A Culture of Conspiracy. Michael Barkun
the Antichrist not simply in individual terms but as a system that drew in the United Nations, computers, and the global economy, the public invocation of the New World Order could only mean that the days of the Tribulation were imminent.
Thus, New World Order came to connote an impending world dictatorship in which the Antichrist would seize control through a combination of co-opted international organizations and marvels of electronic surveillance. But simultaneously, a second conception of the New World Order had arisen, growing in this case from secular roots.
THE ILLUMINATI
The secular version of the New World Order foresaw an equally bleak future, also dominated by expanding tyranny. In this case, however, the source of domination was not the power of Satan but an evil cabal that sought absolute power over the world’s people and resources for its own selfish reasons. Although many secret societies were deemed to be carriers of the conspiracy, the one most often invoked was also the most shadowy and obscure, the Illuminati.
Richard Hofstadter began his seminal essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” with an example probably unfamiliar to most of his readers—the belief in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century America that the new nation was about to be taken over by the Bavarian Illuminati. The fear of a plot by this secret Masonic society had been stoked by an earlier literature that sought to portray the French Revolution as the result of an Illuminatist conspiracy. The two key works on this revolutionary conspiracism were John Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy (1798) and Abbé Barruel’s Memoirs, Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (1803). Although the alleged doings of Illuminatist plotters in America seemed credible to some prominent New England clerics and academics, the panic peaked by the turn of the nineteenth century, after which it became increasingly clear that the Illuminati lived mostly in Robison’s fantasy life. Hofstadter himself disposed of the topic by noting that it may have opened the way for the anti-Masonic movement of the 1820s and 1830s, but he then proceeded to better-known examples of the “paranoid style,” such as anti-Catholic nativism. The Illuminati were relegated to the role of the progenitors of a conspiracist strand in American life that was to take other forms in the future.13
In fact, however, the Illuminati—or at least the image of the Illuminati—had just begun to spread by the 1830s. Both Robison’s and Barruel’s books continued to be reprinted, and both are featured works currently sold by the John Birch Society’s book service. Its catalog touts Barruel’s work as “the most comprehensive expose of a Master Conspiracy to rule the world,” while it offers Robison’s book as a description of “this secret group, whose select members became part of a conspiracy to enslave all people in Europe and America.” By way of updating Robison’s scenario, his current American publisher asserts that the Illuminati “have long since discarded Freemasonry as their vehicle,” preferring to operate in “universities, tax-free foundations, mass media communication systems, government bureaus such as the State Department, and a myriad of private organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations.”14
So much mythology has encrusted the Illuminati that their actual history has been obscured, even by scholars. This is a case of the image having achieved greater prominence than the reality of the organization itself—an ultimate though dubious tribute to the influence of the genre begun by Robison and Barruel. Distinguishing the image from what it purports to represent is made more difficult by the Illuminati’s own penchant for secrecy, its small size, and its brief lifespan. Nonetheless, the broad outlines of its history are reasonably clear.
The Bavarian Illuminati (formally, the Order of Illuminists) was established by a Bavarian canon-law professor, Adam Weishaupt, on May 1, 1776. Utilizing organizational models taken from both the Jesuits and the Masons, Weishaupt created a secular organization whose aim was to free the world “from all established religious and political authority.” An elaborate apparatus of secrecy and ritual was designed not only to protect the organization from state penetration but to mold its members into an elite capable of achieving Weishaupt’s grandiose objective. By the early 1780s, it had acquired a peak membership of approximately twenty-five hundred, most in German-speaking areas. The organization’s aims and its clandestine methods (for example, the infiltration of some Masonic lodges) attracted unwelcome government attention, which proved potent enough to bypass even the order’s security measures. By 1787, the Illuminati had been dissolved, but its sweeping goals, attention to secrecy, and insistence on unswerving personal dedication made it a model for a sizable number of early-nineteenth century revolutionary organizations, much in the manner of the Paris Commune in the next century.15
In short, the Illuminati influenced subsequent revolutionaries, albeit indirectly, even though the organization seems on the most reliable evidence to have lasted no more than eleven or twelve years. Yet the irony is that if its sympathizers were eager to preserve its legacy and to achieve the total liberation that had eluded Weishaupt, its enemies were even more eager to keep it alive. They insisted that it had never died, that its dissolution was only apparent, and that in the ultimate act of clandestinity, it had survived its own death. The fact that the order had been dissolved even before the French Revolution began made allegations of its survival all the more attractive, for how better to explain an unprecedented upheaval than by fastening on an unprecedentedly cunning cabal? Hence by an act of reductionist self-deception, opponents of the revolution could both explain its occurrence and resuscitate the Illuminati. And so began the convoluted tale of an evil conspiracy that was said to move from country to country, and century to century, setting off revolutionary conflagrations wherever it appeared.
The Illuminati in the Twentieth Century
Illuminati literature took a major leap in the interwar period of the twentieth century, when the legend of Weishaupt’s group came to be placed within a far more complex and ambitious conception of history. This transformation was mainly the work of two English writers, Nesta Webster (1876–1960) and Lady Queenborough, also known as Edith Starr Miller (d. 1933), each responsible for remarkably similar syntheses of the Illuminati literature. It is scarcely hyperbole to say, as Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke does, that without Webster “few Americans today would have heard of the Illuminati.” The women shared an unshakable faith in Robison’s and Barruel’s notion that the Illuminati were responsible for the French Revolution, and like the earlier authors, they insisted that the Illuminati had not disappeared in the late 1780s but had gone on causing mayhem for decades thereafter. More important, Webster and Queenborough added two ideas that turned out to be immensely influential in later years: first, that world history could be correctly understood only as the product of the machinations of secret societies; and second, that Jews were central to these activities. By elevating secret societies to the role of prime movers in world history, they left the French Revolution behind, extending the Illuminati’s field of action into the present, including above all a catalytic role in the Russian Revolution. By linking Illuminism with the Jews, Webster and Queenborough gained access to a whole new body of conspiracy ideas, which they quickly appropriated.16
The problem they both confronted was that of fitting an organization that had not been founded until 1776 and that appeared to have fizzled out in about 1787 into a conspiracist historiography. Building such a theory, while at the same time giving the Illuminati their due, required them to sweep in a whole raft of other organizations as ancestors, successors, affiliates, or subsidiaries of the Illuminati. In the end, Webster and Queenborough included, among many others, the Knights Templar, the kabbalists, the Rosicrucians, and the Carbonari, postulating or claiming to demonstrate all manner of linkages among dozens of clandestine groups. Thus was born the concept of a kind of interlocking directorate of conspirators who operate through a network of secret societies. The fact that there had actually been secret societies that had played a modest role in channeling European political dissent from about 1790 until the middle of the nineteenth century gave a surface plausibility to some of these claims, but scarcely provided justification for the wildly inflated charges made by Webster and Queenborough.17
Webster, writing in 1924, concluded that the world’s ills were attributable to anti-Christian Illuminati, to “Pan-German Power” (she was, after all, writing shortly after World War I), and to “the Jewish power.” She was unsure exactly how these three forces were intertwined, but proposed the following scenarios: