By Terry Liddle

In 1738, Pope Clement XIII issued an Encyclical, In Eainente, in which “for the sake of the peace and safety of civil governments and the spiritual safety of souls,” he condemned Freemasonry and other secret societies. At first sight, this seemed an odd thing to do as many Catholics, including such prominent figures as Francois, the holy Roman Emperor were Freemasons. However, in a letter which was not published until 1962,¹ the pope stated that he not only thought that the masterminds behind Freemasonry were the same as those behind the Lutheran Reformation, but also that Freemasons denied the divinity of Jesus. The pope may well have been paranoid, but it remains a fact that within little more than half a century all the old powers of Europe, both spiritual and temporal, would be under threat from new social forces, forces which would be anti-clerical and atheist, revolutionary and republican. And as in sore recent times these forces organised themselves into political parties so in the late 18th century they found their expression in conspiratorial secret societies. In 1751, throughout the 19th century, and even as late as 1917 the popes would condemn such societies.

One such society which to this day still excites much speculation was the Bavarian Illuminati. Founded on May 1, 1776 by Adam Weishaupt, a professor of religious law at the University of Ingolstadt, it originally had only five members; by 1780 it had sixty members in five cities, Weishaupt had become a mason in Munich in 1777 and two years later had control of the Lodge of Theodore of Good Counsel there.

However, it was the recruitment in 1780 of Adolf Francis, Baron Knigge, which enabled the Illuminati to expand its influence. Within a few months of his joining membership was 300 and by 1784 had grown to 3,000. At a masonic congress in Wilhelmsbad in 1782, Knigge recruited most of the delegates thus blocking an attempt by the Strict Observance sect, which had connections with the Jacobites, to take over. While the Illuminati maintained all the ritualistic trappings and mumbo-jumbo of masonry, their real aim was the overthrow of the feudal state and the Roman Catholic church which they saw as stumbling blocks to progress. According to the Catholic writer on occult matters, Montague Summers, a number of masons, including Illuminati member Christian Bode, who was recruited in 1782 by Knigge, met in Frankfurt in 1786 to plot the deaths of Louis XVI of France and Gustavus III of Sweden. The Austrian publication, Veiner Zeitschrift, further accused Bode of secret meetings with Mirabeau, who in 1791 would become President of the French Assembly. The fact that as late as 1946 Summers could attack Weishaupt as ‘one of the greatest criminals and most evil minds known in the history of the human race’, shows how much Catholicism feared and hated such societies as the Illuminati.² This hatred is echoed by such right-wing pseudohistorians and conspiracy theorists as Nesta Webster and Gary Allen.³

According to John Robison, himself a Mason, the Illuminati ‘abjured Christianity, advocated sensual pleasure, believed in annihilation, and called patriotism and loyalty narrow-minded prejudices incompatible with universal benevolence’. Furthermore, ‘they accounted all princes usurpers and tyrants, and all privileged orders as their abbetors; they meant to abolish the laws which protected property…and to prevent for: the future and such accumulation, they intended to establish universal liberty and equality, the imprescriptible rights of man…’⁴ No wonder, then, they should attract the unfriendly attention of both church and state.

As the influence of the Illuminati grew, complaints were made that it was subversive of political and religious authority and was attempting to influence education and the press. In October 1783 a former member, Joseph Utzschneider sent a letter denouncing the Illuminati to the Duchess Maria Anna, who in turn aroused the suspicions of the monarch, Carl Theodore. In April 1784 Knigge withdrew from the Illuminati and in June of that year Carl Theodore issued an edict outlawing all secret societies in his realm. This was followed in 1785 by a further edict bantling the Illuminati and offering rewards for those willing to inform on it. In July of that year a member named Lanz was killed by lightning and the police found on his body incriminating papers which they placed in the hands of Carl Theodore. Raids on the homes of members uncovered more °subversive° documents. Many former members now turned state’s evidence and gave lurid accounts of the organisation’s activities which further fueled the fear and hate of the ruling powers.

Veishaupt had already fled in 1785 to Gotha where he attempted to defend himself against the charges of procuring an abortion for his sister-in-law., Bode attempted to carry on, but in 1787 the Duke of Bavaria issued a final edict. However, as late as 1790 the police were still harassing people they thought to be members of the organisation. Officially the days of the Illuminati were done,but according to some sources it was reorganised as the German Union and members of it were to play a leading role in the events of 1789 which led to the downfall of the Capetian dynasty in France and plunged Europe into an epoch of war and revolution.

It should not be forgotten that 1776, the year the Illuminati was founded, was a year of revolution in America. While the charges of belonging to the Illuminati made against them by their opponents were unfounded, it cannot be denied that many of the American revolutionaries were active Freemasons. Jefferson, for example, praised Weishaupt’s ‘rationalistic philosophy” and said that had he written in America he would have had no need to act conspiratorially. Franklin had become a Mason in 1731 and had helped with the initiation of Voltaire into the Lodge of the Nine Sisters in Paris. Washington was initiated into a Virginia lodge in 1752, and was a close friend of fellow-Mason, Lafayette, who played a leading role in both the American and French Revolutions. It should also be noted that the Great Seal of the United States and the Illuminati symbol are almost identical.

However, it was in the French Revolution that masons, some of them like Mirabeau with links with the Illuminati, were most active, the Jacobin Club appears to have its origins in part in Mirabeau’s Lodge of Philalthes, while Lafayette was a member of the political committee of the Social Contract Lodge. Other members of the Illuminati such as Clootz, Zimmermann and Buonarroti, a leading figure in Babeuf’s, Society of Equals, were in the vanguard of the spread of revolutionary ideas in France and beyond. It was during the French Revolution that popular societies such as the Cercle Sociale, to which Karl Marx paid homage, began to criticise capitalism, just then coming into being, In doing so they echoed Weishaupt’s attack on ‘the mercantile tribe’. It would, however, be wrong to see the French revolutionary movement as merely a Masonic conspiracy. If Masonry had never existed the popular masses would still have fought to break out of the straight-jacket of feudal society.

As the 18th century gave way to the 19th, those in revolt against the old order in Europe and beyond continued to form Mason-like secret political societies. In 1809 in Geneva, Buonarroti formed the first international secret political society, the Sublime Maitres Parfaits, and the following year, Father Hidalgo, both a Jesuit and a Mason, who was fond of quoting Voltaire and decorating his churches with the Illuminati symbol, led the revolt of the people of Mexico against Spain under the slogan of ‘Long Live Our Lady of Guadeloupe and death to bad government” (it was under the banner of Our Lady of Guadalupe that the Zapatistas would fight a century later). In Russia, Masons were organising secret societies which would become the Decesbrist movement, which in 1825 would attempt to overthrow the tsar. In Poland under the flag of National Freemasonry the foundations for the long struggle against Russian domination were being laid.

In Britain the radical poet Burns joined the Scottish Masons, while the early trade unions, forbidden by law from organising openly, adopted much of the secrecy and ritual of masonry. To this day, branches of the National Union of Miners are known as lodges.

In Italy, the Carbonari, denounced by Pius VII in 1821, were struggling for national liberation. Members of this society addressed each other as Good Cousin and took as their symbol a red, blue and black tricolour. In 1820 they attempted uprisings all over Italy. When these failed their Grand Lodge moved to Paris where it helped work towards the revolution of July 1830, Mazzini joined the Carbonari in 1827.

Attempts have been made to link Marx with the Illuminati via the League of the Just, a secret society founded by German exiles in Paris. Among its members were Carl Schapper and Heinrich Bauer, After an unsuccessful revolt, these two moved to London where they formed the Communist Workers’ Educational Society. This eventually became the Communist League for which Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto. There is no mention of the Illuminati in the work of Marx, but Trotsky in his autobiography describes them as “forerunners of the revolution’.⁵

It is with the formation of the Communist League that there begins the type of mass working class politics we know today. However, secret political societies continued to be active, the Philadelphians, for example, helped found the First International,⁶ and the banners of the Masons flew beside the red flag during the Paris Commune. Many socialist leaders, including Proudhon, Allende and Attlee, were also Masons. Although today Masonry is mostly a reactionary society of the rich and corrupt, we all owe a debt to the radical pioneers who organised clandestinely, not because they had awful occult secrets to hide, but because given the circumstances of their time it was the only way they could.

References

1. Peyrefitte, R. ‘La Lettre Secret’. Le Syabolisse. Paris. April-June, 1967.
2. Summers, M. Witchcraft and Black Magic. Rider & Co., London, 1946.
3. See the forger’s, The French Revolution, and the latter’s, None Dare Call It Conspiracy.
4. Robison, J. Proofs of a Conspiracy. First published in Scotland in 1794. The current edition is by Western Islands Press, Belmont, Mass., USA.
5. Trotsky, Leon. My Life, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1975.
6. See B. Nicolaevsky, ‘Secret Societies and the First International’ in M. Drachkovitch (ed.), The Revolutionary Internationals 1861-1943. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1968. The Philadelphians had links with Bradlaugh who was an active Mason.