Author: Steven Hager

In 1888, a Christian mystic and Prussian military intelligence officer met and began a collaboration. They are listed as founders of the German branch of the Theosophical society, which was penetrated if not conceived by British intelligence. The society was constructed as another layer on the established masonic networks.

For millennia, control of the dominant religion was paramount to managing the national zeitgeist. But when intellectuals in Europe began reading classical Greek and Roman literature, the once magical stories in the Christian bible lost their glow. Greek philosophers seemed so much more enlightened and rational.

The classics created a sudden jump in science, something that had been held back by Christian superstition and dogma. A fever grew in the minds of men and women, something similar to the fever of the mid-1960s, when a generation discovered cannabis and other forbidden substances, and yearned for more freedom of thought.

But after rejecting Christianity and Judaism, the rank and file of the enlightenment greatly missed the ceremonies and pomp and circumstance, and masonry rushed in to fill the void with an even better magic show, which unfolded in secrecy, making it even more alluring and enchanting. And if you lived in a Catholic country, becoming a mason was tantamount to heresy and often led to execution, which made it daring and noble. Masonry was based on the secret society created by Pythagoras after he visited with the Zoroastrian Magi in Persia mixed with Bible stories involving Solomon’s temple. The pentagram was popularized by the Pythagoreans, although it can be found in ancient Sumer, Babylon, Judea, and China.

In Catholic Bavaria, the publishing industry was under strict supervision, and spreading the wrong info got you tortured and murdered pretty fast. Not so much in France and even less in England. Voltaire inspired a generation by attacking censorship, slavery, and religion, especially Catholic dogma. He became Elvis overnight and was sought out by the most enlightened rulers in Europe. His books were in French and slipped through the Bavarian censors.

This was 50 years before the American Revolution. Frederick the Great, crown prince of Prussia, became his most famous patron. Frederick had written an essay disputing everything in Machiavelli’s book, The Prince, which claimed rulers must be ruthless to remain in power (because those seeking to steal the kingdom will be, and the most ruthless win). Frederick favored a more genteel approach rather than rule by terror. Voltaire briefly served as a spy for the French King, reporting back on Frederick’s military plans during the Austrian War of Succession. Frederick was Grandmaster of the Grand Lodge of Prussia, and Voltaire a prominent member of French masonry.

The spy and the mystic decided to revive Weishaupt’s order of the Illuminati. Just as Weishaupt had invented a phony story about the order’s origins, claiming the order was led by a council of intellectual giants descended from the Magi, the spy and mystic made identical claims (even though Weishaupt had later admitted his origin story had been fabricated).

This hoodwink would be repeated when the phony Priory of Sion was born in Paris, which claimed the story of the grail was about the blood of Jesus. Jesus never walked the earth, and the priory was just more fabricated Christian mysticism. Christian mystics should be considered deluded or frauds, with most falling into the latter because “garbage in, garbage out.” For millennia, some of our greatest minds had been chained by religious fundamentalism. At the same time, getting rich by staging elaborate shows with magic lanterns and Pythagorean symbols was relatively easy. Hypnosis wasn’t discovered until the late 1800s, but the guided meditations of the Jesuits easily brainwashed Christians into believing the Bible was the divine word of God. Goethe was greatly troubled by the story of Moses leading his people around the desert for 40 years, which indicated Moses was an incompetent leader, or the story was fabricated. As brilliant as he was, Goethe couldn’t fathom the reality Moses was a myth and created as a composite of Cyrus the Great and Zoroaster.

So not only are Judaism and Christianity built on fabrications, but so is masonry and all its offshoots. The mind is easily enchanted and craves magical stories and will invent them if necessary just for the entertainment value. The control of the occult societies is just as vital as control of religion, which is why some royals immediately flocked into the masonic societies and used their power and influence to take control of the lodges.

But did the Illuminati network really disappear when Weishaupt retired? In the 1840s, William Huntington Russell, cousin to the heir of the North American opium empire known as “the China trade,” so as not to mention the word opium, visited Germany and joined a fraternity, and he brought the Illuminati rituals back to Yale.

Before Weishaupt resigned, he left detailed instructions on how to survive the ban. He had created many splinter organizations in different countries that never used the name Illuminati, and had been designed to be self-perpetuating assets serving the order.

Almost nothing real has been written about this for centuries, but I hold out hope AI will one day expose all the bullshit. And one day the masses won’t be so enchanted by magic stories, but develop a more rational zeitgeist not so easily swayed by dogma and hocus hocus.

