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Title: Meet the Man Who Started the Illuminati
Source:
nationalgeographic.com
URL Source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/ ... upt-illuminati-secret-society/
Published: Feb 2, 2018
Author: Isabel Hernández
Post Date: 2018-02-02 08:41:19 by Gatlin
Keywords: None
Views: 3003
Comments: 23
THE ILLUMINATI AIMED TO CREATE “A STATE OF LIBERTY AND MORAL EQUALITY.” How did a Bavarian professor end up creating a group that would be at the center of two centuries of conspiracy theories? The 18th-century German thinker Adam Weishaupt would have been stunned if he had known his ideas would one day fuel global conspiracy theories, and inspire best- selling novels and blockbuster films. Until he was 36, the vast majority of his compatriots would have been equally stunned to discover that this outwardly respectable professor was a dangerous enemy of the state, whose secret society, the Illuminati, was seen to threaten the very fabric of society. Born in 1748 in Ingolstadt, a city in the Electorate of Bavaria (now part of modern- day Germany), Weishaupt was a descendant of Jewish converts to Christianity. Orphaned at a young age, his scholarly uncle took care of his education, and enrolled him in a Jesuit school. After completing his studies, Weishaupt became a professor of natural and canon law at the University of Ingolstadt, married, and started a family. On the surface, it was a conventional enough career—until 1784 when the Bavarian state learned of his incendiary ideas. A closer look at his upbringing, however, reveals that Weishaupt always had a restless mind. As a boy he was an avid reader, consuming books by the latest French Enlightenment philosophers in his uncle’s library. Bavaria at that time was deeply conservative and Catholic. Weishaupt was not the only one who believed that the monarchy and the church were repressing freedom of thought. Convinced that religious ideas were no longer an adequate belief system to govern modern societies, he decided to find another form of “illumination,” a set of ideas and practices that could be applied to radically change the way European states were run. Freemasonry was steadily expanding throughout Europe in this period, offering attractive alternatives to freethinkers. Weishaupt initially thought of joining a lodge. Disillusioned with many of the Freemasons’ ideas, however, he became absorbed in books dealing with such esoteric themes as the Mysteries of the Seven Sages of Memphis and the Kabbala, and decided to found a new secret society of his own. Weishaupt was not, he said, against religion itself, but rather the way in which it was practiced and imposed. His thinking, he wrote, offered freedom “from all religious prejudices; cultivates the social virtues; and animates them by a great, a feasible, and speedy prospect of universal happiness.” To achieve this, it was necessary to create “a state of liberty and moral equality, freed from the obstacles which subordination, rank, and riches, continually throw in our way.” On the night of May 1, 1776, the first Illuminati met to found the order in a forest near Ingolstadt. Bathed in torchlight, there were five men. There they established the rules that were to govern the order. All future candidates for admission required the members’ consent, a strong reputation with well-established familial and social connections, and wealth. In the beginning, the order’s membership had three levels: novices, minervals, and illuminated minervals. “Minerval” referred to the Roman goddess of wisdom, Minerva, reflecting the order’s aim to spread true knowledge, or illumination, about how society, and the state, might be reshaped. “The Illuminati aimed to create “a state of liberty and moral equality.” Over the following years, Weishaupt’s secret order grew considerably in size and diversity, possibly numbering 600 members by 1782. They included important people in Bavarian public life, such as Baron Adolph von Knigge and the banker Mayer Amschel Rothschild, who provided funding. Although, at first, the Illuminati were limited to Weishaupt’s students, the membership expanded to included noblemen, politicians, doctors, lawyers, and jurists, as well as intellectuals and some leading writers, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. By the end of 1784, the Illuminati had 2,000 to 3,000 members. Baron von Knigge played a very considerable role in the society’s organization and expansion. As a former Freemason, he was in favor of adopting rites similar to theirs. Members of the Illuminati were given a symbolic “secret” name taken from classical antiquity: Weishaupt was Spartacus, for example, and Knigge was Philo. The membership levels also became a more complex hierarchy. There were a total of 13 degrees of initiation, divided into three classes. The first culminated in the degree of illuminatus minor, the second illuminatus dirigens, and the third, that of king. Pressures both internal and external, however, would soon put an end to the order’s expansion into the upper echelons of Bavarian power. Weishaupt and Knigge increasingly fought over the aims and procedures of the order, a conflict that, in the end, forced Knigge to leave the society. At the same time, another ex-member, Joseph Utzschneider, wrote a letter to the Grand Duchess of Bavaria, supposedly lifting the lid on this most secret of societies. The revelations were a mix of truth and lies. According to Utzschneider, the Illuminati believed that suicide was legitimate, that its enemies should be poisoned, and that religion was an absurdity. He also suggested that the Illuminati were conspiring against Bavaria on behalf of Austria. Having been warned by his wife, the Duke-Elector of Bavaria issued an edict in June 1784 banning the creation of any kind of society not previously authorized by law. The Illuminati initially thought that this general prohibition would not directly affect them. But just under a year later, in March 1785, the Bavarian sovereign passed a second edict, which expressly banned the order. In the course of carrying out arrests of members, Bavarian police found highly compromising documents, including a defense of suicide and atheism, a plan to create a female branch of the order, invisible ink recipes, and medical instructions for carrying out abortions. The evidence was used as the basis for accusing the order of conspiring against religion and the state. In August 1787, the duke-elector issued a third edict in which he confirmed that the order was prohibited, and imposed the death penalty for membership. Weishaupt lost his post at the University of Ingolstadt and was banished. He lived the rest of his life in Gotha in Saxony where he taught philosophy at the University of Göttingen. The Bavarian state considered the Illuminati dismantled. Their legacy, however, has endured and fuels many conspiracy theories. Weishaupt was accused—falsely—of helping to plot the French Revolution. The Illuminati have been fingered in recent events, such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Weishaupt’s ideas have also influenced the realms of popular fiction, such as Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons and Foucault’s Pendulum by Italian novelist Umberto Eco. Although his group was disbanded, Weishaupt’s lasting contribution may be the idea that secret societies linger behind the scenes, pulling the levers of power.
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Adam Weishaupt, founder of the Illuminati An Inside Job
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Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 7.
#1. To: Gatlin (#0)
Connecting Long-lost Dots - Illuminati and NWO
Why Do Some [Idiots] Believe in Conspiracy Theories?
Was Solzhenitsyn an idiot? www.google.com/search? q=2...ars+together+solzhenitsyn Russia! Russia! Russia?
I have seen it said that Alexander Solzhenitsyn was: A Useful Idiot for the West and that “he was a bad novelist and a fool. The combination usually makes for great popularity in the US.” Here, I’ll let you see that too: Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a charlatan and a buffoon of epic proportions. He coined and popularized the emotionally-charged propaganda term gulag in his bad work of fiction known as the “The Gulag Archipelago.” The book was promoted in the West and taken without question as a true and unbiased account of life in the Soviet penal system. In fact, it was translated by a man named Thomas P. Whitney who had a background in intelligence (what a shocker!). Mr. Whitney was an analyst with the OSS during the second world war. The OSS, or Office of Strategic Services, was the precursor to the CIA. Solzhenitsyn supposedly gathered the stories of scores of prisoners in the Soviet labor camps spread throughout the country. By the way, the term gulag is nothing more than an acronym taken from “Main Camp Administration;” a shortened form of the full name of the penal system which was called “Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Labor Settlements.” The sound of hard consonants must evoke some kind of emotional response that is decidedly negative. Gulag sure sounds a lot more menacing than “Main Camp Administration.” Solzhenitsyn was picked up by state security while