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The Illuminati Enlightenment
Science & the Freemasons
This is the great object held out by this association; and the means of attaining it is illumination, enlightening the understanding by the sun of reason which will dispell the clouds of superstition and of prejudice.
- Adam Weishaupt
I’ve been doing a lot of good old-fashioned speculating lately about everyone’s favorite conspiracy punching bag, the Freemasons and their good buddies the Illuminati. It’s a big topic and I am currently trying to carve it off into manageable chunks which will hopefully reveal a narrative whole which many people may never have considered before. Bear with me if the whole thing seems a little jumbled at first.
Now, this “revelation,” as it were, began to unfold itself when I made the connection between the word Illuminati and the word Enlightenment, as in the Age of Enlightenment, which in turn followed the Age of Reason and the Renaissance in Europe, and all of which reconnected European thinkers with ideas which had been lost or suppressed during the Dark Ages. Wikipedia’s page on The Enlightenment provides this telling quote:
The intellectual leaders of this movement regarded themselves as a courageous elite with the purpose of leading the world into progress and out of the long period of doubtful tradition, irrationality, superstition, and tyranny, which they imputed to the Dark Ages.
If you actually read through some of the writings of Adam Weishaupt and the founders of the Bavarian Illuminati, you may very well see these same ideas expressed again and again. Another interesting link in the chain that I uncovered is the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, founded in 1660 and more commonly known as the Royal Society. A Masonic lodge in British Columbia offers a wonderful morsel of information on the importance of the Royal Society:
In the beginning of Speculative Fraternity under the Grand Lodge system the Freemasons avowed their devotion to the sciences more boldly, and even dramatically. The Royal Society was in the British public mind synonymous with science, and for more than a century it, and its offshoots, were the only exponents and practitioners of science in Britain. […] A lodge largely composed of Royal Society members met in a room belonging to the Royal Society Club in London. At a time when preachers thundered against these scientists, when newspapers thundered against them, street crowds hooted at them, and neither Oxford nor Cambridge would admit science courses, masonic lodges invited Royal Society members in for lectures, many of which were accompanied by scientific demonstrations.
As I said, I am still piecing together this narrative, but so far it is a new way (at least for me) of looking at the Freemasons and the Illuminati: as practitioners and proponents of science, reason and philosophy. I’ve been told there is at least one good book on the subject: The Rosicrucian Enlightenment by Frances Yates. Oddly, this is a rather difficult topic to research online, as the dominant narrative regarding these groups is that they are occultists and devil worshippers bent on world domination. But let’s see if we can’t disassemble that idea a little. Here is a representative passage against the Masons from an annoying website called Save the Males, which you may have seen before:
In The Dying God, The Hidden History of Western Civilization, Livingstone shows that modern secular culture is really the product of an occult tradition that can be traced back to ancient Babylon through Freemasons, Rosicrucians, Templars, Plato and the Cabalists.
Essentially, this tradition adopted Lucifer as symbol of mankind’s rebellion against God. It enshrined human reason, appetite and will as the ultimate standard of goodness and truth.
It usually defined freedom in terms of destroying the moral and social order. Freedom means dissipation not uplift and empowerment.
We’ve already seen that by championing scientific exploration and discourse in their lodges while it was outlawed most everywhere, the Freemasons must have aroused the ire of the Church. This was, you may recall, only a little over 25 years after the Catholic Church had Galileo tried for heresy for publishing scientific ideas counter to the Bible. With such a clear division between religious authority and what the Masons were doing, it is small wonder that they were painted by Luciferians by the Church, and also seemed to have proudly adopted that symbol of rebellion in some cases of their own accord. The use of Lucifer for them - if you take their talk of dismantling superstition and outmoded religious authorities at face value - worked in their minds as a secular-literary symbol, while for Christians it retained the much more loaded “superstitious” meaning of devil-worship.
