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The Illuminati: Bavarian Order
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In this episode, Megan and Frank investigate the Bavarian Order of the Illuminati, a secret society founded in 1776 by the Enlightenment philosopher Adam Weishaupt. This conversation covers who the Illuminati were, what they believed, and how they attempted to bring about a "new world order." Thinkers discussed include: Adam Weishaupt, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Mencius, and Alasdair MacIntyre.
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Hosts' Websites:
Email: philosophyonthefringes@gmail.com
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Bibliography:
The Secret School of Wisdom: The Authentic Rituals and Doctrines of the Illuminati (Primary source documents)
CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Illuminati
Illuminaten - Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism
Perfectibilists | Independent Publishers Group
After Virtue - A Study in Moral Theory - Alasdair MacIntyre
How Mengzi came up with something better than the Golden Rule | Aeon Ideas
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Cover Artwork by Logan Fritts
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Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
https://uppbeat.io/t/simon-folwar/neon-signs
License code: CUCILUBPXFZKKTOP
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Transcript
Introduction and Topic Announcement
00:00:04
Speaker
Welcome to Philosophy on the Fringes, a podcast that explores the philosophical dimensions of the strange. We're your hosts, Megan Fritz and Frank Cabrera. Today, we're talking about the Illuminati.
00:00:15
Speaker
Who were they? What did they believe? And how do their ideas fit into the Enlightenment movement?
Historical Illuminati vs. Modern Perceptions
00:00:39
Speaker
Hey, welcome back, everyone. Thanks for joining us again for episode 24. Today, we are doing another, we're starting another two-part ah episode topic. We haven't done a two-parter in a while. Since the myths episodes. That's right. Mm-hmm.
00:00:55
Speaker
But we're talking about the Illuminati. And as we kind of dug into the topic, we realized that there was so much material that that it merited two topics.
00:01:06
Speaker
and And it sort of divided itself kind of neatly into two distinct categories. So this is part one of two, ah talking about the Illuminati. And today we're going to be focusing on the actual organization of the Illuminati, their formation, rituals, beliefs, philosophies, and everything that went along with the actual Enlightenment era organization.
00:01:33
Speaker
Yeah, Megan, so you said the actual Illuminati. So this would probably be a little bit striking to some of our listeners because it seems like on its surface, the Illuminati refers to kind of just a generic catch-all term for any shadowy cabal of elites who control all the events in the world. right That's mostly what people mean by the Illuminati.
00:01:55
Speaker
Yeah, and yeah. That may exist or not. We'll get into that in in the next episode. But as as you suggested and the at the outset, there really was a historical documented organization called the Illuminati.
00:02:08
Speaker
Right. They might not have been as cool as say, Dan Brown portrays them as in and his novel. And probably, you know, Beyonce is not a member. But there really was a real organization really called the Illuminati. Right.
Adam Weishaupt and the Founding of the Illuminati
00:02:22
Speaker
Okay. And so who were they? Well, they were they were founded on on May 1st in 1776. Is that a coincidence? We'll talk about that maybe in the next episode, too.
00:02:31
Speaker
By a man named Adam Weishaupt. Wait, what do you mean a coincidence? 1736. Founding the United States? Like two months. Have you ever looked on the back of the $1 bill?
00:02:42
Speaker
I thought you meant May 1st. Like, yeah, they they they decided to found it on May Day. Yeah. They might have done that on purpose. OK, so founded by a guy named Adam Weishaupt. So he's the brainchild of this operation.
00:02:55
Speaker
So they're originally called the Order of the Most Perfectible, the Order of the Perfectibilist. This will be really important as we proceed onward with the episode, um because they thought you could perfect human nature. and That's part of their their philosophy.
00:03:10
Speaker
ah I think he once considered naming it the Society of the Bees because bees are really hardworking. and He wanted his organization to be really hardworking. I think the bee also is a symbol associated with Freemasons, which also have a connection to the Illuminati, as we'll hopefully discuss.
00:03:27
Speaker
Eventually, he settled on the the term the Illuminati, which there there were other organizations in history that were called this. It just sort of is a term that means the Enlightened Ones.
00:03:39
Speaker
That name just goes so much harder than... Yeah, of course, of course. The B. yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think he just briefly considered it. So it began really more as a very small group of individuals who were meeting. I guess we just say a bit about who Adam Weishaupt was because he is like the protagonist in this story. He's got an interesting backstory. Yeah, he does. So he was born in 1748. He died in 1830, long life.
00:04:07
Speaker
1748. he wasn't even 30 when he founded this. He was 28. No, yeah. He was a young professor. So he's born and raised in place called Ingolstadt in Bavaria. That's southern Germany.
00:04:19
Speaker
ah So Bavaria is also incidentally where my favorite documentarian Werner Herzog is from. as He's from Munich. where my favorite kind of cream comes from. Yeah, there you go.
00:04:29
Speaker
ah He was educated by the Jesuits and he became became a professor of law at a very young age, like age 24, 25. And in his capacity as a law professor, he sought to to spread the principles of the Enlightenment. He was a disciple of the Enlightenment, which we'll say a bit more
Structure and Expansion of the Illuminati
00:04:45
Speaker
about soon.
00:04:46
Speaker
His endeavor, though, was frustrated by the Jesuits, this Catholic religious order, ah the Society of Jesus. So they had been suppressed by the Pope at this time for like political intrigue or something.
00:05:00
Speaker
But there were still secret Jesuits hanging around in Ingolstadt in the university. And they were frustrating his plans to spread Enlightenment principles, you know include Enlightenment figures on his syllabi, publish about the Enlightenment principles and all of that.
00:05:15
Speaker
So he decided to found a secret society. And although he didn't like the Jesuits, he really did model the society, his secret society, on Jesuit principles, Jesuit methods.
00:05:26
Speaker
He said that he was going to use ah you utilize for good purposes the very means which that order, the Jesuits, employed for evil ends. So, yeah, he's ah he's a he's a disciple of the Enlightenment. He starts this secret society, begins as a very small university organization, and eventually spreads to include something like, at its height, 2,000 members.
00:05:49
Speaker
ah So Adam Weishaupt himself was kind of an unpractical man. He was a professor. He's like us, right? he's not If we tried to start a secret society, you and me, like it's not going to go anywhere. you ah You're very practical. I guess you have 8,000 Twitter followers, so you could start a secret society. It wouldn't be very secret. I only have, well, you just DM some of the select few.
00:06:09
Speaker
Back when we had Twitter circles. Yeah. I only have 780, I guess because I don't ever use Twitter really. ah But if we tried to start a secret society, it probably wouldn't work out very well. and we We're not very practical, you know, we're not really good organizing things.
00:06:22
Speaker
So this Illuminati organization really only took off once another ah guy got involved, this guy, Baron Adolf Kanige. ah So he he was a Freemason and he spread the Illuminati idea to his fellow Freemasons and then it it sort of took off.
00:06:40
Speaker
ah The most famous members of this real Bavarian order, the Illuminati, were probably the the writer, polymath, I guess he did everything really, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
00:06:53
Speaker
He wrote Faust, right? ah But there are also some dukes and princes and minor monarchs that were in the Illuminati too. Wait, the author of Faust was in the Illuminati? Yes, he was in the Illuminati. yeah That's yeah yeah good pretty ironic given the plot of Faust.
00:07:08
Speaker
Well, remember... There's a lot in the Illuminati. We're going to get to all the secret wisdom and stuff. But it began as like a really... That's pretty ironic given the plot of Faust. Well, the plot of Faust being, right? Faust, he's visited by one of the demons, Mephistopheles, and gives him a bargain. He wants knowledge. What has it go? I forget. read it long time ago.
00:07:27
Speaker
Yeah, he want he wants a lot of knowledge. Yeah, he has to sell his soul to get knowledge or something. Yeah, I mean, yeah hey Interesting, interesting, interesting. Okay, yeah, Gursa was like, ah you know, actually, this was this was not a cautionary tale. This is just something I thought sounded super cool.
00:07:43
Speaker
Yeah. We don't really know what he did. There were lots of levels to the Illuminati. but we We're getting ahead of ourselves. Okay. Right. So, yeah. so So, it it's on its surface, it's like an enlightenment reading group or something, an enlightenment club, right? a so A salon, a coffee house, something like that.
00:07:58
Speaker
But the the goals really were to spread these these ideas, these ideas from the enlightenment. So, we've used this term a lot already. We should say a bit about what the enlightenment was. I'm sure a lot of our listeners have a general sense of what the Enlightenment was. But let's let's talk a bit about this. So what do what do we mean by the Enlightenment, Enlightenment principles? want to help us out, Megan? Yeah, I mean, this is something that kind of you start to see rising across Europe basically at the end of the 18th century, kind of principles of sort of secularization, um moving away from
00:08:31
Speaker
The church as the primary source of knowledge and to universal sources of knowledge like reason. Right. So the the quintessential Enlightenment philosopher is Immanuel Kant. yep And he said ah in a famous essay, What is Enlightenment?
00:08:46
Speaker
That Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Yeah, there's definitely a big idea with the Enlightenment that we have the power to make the world and ourselves better if we would just stop being so irrational and so appetitive and just, you know, hunker down and use reason to get
Enlightenment Principles and Secret Societies
00:09:07
Speaker
us where we need to go. Yeah, right it's a real faith in reason.
00:09:10
Speaker
And that's really what Kant says elsewhere as well. He says, ah have the courage to use your own reason. That is the motto of the Enlightenment. And Weishaupt, he says similar things, right? So this is all these ideas are in in the air at this time. The late 18th century is like the height of the Enlightenment.
00:09:27
Speaker
So Weishaupt says, it must teach people to come of age, to shed their guardianship, to attain manhood, and to to dispense with the princes. um So this includes this is was a large scale social movement involving lots of different people and includes stuff like questioning authority. Right. The questioning social norms. A very political component to the Enlightenment. Definitely. We we see these no kings protests going on. Yeah. ah That's a that's a big Enlightenment. throw Yeah. Like that that that. That idea would make no sense without the Enlightenment right movement. Right. Right. Questioning tradition.
00:10:00
Speaker
um So definiterefore there's definitely a real anti-monarchical ah strain in Enlightenment thought, although there were people who flirted with the idea of enlightened absolutism, but definitely goes hand in hand with ideas of republicanism, liberty, tolerance.
00:10:14
Speaker
ah The belief in human progress. We're going to talk a lot about that, too. And an enthusiasm for science, right? The scientific revolution like either goes hand in hand or led to the Enlightenment. You can think of the the scientific revolution as part and parcel of the Enlightenment if you want. Yeah. And incidentally, this idea, this belief in human progress is going to keep gaining influence through the 19th century, basically up until Charles Darwin, um which is part of the reason that real Darwinism took so long to actually disseminate into the popular mind, popular ideas. Yeah, Megan's referring here to a very popular misconception about the nature of natural like evolutionary theory and biology and natural selection. The idea that evolution or natural selection is like trying to create the most perfect organism or something. There's like a goal that nature is trying to achieve. and
00:11:07
Speaker
That's not what Darwin thought, but that's what a lot of these guys thought. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, if that if if they knew this wasn't true, i they i mean, i guess our listeners will hear as we go through and read quotes and stuff from from their their writings and stuff. but But without this idea, I mean, the the whole organization goes pretty much. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:11:25
Speaker
OK, so I mentioned earlier that that the Illuminati was founded as a kind of counter Jesuit organization. right so So I really like centering the Jesuits here as kind of the the bogeyman because the the Jesuits, ah one name that they have is, I should mention, by the way, the Jesuit is the largest Catholic religious order. and has like something like 16,000 members, including priests and scholars and stuff. And actually everyone likes centering them as the bogeyman.
00:11:53
Speaker
Nobody likes Justin. Yeah, no one likes, one, like, it's hard to know, it's hard for, I didn't really figure out why this was at the time, like, why the Pope suppressed them. They got unsuppressed, like, they exist today. And today they're they're most well known for charity and, like, I guess they're considered more progressive. Yeah. Yeah.
00:12:10
Speaker
I like Jesuits. I have many friends who were are Jesuits. so But I think back in the day when they got suppressed, it was due to just political intrigue. They got really involved in politics. This is a time when the monarchs trying to strengthen their power, create the nation state, and you have the Jesuits trying to mess around with things.
00:12:26
Speaker
I always just feel like they're just like the fall guy. Like you can say, oh, no, and the Jesuits didn't. People be like, oh OK. Yeah, so Weishaupt didn't like the Jesuits, but he liked the way they did things. right so they They were called the soldiers of Christ, and he wanted to make basically soldiers of the Enlightenment, the the ah the real Bavarian order. their Their goal was to create this sort of legion of true believers that would go out into the world, infiltrate all the institutions, the schools, the churches, the government,
00:12:57
Speaker
and spread you know secretly not not make a big fuss about it secretly these like enlightenment ideals wow so yeah so so let's talk a bit about like i know this is not a history podcast and megan you stop me if i'm going too deep okay we really we got to get to the flock i know i know i know i i identify as a little bit as a historian this is frank's weak point i know i identify as historian a little bit sometimes okay ah But yeah, let's talk a bit about like the structure, you know, the rituals, what ah what it was like to be in the
Hierarchy and Educational Focus of the Illuminati
00:13:28
Speaker
Illuminati. So we have lots and lots of documents from them.
00:13:32
Speaker
Really not a good idea if you're a secret society to have all these documents, but they did. the Hundreds of pages of stuff were um were released once they once they were kind of found out and suppressed.
00:13:43
Speaker
See, okay, I'm going to stop you here because I find this interesting. So, right, you said, well, it's not, if you're trying to be a secret society, why would you write everything down? And I think, to me, this always just, like, shows that the true motive behind the secrecy of secret societies isn't actually secrecy. It's like um you're trying you're just trying to make yourself seem cooler.
00:14:06
Speaker
Yeah. And I actually don't even what else we know about them I don't even know that they would contest that. No I think ah so we'll talk more about this I think in the next episode. Right. What what what draws people to secret societies. yeah So this was a time ah where secret societies were very prominent.
00:14:22
Speaker
And this is kind of a neglected element I think of the kind of enlightenment narrative you get in school. Right. ah So it's the age of reason and all that. But also it was like the age of people being into some weird stuff like a cultism. The Freemasons were founded in in the 18th century. Lots of Enlightenment figures were Freemasons. We associate mystery cults with the ancient world or maybe the medieval time period. yeah But they were big in the Enlightenment too. Yeah.
00:14:45
Speaker
Like, Weishaupt loved the ancient mystery cults, um so things of that sort. So it so it is kind of one reason I really like this topic is it really neglected element of of the like historical narrative, the kind of um really neat and tidy narrative you get when you do history ideas or history of European civilization or whatever. Yeah.
