passions that drive men, being able to control them.

And this is where perhaps there is something a little bit more sinister. If you can understand those things about yourself, then perhaps you can control them in other people. Right. They absolutely did foresee, or they certainly wanted to foresee, a world in which these changes take place. I'm not sure they ever really understood exactly how they were going to give effect to these things, because the relative success in recruitment rather overtook Weiss Hype's ability to construct a secret society that was big enough and robust enough and could be directed with enough central authority in order to achieve these goals.

I'll be back with more American history after this short break. We look at the Enlightenment with such a, you know, from the perspective of history, at the time, how much were they talking about these ideals as happening in everyday life? I mean, something they were trying to practice as they preached. There was certainly a domestic aspect to it. They focused in their recruitment. They were sent really quite extensive documents about all the things that they should look for in an ideal illuminatus. And it would be how a man behaved, you know, were they polite? Could they command the respect of somebody in, you know, a coffee shop or in a lecture theater. How did they interact with one another? How did they deal with adversity?

It was as much about perfecting the ability of the human being to withstand whatever life in society could throw at him as much as it was about shaping society directly. So it was all about these indirect processes. Which is what basically the Freemasons were doing for for a long time at that point. I'm using the metaphor of a builder, the compass, you know, all the techniques of architecture to rebuild a man from the inside out and create a better and stronger individual. How much did he use the ideas of Freemasonry in creating this group? So Weissauk was very much aware of Freemasonry before he founded the Illuminati, and they were something of a model. He actually tried to join them. He tried to join a lodge in Nuremberg in 1775,

but he found that he couldn't afford the fees and the travel expenses. So it wouldn't be until later the Weissop formally joined Freemasonry. It's important to say, that the Illuminati are not Freemasons, individual Illuminati, many individual Illumannadi are Freemasons. And eventually, what Weissauld Weissaulde and one of his lieutenants, Adolf Reheira von Knege, decide upon is that they would use disenchanted lodges of Freemasonry, because there's a crisis in German Freemasonry in the early 1780s. There's an ideological schism. And they look upon the lodges and the members of these lodges, not only as viable recruits, but as vehicles for what they want to do. Because the Illuminati don't have bases. They don't necessarily have

meeting houses. They don't have an institutional structure, which will allow them to carry out their plans. So they try to infiltrate free Masonic lodges. And they do that really, really successfully. In most of the major cities in Germany, they convert leading masons to Illuminism, or to what some of the Orings have called illuminated Freemasonry. And therefore, they use these Masonic lodges as headquarters for their campaigns. Yeah. So let's underscore what we're talking about here. Just take a moment. The Illuminati is a name that refers not to some strange mystic glow or even weird lighting device from under the table. It refers to the Enlightenment. That is a direct case here, which for my money is that which made modern society. Certainly this American one that I live in, it makes it work. Separating us from the binds of old feudalism and state religion. So every time we, we say the word Illuminati, one should not hear the woo-woo sound effect in your head. It has nothing to do with it. It has to do with the Enlightenment. Yeah. And in many cases, you can look on this

original real history of the Illuminati and think that maybe they were the good guys. They were trying to improve the world, or at least they were trying to improve the world in the way they thought was genuine and sincere. And they were keen on the whole idea of a new world, maybe not quite the New World Order that comes from the woo-woo in the 20th century, but they were looking, bear in mind that the American Revolutionary War is happening at the same time here. They're on the side of the Americans. They want the colonists to triumph. And in fact, they want to send emissaries to speak to Jefferson and Adams whenever they're at Paris and Versailles,

negotiating the French intervention in the war. But they also look upon the upside to an American defeat, because they understand that if the British win, they will need to rebuild their colonel. in the Americas, and they will need to repopulate them. So whenever the Illuminati are trying to recruit influential individuals, they are promising at the same time that if the British win, we're going over there, we're going to form illuminated colonies in Georgia and South Carolina. We're going to start out with maybe a few dozen men, the best kind of men from Germany,

and we're going to take over our wives and we're going to adopt orphaned children, and we are going to build our new illuminated society in the south of America of America. America. So, Michael, this lasts this period you're talking about a little more than a decade. Is that fair to say? Yeah. So by 1784, the Illuminati are strong. They're confident, but they're overconfident. And they begin bragging a little bit too loudly about what they're trying to do. And they make some very powerful enemies in Munich at the Bavarian court. And from 1784, over the course of the next three years, they are hunted down. They are banned. They are thrown in prison. They lose their jobs, they lose their reputations. Adam Weissiped has to flee first from Ingolstant to Regensburg

