everyone always asks who are the Illuminati but nobody ever asks how are the Illuminati I'm Aiden Mattis and welcome back to the [Music] Warlock the Illuminati are probably the best known conspiracy theory out of all of them as far as the 21st century goes you look basically anywhere on the internet and you're going to find somebody accusing somebody powerful of being a member of theum if you look up who are the Illuminati or what is the Illuminati or any other series of inquiries about the identity of the group known as the Illuminati you will get
so many results everything from it's a powerful banking family with a hard to pronounce name to its Travis Scott doing a soul Harvest at a concert which I I I see where you're coming from with the symbolism but we covered that in a video last year so you know but generally all of these answers fall into one of a few groups you'll have the suggest question that it is a group of rich people billionaires powerful world leaders like presidents and popes you'll also see celebrities on lists like Beyonce Jay-Z Lindsay Lohan the Kardashians LeBron James
and a whole lot more of them you will certainly run into some of the most anti-Semitic things you've ever read there's also the suggestion that it's the highest level of Freemasonry and the point at which the true purpose of the fraternity is revealed to you others will say it's nothing more than an internet hoax and even more people will say that it's a scop to get you to ignore you know like certain other groups that think that you should own nothing and be happy so basically nobody has a solid answer for what the Illuminati are
in 2023 but there are a whole hell of a lot of conspiracy theories regarding it many believe that they are a shadowy organization seeking One World Government using the Freemasons as a front in many cases the evidence for this is the similarities between Illuminati symbols and symbols used by the Freemasons people pretty automatically associate the Illuminati with Satanism this is largely because Anton Le was a boring weenie who stole all of his symbols from everybody else for example the pentagram dates back to about 3500 BC in Mesopotamia it's used on Greek pottery as far back
as 600 BC Hebrew Pottery as far back as 300 BC and even made its way into medieval Christianity as a symbol for either the five senses or the Five Wounds of Christ it is also claimed as an ancient Pagan symbol by the wiccans but that's a whole another video it only worked way into Satanism officially back in the 1960s under Anton L's leadership and organizing this General Cult of beliefs into something more of an organized religion known as Satanism and then there's the Eye of Providence also known as the allseeing eye that pyramid you see
with the little eye in the top of it that's on the back of the dollar bill that is the Eye of Providence as far as I was able to ascertain it first appears as a Christian symbol back in the 17th century and that does appear to be the origin of the allseeing eye symbol the pyramid originally was a symbol for the Trinity the Rays for God's light and the ey his watchful protection it was eventually adopted for the Great Seal of the United States which is why it appears on the back of the dollar bill
and that was suggested in 1776 and made official in 1782 the Freemasons on the other hand adopted it in 1797 as an official symbol of the order but it was in use on Masonic literature as far back as 1741 where it appears above a group of Masons walking into the lodge eventually it was adopted by Alistar Crowley in the late 1800s hence its association with Satanism and the Occult but that was not until much farther down the line and also Crowley is a guy who has been quoted as saying all the symbols are interchangeable so
not really the kind of guy who totally even really understands the concept of symbolism only much later did it become associated with the Illuminati and that was because of the Illuminati Connection in pop culture with Satanism and this is kind of the thing with most Illuminati symbols once you understand they Origins a lot of these conspiracies fall apart because there are people who are using them for their actual purpose not some sort of allegedly secret Illuminati symbolism like I said on the dollar the Eye of Providence is a symbol for God and it very often
served that purpose in the 1700s it was even used on churches and then when it comes to the pentagram that wasn't associated with the occult until the 1950s but of course that's not the only thing associated with the Illuminati conspiracy yes there's a lot of these symbols that people point to as is evidence but what is it evidence of well a new world order a global government some sort of shakeup where we're going to change the way that everything works for the betterment of mankind or at least the enrichment of a few people at the
very top while I won't argue with the possibility of a new world order coalescing around us as we speak it's not the Illuminati or at least not the Illuminati of 1776 the real Bavarian Illuminati from whom all the conspiracies are in fact descended so you might be sitting here going Aiden that's a lot of very concrete statements about what you've just said as a shadowy group that may or may not exist yes and that's because while the Illuminati as a general concept the way that they're talked about now are not the first Illuminati they're not
the original Illuminati in fact the Illuminati we're talking about today aren't even the original Illuminati it goes further back than that again very confusing topic but the the term itself and the people it directly relates to are pretty discreet we know their history there was an order of the Illuminati founded in Bavaria in 1776 but before we get to that we should probably start with the the term itself Illuminati and what does it mean why is it used who was using it at the time in its simplest sense it's the plural of the Latin word