00:15:05
Speaker
Okay, so so the this the structure of the Illuminati. So there were three classes of ah that you could belong to. There was the Minerval class, the lowest class, the the Freemason class, and and the so-called Mysteries class, the highest class And there were various divisions within these sorts of things. So ah so you'd have to be invited to to ascend to the highest class, and only the best members would would be invited to do so and learn the biggest mysteries of the Illuminati. and
00:15:36
Speaker
ah So there was a lot of surveillance in the in in the organization, in the order. I'll just call it the order to make things a little more... um Mysterious. Mysterious. The order. And that's what they referred themselves as, as the order.
00:15:48
Speaker
You know modeling themselves on the Jesuits. They were an order too. So members needed to submit monthly these kind of ah journals of all their thoughts and feelings so that their superiors could surveil them and and check to see that they were in absorbing enlightenment principles correctly. They're supposed to write down all of their thoughts. Yes.
00:16:06
Speaker
Yes. All their thoughts. I guess all the relevant ones. and What's relevant? You use your practical judgment. like guy um so and I like reading i liked reading from Weishaupt because he has all these really cryptic and sinister quotes.
00:16:19
Speaker
He says things like this. I turn everyone into a spy of others and of all. So obviously there's kind of parallels here you might think of in East Germany, for instance, during the communist times. like There were like 100,000 people in the and the kind of secret police that were surveying all the citizens and What about what about America post See something, say something.
00:16:42
Speaker
Yeah. Wiretaps. Yeah. Well, yeah I mean, we were supposed to spy on each other. Yeah. Or even, I mean, you know, the Red Scare. Yeah. ah information was very carefully controlled. right So the lower classes of the order, the initity the the novices, ah they wouldn't be told all the secret wisdom immediately. And in fact, they didn't really know ah exactly what the order was up to. and It seemed on its surface to be a kind of Christian institution. They would do readings from the Bible sometimes.
00:17:09
Speaker
It was called an order. I think you couldn't be a member if you were literally a pagan. Like if you were if you were a well-known non-believer, and not not a believer and in Christianity, you couldn't be a member. So it seemed like a Christian organization and the for the lower levels. As you ascend upward and and receive the secret wisdom, then you get the kind of anti-religious message that we'll turn will turn to soon. All right, wait, so I'm going to pause you because I i have a question about the structure here.
00:17:33
Speaker
So would it have been possible for everyone to ascend to the highest class? Or is this kind of like Amway where they they need more people to be like lower level grunts for this all to work? Well, what they say in the documents.
00:17:48
Speaker
yeah i So I didn't read all of it. but I read you know maybe maybe like 200 pages. There's a lot of stuff. It's based entirely on on how well you do in your essays, on in your homework.
00:18:00
Speaker
There's a lot of homework. when okay When you go to the Illuminati. So it's not necessarily like an MLM. No, no, no, no, no. Okay. No. Okay. No, there was a lot of, they wanted you to write essays about the topics that you would talk about. There were reading lists. You'd have to read Seneca. You'd read Cicero. You'd have to read Plato.
00:18:18
Speaker
You'd have to read Marcus Aurelius. And then there would be like monthly questions you need to respond to. And they say in the documents that you ascend to the extent that you do well on these like essays. So get graded. So, I mean, it's just like being in school. Yeah. Like he's a professor, right?
00:18:36
Speaker
yeah There's a lot of homework. Okay. Yeah. So it was interesting to look at some of the documents that the the initiates had to fill out. So if you're going to be initiating the Illuminati, you have to fill out some stuff, right? So you have to tell them.
00:18:48
Speaker
You know, what your name is your place of residence, the languages you know, your favorite studies, your favorite subject in school, um how you intend to be of use to the order, persons you would like to bring to the order and why, persons you would like to exclude from the order and why.
00:19:05
Speaker
They're like, this guy's favorite subject is P.E. He can't ascend. Tell me your friends. Tell me who your enemies are. as you have to give them a lot of information. So they preferred young people. They're more impressionable. And they're just counting on people being honest about this and not trying to like game it?
00:19:22
Speaker
Well, they had you would have to fill stuff out if you're initiate. And then also the the person who's or your sponsor, they that's called the, I think, the insinuator, the person who is bringing you into the order.
00:19:34
Speaker
They would have to assess you as well. So it's it's it's two ways. okay and So if you if you if you flat out lie, the insinuator is going to um you know be aware of that. I see. um So the the the basic element of the Illuminati were these so-called Minerval churches.
00:19:51
Speaker
So the the logo, the the symbol of the Illuminati is the owl of Minerva. so Minerva is the Roman goddess of wisdom. The the Greek correlate is Athena. I guess in some depictions, Minerva Athena has an owl on her shoulder or something.
00:20:06
Speaker
So the owl is associated with wisdom. So there's like 10 to 15 members in these so-called Minerval churches. You get a secret name. So Weishaupt's name was Spartacus. So they liked classical names.
00:20:20
Speaker
And like, as I mentioned, the other there was a lot of lot of homework, a lot of essays. And it had the appearance of like a learned society, which there were a lot of these things around during the Enlightenment. A lot of learned societies, ah scientific societies, salons, coffee shops, those sorts of things.
00:20:36
Speaker
So they give you a secret name. I forget if they give you one or you pick one, but but yeah you had a secret name. Yeah, so there's a lot of a lot of secrecy. It's almost to like the point of being absurd. There's so much secrecy.
00:20:47
Speaker
There's so much organization. There's all these different classes, all these different positions within these classes. So a lot a lot was a lot was ah went into it. I am Spartacus. Perhaps too much.
00:20:59
Speaker
I should share. I got to share. I know I've given a lot of details already, but I got to share some of these other things that I found so amusing. ah So not only do they want to know who your friends were and your enemies were, they also included information about what you looked like.
00:21:13
Speaker
And like, I guess they they did that because they want they thought you can they can glean things about your character from what you looked like. So you would they would you would have to say things about like the appearance of the candidate.
00:21:25
Speaker
So for instance, Quote, is his eye quit piercing dull languishing amorous haughty ardent or dejected in speaking does he look fully in the face and boldly does he look sideways can you endure being stared full in the face is this look crafty or is it open and free is it gloomy or pensive or is it absent light insignificant friendly or serious is his eye hollow or level with the head Or does it stare?
00:21:52
Speaker
His forehead, is it wrinkled? And how? Perpendiculary or horizontally? I mean, physiognomy was a big, you know, this was big in the Enlightenment. They thought they were doing hard science. yeah They're like, look, we figured it out.
00:22:04
Speaker
And just as it turns out, you know, people who look crafty in the face are
Weishaupt's Views on Women and Moral Aims
00:22:09
Speaker
are extra crafty. And that's just how the world Yeah. Yeah. I guess like got they thought you could know a lot of character, a lot of your character. Yeah. By how you what you looked like. I mean, for me specifically, they would have known from my physiognomy that I was unfit to be a member because I am a woman.
00:22:25
Speaker
Yeah. But you do have a role in the Illuminati. I do. But it's not it's not as member. Why don't you read what advice has to say about women? Sure. Yeah. So I've got this quote right here. So he says, one can often accomplish the most in the world through women.
00:22:41
Speaker
How to ingratiate yourselves with them and win them over should be one of your prime areas of study.
00:22:49
Speaker
I haven't read this out loud before. All women are more or less guided by vanity, and curiosity, sensuality, and the desire for change. One should take advantage of this for the good cause.
