HUISWERK: John Robison and the birth of the Illuminati
Een lesje geschiedenis voor de leden van de Belfort-group, waarmee ze – naar keuze – de wildgroei van hun paranoïde fantasieën omtrent het duistere genootschap van de Illuminati kunnen uitroeien of verder cultiveren. In het artikel John Robison and the birth of the Illuminati beschrijft Mike Jay hoe de samenzweringstheorie in de 18e eeuw tot stand kwam in (het hoofd en) een boek van John Robison, hoe Robison de (op zich niet zo interessante) Illuminati er uitpikte als ultieme protagonist voor z’n vermeende samenzwering, en hoe z’n theorie zich tot op de dag van vandaag blijft manifesteren en transformeren.
Over het boek van John Robison
At the beginning of 1797, John Robison was a man with a solid and long-standing reputation in the British scientific establishment. He had been Professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh University for over twenty years, an authority on mathematics and optics, and had recently been appointed senior scientific contributor on the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, to which he would eventually contribute over a thousand pages of articles.
Yet by the end of the year, his professional reputation had been eclipsed by a sensational book that vastly outsold anything he had previously written, and whose shockwaves would continue to reverberate long after his scientific work had been forgotten. Its title was Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, and it launched on the English-speaking public the enduring theory that a vast conspiracy, masterminded by a covert Masonic cell known as the Illuminati, was in the process of subverting all the cherished institutions of the civilised world and co-opting them into instruments of its secret and godless plan: the tyranny of the masses under the invisible control of unknown superiors, and a new era of ‘darkness over all’.
Over de kracht van de samenzweringtheorie
The power of Robison’s revelation was that it identified within this buzzing confusion of conspiracies a single protagonist, a single ideology and a single overarching plot that crystallised the chaos into a concerted drama and elevated it into an epic struggle between good and evil, whose outcome would define the future of world politics.
Over Adam Weishaupt en the Bavarian Order of the Illuminati
Robison’s vast conspiracy needed an imposing and terrifying figurehead, a role for which Adam Weishaupt, the founder of the Bavarian Order of the Illuminati, seemed on the surface of things to be an unpromising candidate. Obsessive and domineering, Weishaupt had from the beginning found difficulty in attracting members to his secret society, where they were expected to adopt mystical pseudonyms chosen by him, jump through the hoops of his strict initiatic grades and take up subservient roles in his messianic but unfocused crusade for world domination. Nor did the appeal of his Order translate easily into the world beyond his small provincial network. Catholic Bavaria was held tightly in the grip of the Jesuits, under whom Weishaupt had been educated and whose influence his Illuminati aimed to counter and subvert; but the ‘secret knowledge’ of enlightenment with which he lured initiates was mostly secret only in Bavaria, where the philsophies of Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot were still suppressed. Elsewhere, and particularly in France, their works had long been freely available: French Masonic lodges, particularly the Grand Orient, already offered congenial surroundings and company for discussing such ideas, and had shown little interest in the Bavarian Illuminati’s attempts to infiltrate them. After 1784, when the Order had been exposed and banned by the Elector of Bavaria, Weishaupt had exiled himself to Gotha in central Germany, since when he appeared to have done little beyond producing a series of morose and self-justifying memoirs of his adventures.
Over de impact van Robison op 18e eeuwse Amerikaanse politiek
But the nation where Robison’s book had a profound and enduring impact was the United States of America. Here, the polarised forces of revolution and reaction that had swept Europe were playing out in a form that threatened to split the Founding Fathers and destroy their fledgling Constitution. (…) The ‘Illuminati Scare’ (…) had touched a nerve deep within the American political mindset, and it has been woven into many subsequent paranoias and panics. Many on the isolationist right continue to believe Robison’s theory to this day: the official John Birch Society line, for example, remains that Weishaupt’s Illuminati ‘was the ancestor of the Communist movement and the model for modern subversive conspiratorial movements’.
De Illuminati samenzwering als flexibele, moderne mythe
Forged in the same crucible as every modern political ideology from nihilism to conservatism, anarchy to military dictatorship, the Illuminati conspiracy has become a modern myth – not just in the dismissive sense that its factual basis evaporates under scrutiny, but in the more potent form of a shapeshifting narrative capable of adapting its meaning to accomodate new and unforeseen scenarios.
