Illuminati

A revelatory history of the world’s most notorious secret society and the conspiracy theory it birthed, tracing its evolution from the French Revolution to our paranoid present, from the author of Impossible Monsters

On 1 May 1776 a young radical named Adam Weishaupt founded a secret society whose aim was to infiltrate and overturn the system of world power from within. Intellectuals, judges, politicians and poets joined, united by Enlightenment ideals and a belief in freedom of religion and democracy. They called themselves the Order of the Illuminati.

Within a decade the Order, with its bizarre ciphers and melodramatic rituals, was gone: outed and banned by the authorities, its leaders were prosecuted and exiled; its effects had been minimal. Yet to this day millions worldwide maintain that its collapse was a sham and that for 250 years this shadowy cabal of self-appointed power brokers, whose members now include Hillary Clinton, George Soros, Bill Gates and Taylor Swift, has been manipulating world events – starting wars, swaying elections, setting interest rates and creating celebrities.

This is the first complete history of the brief, troubled life of the Illuminati and the conspiracy theory they spawned, from which all others have since derived. From the birth of the theory in the revolutionary war and terror of the 1790s, through the great upheavals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into the present, it shows how at moments of spectacular transformation, fear and perceived betrayal, people – including even George Washington and Winston Churchill – have turned to the theory for explanation or advantage. Associated first with freemasonry, later with communism, the conspiracy became entwined with antisemitism and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the 1920s, gained momentum through the rise of America’s Christian Right and even infused the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s, before finding new leases of life in the paranoid thinking of 9/11 Truthers, QAnon, vaccine sceptics and the Manosphere.

For centuries, the Illuminati have maintained a deep and unsettling hold on the public imagination. Michael Taylor’s meticulously sourced and gripping account of this story exposes and explains the power of conspiracist thinking as never before.