for enlightened illuminatus or Illuminati but the thing is that was not any sort of ancient Latin order or any sort of mystical sect no it was just a term meaning exactly what it meant so anybody could claim to be Illuminati enlightened for example a gnostic sect in Spain between the 15th and 17th centuries used the term Illuminati except in this case it was the Spanish form of the word in this specific case it was the result of a Dominican order member a Woman by the name of Maria de Santo Domingo claiming to have the ability
to converse directly with Mary the Mother of God and Jesus himself and while this version of the Illuminati were more based around the ability of one woman to be a sort of prophet the other people to use the term were a little bit more interested in the occult in this case the rosac crucians Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry do bear a set of resemblances but unlike the medieval form the Masonic form is exclusively Christian and the rose crucians also sprung out another order the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn who they themselves were also very occultist and
not Masonic and not Christian as well as far as the connections between the Freemasons and the Illuminati here go the rosac crucians of Freemason are not any sort of official branch of Freemasonry they are a voluntary appendant body but as I said when people are talking about the Illuminati they're typically not talking about the alumbrados nor are they talking about the rosac crucians in reality they're talking about a group formed by a man named Adam Von wept who was a canon law professor at the University of englot in the late 18th century and this man
founded his order of the Illuminati in the electorate of Bavaria now I could go into the history of the Holy Roman Empire Empire and what electorate means but I'll just tell you this basically not an Empire not holy not Roman but it was essentially a confederation of different German states who all agreed to caucus under the rule of one guy that's the simplest way to put it his order originally consisted of himself and four students and went by the name Bund perfect bisten or the Covenant of perfectability founded May 1st 1776 they took minurva owl
as their symbol which is something that you might see if you watch anything about Bohemian Grove everybody in the order took aliases at first with Weiss Haled being brother Spartacus and then his other students Mazen Housen boff mortz and sutor taking the names Ajax agathon Tiberius and arasmus now arasmus was later rejected from the order for indolence or being lazy from its Inception the order was mostly targeting students who were inquisitive Minds eager to learn and most importantly had no real world experience and were very naive and gullible but Weiss halp was aware that there
was there was no way of sustaining that he wasn't going to create what he was looking to create we'll get into exactly what it was just by attracting students into his order in fact he might start to seem pretty creepy no he needed to associate himself with older men and men of means and Status people who could actually help him to advance his goals not just be kind of an army of psychop to this end after initially opposing the idea Weiss how made the decision to join the Freemasons in 1777 this had a dual purpose
part of it was to learn about their ritual structure understand how they functioned because they were quite successful at it and also to find himself a body of recruits who while they wouldn't be quite as gullible as his students would start with some of the same generally liberal ideas of the Enlightenment and be hopefully in this case easier to persuade it is also important to note that the political situation where Weiss help was in Bavaria was not the same as it is today nor the same as it was in the other strongholds of Freemasonry like
the UK and what was going to become the United States Weiss hopt was in Germany and at this time Germany was not yet Germany it was the Germany a collection of proms electorates duchies all these other small little things that all kind of fell under the Holy Roman Emperor it wasn't a United Country yet and considering that masonry typically operates on a state or national level at the Grand Lodge level it made it much easier to infiltrate Freemasonry where you had much smaller sects and a lot more Division and far less organizational structure so he
joined Prudence Lodge of the right of strict observance in February of 1777 for the Masons in the room the right of strict observance was an offshoot of the Scottish right imbued with German ethnic Pride so to be clear ethnic pride is not typically considered a masonic virtue initially the Illuminati stood to do a few things they wanted to oppose abuses of government power oppose superstition and oppose the involvement of the church in state affairs these ideas of course did appeal to Freemasons who told geometry philosophy logic and the liberal arts in general as some of
their core Central values what didn't appeal to Freemasons about Illuminati values were the fact that they wanted to overthrow government so they were fomenting Revolution which is not again a Masonic value and also that they wanted to completely dismantle Christianity get rid of it and replace it with an atheist system of values both of these things are antithetical to Freemasonry especially the latter as believing in a Creator is one of the most important things that you have to do to become a Freemason but that whole issue between Weiss Hal's goal of getting rid of religion
and freemasonry's core value of having religion that that was not enough to deter him from joining pretending he believed in God and then taking all of the Masonic rituals and symbols corrupting them and bringing them back to his own order in 1778 the Covenant of perfectability was renamed to the order of the Illuminati for the purpose of well it just kind of sounded weird calling it the other thing they adopted a modified Masonic structure with the first three degrees of Entered Apprentice fellowcraft and master being replaced with novice Manville and illuminus minor at the time
the the degrees were basically exactly the same there were minor tweaks but he hadn't done much of his own work yet here by late 1778 the Illuminati were active in five cities with 27 members and this weird internal spy Network that made sure that everyone was suspicious of each other and loyal only to weissa himself but Weiss hopt was struggling with the Freemasonry side of things while the recruitment was going just fine he had expected to be initiated and instructed in all of these different mystical Secrets held by the Freemasons when he got none of
this secret knowledge he believed that he just needed to be a higher ranking Freemason in order to allow himself to ascend through the ranks of Freemasonry in the way he thought would be most most efficient for himself he obtained a warrant from the Grand Lodge of Prussia to found Theodore of the good Council in Munich in March of 1779 now Theodore of the good Council might sound like a weird name for a masonic lodge a lot of them have names that aren't quite as simple as you know whatever Town you're in at first the master
of the lodge the person in charge appears to have not been a member of the Illuminati it seems that the Grand Lodge of Prussia sent their own guy there to get things started to make sure that this was running according to their rules and regulations Weiss halp seeing this as a problem with his plan of completely controlling the lodge convinced that guy to resign and then the Illuminati took over his position with the lodge then under their control they could start using the front of Freemasonry to effectively recruit for their order however even with control
of Theodore of the good Council they still didn't have the ultimate authority over their own Lodge that reside with the Grand Lodge of Prussia and if Weiss halt wanted this to really be its own thing he was going to need to see seek recognition from other lodges other Grand lodges in other countries and that is because there is no International Masonic Authority there is no government body that controls all of the grand lodges no they just recognize each other it's on a system of you know basically it's basically an honor System of like yeah you
guys seem chill we'll we'll vouch for you that's kind of how it works between Grand lodges in the early days of the Illuminati aside from some of the other more basic conflicts between the Illuminati ideology and the Freemason there was also the fact that the Illuminati did not allow Jews or pagans to join the order they specifically looked for Christian men of good moral standing because once you had that all you really needed to do with your recruit was get them to renounce Christianity and you were good to go still despite this Improvement in their
situation the order was struggling to recruit outside of Bavaria and to expand and gain any semblance of real power and they were also not getting any of the access to the Masonic secrets that they so desperately were craving and that's where a guy who's name I am not going to say in this episode comes in Aiden please put it across the bottom of the screen so they understand why I'm not taking any chances for the purposes of this video we're going to be calling him Addie Addie was a young man just 27 years old and
more importantly already a Freemason and kind of in a perfect situation he had his own dreams of reforming Freemasonry being of the noble class Addie had the connections and status that Weiss helped would need to actually expand be Beyond his little home base in Bavaria to that end Weiss halp invited him to join the order in November of the same year claiming all the while that he and the rest of the Illuminati served a group of most Serene superiors which is absolutely not the most cultish way to put that Addie was pretty excited about the
prospect of joining and being granted you know such an important position that he asked you know well what what goes past this what's next you know how do I get hire in the order but weop told him that before he could expose him to any of the higher Secrets Addie was going to need to do some recruiting of his own basically he had to bring five friends in the order before he could be elevated above the level of illuminus minor and yes that does sound like a multi-level marketing scheme Addie was not a stupid man
and he accepted under the sole condition that he'd be allowed to choose his recruiting grounds he didn't want Weiss help telling him where he was going when he was going there and then him failing because of Weiss help's idiocy he wanted to fail on his own terms and initially Addie was extremely successful at recruiting but he kept running into a problem when people asked about the degrees above illuminus minor because he didn't have any information so he went and did the rational thing and asked Adam Weiss halp for more information so he could actually explain
the order's higher functionings to prospective members at which point weop was forced to admit that not only were the superiors made up but also to everything else about the Illuminati was totally made up and this was actually a conspiracy about creating a new world order and due to the fact that all of this was made up in order to be a conspiracy to create the New World Order none of the higher degrees actually yet existed Addie of course responded as you'd expect he said okay and then Weiss Hop was like oh oh you're cool with
that um well you know more about Freemasonry than me do you want to design the higher degrees and Addie went yeah that sounds like a great idea he was given significant control which even included the ability to restructure the existing degrees his plan was to use that opportunity to reform the framework of the Illuminati Brotherhood while their ideas were considered very liberal and very interesting in Cath Bavaria in the more liberal Protestant German Nations nothing about the Illuminati was particularly interesting or unique in fact a lot of their ideas were simply just Enlightenment Theory so