00:23:01
Speaker
This sex has a large portion of the world in its hands.
00:23:07
Speaker
So... I like how it's like, starts out kind of positive, it gets a little questionable, goes downhill, and then tries to go up again. Yeah. As we know, women suck, but...
00:23:19
Speaker
They're also very dumb. Yeah. ah So, okay, so we've said a bit about the hierarchy, the structure, way we've we talked about the secrecy. There's a lot of, there's a little bit of an irony here, right? There's a lot of, the the the the initiates are really supposed to obey their superiors completely and they're supposed to reveal all their thoughts.
00:23:36
Speaker
That's kind of weird given the enlightenment principles, right? like Like the enlightenment stresses freedom and autonomy and free thinking and all that kind of stuff. But really the initiates are supposed to so really subject themselves to the wisdom and the will of their superiors.
00:23:51
Speaker
Well, I mean, Enlightenment thinking definitely stresses free thinking for certain people. yeah but but ah But I mean, a lot of Enlightenment thought is super restrictive about the kinds of people who you know they think can be successful using their own brains. yeah So I mean, to me, this kind of goes along with a lot of Enlightenment thought that, yeah, free thinking is is a good thing if you've got the brain to do it with. But most of you don't or you need to like fix yourself until you do.
00:24:21
Speaker
Yeah, I guess we still have a remnant of the idea with us today. i mean, we think that like children lack full autonomy, right lack moral agency, lack full autonomy. It's okay to make decisions for them.
00:24:33
Speaker
So I guess they would say, well, the initiates, the novices, they're still like children. They need to be trained by the superiors and in in the higher wisdom. yeah So it's not it's not a contradiction. Right. so Yeah.
00:24:46
Speaker
So one thing that struck me when reading these Illuminati documents is how like benign the the general purpose of the organization is seen, at least when it came to what they told people at the lower levels, those in the Minerval class.
00:25:01
Speaker
So, for instance, here's a here's a selection from their stated purpose from the general statutes, the kind of thing you would read if you were being initiated into the order. ah To reassure and assuage the doubts of perspective as well as actual members of this society, and to anticipate any unfounded suspicions and fears, the Order declares, first of all, that it harbors no harmful sentiments, nor engages in any actions harmful to the state, religion, or good morals.
00:25:28
Speaker
Its whole purpose and all its efforts are designed solely to make the improvement and perfection of his moral character interesting to man. all that stuff sounds really great, right? They're spreading knowledge. It's kind of like a learned society. Some minerval churches published things.
00:25:44
Speaker
for the the promotion of worthy persons and make useful knowledge which still remains largely hidden more generally available so that stuff sounds really great right with a spreading knowledge it's kind of like a learned society some minervval churches published things This just sounds like a liability statement. Yeah.
00:26:00
Speaker
Yeah. and And in fact, when you when but when when you look at some other stuff they say in their documents and in their letters and and all that, ah they kind of give the game away. um So, yeah, there's some pretty choice that quotes that we have pulled out here. i mean, you I guess we haven't told the listeners, but the Illuminati proper lasted only a decade.
00:26:19
Speaker
Yeah, only less than about a decade. It was suppressed under under penalty of of execution. and So Weishaupts fled Bavaria and he spent the rest of his life elsewhere. And it makes sense given the other stuff they kind of said.
00:26:31
Speaker
Yeah. So contrary to what the Minerva class is told when they're joining, when they're just they're just signing up to sell knives door to door, right? i here ah Actually, ah here's here's some great quotes from their writings.
00:26:46
Speaker
Our general holds all religion to be a lie and uses even deism only to lead men by the nose. Yeah. Adam himself says, yes, princes and nations shall disappear from off the face of the earth.
00:27:02
Speaker
Yes, the time shall come when man shall acknowledge no other law but the great book of nature. This revelation revolution shall be the work of secret societies. And that is one of our grand mysteries.
00:27:15
Speaker
Yeah, so if you're like a monarch or a duke or whatever and you read this, you might feel a little concerned. Yeah, wait, I want to read this last one too. Yeah.
00:27:25
Speaker
Military schools, academies, book printers, booksellers, cathedral chapters or any other institutions that influence education and government should never be ignored. And the regents should unremittantly design plans for setting about gaining control over them. Yeah.
00:27:41
Speaker
This is like I mean, you could read this in some like, you know, news outlets today, like such and such ideology gains control over the public school system. But like that's what they were actually trying to do.
Philosophical Engagement and Religious Stance
00:27:53
Speaker
Yes, they were. like They really were trying to do that. and They really were trying to found a new world order. Yeah. that That's what they were up to. Yeah. That's true. Man, they really failed. Yeah, they failed. Yeah. I got to mention this, too. there's There's just a lot of funny stuff, a lot of amusing things that I discovered in my my researches.
00:28:08
Speaker
So apparently one member of the Illuminati was struck by lightning and like he had documents on his person at this time. And that's at least partly how they were uncovered.
00:28:19
Speaker
Embarrassing. That's what the sources say. Absolutely embarrassing. Yeah. Yeah, man. So unlucky. OK, now that we talked a lot about the organization itself, it's how it worked and all that to some degree.
00:28:33
Speaker
Let's turn now to what you would learn, the secret wisdom that you would be told were you to ascend to the highest class of Illuminati, the mysteries class. Yeah, there's quite a lot of philosophy here. Yeah, yeah. it's so So there's a ritual you get to go through. we won't go through how it works. There's very elaborate ritual. There are all these like ceremonies and stuff. there's If you read the documents, there's very detailed descriptions of how the room should be set up and what sort of clothing people ought to wear and stuff like that.
00:29:02
Speaker
But after the ritual, you ah ah you got to sit down and you're given a lecture. It's basically a philosophy lecture. And it's about a bunch of a bunch of really interesting topics. It's it's kind of funny because they they they preface the lecture like this. They say, quote, after careful preparation and examination, the time of your reward is near at last.
00:29:23
Speaker
So you go through the all the... all the The hoops. You jump through all the hoops in order to get to the highest class of Illuminati and receive the secret wisdom. And lo and behold, you're hit with a philosophy. It's just some guy giving you a philosophy. like Yeah, that's your first payoff ever. It's a reward. And in fact, it's so long. And they even say this in the document that two people need to read it.
00:29:50
Speaker
Yeah. So, Megan, let's let's let's start us off. So what's like the one of the the first topics they discuss in this this lecture? Well, they're interested in history yeah as as a not not a specific time in history, but like a way of looking at history. and Specifically, they want to teach people the Illuminati secrets that history is progressive. It's it's teleological it's it's going toward some end and many of our listeners who are familiar with history of philosophy to some extent will probably immediately recognize that idea and associate it with hegel but this uh predates hegel and kant by a decent amount so uh showing really that this idea of history as teleological is is really in the air quite a long time before these people came along and formalized it
00:30:44
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean, Adam Weishaupt has the the ideas for the Illuminati, I guess like the late 1770s. So that's kind kind of close to Kant, like what the critique is like 1781. eighty one i get what what yeah What about Kant? It's around the same time as Kant.
00:30:58
Speaker
So I think a lot of these ideas are in the air. i think a lot of ideas we associate with like it's a little before haig Hegel or Kant. You know, these are in these are in the air in Germany and other places. And my minor figures like Adam Weishaupt are also talking about these things.
00:31:11
Speaker
Yeah, so the Illuminati's understanding of history sort of um expands what happens in to in the individual human's lifespan out to the the entire, out to all of humanity. So Weishaupt says, just like individual men, the entire human race also has its childhood, adolescence, its maturity, and its old age.