and then from Vegensburg to Guta. And it's a fairly pathetic existence that he leads for the rest of his life. He's crying in the wilderness, trying to protest his innocence, trying to prove that he was a good, loyal citizen and that he just wanted to change the world for the better. This is not however the end of the story, because come 1789 and especially come 1792 and 93, truly revolutionary things have happened in France, truly extraordinary things. The people are really struggling to understand. The French monarchy has been probably the most significant political institution in Europe, if not the world, for several centuries.

And it disappears within the space of three years. It's abolished. And in desperation, people are trying to work out who could possibly have done this thing, because they don't have sophisticated means of analysis, they don't have access to all of the evidence. What they have are references to God, and they assume that God hasn't direct the French Revolution or human agency. So which group of men could have been willful and powerful enough to achieve these things?

Who wanted to achieve these things? Well, on one reading of the history of the Illuminati, Weissaupe and his acolytes did. So from 1797 and 1798, we have two really influential books that are published in Britain. First, by the Abbey Barrowell, who is an emigrant, he's an exile, he's a former Jesuit priest, he's deeply conservative, and he despises everything about the French Revolution. So he blames the Illuminati. He thinks the Illuminati have survived somehow and have exported their message into Paris, into the Jacobin Clubs, and that they are driving the French Revolution. The other author who writes his account of the conspiracy theory in isolation from Barrowell,

but at the same time, is John Robeson, who is one of the paradigmatic figures of the Scottish Enlightenment. He's a physics professor who has a fairly unblemished reputation on this point. But he's also a mason, and he wants to defend freemasoning from charges of corruption and infection by the Illuminati. So he simultaneously seeks to blame the Illuminati for the French Revolution. In Britain, we have in this late 1790s these two books, which some people think are ridiculous, but lots of people, especially conservatives who fear the ideology of the French revolution and who would have opposed the Illuminati themselves if they had known about them at the time. They believe this conspiracy theory. They are terrified and they are

looking for an enemy, and so they alight upon the Illuminati. But this belies the fact that the Illuminai have sort of rotted from within, haven't they? There was so much infighting during that period of the breakdown. Oh, they collapsed completely. So as much as they take over lots of Freemasonic lodges in Germany, they can't control these lodges. In fact, lots of people who are promised, you know, higher secret wisdom and the mystery of a secret society, Well, if they were already fairly literate progressive figures in Frankfurt or Mainz or these fairly developed German cities, they'll have seen what these Bavarian professors are doing. They weren't very impressed. And so they fall away pretty quickly. But Weissipps wants to control everything that's going on within the Illuminati. And that doesn't sit well with other ambitious people. So he begins falling out with his lieutenants. He also begins falling out with all of his colleagues at the university. Now, he's established the Illuminati at Ingolstadt as a means. of escaping from the conservatism of the Jesuits at Ingolstadt.

But they still hate him. They're still after him. And so by 1785, with rumors swirling around about the founder of the Illuminati, they go for him again and he flees. He quits. And he's in exile, really, for the rest of his life, as we've said. And so the Bavarian authorities by this stage are beginning to hunt down members of the suspected members of the Illuminati. People are turnedcoach.

They go over to the authorities and they say, Oh, these guys who are my enemies now, they were up to all sorts of terrible things. So you should definitely persecute them. And they accidentally yield up evidence of everything that they were doing as well. We've learned the term from all those police procedurals. They've rolled up on these guys. They, you know, everybody turns on each other and houses are ransacked and documents are seized. And it all gets very condemned by the state.

and then gets painted with a brush, as you say, down the road. And so much of this is farce rather than high treason. So one of the senior Illuminati was called Franz Zaver von Swack. And he's been expelled from his job, or at least from his office in Munich, and he's in a Bavarian town called Lanshut. And he hears that further accusations are going to be made about him to the Bavarian authority. So he rushes off from Lanzhut to Munich. But he leaves all of his documents unguarded.

Well, he thinks he's done enough to protect them because he's stored them in a in his bedroom beneath his wife's underwear. But the authorities come in, they ransack the place, they find all the documents, and suddenly there's proof that the Illuminati were up to no good. This happens again with Count von Basis and his documents that he's just carelessly stored in a drawer in his study in his castle at Sanders' door outside Ingolstadt. So now suddenly by 1786, 87, there's evidence that the Illuminaity were real, that they were a secret society who were promulgating all of these radical ideas, and that's enough

to pay to the secret society for good. So over the course of about 10 to 20, 30 years, really, you end up with this very hopeful idea run by a guy who becomes a dictator. I mean, it really sounds like the story of any, I mean, cult, frankly, but any group like this that has sort of this internal agenda trying to inflict itself upon the world, has problems within itself, and then ends up breaking down with the pressures that come upon it. I want to explore what you've just touched on before about the way that this group was blamed for the French Revolution, which becomes so much of the crucible of what we still live with, with this idea. Does it begin with these books that come out of Great Britain?

There are rumors and there are accusations in the early 1790s in Germany, in France, some in Britain, but it really does begin with these books in 1797, because they are literary and commercial sensations. Even if you don't believe them, everybody's reading them. All of the newspapers, all of the review journals are addressing them, are critiquing them, and they command quite serious audiences. The problem, if you're trying to debunk the conspiracy theory, is that things begin to happen, which might be attributable to a secret society doing terrible things. So you have mutinies in the British Navy, in the Royal Navy in 1797, and you then have an Ireland in 1798 a massive rebellion of the United Irishman, who had been in contact with the French Jackom. So if you are minded to believe in the conspiracy theory, you can easily fit everything that is happening in the 1790s into that continued story of the conspiracy. Because it seems so unlikely that the great state of France with this tremendous aristocracy, with all of the history that was behind this would suddenly collapse. How could that possibly happen?

There are lots of reasons why that happened. And there's lots of history behind that that's provable. This is so much the case of conspiracy theories that they become a comfortable place for people to go to to undo what seems like such a tangled mystery. This happens over and over and over again. It's just very interesting to find out that the Illuminati were blamed for the French Revolution. I don't think a lot of people walking around today understand that that's really where it begins. And lots of really, really serious people believe this. So British booksellers ship these books across the Atlantic as well, and they land in the United States, and especially in New England, at a time of intense political activity and sensitivity.

So the United States is torn between perhaps allowing itself with Britain against France, or perhaps allowing itself with France against Britain. It's fighting the French in a quasi-war at sea over piracy. In 1798, the Adams government passes the Alien and Sedition Act because they believe that immigrants to the United States, especially from Europe, are Trojan horses for this kind of Republican ideology that they think would be fatal to their own Republican project or this extreme Republican ideology that they fear. And there are important influential people, especially in Connecticut. So you have Timothy Dwight, who's the president of Yale. You have Jedediah Mors, who's a really respected preacher in New England. the father of Samuel Morse, who invents Morse code, and they are publishing books and pamphlets and sermons saying, you know, hold on here, if we look at Jeffersonian republicanism,

if we look at Jefferson's well-known pro-French biases in foreign policy and the time that he spent in Paris, well, isn't it obvious that the Illuminati are beginning to infiltrate American society, too? I'll be back with more American history after this short break. So the idea was, if I'm getting this, that this German phenomenon, the Illuminati, had somehow infiltrated the French society, tipped the revolution, which of course at first we were in favor of, but went too far because of all their nefarious doings. They want to take things over. That same problem could happen to the American revolution, to our ideals, that if we let these people infiltrate here, that's going to happen. And they see this. so obviously because the French had such a big role in our revolution, right? Yeah. The world is a much more connected place. These ideas about freedom and liberty and republicanism are being swapped across the Atlantic and between cities. And so it's not necessarily

a stretch of the imagination to believe that, you know, a small number of French people at the French court in the 1770s and 1780s had done so much to accelerate and to solidify and to guarantee the American Revolution, why would the Illuminati, these geniuses of the Enlightenment, not have been capable of doing the same in Paris? And if they've done that, then what would be to prevent them doing something similar in the United States?

Sure. And it's important that we recognize this is not completely far-fetched for people at the time. It's obviously insane. It never happened. And we would probably be laughed out of any kind of court if we tried to prove it today. But serious people did believe this.