instead of focusing so heavily on the anti-religion sentiment he was going to focus on the more Mystic aspects all of those interesting secrets and philosophical things you weren't really allowed to talk about in normal common public life though these agreements were progress the order would be getting more rituals and more consistency and more stability they were having other issues for for example there were five commands set up throughout Bavaria that were basically the you know the the nodes these were the points at which Illuminati orders were given and received and just before Addie's recruitment the
iot command had gone independent breaking Weiss's hold on the entire order he now only controlled four of the five there were also problems between Weiss halp and his ruling Council the area pagas who felt that he was arrogant and domineering upon joining this was one of Addie's immediate responsibilities was acting as is kind of a peacemaker between the area pagas and the leader of the order so Addie said about identifying the areas of concern you can start to see that while weop was the guy who founded the order this is the guy who was actually
doing things this is the guy who was really running things behind the scenes Addie found that the young naive students that were easy to recruit lacked the experience to hold positions of leadership so they were going to need to look for older men he also noticed that the aggressive anti-religion sentiment behind the Illuminati would Faire pretty well in Catholic conservative Bavaria but if you went North into the Protestant parts of Germany those ideas were very quickly going to f animosity against the Illuminati it wasn't going to work in their favor like it did in Bavaria
and if the goal really was to infiltrate Freemasonry and use it as a vehicle as it was becoming the the main plan here they were going to need to really dial that back because again creationism believing in a higher power is a fundamental aspect of Freemasonry you cannot become a Freemason if you are atheist Addie of course had Solutions but those solutions would require Weiss hop in the area pagas handing over a ton of power over the organization's future but they really didn't have a choice cuz at this point the order still only had those
three basic degrees and people were asking okay well when do I get to the cool stuff when do I get to all the secrets they didn't have an answer for them and then there was also the issue of their association with Freemasonry that Lodge that Weiss hop had formed Theodore of the good Council which that name was actually supposed to just be flattering the new Prince elector of Bavaria Theodore that Lodge was still under the jurisdiction of the Grand Lodge of Prussia so Weiss hopt was stuck he couldn't do anything with his lodge without the
ascent of the overarching body of Freemasonry in the German areas add's initial idea was to gain independence from the Grand Lodge of Prussia by gaining recognition from the Grand Lodge of England which was the oldest and most respected Grand Lodge of Freemasons at the time if he could get that recognition he would no longer need the recognition of the Grand Lodge of Prussia and could operate as his own Grand Lodge and spawn his own daughter lodges in order to do that however they would need the full consent of their chapter of Freemasons their Lodge and
they couldn't get it not willing to be deterred instead of just saying all right well we tried they made sort of an agreement an alliance with the Freemasons of their Lodge that they would be allowed to spawn daughter lodges and open up Illuminati Order type other Ventures without dragging the Freemasons who were not Illuminati in their Lodge into it they made that agreement in January of 1781 spawned four daughter lodges and basically got half of what they wanted another of add's ideas was to go abroad and convert more Masons elsewhere to make them into Illuminati
members so that Weiss Hop's order didn't actually have to leave Bavaria it could just spread its ideas and eventually more and more Masonic lodges would fall to Illuminati influence so Addie spent the fall of 1781 and the winter of 1782 doing just that going and setting up other Masonic lodges with Illuminati infiltration then by 1782 Addie had actually reformed the structure of Illuminati degrees as well into three classes class one were those Illuminati degrees novice manval and illuminus minor class two then included the Masonic degrees of Entered Apprentice fellowcraft and master and finally class three
included the mystery degrees which had Prince and priest as the Lesser Mysteries and Mage and King as the higher greater Mysteries and it's generally believed that the actual rituals for those two highest degrees were never actually written with all of his degrees laid out ADI spent the spring of 1782 roving around the germanies recruiting Freemasons to his new Illuminati ideals he targeted the worshipful Masters and the wardens of these lodges hoping that by converting the leadership first he could get it to kind of cascade down through the membership in some cases entire lodges pledged allegiance
to the new Freemasonry all at once and in order for this to have happened at the rate that it did it seems very likely to me that this this man who was doing all this recruitment was leaving out the anti-religious sentiments that either he had changed up the degree structure to not explicitly mention religion at all or he had simply said you know I'm not going to tell them I'm I'm not going to tell them that the end goal of this group is to dismantle religion entirely because that would at the end of the day
