A History Infected By Its Own Subject

Neal Wilgus’ The Illuminoids: Secret Societies and Political Paranoia had its moment in the sun some 40 years ago – initially released in 1978, it last got reprinted in 1980 and from there so far as I can tell it dropped off the face of the Earth. It was enthusiastically promoted by Robert Anton Wilson – who, on the strength of the Illuminatus! trilogy he co-wrote with Robert Shea and an interminable number of spin-offs yielding ever-diminishing returns, had become the post-hippie counter-culture’s resident Illuminati expert, and who even contributed an introduction to the volume. (Naturally, he hamfisted in a lot of his hippie-libertarian pet themes and too many Discordian in-jokes, because if there’s one thing Wilson was good at it was taking a moderately funny joke and playing it out until it had become utterly risible.)

The book offers a look at the conspiratorial view of history through the lens of the various theories that have swirled over the years around the Bavarian Illuminati, but does not limit itself to this; the “Illuminoids” of the title are Wilgus’ term for various institutions or individuals which, whilst not part of the Bavarian Illuminati themselves, have been alleged to conduct themselves in a similar manner.

Conventional history tells, broadly speaking, the following story about the Bavarian Illuminati: they were organised by Adam Weishaupt in 1776 in (naturally) Bavaria, and were a secret society of freethinkers out to promote rationalism, secularism, gender equality, and various other ideas that both church and state were not so keen on at the time. They expended a lot of energy on various dramatic spats with other secret societies, largely stemming from the Illuminati’s use of entryist tactics to infiltrate Freemasonry and various connected bodies and use them as recruiting pools. (In the process of doing so, they ended up being useful allies to the more rationalist school of Masons, who opposed the more mystical-religious attitudes of the Rosicrucian strand.

Eventually, the combination of this drama, internal friction, and leaks to the authorities led to Charles Theodore, the ruler of Bavaria, including them in a 1785 blanket ban on secret societies, and they were suppressed – with Weishaupt fleeing and the organisation apparently collapsing in a big heap of drama.