So, you know, John Adams and his wife Abigail are reading about these things. They've been alerted to them by their sons who were in Europe at the time. And they are very, very deeply concerned. George Washington is informed of the Illuminati by a German immigrant to Virginia. And again, he seems to take it relatively seriously. Jefferson himself ends up reading the books. And he actually seems quite sympathetic to lots of Bysop's ideals, as you might expect. But he regards Barrowell as a cracker.

as a crackpot. So in these years, 1798, 99, 1800, which culminates in the revolution of 1800 when Jefferson's Republicans cast out the federalists from the federal government, Jefferson beats Adams in the presidential election. The Illuminati are a specter looming over all of this in the political discourse. Because where did Jefferson come down on this? He was sympathetic to the ideals that the Illuminati were propagating, but he didn't necessarily believe that there had been any kind of conspiracy that could have caused the French Revolution. But he could have been painted with that brush, right, by his, by his adversaries. Oh, and he was. Jeffersonian Republicans were damned as American Illuminati. If you weren't a federalist, if you weren't pro-British, if you were

sympathetic to the European immigrants who were arriving on the shores and likely to vote Republican, then you were probably one of the Illuminati, at least in their adult imagination. Boy, you can see how useful this is to, you know, not just to the 1700s, but all the way through to all the world events that happen or the domestic events that happen here in the States that seem to shake the very foundation of where we live. How does this happen? You know, you look back on it. How did we get here? Well, it must be this group that's in charge. And it's incredible to me how applied this becomes throughout time. I mean, we move from this into the 1930s and 50s, for that matter. It's incredible. Yeah. So the Illuminati are there

in the background in quite a lot of events in the 19th. century. They do have an eruption of relevance in the 1820s and 1830s in American politics with the rise of the anti-Masonic party, who send quite a few congressmen to Washington. They've got the governorship of Delaware and Pennsylvania. They have people like William Henry Harrison and Millard Philmore and John Quincy Adams among their ranks at the time. And if you go back and read the transcripts from the early anti-Masonic party conventions, they are passing motions about Barrowell and Robeson and condemning Adam Weissheb and the Illuminati. They, you know, the conspirators. theory is alive and well in the 1830s. What really gives it a new lease of life in the 20th century

is the Russian Revolution. So if we can compare it to the French Revolution, you have the Russian Empire, the Tsars of St. Petersburg, who've been there for hundreds of years. You have a deeply autocratic, religious, conservative, orthodox state, which disappears within the course of a year and is replaced by a militant form of communism. And again, again, Again, people will look at this and just not understand it. So they are more inclined, I think, to blame individuals or to at least attempt to understand the processes underlying the Russian Revolution with reference to individuals.

Who could possibly have achieved such a thing? Who were the plotters? And thanks primarily to a very well-off British socialite an author called Nesta Webster, the myth of the Illuminari conspiracy theory is revived again. And she begins to paint communism and Leninism and Marxism as merely a continuation of Adam Weiss Hepp's project from the 1770s. She now looks back into the history of the 19th century and sees the hand of the Illuminati in almost everything that has happened and a continuity between Bavaria and St. Petersburg.

Wow. Literally. I always thought that, you know, when people bandy about the term, Illuminati, it's more of a general idea rather than specifically referring to a continuation of the organization. but you're saying that was actually written about. Oh, yeah. And it's picked up in lots of the British press. The books sell a hell of a lot of copies. Someone like Winston Churchill is reading one of her books in the early 1920s, reviewing it in the London press. And he says, well, yeah, clearly this has been going on for the last 150 years.

What seems to prove it is that Adam Weishepe's code name was Spartacus within the Illuminati. And who had just launched a communist revolution in Germany, the Spartacists. So in this conspiratorial mindset, everything is proof. Yeah, it goes right into the 50s and John Birch society takes this up. But I really want to emphasize the fact. I've never trusted the fact that there was a literal reference being made, that this had sort of shifted over time to a more of a metaphor, that people, we don't understand who they are, but they're at work here. But this is really important to make note of that there are a lot of people who literally think that this is the same organization. Yeah, and there are three or four people in the post-war period who do quite a lot to keep propagating this myth.