just completely turn off Freemasons whatever he was doing it was extremely successful because by mid 1782 he had accumulated 300 new recruits and only 20 of them were students so he had completely flipped the demographics of the order however the problem of their home Lodge being loyal to the Grand Lodge of Prussia still persisted so the Illuminati proposed to the just Masonic side of Theodore of the good Council hey how about we just split you guys go your own way and form your own Lodge we'll keep this one that way we don't have to argue
with each other by doing that they could get rid of all of the non- Illuminati masons take a vote and then get their recognition from another grand lodge and finish out their plans what they didn't expect was for the Masonic side of the lodge to just fold and say yeah we'll join you guys that could be partially because around this time the right of strict observance the Masonic body to which they had attached themselves was in a complete crisis of leadership and of identity the right was very interested in mysticism but they were having difficulty
keeping membership up and with sort of how how different the ideas had become within that appendant body some people wanted reform some were pushing to just simply join the Swedish right of Freemasonry and what it led to was this Clash of ideas at a council where they basically removed the the the Templar backstory that they had said oh you know all of our ancient rights and rituals were you know corrupted or made up or edited and adopted some it kept some of the Templar symbolism but got rid of the Templar backstory there's there's so much
to go into here that's not super well documented in English so I can't really give you too much info here just understand that they basically reorganized themselves out of existence initially the Illuminati wanted to find their way in here so that they could reorganize the symbols of the right of strict observance reorganize their story into their own but Weiss help decided that that wasn't the best course of action and in instead they should just Target the disillusion Masons who didn't want to be part of the right of strict observance anymore but still wanted to be
part of something higher than Simple Craft Freemasonry and since I haven't really explained what that is the universal part of Freemasonry are those first three degrees uh it's not totally Universal but especially in the British and the American World they're constant they are consistent the enter Apprentice fellowcraft Master 1 2 3 in order to do anything at a higher level of Freemasonry you have to first become Master Mason and while there are small variations in ritual for the most part anywhere throughout the United States Canada and the UK you're going to get the same ritual
almost almost completely that plan worked well enough and it did bring some more people in and it allowed the Illuminati to avoid collapsing with the right of strict observance now with their influence growing and their competition struggling the Illuminati were able to look to Ally with other Grand lodges around the Germany's part of the reason that they felt comfortable doing this is because they now had princes and Dukes among their ranks they had men of power and status that they never could have dreamed would be on their side so it seemed possible that they could
look to go outside that they could take those chances with the law that they could get themselves out of the Shadows once and for all they eventually proposed a federation system of grand lodges where all three of those first step degrees would be Universal but then every Lodge could decide on its own what further degrees do we want to pursue do we want to go Scottish right do we want to go York right do we want to go with this Illuminati thing and that way there was no governing body over any degrees over three that
was what they wanted here it wasn't about those first three degrees that was whatever to them it was about making sure that there was no broader body deciding hey all of these lodges will do this further ritual no he wanted to be able to go to each Lodge individually and have them disconnected from the others when he presented his Illuminati ideology so he could say hey I've got all of these guys behind me they're all in you should join our club arguing with the Grand Lodge is a lot more difficult individual Lodge you might be
able to get that one pushed through especially when you start to mention the little perks of you know hey well my buddy the prince of this you know region in Saxony he's willing to loan you guys some money help you guys out when you got that involved suddenly you're dealing with a a much better situation than what they had previously where they were basically this tiny collection of lodges going to an overarching body and saying hey guys uh we've got all these radical new ideas and you probably won't like half of them you should adopt
them now by this point in the story Theodore of the good Council Lodge is its own independent Grand Lodge in a sense of course masonry back then not the same as masonry today for any Freemasons going that doesn't sound right it didn't sound right to me either but it was an independent Lodge with that step completed the idea was now to take over all the other lodges in Germany and then presumably to move out of Germany and do the same thing the first step was to distribute a pamphlet accusing a whole bunch of people within
Freemasonry of being either corrupt or bad at their jobs including the Grand Lodge of Prussia which they said had been infected by Jesuits they also announced their own set of higher degrees and began doing the groundwork to spread those around all of Germany as I said craft masonry is the first three degrees those are Universal between all Grand lodges but when it comes to the rights like Scottish right and York right those are appendant bodies they are further schools of thought they are not included amongst all Freemasonry not all Masons are Scottish right or York