he was an officer in the Red Army during WWII, or the Great Patriotic War, as it is still known in Russia. His correspondence, primarily that between him and his close friend, Nikolai Vitkevich, was intercepted. In their letters they spoke of “Resolution No. 1” which was their plan for a “war after the war” in which they would right the so-called wrongs of Stalinism. They mocked Stalin as a “big shot” and as “the moustachioed one.” As the Soviet Union was under massive attack by the Wehrmacht and fighting for its very survival the Soviet leadership could not be expected to have a sense of humor about this sort of thing. Solzhenitsyn was arrested and charged with anti-Soviet propaganda and founding a hostile organization. The traitor could have faced the death penalty for his crimes, but instead received a sentence of 8 years in the labor camps. The type of people who were prisoners in this “gulag archipelago” was truly shocking according to the narration from a documentary called, erroneously, Great Hearts of Courage, about Solzhenitsyn’s sorry life: “Doctors, lawyers, teachers, priests, scientists, professional people of all kinds – anyone with the courage or indiscretion to speak the truth.” [In other words, bourgeois scum of all kinds.] (GHC) After Solzhenitsyn lied in order to pass himself off as a nuclear scientist, he was moved to a much cozier prison for scientists to work on the nuclear project. While here, Solzhenitsyn began to transform. In his own words: “I began to move ever so slowly toward a position of an idealist [sic] , supporting the primacy of the spiritual over the material and, secondly, patriotic and religious. In other words, I began to return slowly and gradually to all my former childhood views.” (GHC) Solzhenitsyn was not the first, nor will he be the last, person to find religion in prison. In other words, he began to return to his previous reactionary and conservative upbringing. He returned to his “childhood views.” Also while in prison Solzhenitsyn reportedly “memorized hundreds and hundreds of pages of text” – the stories of his fellow prisoners; their tales of suffering. One might conjecture whether these stories were truly memorized or invented. Solzhenitsyn goes further in his nonsense: “Freedom is not to grab and take as much as possible from neighbors or from somebody else. Feelings have been given us for freedom, but God gave us freedom of choice [sic]. Before my exile I wrote that freedom consists of being able to act and to think independently of external pressures and external enemies. That is freedom. In the Gospel it says: ‘Understand truth and truth will make you free.’ This is fascinating.” (GHC) For Solzhenitsyn, freedom came from God. Is it any wonder that he was quickly handed the Nobel Prize by the West and that they broadcast, through Radio Free Europe (a CIA proprietary) excerpts of his crappy book, “The Gulag Archipelago”, as well as working overtime to smuggle copies of the same into the USSR and eastern Europe? Furthermore, is it just a coincidence that his quote above about the “the truth will make you free” mirrors quite closely the biblical passage engraved in the CIA lobby: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free?” I wonder. Solzhenitsyn defected to the West and settled in Vermont for a time. He was a staunch supporter of U.S. imperialism, urging at one point for the U.S. to return to Vietnam and finish the job on the commies there. In time, Solzhenitsyn began to pine away for the glory days of the Tsar and his anti-Semitism became increasingly apparent to the point where even his previous imperialist backers had to abandon him. The only people who seem to invoke his name these days are nutbags from the far right like Alex Jones. Solzhenitsyn was an anti-communist, reactionary buffoon and the world is well rid of him. References
Comrade President Andropov, is that you or is Gatlin just one of your misfiring KGB propaganda puppets?
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#2. To: Deckard (#1)
#3. To: Gatlin (#2)
(Edited)
Why Do Some [Idiots] Believe in Conspiracy Theories?
2+2=4
#5. To: VxH (#3)
Was Solzhenitsyn an idiot?
Gore Vidal (Views from a Window) said about Alexander Solzhenitsyn: He is a bad novelist and a fool. The combination usually makes for great popularity in the US.
But I know of no one who has ever called him an “idiot” and I have neither reason to nor reason not to.
Now that we have that bit of research out of the way....what exactly is your point in asking the question?
#7. To: Gatlin (#5)
"This hooligan is out of control!"
Replies to Comment # 7.
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