One of them is a retired British naval officer called William Guy Carr, who after the First World War spends the 1920s hunting down communist spies in the merchant marine around the world. Emmanuel Mann Josephson is an American Columbia educated doctor, and he writes an influential first pamphlet called Roosevelt's Communist Manifesto. He wasn't a fan of the New Deal. And with, as you mentioned, the John Birch Society, these people begin to reimagine the Illuminati as nefarious international conspiratorial government forces. If Weissauap's plan eventually had been to transform the world, well, wouldn't he have wanted a world government? And so they point to to things like the IMF and the United Nations and even to NATO. Never mind that NATO is formed as a defensive alliance against communism and against Russia. They nonetheless believe that

NATO is a Trojan horse for communism and for the illuminous conspiracy to foist communism upon the United States. But how much do you think that these people were using this idea, you know, consciously understanding that it wasn't correct, but they were using it, that it becomes this ploy that they can win, you know, mass audience with because they know that the myth is still alive. So the question of where the metal ends and the rust begins with these people is always really, really difficult. I think from what I've read of them so far that certainly at first, they genuinely believe

this. They truly think that there is a network of man sitting in smoky rooms deciding the fate of the world in service of an illuminous project. Yeah. It doesn't necessarily take in the same way that it did in the 1920s or in the 1790s for a number of reasons. One is, as I've just mentioned, it was really obvious that these government associations were fighting communism. They were not propagating it. The fact that there is really explicit anti-Semitism in a lot of these people's views as well discredits them completely because this is a world which is coming to grips with the horrors of the 1940s in Central Europe.

And so I think serious political figures are really unwilling to align themselves with any of these anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. I also began to wonder whether or not the boom in political satire in the 1960s had something to do with it. It was just easier for people to laugh at these ideas. Now, previously, you might have disagreed with them. You might have thought they were nonsense. But you may have accorded them a modicum of respect, but now you can just take the Mickey out of them. You know that it is honest, so you can just laugh. What along comes to the internet, which now gives, you know, free wheel to everything that is, you know, everything and anything comes at you every day.

You're writing a book on this subject. Do you see a hopeful end to this, or is it just going to get worse? Well, I think it's certainly different. The Illuminatic conspiracy theory in the time of the internet has changed. You mentioned a few minutes ago, whether, you know, the idea that Illuminati. was simply a catchword that people would try to attribute to anything they didn't like. Now, that hadn't been true for a very long time, but I think it is true now. I don't think anybody is tracing a lineage all the way back to Bavaria in the 1770s anymore.

In fact, if you go on to your website like InfoWars and you may or may not want to do that, and you read all of their articles, which allege that the Illuminati are behind the assassination plot on Trump or the Oscars or the Forest Virus, or whatever it may be, it's not really about the Illuminati at all. It's a word to grab people's attention. It's now become a conspiracy theory where you say somebody is a member of the Illuminati to discredit them or you want to blame shadowy figures that you can't identify and you call them Illuminati or members of the Bohemian Grove or members of the Bilderberg group or attendees of Davos in the World Economic Forum.

It all melds into one. Right, exactly. It's become the great, you know, unseen hand that's working among us. Yeah. There are a few things I think people should really remember whenever they're considering the validity of conspiracy theories. First, and this is not the most sophisticated thing that you'll ever hear in a story and say, but sometimes stuff just happens. Yeah. The second thing is people are really, really bad at keeping a secret.

Now, if you were a member of the Illuminati, if you were an all-powerful member of this enlightened secret society, which was directing world events, I'd want to tell people. Yes. From the documented history that we do have about the Illuminati in the 1770s, they did tell people. That's why they got caught. They were so excited and caught up in what they were doing that they let their guard down. And they were exposed really, really quickly. The third thing is that people are incompetent.

There is no way that people who couldn't arrange accommodation for members of their Congress or who arranged a convent of leading Freemasons that was supposed to be held in super secrecy in the summer of 1782, at a really popular spa resort at the height of the summer season, you know, these people didn't necessarily know what they were doing. And I think that's true of all of these conspiracy theories. Do you really think that everybody could pull off these incredible tricks and feats and hoaxes? No. Well, they've won in that we're even bothering to talk about it, but it's the case of human nature, really, is what's at the heart of it all. Michael Taylor's new book is called Impossible Monsters Dinosaurs.

Darwin and the war between science and religion. But I'm really looking forward to the new book that you're working on, which is the History of the Illuminati. Good luck with that, Michael. Thank you so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays, all kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries.

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