right but all Master Masons are Master Masons of the blue Lodge unfortunately for wise help his pamphlet had entirely the opposite effect of what he'd intended he had thought that this would be a way to undermine the other Grand lodges and to place his own brand of masonry this new Freemasonry at the top but he completely miscalculated here because while this might have been very popular in Catholic Bavaria the Protestant Nations and the Freemasons who lived in them were not fans of anything that he was bringing to the table so rather than bringing people into
his sphere of influence he actually just ended up offending a lot of Masons throughout the germanies he was essentially seen as an upstart who wasn't offering anything new he was just replacing the restrictions that they didn't like in the right of strict observance with the Illuminati restrictions see at the time Germany was not United it was not a whole so the situation with the Freemasons of Germany much like the statehood of Germany was tumultuous it wasn't something consistent as a result of that inconsistency of ritual Weiss Hop was dealing with a whole lot of competition
and not just from what was standard Freemasonry but also these other rights type bodies that wanted to do their own version of what he was doing so this meant that all of their grand plans were styed but at the small scale with just recruitment things were going okay at the time Bavarian politics were very very good for the Illuminati the Ascension of Prince Charles Theodore to the crown of Bavaria had created a bit of a liberal thought boom he had rolled back some of the conservative Catholic restrictions that had led to the creation of the
Illuminati in the first place however when this kind of rubber banded and the Pendulum swung back and they reinstituted a lot of these restrictive Catholic policies it just made it that much worse for all of the people in Bavaria who were more liberally minded rather than just living under that constant oppression they were given a taste of freedom and then when it was taken away from them it accelerated all of these irritations all of these things they didn't like about the governing system that they were living under because so much of the educated class was
then irritated with the government and with the church the Illuminati had a much much easier time going to those people and saying hey I know you don't like the church and I know you don't like the crown how about you come and join us we've got plans to handle this in the Protestant regions however where none of this Catholic political drama was really going on they weren't making much progress however in Protestant regions where you didn't have this difficulty of the Catholic Church's involvement in government they had a lot more trouble recruiting Because all of
these ideas they were promoting weren't as unique or interesting outside of the Pope's reach however by the end of 1784 the order numbered over 650 people possibly as high as 2500 but 650 is the number that we were certain of and amongst those 650 people were Dukes princes high-profile clergymen people who had means and people who had influence and the fact that there were clergy involved leads me to believe further that they probably were keeping all of this stuff about being anti-religious within the area pagas within the ruling Council group but with all of that
success came squabbles as the order was now growing consistently and the system of higher degrees had at the very least been theorized they didn't have have much of a need for Addie anymore his primary purposes were the creation of the ritual and the recruitment both of which were now either completed or self-sustaining so Weiss Hal seeing that he had no real use for Addie anymore wanted that power back but Addie felt he had earned his position at the same time his methods the people he targeted the way he recruited and the way he had set
everything up really focused more heavily on the Mystic side of the Illuminati and by extension the Freemason they were copying their beliefs it wasn't so much focused on that anti-clerical anti-church aspect anymore and that that was kind of hard for Weiss out because for him yeah it's great that he had this this group now that he had created his secret society that it had power but it didn't have the power or in in truth it didn't have the will to do what he wanted it to do because they hadn't recruited people who were anti-clerical they
had recruited people who were Masons eventually things came to a head when Weiss help asked Addie to rewrite the ritual for the rank of priest basically the area pagus some of the other high-ranking members of the Illuminati and wise helped felt that it wasn't straightforward the language wasn't great it was kind of jumbled it didn't make a ton of sense they just didn't like the way that Addie had put this together but Addie rightfully pointed out that this degree had already been published to all of the Illuminati lodges and it had been published under the
offices that it was an ancient ritual passed down for thousands of years from some ancient mystery religion so if they just rewrote it suddenly that was going to look super super suspicious now as you can probably tell Addie was seemingly the most intelligent of the bunch and he did try to pull together the arop pagus and the other high members so that they could in some way work to convince weissa out of the direction he was taking things but he failed to do this because they trusted him less than they trusted Weiss out as a
result of what he saw is in subordination Weiss help started spreading all sorts of slanderous rumors about Addie but Addie responded to this by saying that if Weiss help didn't retract all of the things he' said he would tell everybody exactly how much hand he had in writing out all of the ritual which was basically all of the stuff that was proposed to be ancient in effect he would very quickly being as he had all of the documentation that he had used to put these together he would very very quickly be able to prove to
