Illuminism and the Illuminati

ILLUMINISM AND THE ILLUMINATI

By Dr. Stephen Jones

7-9-2019

The Revelation commentary series written by Dr. Stephan Jones is truly a highly informative compilation and well worth the effort to read.  The following article concerning the beginnings i.e. creation of the so-called Illuminati was inserted within the discussion involving Revelation chapter 13.  The information was extracted and placed it into this separate article.

The information concerning illuminism and the illuminati was included in Book 5 of the Revelation commentary to explain the beginnings of the central banking system, the French Revolution, and the so-called Illuminati-Masonic-elitists that have long planned for a one-world government under their leadership.

The first beast, the “beast from the sea”, which is a continuation of the prophecy of the “little horn” as written in Daniel 7.  The “little horn” or the sea beast is an extension of the Western Roman Empire.  This extension is often defined as the Holy Roman Empire, aka the Pope and the Vatican, or simply the Roman Catholic Church, as it eventually came to be known.  The Roman Church later claimed to be the universal Church.

The second beast exposed in Revelation 13, or the beast from the earth, became the banking system, eventually controlled by the Rothschild family.  This banking system transformed into the current central banking system and is a major section or division of the Mystery, Babylon system.   

ILLUMINISM

But a new beast was rising that would put in check the power of the sea beast. It (second beast) was a philosophical beast, formed by Adam Weishaupt on May 1, 1776, an ex-Jesuit who expressed bitter hatred toward the Roman church for disbanding the Jesuit Order in 1773. Yet he himself was a tool of his more secretive financiers. He founded what was called The Illuminati, although this term had been used by other secret societies for a long time. Weishaupt’s Illuminism combined gnostic teaching with Jewish mysticism of the Cabala, along with some pretense of Christianity (which he despised) in order to use a wide range of people to support the organization financially. In one of his papers, he wrote:

“You cannot imagine what consideration and sensation our Priest’s degree is arousing. The most wonderful thing is that great Protestant and reformed theologians who belong to Illuminism still believe that the religious teaching imparted in it contains the true and genuine spirit of the Christian religion. Oh! Men, of what cannot you be persuaded? I never thought that I should become the founder of a new religion” (Nesta Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, p. 218, 219).

Weishaupt used his Jesuit skills to infiltrate Freemasonry and to use it for his own purposes. After founding his Illuminati organization in 1776, Weishaupt was initiated into Freemasonry in 1777 in Munich. This began his rise within the ranks of Freemasonry.

In 1786 his organization was discovered when a messenger was struck and killed by lightning, and the authorities found incriminating papers sown into the lining of the dead man’s coat. The Illuminati was then outlawed, but it had already been hidden in Freemasonry where it could function more freely.

The Magdalene Cult

Weishaupt was a Jesuit professor of canon law at Ingolstadt University until 1773, when the pope disbanded the Order. It is often argued that Weishaupt hated the Jesuits, along with the Roman church as a whole, but this would seem strange, coming from a professor of canon law. If he truly hated the church prior to the abolition of the Jesuit Order, then no doubt it was because Weishaupt was part of the main rival faction within the church itself.

This rival faction believed that Jesus had married Mary Magdalene, that He had survived the crucifixion, and that He had three children, who became the progenitors of the Merovingian monarchs in Europe. The Merovingians began with Merovech (415-456 A.D.), who was king of the Franks. Legend says that he was conceived while his mother was swimming in the ocean and was impregnated by a Quinotaur, a sea monster. This idea was later taken as evidence of descent from the Fish, which was an early church Christian symbol of Christ. (The Greek word for fish is ichthus, whose acronym is Iesous Christos Theous Uois, Soter.)

The theory of Merovingian descent from Jesus was later used by monarchs to claim greater authority than the pope, whose presumed authority was based on Peter. This theory was put forth in the 1982 book Holy Blood Holy Grail and later popularized by the movie, “The Da Vinci Code”.