00:31:37
Speaker
Yeah, and because they have this view of history that it's like progressive, that it makes sense, like there's there's a rationality to it. I think a lot of people tend to think that history is just like one one damn thing after another. yeah Random stuff just kind of happens. And maybe there's sort of small-scale local explanations for why stuff happens. There's no like grand, overarching narrative. like History's not going somewhere intelligible.
00:32:00
Speaker
But that's that's kind of what these folks think. And because history is structured in this kind of progressive teleological way, they think you can kind of predict the future if you're good enough at history.
00:32:12
Speaker
So Weishaupt says, examine the past, compare it to the present, and you will find the future. and a slogan, you might think something like this. If you want to be a prophet of the future, first become prophet of the past.
00:32:23
Speaker
That's kind of paraphrasing him. Yeah, once again, kind of anticipating these sort of Hegelian ideas of laws of history. but But Hegel does say, though, that like predicting the future course of history is kind of difficult. Sure, yes.
00:32:38
Speaker
Right? So he says this in in the the preface of the philosophy of rights. Yeah, he says, "...when philosophy paints its gray in gray, one form of life has become old, and by means of gray it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known.
00:32:53
Speaker
The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering." Sometimes I'm like, maybe Hegel's daddy was in the alumni. Well, I guess he was friends with a lot of people who were in the alumni. It has to be, right? like i Yeah. There's a lot of even overlapping like imagery.
00:33:15
Speaker
like but So is a cool quote, right? The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering. This is, I've heard this, I feel like this is just a saying. People say like the owl of Minerva only flies at night. And i I don't actually think they mean the correct thing by it.
00:33:30
Speaker
It sounds like to me what Hegel's saying here, if you look at what he says before that, he says, only one word more concerning the desire to teach the world what it ought to be. For such a purpose, philosophy at least always comes too late.
00:33:42
Speaker
Right. So I think he's saying here, it's hard to predict what's going to happen. And really, you can only understand history in hindsight. So this is going to be where Hegel differs from them. Yeah. but i So Hegel certainly does think that laws govern history. It's just that not in a way that we have like epistemic access to. Yeah.
00:33:59
Speaker
um So he's going to depart from the the Illuminati by saying, well, yeah, it is teleological. There are these laws, but really we we can't know that far in advance. Interesting that he uses the owl of Minerva as his little metaphor there, right? That's what I'm saying. Owl of Minerva is the symbol the Illuminati. That's what saying. There's so much overlapping imagery and so many overlapping ideas. like heat There had to be some kind of cross influence yeah here. Yeah.
00:34:22
Speaker
um So I mentioned earlier in the in the podcast, in the in the episode, the the back of the U.S. dollar. So sometimes people say that the the back of the U.S. dollar is full of a bunch of Illuminati symbols. they have They have in mind things like the little all-seeing eye above the pyramid.
00:34:35
Speaker
I'm sorry to report that that is not true. That was not really there the Bavarian order symbol. I guess that's just popular. But treasure told me it was. Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah. yeah It's a cool symbol, but it really predates the Illuminati. It's a classic symbol and religious iconography. so Well, speaking of religious ideas, I think you were talking about the teleological views of history.
00:34:58
Speaker
And I think, like, at least now, people associate teleological views of history only with religious views. Yeah. Like, the only reason someone would believe that history was progressing towards some end would be if they held to a particular religion with a particular eschatology. and But they're explicitly not religious.
00:35:15
Speaker
Not when you get to the highest level. yeah So like as Megan read and in the those subversive quotes earlier, it seems like even deism they weren't really on board with. it it's It's hard to know exactly what their their religious views were. It seemed like at at most they would accept a kind of pantheism.
00:35:33
Speaker
They often personify nature. or talk about nature's plans and stuff like that. Maybe they're like proto-transcendentalists? i'm Yeah, I'm not sure. I don't know much about that that view. but But yeah, they they definitely they definitely don't.
00:35:45
Speaker
It doesn't seem like they believe in like a personalistic God once you get to the highest levels. Someone who knows stuff about the transcendentalists, tell us if they sound like proto-transcendentalists. Maybe we should do an episode on them.
00:35:57
Speaker
So another thing you would learn were you to ascend to the mysteries class, the highest class Illuminati, is you learn a bit about human nature, our original position, the state of nature, what what man is really like.
00:36:10
Speaker
So the Illuminati wants to perfect human nature. so you need to know a bit about human nature to perfect it. Their idea is that human nature is but like it ultimately like the the the key facts about human nature is that we we're all at one time like human, to human race before the rise of states and civil societies. We were equal and free, equality and liberty. These are the essential aspects of our nature.
00:36:37
Speaker
And there's kind of, i don't know what you want to call it, I guess some people refer to as like the noble savage idea. There's this this sort of idea you can see in in the in the lecture we're referring to.
00:36:49
Speaker
They really think that early primitive man, in some respects, was better off than us. I mean, this is commonly associated with ah the ideas of the philosopher Rousseau. Yeah. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a French philosopher, often thought it to be like the guy who inspired the French Revolution.
00:37:04
Speaker
so he the he he writes he writes as though that things started really to go wrong when civil societies arose. Mm-hmm. So it's i think it's a little bit tricky. Like, I don't think he wants to say we should just become like anarchists living in the forest or anything like that.
00:37:19
Speaker
But I think he wants to recognize that there was something good about that kind of state of affairs. We're all free and equal. Right. It was before property arose and people started to distinguish themselves from each other.
00:37:29
Speaker
And then there was a lot of good things about that. There are fewer modern amenities, but people were happier. Yeah, we can't go backwards and re-enter Eden for various reasons, but we can um maybe improve our position by recognizing what we lost.
00:37:46
Speaker
Yeah, because remember, they're they're progressivists, right They want to evolve. Human nature needs to evolve. So we don't want we don't want to go backwards, but we need to, in some sense, reclaim it. there's There's this one passage where Weishaupt says, well, we lost it, but now we we feel the loss even better. and when we get it back, we'll cling to it forever. We'll never lose equality and liberty.
00:38:08
Speaker
There is real sense in which these people thought that humans really emerge in the world as like total blank slates. ah He says that men are not as evil as Saturnine moralists make them out to be. Yeah.
00:38:23
Speaker
It's either either men are ah kind of neutral or they're good. He kind of almost talks as though they're good and like society makes them makes them bad. Yeah. So it's either one of one of those two. it's it's hard It's hard to say.
00:38:35
Speaker
but but So these are all like really high flute and philosophical ideas. What does this mean when it comes to concrete political terms? It means they were kind of like anarchists. Like ultimately they have this kind of utopian anarchist vision where there won't be any like states anymore um because states impinge on liberty.
00:38:53
Speaker
ah There won't be property because that's that also impinges on liberty and equality. And that's like the goal. The goal is for there be a kind of universal fellowship among there's no there's no nations or anything like that. Yeah.
00:39:07
Speaker
It's interesting to me that they are interested in toppling all of these institutions ostensibly because of the restrictive nature of their hierarchical structure.
00:39:19
Speaker
But they're very hierarchical. That strikes me. Yeah, that's like the irony I mentioned earlier. I guess it's just sort of it's it's it's kind of a necessary stepping stone to necessary evil. Yeah, necessary.