the entire world that the Illuminati was a sham that this was was just a front for something else by the end of the year however Addie was convinced to turn over all of his materials to the ruling Council of the aluminati and Weiss halp agreed that he would retract all of his statements Addie left the order went back to his hometown and just kind of did his own thing for the rest of his life which was not altogether that long he died in the 1790s to this point the Illuminati had survived by presenting itself as
a Freemason organization which allowed the true identity and true Ambitions of Weiss helped and his men to go unnoticed and remain under the radar however with power came bragging and with bragging came notoriety the names of Illuminati members their positions in society basically every bit of information you would need to know about these people in order to understand that what they were a part of might have an influence on your life all of that became public knowledge and when people started to see the names of powerful individuals like the treasurer of Bavaria on those lists
they started to distrust the government but it didn't stop at the government no the Illuminati had also managed to infiltrate the University of englot and drive out all of the people who had formerly been Jesuits who were in charge of that school so you now had government and Academia that were starting to see that first semblance of control by the Illuminati but Prince Charles Theodore was not having it he was not going to let anybody come in and disrupt his rule in this way so he banned not just the Illuminati but all secret societies from
Bavaria in 1785 Weiss halp of course fled Bavaria and the government seized and distributed his materials and as the order had failed to expand in any meaningful way outside of Bavaria it too fell out of relevance the influence it had on the German variant of Freemasonry and possibly the French as well however may have been more lasting than the order itself in Bavaria for example in 1798 the first president of the United States George Washington who is a well-known Freemason received a book and a letter from a man named G W Snider the book was
a copy of John Robinson's proof of a conspiracy which alleged that the Illuminati were behind the French Revolution that they had set the whole thing up the Declaration of the rights of man was them all of it the French Revolution was the Illuminati which if you look at the Declaration of the rights of man and you look at The Illuminati's values it's not a totally unbelievable conspiracy theory however if you look at the evidence it's the number of Illuminati who would have had to be involved is kind of like saying that the American Revolution was
planned by the Freemasons yes the Freemasons were involved in that a number of the founding fathers were Freemasons but the Freemasons as a whole were not directing the American Revolution Washington responded by saying that he had heard of the Illuminati and he did in fact believe that their ideas had spread across the ocean to the United States however he was also clear that such quote diabolical tenants had not infiltrated American Freemasonry though he goes on to say that the efforts of certain individuals could not really be denied regardless of any remnants across the world the
Bavarian Illuminati as the organization Weiss helped started fell out of relevance by the early 1800s their name would be revived occasionally for example during the anti-masonic movement in the United States during the mid 1800s but they never exerted any sort of open control the way that they had during the late 1700s so why do we hear about the Illuminati now 250 years after it was founded well well there's the fact that a number of organizations today claim in some way to be the Illuminati and that they have some tradition that they date back to the
Varian Illuminati or they use the title of Illuminati or illuminatus but none of them have a ton of evidence to show that they have anything to do with the original order directly maybe they adopted some of the ideas but it doesn't seem like they were actually in any way connected of course there's the fact that a lot of people associate the Freemasons with the Illuminati and the belief that these organizations are one and the same that the higher Echelon of Freemasons are all the Illuminati and that all of this symbolism goes both ways and you
know that the Freemasons are are the bad guys here but that comes from a series of letters to the editor of Playboy during the 1960s you see a group of writers at Playboy decided to write a mock religious text and they called it principia discordia and this entire thing is a religion worshiping the goddess of Discord and if you read read even the first couple Pages you can immediately see that this was never intended to be taken seriously it calls the the five Commandments the pentab barf there's a you know Priests of Pooh and different
stuff like that it's it's like South Park level principia discordia was primarily written by a guy named Greg Hill who styled himself under the pen name Mal clipse the younger a single passage of the book mentions the Masons the Ros Childs and the Federal Reserve as all being fronts of the Illuminati the other principal author Carrie Wendell Thornley was one of the people writing for Playboy he and another accomplice Robert Anton Watson wrote a series of these fake letters to the editor claiming that they had secret knowledge of the Masons or they were Masons and
that they could expose all of this truth about the Illuminati and what was really going on and who was in charge and who really killed JFK all of this stuff they called this operation mind and their plan was to convince everybody that quote all national calamities assassinations were conspiracy icies were planned by the Illuminati in one letter they claim that the Illuminati run the banks all of them are 32nd degree Masons and that they're the inspiration behind Spectre in Ian Fleming's James Bond series and that they actually killed Ian Fleming for writing it that same