This talk too of “destroying the moral and social order” makes sense when you realize the “moral and social order” in question is the authority of Churches everywhere. There is a good Adam Weishaupt quotes about something similar, such as “When man lives under government, he is fallen, his worth is gone, and his nature tarnished.” And this one from another member of his Illuminati group:
Jesus Christ established no new religion; he would only set religion and reason in their ancient rights. For this purpose he would unite men in a common bond. He would fit them for this by spreading a just morality, by enlightning the understanding, and by assisting the mind to shake off all prejudices. He would teach all men, in the first place, to govern themselves. Rulers would then be needless, and equality and liberty would take place without any revolution, by the natural and gentle operation of reason and expediency.
[See also my post on Christian Nations for an exploration of this idea]
Those ideas are, of course, entirely threatening to established power structures and it makes perfect sense why these groups have been so villified by their opponents throughout the ages. But then, I’m personally not a Mason (nor am I an Illuminati member, as some might suspect), and I’m entirely open to the possibility that I have this all entirely wrong - that I am concocting a narrative out of my own wishful thinking and need to be contrarian. But I plan to continue this thread in some other posts over the coming days, and perhaps others more knowledgeable on these topics than I will be able to shed some fresh light on them!
UPDATE!
See also this New York Times article exploring the connections between alchemy and modern chemistry. It’s not the greatest article and doesn’t go to the depths we go here, but it has some interesting bits!
- Are the Illuminati Gnostics?
- Inquiry & Enlightenment
- What’s Enlightenment Anyway?
- I have a new hero: the running monk
- Technocracy & The Noble Lie
- Prev: Bush-Bashing: Out of Style?
- Next: Internalizing Propaganda
July 26th, 2006 at 2:06 pm
This is an excellent resource from an Atheist website which has a very neutral and seemingly historical view on The Enlightenment, Freemasonry and the Illuminati. It is literally one of the only sources I could find like this online.
Also interesting is a piece I just remembered by the current pope about how Christianity is the religion of Reason. In it, he says that the Enlightenment could only have come out of Christianity - which is rather interesting in light of what we’ve said above.
July 26th, 2006 at 2:41 pm
You are totally on the right track. People who don’t think modern science is a religion (so to speak) may or may not know a lot about science, but they certainly don’t know much for the history of thought and religions.
—
There is only one thing, through which all things are effected.
We should not, then, be surprised that the modern world is no less a product of this thing, a totally natural (though robotic and dark in some aspects) outgrowth of alchemy, mathesis, sacred geometry, stonemasonry, qbl, in short, the Work.
We can surprisingly often trace these modern elements directly back to their esoteric origins. Sacred geometry came before profane geometry.
I can’t go on here in any depth (mail me if you like), but here’s some stuff to google:
Buzz Aldrin conducted a masonic ceremony on the moon
vannevar bush (forefather of computing) was a mason
combinatory logic (basis for computing) came through folks like alchemist raymond llull, who got the idea from qabalistic meditational tools
leibinz invented the binary digits from the i ching
http://www.fiu.edu/~mizrachs/Gutenberg_Galaxy.html
positivist science came from alchemy, but lost the content, retaining only the outer forms. this was utterly unavoidable.
People who think masons act as one body are like people who think the same thing about catholics. There is a lot of good and bad in anything; this is the reflection of the Primal Bifurcation.
July 26th, 2006 at 2:49 pm
addendum: I’m on the last 100 pages of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, which is a fun fictional account of the Royal Society and the origins of modern banking. Stephenson doesn’t seem to grok the alchemy, but that’s ok! These books are great fun for anyone interested in the history of science, which is, at least in many respects, synonymous with the history of our modern world.
July 26th, 2006 at 6:13 pm
And this is from the July-August 2006 issue of New Dawn Magazine, page 32, an article by Michael Howard, “The Occult Conspiracy Revisited”, jotted down here for later use:
July 26th, 2006 at 6:35 pm
pretty much. to a certain degree though….
theres always people looking to use things like Masonry to manipulate and deceive. So hooray for masonry, yall destroyed the church, so far as youve inspired the great bloodsheds of the 20th century with your occult scientific “materialism”…
now its time for true revelation…
because at this point imho, all secrets reveal. and orders are pyramid schemes.
self initiation.
one
human?