It is likely that Weishaupt, as a Jesuit, was part of this alternate movement within the Roman church. When the Jesuits were suppressed, and he lost his position at the University, he then openly turned against the Roman church and seemingly even against the Jesuit Order itself. At any rate, Weishaupt’s Illuminati was designed first to overthrow the Roman church, but when the papacy was reinstated (ended by and restarted by Napoleon), they were content to undermine the traditional teaching of the Roman church and replace its devotion to Mary the mother of Jesus with devotion to Mary Magdalene. They knew that if they could succeed in replacing one Mary with another, they would ultimately be able to lay claim to having both spiritual and political authority as direct descendants of Jesus Himself.

One might ask what their ultimate purpose was meant to accomplish. As with all such people, the goal was to obtain power and money, or, in this case, to use what money they already had to increase their power. To accomplish this, they needed to eliminate all opposition, and recognizing that the Roman church had the most power, they focused upon destroying the papacy. Once they accomplished this goal (in 1798-1800), then they were able to control and use the church, having infiltrated it as they did with Freemasonry earlier.

Evidence of this infiltration is now surfacing, especially with the book and movie by Dan Brown, The DaVinci Code. Catholic Gnostics are now secure enough to come out into the open, for they believe many are ready to hear their doctrine that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had children with her, who are the ancestors of the European royal families (i.e., the Merovingians).

Ultimately, the goal is not really to get them to believe their doctrines, but to destroy all forms of Christianity itself. Their aim is to destroy the present society in order to rebuild it as a Luciferian Order. To do this, they must also destroy marriage and the family unit and promote all forms of immorality and avarice among the youth.

The Magdalene cult itself is only a way to gain support among Catholics to shift power from the sea beast to the earth beast. Once this has been accomplished, the earth beast plans to set forth its “final truth” that Lucifer, the supposed brother of Jesus, is the true inheritor of the earth. They hope in this way to shift Christianity to Luciferianism.

Because the church lost its moral compass a long time ago in the search for power and money (supposedly to establish the Kingdom of God), God has raised up the beast from the earth. In the 1700’s, this beast destroyed the power of the church; in the 1800’s it made an alliance with the church in order to use it for its own purposes, but today the entire social and moral order is being destroyed.

Then the French Revolution from 1789-1794 overthrew the Roman Church in France, killed or exiled its monarchs, and established what they called a Republic. At the same time a Republican movement was gaining strength in Italy. When the republican agent, Hugo Basseville, was murdered in the streets of Rome in January 1793, the French government held the pope complicit in the murder. Alarmed, the pope joined a European coalition in 1795, sending 12,000 troops to fight against France and to bring it back under papal control.

In 1796 France sent Napoleon against Austria and Italy, easily defeating them. When Pope Pius VI refused to renounce political power, he took the aged pope captive and expelled the entire Roman curia. The pope later died in a French prison in Valence at the age of 82. As his health failed, Napoleon issued an order that no successor should be named. Even so, Napoleon allowed Pope Pius VII to be elected in Venice on March 14, 1800. His relationship with Napoleon was often stormy, and in fact, Napoleon imprisoned him as well from 1809-1813.

But by this time, Napoleon’s days were numbered, for he was greatly weakened by his disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812. He was forced to abdicate in 1814. The nations of Europe then met at the Congress of Vienna to “redraw the map of Europe” in what came to be known as the Holy Alliance (1815).

The “fatal wound” inflicted upon the first beast after 1,260 years occurred generally with the two popes being taken captive. Perhaps more important, however, was the captivity of the first pope, as there was no pope at all for a short time. But yet the Church came back to life, and the second beast gave its authority to the first, as Rev. 13: 12 indicates.

THE ILLUMINATI

The Illuminati was founded on May 1, 1776 by a Jesuit-trained professor of canon law named Adam Weishaupt. He had lost his job at Ingolstadt University when the Jesuits were dissolved in 1773. A group of Jewish bankers thought he might be useful to their cause against the Roman church, so they financed his Illuminati Order. He became a Freemason shortly afterward in 1777 in order to try to use it for his own purposes. He had no success until 1780, when Freiherr von Knigge joined his cause.