00:39:30
Speaker
i mean, they were in a it seems like they were not above doing anything for the good of the cause. Yeah. I mean, I guess this quote is mostly by by saturnine Saturnine, whatever, moralists. he's He's mostly talking about people who, you know, like something like original sin or something. Or Hobbes, right? Hobbes says human nature selfish, self-interesting. Or Hobbes. Good point. yeah So if you read Weishaupt and the Illuminati documents, i it's he's kind of it seems like he's up to similar things what Hobbes is up to. where Hobbes is trying to give a justification or an explanation for the origins of a state government. like Why is there a state? Why is there a government?
00:40:09
Speaker
Hobbes and Rousseau, two warring views of the the the nature of nature. yeah Is it bad or is it good? Yeah. And and how do we how do we get governments at all? Why do those things arise? right So Weishaupt, he's playing this similar sort of game, but he has different views about what our nature is and where we ought to go um So one of the things you mentioned that takes, you know, the good, sweet humanity in in the in the innocence of nature and ah kind of curdles him is property.
Critique of Property and Nationalism
00:40:38
Speaker
ah they And they were really against property, the notion of owning property. um They say the desire for exclusive property of all kinds of goods, this true original sin of all men, which makes me think they were talking about original sin before,
00:40:54
Speaker
ah With its deplorable consequences, envy, avarice, immoderation, illness, and all the torments of the imagination. So they really see property ownership as giving rise to these vices that, ah yeah, that that that take the good natural way that humanity comes onto the scene and just makes bad, I guess.
00:41:15
Speaker
ah Again, probably a familiar idea to a lot of our listeners, but very reminiscent of Marx. Yes. Yes. Just so right downstream of Hegel. Of course. so And it's no surprise you that there are people in the 20th century who were familiar with the Illuminati, and the historical Illuminati, who were like, hey, I wonder if the Bolshevik revolution in Russia was inspired the Illuminati. And there were there were books about this sort of thing. Oh, wow. that's how that's how they they kind of made their appearance in the 20th century. and I'm excited for the second part of this. ah yeah The influence of the.
00:41:47
Speaker
Yeah. and and And the myths and conspiracy theories surrounding the Illuminati. Yeah. That's going to fun. All right. So another thing i mentioned, Megan, so I want to talk about zero in on a little argument here, this sort of argument against nationalism. So they're against nationalism. That's why a lot of the princes didn't like this, because the princes and the monarchs want to they want to ah create their nation states. But but Vycehout and the Illuminati says, no no, no, no, we should all there should be like ah one world government. There should there there were cosmopolitans.
00:42:13
Speaker
I know it sounds crazy, but they did they did think this. So, for instance, he says, there is a general law to which all others are subject and that is the benefit of the entire human race nationalism replace the love of humanity here a crime against mankind is called a virtue patriotism nationalism those are all bad things because you care about everyone in the world just as much right you should as you take everyone's interest into account we're all part of one human family um So he gives a kind of argument for this, which I thought was kind of interesting.
00:42:43
Speaker
The basic idea, let me read the quote. So he says, quote, "...once it was deemed permissible or even virtuous to hold men who do not live in the same stretch of land as me in lower esteem or perhaps even insult them, should it not also be permissible to limit this love even more to the inhabitants of one city, even one family, or finally myself alone?" And thus, patriotism gives rise to localism, family spirit, and finally, egotism.
00:43:10
Speaker
So I thought this was kind of an interesting argument. It's kind of like, well, okay, nationalists. Like, why are you a nationalist? why aren't you ah Why don't you prefer and care only about the interests of your town? Or better yet, why don't you care only about the interests of your neighborhood? You better yet, why don't you care only about the interests of your family? You know what? Better yet, why don't you care only about the interests of yourself?
00:43:33
Speaker
The idea is like, it's a slippery slope. Once you start only caring about the people in your own nation, it's a slippery slope to egoism, selfishness, and self-centeredness. So I thought this was nifty little argument. Any thoughts about this, Megan?
00:43:48
Speaker
Yeah, I don't like it. Okay. I'm no nationalist. Where do you draw the line? nationalist. Where do you draw the line? ah It's either you care about everyone or you care about yourself.
00:43:59
Speaker
Well... Okay. So, I mean, a slippery slope argument only works insofar as there's nothing differentiating caring about, you know, ah only caring about your nation from only caring about yourself. But, I mean, it seems like clearly the the person who does think national pride or care is warranted has some resources to draw on, right? and common culture or common platform for civic involvement that can give rise to similar civic virtues, which in turn can give rise to similar values. i'm obviously just parroting Alistair McIntyre here, but that's the it's possible to have a similar foundation for one's values, which arise from shared civic involvement with people in your nation state, whereas that is probably impossible or harder with people outside of it.
00:44:52
Speaker
Well, until the one world government comes about. and I suppose. Yeah. yeah ah Well, I want to point out again something that strikes me as ironic here. um I'm starting to feel like Alanis Morissette, but there's a lot of irony going on because right now they're critiquing you know, borders, it the literal and abstract, eyes you know, a kind of way of separating, you know, who we are for from who we're not for.
00:45:17
Speaker
But they are the like the most exclusive. They have the most exclusive setup one could have. yeah Again, you need to, you know, Break a few eggs and make it all. Yeah, whatever.
00:45:29
Speaker
yeah you You climb the ladder and then you kick it down, whatever metaphor you want. but But I'm saying they could apply the same argument to themselves. So they they feel that they should care about everyone in the world equally.
00:45:41
Speaker
Yeah, that's their view, right? They still treat the members especially. As a necessary stepping stone to universal brotherhood and fellowship. So the person who thinks that, you know, what whatever they're calling nationalism is OK, can say the same thing. Well, I care about all humans equally, but I think that it's pragmatically necessary to have a focus on your nation state for reasons X, y and Z.
00:46:02
Speaker
Yeah, you know what kind of view, I'm just reminded of it now because I teach it, is ah like Confucian philosophers, like Confucius and Mencius, they had this view. like It's very virtue-oriented. Yeah, like yeah like like moral sentiments begin in the family. They necessarily, they they're cultivated there.
00:46:18
Speaker
And the goal is to eventually spread these kinds of moral sentiments, these good feelings and love outward to others. But has to sort of start small and then a circle of care expands.
00:46:30
Speaker
Yeah. this Yeah, this is like McIntyre, except for the Confucians start its family instead of the community or whatever. Yeah, precisely. Okay. um Yeah. Once again, i want to i want to reiterate on the air, I'm not a nationalist.
00:46:43
Speaker
and what What they're calling or kind of talking about, I don't think is really nationalism. it's i mean Another way to put this to put this in like contemporary moral philosophy lingo is they're... They're denying the idea, like they're denying special obligations.
00:46:56
Speaker
Yeah. The idea of that there are special relationships and special obligations, moral partiality due to reasons of arbitrariness. Right. Either all, everyone in the world, or or just you you yourself. There's no way to make a non-arbitrary distinction in between those two ends of the spectrum.
00:47:13
Speaker
And what Megan's trying to do is say, no, there's clearly ways to do that. Yeah, it seems a little bit lazy to me, honestly. Okay, so interesting. Even though they were very ultimately against organized religion, which you learned once you got to the highest level, and they wanted to bring it all down and infiltrate the religious institutions, they still really liked Jesus.
Reinterpretation of Religious Figures and Philosophical Legacy
00:47:34
Speaker
And yeah here's a here's a great quote. It says, No one has paved man's road to wisdom as safely and easily as our great master, Jesus of Nazareth.
00:47:47
Speaker
Yeah, when I read those lines, I was a bit surprised. I just feel like at that time, you you just can't really get away with saying that you don't like Jesus. Yeah. Nietzsche was probably like the first.
00:47:59
Speaker
So obviously they had a very particular view of what Jesus was up to and what he was doing and who he was. um So from the perspective of traditional Christianity, some of the things they say are kind of amusing. so He says he instructed people in the doctrines of reason. Yeah.
00:48:18
Speaker
Not really you think of it. The Sermon on the Mount, classic instruction in the doctrines of reason. Yeah. So basically their view of Jesus was a they they they give a desacralized narrative of what Jesus was up to. right so They Thomas Jeffersoned him. Yeah. So like the idea is ah what what's a what what's our pure nature?
00:48:35
Speaker
ah freedom and equality. What's original sin? It's something like property and civil government. What's redemption? It's like getting rid of those things and thereby establishing, quote, the kingdom of the just and faithful on earth.
00:48:52
Speaker
So ah so that's how that's how they sort of incorporate Jesus into their and through their scheme. they They think of him as basically like a proto-socialist. So this, I think... This goes along with the no property thing, yeah I guess.
00:49:05
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So why why do they think Jesus... so they also say that Jesus was kind of preaching socialism. Why do they say that? Well, they point to things like the fact that early Christians, um as like represented in like the book of Acts and stuff...
00:49:17
Speaker
they They held their property in common. um There's that one story, that one that one um chapter in the the book where these two folks, they they sell their land, but they they hold back some of the money. They don't put it into the general the general fund.
00:49:31
Speaker
And then they they are struck dead. by Yeah. I mean, but Jesus himself says, you know, if your enemy soldier says they want your cloak, you know, give it to them. Yeah, it's it's not yours. You know, it's it he says, you know give to anyone who asks of you.
00:49:45
Speaker
You know, that's that's Jesus. That's pretty, you know, at least so one can be forgiven for reading that as there's no meaningful rights to personal property. So they'll say given things like that, they'll say our all our traditions, quote, are authentic remnants of the earliest Christian church.
00:50:02
Speaker
I mean, everybody wants to, you know, trace their origin. They want they want to have apostolic succession, as it were. Yeah. yeah he that He does a lot of stuff in in the last parts of the the lecture. So we're getting to the end of the lecture where he's trying to argue that the current Illuminati is like connected historically to the early church. He'll say, well, look, we're connected historically to Freemasonry.
00:50:26
Speaker
So the relationship between the Freemasons Illuminati is really complicated. They are distinct, but a lot of the Freemasons were, lot of members of the Illuminati were Freemasons. ah Weishaupt's lieutenant, um the guy that spread the Illuminati outward, he was a big Mason. They met in Masonic lodges.
00:50:44
Speaker
They adopted like Masonic symbols and stuff. So it's a really i close relationship. they say, well, the but the original, secret, true message of Christianity, which is political in element, right?
00:50:56
Speaker
It's about changing the political order. It was preserved by Freemasonry and it's now preserved by us. is that This is this is a tangent, but I I'm going forget if I don't ask you yeah right now. Is there a difference between a Masonic temple and a Masonic lodge?
00:51:11
Speaker
I'm not sure they see. I mean, just they they they bring to mind very different images. Yeah, I'm not sure. I didn't i didn't research Freemasonry. so But I know that the Illuminati, they met in the Masonic lodges. So when when when he's saying infiltrate the institutions, he also has in mind Freemasonry because they were a more established ah free sea secret society at that time. I mean, they're still around now. They're still around now. They've really done a lot better. Yeah, they they are losing members, um but they are still around. There's still a couple million in the United States, I think.
00:51:39
Speaker
Wow, amazing. Yeah. I think in like the it were like five or six million. Really? Yeah. That's shocking. Yeah. I think in the Flintstones, when you know he's a member of like a club or something, I think that's supposed to be like Freemasonry. and You remember Flintstones, Fred Flintstone, he's like he's he's a member of a lodge or something like that. I don't remember. Yeah. yeah he meet you meet he and He and Barney meet at a lodge.
00:52:02
Speaker
And i I think it's supposed to be like kind of a riff on Freemasonry. I just made that up. Women are still not a allowed to be Freemasons, right? I think it varies by lodge. I'm not sure. be yeah, a lot of them don't like it.
00:52:14
Speaker
Okay. So they, you know, they want to increase their membership, they should let women and Yeah. Women will take it over. All right. So we said a lot, but there's a good summary that I have here. Do you want to read this summary out, Megan? This really good summary of like all the things that we've said. These are all the things you would receive when you got the highest wisdom. Is this like the end of the lecture? The end of the- It's close to the end. Six hour lecture that you get. Yeah. It's really long. As a new initiate. You sit through this.
00:52:39
Speaker
all right so so so adam says thus you can see that the very name illuminati stems from the earliest church and that therefore it is the purpose of true freemasonry and of the order to enable mankind to gain its freedom to unite the world and its people currently divided by their civil institutions into a single family to bring about the kingdom of the just and virtuous by means of an active Christianity, the proliferation of Jesus' teachings, the preservation of the true secrets of this doctrine, and the enlightenment of reason.
00:53:23
Speaker
Christianity seems like it's really, that's really kind of a Trojan horse here. Because, like, they're clearly using this, like, the term today you know, so they don't get shut down. And then they're like, but the true secret of it is.
00:53:39
Speaker
Hashtag no kings. Well, you just think that because you haven't been initiated into the order. Gone through it all the all the stages. like once you get to Once you do that, you'll see the highest weight. I want to say since we're reading the summary of it, I think it's just really when when we were doing all this research we were reading you all this stuff, I found it like just clear as day how many...
00:53:59
Speaker
Ideas, of especially from like the German Enlightenment, are just obviously here. Yeah. Right. Like obviously stuff from Kant, the focus on pure reason, obviously stuff from Hegel, the teleological view of history, idea that his history is governed by laws, obviously stuff in Marx.
00:54:18
Speaker
That property is, you know, and material conditions are the the reason behind all these conflicts and and the reason why people are badly off and bad actors. and i And it just sort of anticipates this entire line of German thought that ends up getting, mean, obviously worked out much more rigorously. Yeah.
00:54:39
Speaker
than here, but it it really does it really does act as like a window into just like the the intellectual milieu yeah right before this all explodes.
00:54:50
Speaker
Yeah, and it's interesting to see these ideas like put into... like His goal is practical. right He even says this at various points. like we're not like Enlightenment's not theoretical. Enlightenment is practical. It's a kind of practical knowledge.
00:55:01
Speaker
but yeah But there's a theoretical component and they want to use these ideas to change the world. um It's interesting that you mentioned Immanuel Kant. So we've talked about him a fair bit already.
00:55:12
Speaker
There's other ideas in here that seem very Kantian to me. And I wish that there were like more studies trying to connect the the Illuminati doctrines to Kant's work. Because it seems like there's a lot of it seems like there was a lot of connections.
00:55:26
Speaker
So we just went through like what the people would receive were they to ascend to the highest highest wisdom, highest class. But so Weishaupt had in mind even further classes, even higher classes than this or higher wisdom. There's even higher wisdom. there Oh, he just he just didn't build that? he He didn't build it. It was kind of left uncompleted because the order was suppressed. But we do have like the the lectures you would receive were you to even get to the highest, the even higher levels. Did he consider himself to have reached like the highest?