July 26th, 2006 at 6:51 pm
hmmm…
i guess my main point is really that what a Christian would view a Satanist, a “Evil” person… yuh know, kinda took over the church… and it wasnt the Church that Masonry had to hide from, it was “Evil” people who took over the church, and then, in turn, these “Evil” people, instead of destroying Masonry, use it…. like they do everything that comes along…
it is fascinating though really, because its on some hidden in plain sight, very magical (the history Illuminati/Enlightenment thing).
just in my heart i know secrets & illumination dont mix. as pitch black dark as it gets, light ALWAYS defeats darkness, but its no beef, just the way it is..
one
human?
July 26th, 2006 at 7:56 pm
I’m following up with this mention of Freemasonry being behind universal public education:
http://www.gl-mi.org/freemasonry-explained.htm
Also
http://freemasonrywatch.org/publiceducation_masonry.html
http://www.saintsalive.com/freemasonry/fmschools.htm
July 26th, 2006 at 11:50 pm
I agree with the post, and I think that if you worry about evil people you’ve probably missed the point entirely. (Note the part about “the Octopus”.) But I can’t resist pointing out that the Illuminati, as a conspiracy within Masonry, resemble Propaganda Due or P2 in Italy. This group demonstrably brought a significant part of the post-WW2 Italian government under the control of fascist or ex-fascist Licio Gelli, who just happened to have links to our intelligence services. We can’t prove just how much the Bavarian Illuminati resembled or resembles P2.
July 26th, 2006 at 11:57 pm
Oh, yes, and Illuminati-linked Mason Ben Franklin knew Sir Francis Dashwood of the Hellfire Club, more properly the Order of the Friars of Saint Francis of Wycombe.
July 26th, 2006 at 11:59 pm
It is interesting to see how the founding fathers of America were connected to free masonary. 13 signers of the constitution were free masons and there were 33 generals in the Continental Army who were freemasons.
http://www.watch.pair.com/mason.html
Anyways hurray for classical liberalism, pluaralism, & social democractic movements!
July 27th, 2006 at 12:07 am
Designs flat on the ground cannot literally point downward.
July 27th, 2006 at 1:46 am
By the way, let’s say we assume as fact the existence of magic — which science would try to explain as an evolved ability or a novel use of such ability, in accordance with Rule Four and the others — and the existence of spirits. In that case, what does Rule One tell us?
July 27th, 2006 at 2:30 pm
Isaac Newton was an alchemist, as were many forerunners of Freemasonry. My question for you is: these guys DID know about magic and accepted it as fact. How and why did their knowledge get lost or transmuted? I’m working on a theory that says they themselves disavowed or buried their magical knowledge at some point; it wasn’t lost or suppressed. Why they would do this is the part I don’t entirely get. My best guess - if this theory holds water - would be that they were trying to associate “superstition” completely and utterly in the public eye with the Church, thereby to draw them out onto thin ice and set themselves up as clear-cut ideological opposites (even though in many ways they were not).
Perhaps then, they had plans that at some point in the future, they would open up the floodgates again to the mystical knowledge they themselves made hidden, but only when people seemed ready for it. This theory would dovetail neatly into the notion that the 1960’s counter-culture was seeded and guided by the government and other groups, and was intended as a means of re-uniting science with its long-lost twin sister…
July 27th, 2006 at 3:09 pm
[…] Last night I was continuing my research into the Masonic origins of modern science. It is a difficult topic to track down as there is so much conjecture and misinformation about the Freemasons. Anyway, I found one resource online which took a very circuitous route in linking the theory of evolution to the Freemasons. […]
July 27th, 2006 at 4:40 pm
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a free mason who said “science arose from poetry–when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends”
My high school quote was “Goethe was an interesting figure because he heavily influenced Carl Jung???”
July 27th, 2006 at 10:02 pm
On the issue of secrecy, Thomas Jefferson himself is supposed to have written of Weishaupt’s Illuminati:
July 30th, 2006 at 11:40 pm
If they accepted external magic and active external spirits as fact, then they may well have arrived at some form of the egregore/tulpa/ Terry Pratchett theory. What effect might their work have, if we accept this theory, and what might they have intended?