letter claims that the Illuminati are actually of Arabic origin and that their leader smoked a lot of marijuana now why did he smoke all that marijuana that's right he smoked weed to work himself into a murderous r to fight the Crusaders now of course if you know anything about the effects of cannabis you know that murderous rage is not typically one of the symptoms of course anybody familiar with the 1960s and the culture of that time could understand why all of these would be big buzzword and Trigger words for people reading Playboy when you don't
have the context of understanding that culture however like somebody in say the 9s or early 2000s might you can see how they might take this seriously so that's how it ends up being part of the cultural Zeitgeist back in the 1960s and onward but when it comes to all of the celebrities that you always see throwing Freemason hand symbols like this you know things like that claiming that that's the Illuminati well there's another explanation for that as well which is marketing with the rise of Lan Satanism in the 60s and 70s and then the satanic
panic in the 80s and 90s a lot of marketing professionals realized that hm the adults don't like Satanism the kids want to bug the adults and if we have somebody throw one of these weird hand signals it's in the news for 24 to 36 hours getting us a ton of free marketing for whatever concert or tour or album is coming out for such and such artist or whatever movie so yes it was just the freest advertising possible and a great way to develop a cult following now of course none of this is to say that
there is no such thing as a sort of Illuminati all I'm saying is that the Bavarian illum did not successfully infiltrate and take over Freemasonry and the modern understanding of the Illuminati comes from a series of letters in Playboy there are certainly groups out there with similar goals to what Weiss helped held and they are powerful and to confront the elephant in the room no it is not them this is not an anti-semitic conspiracy theory video that's not what we're doing here don't go there don't go down that rabbit hole this is not what this
is about we do not like anti-Semitism at this this channel we are not fans of it we we wish you would stop please that said there are certainly groups and individuals who want to course correct so to speak human development societal development because they think that we're going in the wrong direction and these groups aren't hiding like the Illuminati were they're working in plain sight they hide all of these plans with flowery language talking about a world where you'll own nothing and be happy every year a couple thousand very rich people fly to Switzerland and
they make decisions about how you're going to live your life are they the Illuminati no but that is a real group that exists that does things like that and there are other versions all across the world with different aims and different intentions but the fact of the matter is it is naive to look at what people say about the Illuminati and say well nothing like that exists no it's not the Illuminati it's not the Freemasons but there are people that are out there trying to do nefarious things trying to direct world events and some of
them are doing it for nationalistic purposes some of them are doing it for the fact that they personally believe that they are somehow exceptional men or women and that they know better than you and whether you believe that any one of these organizations is the legit Illuminati or that any one of these organizations or countries is somehow more worrisome than the others the truth is this Illuminati thing everyone focusing on this conspiracy theory is good for them because as long as we're all looking for something that's hiding in the shadows the people with the real
bad intentions they can do everything they want out in the open and as long as they say we're the good guys nobody's really questioning them so this isn't to say that there's no such thing as evil secret societies in the world or people trying to do bad things there of course are people out there trying to do bad things it's just to say don't look at the obvious flashy red herring and stay frosty Kings and if you'd like to help us here at the Lura Lodge stay frosty you can subscribe to us on patreon for
just $ a month you can also try our coffee from Tableau Roasting Company Mount Pocono perk which Aiden should be throwing at my face right now but instead he's on his phone over in the corner so I don't even know what to do anymore I guess maybe okay and now it's been dropped all right well you know I'm just going to keep talking until I pick up the coffee and now it's next to my face we're good we're happy that's all good we also do this show live Sunday nights at 700 p.m. every week and
we have it on Spotify Apple music Google podcast Amazon music you know I like how we all thought cutting the cord was going to be good for us and now there's a different streaming service for you know whichever different breakfast food you're interested in and if you want to look phenomenal and also be very comfortable while also helping to spread word about the lore Lodge you can do so by going to our merch store the L lodge. shop and purchasing any one of the wonderful designs we have up there and if you like how we
do content but you're interested in content about different stuff you can check out our other channels the history Hut or the weird Bible where we do this but about history and the Bible and if you want to make sure that you get access to all of the updates on what we're doing make sure you join our Discord server at bit.ly jooin the lodge once again I'm Aiden Mattis and thanks for stopping by the glory Lodge [Music]
