Bush, of being members of the Illuminati. The same right-wing circles accused two Republican Presidents they regarded as too moderate, George H.W. He is still celebrated in right-wing circles as a martyr of the Illuminati. The officers returned fire and killed him. Surrounded by the county sheriff’s agents, who intended to arrest him for tax evasion, Cooper opened fire on the officers, wounding one in the head. Cooper also refused to pay taxes to a government he regarded as controlled by the Illuminati. There was the home of Milton William Cooper (1943–2001), the author of Behold a Pale Horse (1991), a book that became extremely popular in the American militia movement by claiming that the Illuminati had created both Communism and capitalism, and were now preparing an invasion of extraterrestrials. On the morning of November 5, 2001, the farce degenerated into tragedy in Eagar, Arizona. A parody, again, except that some Christian fundamentalists and right-wing extremists argued that both the Illuminatus trilogy and the card game, under a clever pseudo-humorous disguise, in fact revealed the truth about the Illuminati. Weishaupt and Knigge were thus reduced to figures in a deck of cards. The Illuminati show up in countless novels, in movies (launching a memorable challenge to Lara Croft in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, 2001), comics, in collectible card games such as Steve Jackson’s Illuminati: New World Order (1994), where the Illuminati of Bavaria face rival groups such as the Discordians, the Gnomes of Zurich, the Bermuda Triangle, and the Aliens. Not everybody understood all this was intended as a (cosmic) joke.įrom the trilogy onwards, the Illuminati popped up literally everywhere-not only in the United States, as proved by Umberto Eco’s (1932–2016) novel Foucault’s Pendulum (1988). Since one of the aims of the Discordians was to mock the anti-cult movements and their theories that “cults” practice brainwashing, Shea and Wilson also revealed a secret word, “Fnord,” which quickly became part of American youth slang, which, introduced in any text, allows the Illuminati to condition its readers through subliminal messages. Throughout the story, the Illuminati are revealed to be at the center of every conspiracy in history: the United States, in particular, has been controlled by them ever since Adam Weishaupt killed George Washington and secretly took his place. The trilogy is actually a libertarian text, where the power of the Illuminati, who represent order and bureaucracy, is challenged by the Discordians in the name of freedom, chaos, and the goddess Eris. Shea and Wilson were members of the Discordian Society, situated somewhere between spiritual parody and alternative religion, which claims to worship Eris, goddess of discord and chaos, through “cosmic jokes” played on the world as a whole. The authors’ intentions might not have been immediately obvious to a casual reader. The three books of The Illuminatus Trilogy. In a totally different vein, it inspired a classic of satirical postmodern literature, The Illuminatus Trilogy, published in 1975 by Robert Joseph Shea (1933–1994) and Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007). Some of his supporters contributed to the confusion by assuring that the Illuminati instead had infiltrated his opponents.Īnti-Masonic authors such as Edith Starr Miller, who became, through her marriage with an English lord, Lady Queenborough (1890–1933), and Nesta Elen Bevan, married Webster (1867–1960) kept the idea of the Illuminati political conspiracy alive. Several police investigations led to nothing, but the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, was repeatedly accused, wrongly, of being a member of the elusive Illuminati. The dreaded Bavarian cult, he claimed, had taken over the American Masonic lodges and was ready to betray the United States by selling it to revolutionary France (in later versions, to Britain). It was a Congregationalist pastor, Jedediah Morse (1761–1826), who, based on the theories of fellow Calvinist John Robison, launched with his sermons of 1798–99 the first panic against the Illuminati in New England. From Twitter.Īlthough the myth of the Illuminati is international, what was a European esoteric order became a ghost haunting the national politics primarily in the United States. The original Illuminati: New World Order card game, 1984. Read article 1, article 2, article 3, article 4, article 5, article 6, article 7, and article 8. The most recent one is still going on.Īrticle 9 of 9. The first national Illuminati scare in the U.S.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |