JFK assassinated the moon landings in Area 51 on 9/11 because 5G Beyonce. The name “Illuminati” is regularly associated with conspiracy theories about a “New World Order” run by a secretive power elite determined to replace sovereign nation-states with an authoritarian world government. But the actual Illuminati was a real thing, and it had no such designs. Quite the opposite.
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down; May 1, 1776--
The Bavarian Illuminati was indeed a secret society, founded on May 1, 1776. But the group’s ambitions were more in line with the promotion of science over superstition. They began because some dude was too poor to join the Freemasons.
The pope had disbanded the Jesuits three years earlier, but they were still mostly running the show at the University of Ingolstadt (in Bavaria) and they were total dicks to anyone at the school who was non-clerical. They were the “Let’s own some libtards” of the day.
Adam Weishaupt, the only non-clerical professor at Ingolstadt, was on the Jesuits’ shit list. He despised the control religion had over people’s lives and embraced the teachings of the Enlightenment. Adam was all about reason and science and liberalism.
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Since Adam couldn’t afford the Freemason fee, he said screw you guys I’ll start my own club. The Illuminati began with Adam and four students and grew slowly from there. Eventually it expanded to include several hundred direct members, and perhaps thousands of affiliated members, many holding influential positions in society.
Things were looking good when Charles Theodore became Duke of Bavaria in 1777 and initiated a series of liberal reforms. Except he was a total jam tart, and the clergy strong-armed the weak-willed monarch into reversing those reforms. D’oh!
Unfortunately for the Illuminati, not everyone was good at keeping the secret order a secret. They became boastful and openly critical of the monarchy, which caused the Duke to ban all such secret societies in 1785, and two years later he passed another edict making being a member of such an order punishable by death. Harsh.
And that was pretty much it for the Illuminati except in the dreams of conspiracy-minded morons who probably think they are in league with our reptilian overlords to harvest organs from people wearing “Q Sent Me” T-shirts to sell as a delicacy on the intergalactic hors d’oeuvres market.
Get the book On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down.