A few years after Reuss announced the Illuminati revival, co-founder and Christian mystic Leopold Engel was bounced by Christian mystic Karl Kellner and the name of the society changed to O.T.O. Soon, a British intelligence agent would join and hijack the society, leading it to great infamy.  That agent was a 33-degree mason who’d recently been kicked out of the Golden Dawn after trying to hijack that society.

The Nazis banned Freemasonry and masons were treated just as severely as Jews, which indicates the masonic network was where anti-fascists could be found. Most masons believed in intellectual and artistic freedom. People flocking to masonry during the enlightenment were departing other religions. The masons were deists who believed a divine spirit ruled the universe but the only way to learn its mind was through the study of nature.

The Nazis seized all masonic documents and assets. As many as 200,000 masons may have been killed as part of the final solution. Those who escaped the dragnet were forced deep underground and used the forget-me-not flower to signal each other. One lodge was established in secret inside the Esterwegen concentration camp. It’s possible the Bavaria Illuminati were wiped out by the Nazis during their takedown of masonry, which would be ironic since a Bonesman-connected bank helped finance Hitler.

Weishaupt never met most of the members. They were told the society was run by a group of Illuminated masters descended from the Zoroastrian Magi. A lot of phony mysticism was invented. Weishaupt understood people crave enchantment and magic. Anyone of potential use was a target for recruitment, but he concentrated on nobles, priests (Catholic and Protestant), high-ranking masons, civil servants, generals and other military, and especially, the best authors. Goethe was the greatest and Weishaupt got him into the fold, but likely never met him, and Goethe was probably agast when the order was banned and Weishaupt went on the run, seeking sanctuary with a royal patron.

The order was running on enlightenment fever, the same thing that created our Revolutionary War. There was a real danger the masses might take control away from the nobles and the Illuminati was supposedly plotting that very thing in France and Russia. They had all sorts of front organizations as they never used the word “Illuminati” in public, and the meetings were rare, and only held for the inner circles. Most members were kept completely in the dark on what the society was up to.

After the ban, a bunch of members ran to rat out the society. They claimed to have been hoodwinked into something evil. Weishaupt pioneered a lot of things now routine in intel, like honey traps. He believed the ends justified the means and nobody knew for sure what his real allegiance was, although he did repair his relationship with the Catholic church before he died, which indicates he may have been secretly working for the Jesuits all along, in order to manage the enlightenment reforms. In fact, a leading member accused Weishaupt of being a secret Jesuit agent.

I suspect the German branch did dissolve because nothing has been heard from it since, and the spy and mystic would not have made contact with the major lodges in Europe to tell them the Illuminati was being revived in Germany if it never dissolved. Apparently, a treasure trove of original documents held in Sweden were sent to the spy and mystic.

It appears the Illuminati may not have dissolved in Italy, which makes sense if it was a Jesuit conspiracy all along. A masonic lodge connected to the Vatican was found responsible for the worst terror bombing in European history. Founded as Propaganda Massonica in 1877, the lodge was renamed Propaganda Due in 1966.  After documents were discovered linking the lodge to a train bombing that had been blamed on the left, it was banned in 1982. Figures high in Italian military, intelligence and law enforcement had been members, along with operatives inside the Vatican and Vatican Bank, as were numerous figures in South America. The list we have is the rolodex of the grandmaster of the lodge, so we don’t really know who was a member and who he just had on speed dial. The Italian media characterized the lodge as “a state within a state.”

The lodge was part of Operation Gladio, a secret stay-behind army organized by NATO in the event France and Italy went Communistic,  which seemed likely at the time. Gladio made strange bedfellows as it merged masons with Nazis. Nazis and the Vatican, however, had always been chummy, and it had been easy for any Knight of Malta to switch sides. There was nothing similar to the Illuminati rituals uncovered, however. Members seemingly had no code names. However, suspicion remained that P2 was connected to another lodge, one buried deeper inside the Vatican, and if those rumors are true, that lodge could be part of the original Illuminati network.

Bones had been kept busy through the decades and most importantly, played a strategic role in the 1963 assassination of JFK. None of this appears in anything written by Robert Anton Wilson who buried the truth in a blizzard of bullshit.

People need to discard their prejudices and understand that membership in the Bavarian Illuminati or in Bones is not an indictment or evidence of a devious mind. Both societies wanted the widest net possible, and mostly good upstanding people, with only a few malignant narcissists for any covert action that needed undertaking, like assassination by poison to elevate some member into a high position. No evidence Weishaupt did that, just that nothing that benefited the society was off the table. And if Weishaupt did foment an assassination, nobody would have been told about it, just like you can bet the knights and patriarchs don’t discuss the JFK assassination inside the Tomb at New Haven.

One of my favorite artists, Gerald Murphy, was a Bonesman, and he never hurt anybody.