00:55:54
Speaker
Like was he fully enlightened? I guess necessarily. ah He's the highest one in the hierarchy. there's a whole there's a whole There's a hierarchy and he's at the top. He's the general. I just can't imagine what it would be to have that idea about myself. Yeah, but yeah it's really weird. um but But so theres when you get to, um when you look at some of the other stuff, the like the unpublished things, the stuff for which there weren't any rituals or ceremonies to go along with it because it wasn't worked out yet.
00:56:19
Speaker
just they dish They just had the lectures. You see some other really Kantian stuff. So one idea that Kant is very well known for, his main idea, is his idea of transcendental idealism. You want to tell our listeners what this is? What's what's transcendental idealism in a nutshell?
00:56:34
Speaker
um So really overly simplistically put, transcendental idealism is the idea that what we perceive, how how the world seems to us through our senses is not actually how things are.
00:56:49
Speaker
That there is a realm of what Kant calls the noumena, which he says are the things in themselves, the things that we perceive apart from our perception of them. How reality really is, right? Something like that.
00:57:03
Speaker
and And the phenomena, how we perceive it, arises from the interaction of the things in themselves with the structure of human consciousness. Yeah. And so we can really, ah we really can't have like true objective knowledge of the world. We can only really, in some sense, have knowledge of how things seem to us.
00:57:20
Speaker
That idea sounds wacky, but I mean, this is, this is i i I actually think that this is kind of the common way that physicists think about time. That probably the majority view among physicists is that like,
00:57:32
Speaker
Time isn't like objectively out there, but it, you know, rises from the structure of human consciousness. or even even in addition to that, based on of some of the weird stuff that goes on in the quantum world, that they might say, well, I don't know what reality is really like. I only know what it's like based on how I measure it whatever.
00:57:47
Speaker
Yeah. so So that's that's Kant's transcendental idealism. So the critique of pure reasons published, I think, in 1781, something like that. But ah so Weishaupt says some similar stuff here. So tell me if you think this is similar to Kant's idea. right So here's a few quotes.
00:58:01
Speaker
um This is from the the again the unpublished, sort of unworked out, even higher wisdom. "...while there are other beings and forces outside us, they are essentially unknown to us and appear to us only through their effects, revealing themselves in different ways depending on the individual subject's receptivity.
00:58:22
Speaker
A tree is not a tree to all beings. That, therefore, every object has the potential to appear in a thousand different ways." Body, matter, and extension when viewed as such are mere appearances phenomena.
00:58:34
Speaker
It is impossible for us to penetrate into the inner nature of beings and to uncover the creation of the world and its main components. Definitely could be read as transcendental idealism. Right. Doesn't seem very transcendental idealism-y.
00:58:47
Speaker
It does. They were also very anti Kant in some ways, though. Yeah. so So when Weishaupt was banished from Bavaria, he continued to do academic work and he published various critiques of Kant's philosophy. Like he argued that it collapsed into a kind of vulgar form of subjectivism, which is the worry you might have about transcendental idealism. Right.
00:59:09
Speaker
And and in in in fact, these quotes, I was going to say the way that they seem to differ from transcendental idealism is that they seem too subjective. But he didn't like that. So i right so yeah this is me bearing my ignorance here. Like, what's the connection between Weishaupt's view and Kant's view, given that he critiqued Kant and also given that he sort of sounds like a transcendental idealism in his Illuminati documents? like This is like a lot of cool stuff here that could be explored by you know historians of early modern philosophy. But he was also an empiricist.
00:59:38
Speaker
Something like that. Yeah, he says no man's ideas are innate. That's the empiricist line. right we so We receive all our concepts only through our senses. Very confusing. Yeah, a a little confusing.
00:59:49
Speaker
He was a professor of law in in the first instance. Okay. Metaphysics wasn't his thing. He was trying his hand at metaphysics. there's yeah There's some interesting stuff here, but it is a little confusing.
01:00:01
Speaker
i like i like I want to read this part of the quote on empiricism because I think it's funny. yeah If the construction of our eyes were microscopic, we would see a new, entirely different world.
01:00:12
Speaker
We would have a different language and philosophy. Like, I mean, I don't know. To me, it sounds like he's the one being a subjectivist. Everything we think would be totally different. if I mean, again, we're we're bearing our ignorance here because neither of us have read his critique of Kant's philosophy that it collapses into the subjective idealism. Yeah.
01:00:28
Speaker
I don't know. For some reason, I just feel like it wouldn't be that compelling.
01:00:34
Speaker
So one one let's let's end on like, ah so we're getting close to time here. So let's end on like a positive positive note here.
Conclusion and Tease for Next Episode
01:00:40
Speaker
So one really, one aspect of the Illuminati that really shines through their documents is their optimism. They're really optimistic about human nature, about what reason can do, about the future progress of society. You might think of this as another feature of enlightenment thinking. Very, very, very optimistic.
01:01:00
Speaker
Mm-hmm. So, ah you know, he says as as a really as a note of optimism, um in the end, it will be apparent that in this world, both evil and virtue have their purpose.
01:01:11
Speaker
You, however, may rejoice that providence has placed you on the side of the good because you're with us in the Illuminati. Oh, okay. Okay. So he's specifically speaking to members there. Yes. Okay.
01:01:23
Speaker
Yeah. So that's like a much, so if you, if you get into the illuminade and Illuminati, you know, for sure you're not a bad guy. Yeah. If you get all the way up there, you're good. Obviously he didn't say you are in the Illuminati. That's what I said, but unquote, you on the side of the good. Yeah.
01:01:37
Speaker
yeah There's a lot of optimism there. Like things, bad stuff happens, um but there's some kind of providential element to the universe. We're going to make society better. You're with us. Things are going to be okay.
01:01:47
Speaker
Well, as a woman, I'm obviously on the side of evil to them. It's unclear what he meant by like recruit women in some capacity. Well, he said our main motivation is vanity. if That doesn't seem good. But you still have the world in your hands.
01:02:00
Speaker
Yeah, but like maybe in like an evil way. Yeah, I don't know. He said they have you have a place. You have a place. I do. Yeah. Obviously. In this world, both evil and virtue have their place. Obviously. Obviously a bad element of this is too patriarchal, of course, you know. and Yeah.
01:02:14
Speaker
Yeah, they're very optimistic. I think also just that like they will be successful yeah as an organization. ah They say that one day princes and nations shall disappear from the earth without violence.
01:02:27
Speaker
Very optimistic. ah The French Revolution gave that part up. They're like, no. ah One day the human race will become a single family. That's sweet. And the world the domicile of reasonable people.
01:02:41
Speaker
Morality alone will bring about this imperceptible transformation. And then, of course, he adds, how this will come to pass, however, is one of our great secrets. Pay your membership, douche, and we'll tell you.
01:02:54
Speaker
wish I lived at a domicile of reasonable people, but I live with a three-year-old and a one-year-old. Anyway, ah they're very they're they really thought they were going to succeed, I guess.
01:03:05
Speaker
And, you know, I mean, they lasted 10 years. So they didn't see the end of ah princes and nations. The whole world wasn't a ah family. But maybe they maybe maybe they're still maybe their is still being carried on by the by the Freemasons.
01:03:21
Speaker
yeah mean so I mean, some people, as well' as we will get to in our next episode, some people think the Illuminati is still with us. That's a great point. I am begging the question ahead of episode two. All right. so that's all the time we have for episode one.
01:03:36
Speaker
Join us for our next episode where we are going to be talking about the exact same thing.