On July 16, 1782, representatives of all of the secret societies gathered at the Congress of Willhelmsbad, and “the alliance between Illuminism and Freemasonry was finally sealed” (Nesta Webster, World Revolution, p. 31).

However, in 1785 an Illuminati messenger named Lanze was struck down by lightning, and instructions from the Order were found sown into the lining of his coat. Weishaupt’s plans were discovered, and the houses of Swack and Bassus were raided. Authorities seized incriminating evidence, and these documents were made public under the name of The Original Writings of the Order of the Illuminati (1787).

The Order was officially suppressed and was forced to go underground. The French Revolution continued as planned a few years later, but largely without Weishaupt’s direct leadership. Having been exposed, he was watched carefully. His sponsors found other leaders to carry out the plan.

Mendelssohn and Rothschild

There are many articles and some books which claim that the Rothschilds financed Weishaupt in launching the Illuminati in 1776. However, there is no evidence that the original founder of the House of Rothschild, Mayer Amschel Bauer, came into any serious wealth until 1796-1798, some years after the French Revolution had concluded. Although he and his sons played a large role in the time of the earth beast in the next two centuries, it was not Rothschild money or planning which launched the Illuminati at its start.

According to Pawns in the Game, written by the Canadian Naval Commander William Guy Carr, Weishaupt was funded by Moses Mendelssohn, a very wealthy Jewish banker in his acquaintance. There seems to be no doubt the Jewish bankers would have benefited from the overthrow of the Church in France— as well as giving them financial control over Freemasonry in Europe.

However, they usually contented themselves with remaining in the background and simply helping the enemies of their great rival power, the Roman Church.

First of all, Carr tells us that Mayer Amschel Bauer, who later took the surname Rothschild, was a poor man at first. On page 25 he says,

“A few years after his father’s death, Amschel Mayer Bauer was employed by the Oppenheimer Bank as a clerk.”

This tells us that the Rothschild family did not inherit any wealth from previous generations, for if they had inherited wealth, Mayer would have been hiring others to work in a bank of his own. Instead, we find him a mere bank clerk working for another wealthy Jewish banking family. The Oppenheimers were already wealthy bankers, along with Moses Mendelssohn and others.

In the two biographical volumes, The House of Rothschild, by Niall Ferguson, he says the Rothschilds did not have much wealth in the 1770’s. Their wealth came primarily after Mayer Amschel developed a relationship with Prince William IX of Landgrave, after he came to the throne in 1785— nine years after the Illuminati was founded (1776). Niall Ferguson writes in Vol. I, page 61,

“The truth was that, despite his efforts to gain a foothold at William’s court while he was still residing in Hanau, Mayer Amschel was still to all intents and purposes a nobody when the new Landgrave moved north to Kassel on his father’s death in 1785.”

We also learn that Mayer Amschel’s financial rise came after he met Karl Friedrich Buderus, who had moved to Kassel in 1792. Buderus had gotten his start by tutoring William’s illegitimate children. In Vol. 1, page 62 we read,

“The first sign of tacit co-operation between Buderus and Rothschild came in 1794 when the former explicitly recommended that Mayer Amschel be allowed to join five established firms in bidding for the sale of 15,000 of English bills. Evidently, his recommendation was ignored, but Buderus tried again in 1796 and this time succeeded.”

Hence, Rothschild was unable to break into the banking world in any meaningful way until 1796. Prior to that he was a middle-class coin and antique dealer. Ferguson again says on page 45,

“However, the speed with which Mayer Amschel’s wealth grew in the 1790s marked a real break with his earlier business activity. At the beginning of the 1790s Mayer Amschel Rothschild was no more than a prosperous antique-dealer. By 1797 he was one of the richest Jews in Frankfurt, and a central part of his business was unmistakably banking. The evidence for this breakthrough is unequivocal. In 1795 the official figure for Mayer Amschel’s taxable wealth was doubled to 4,000 gulden; a year later he was moved into the top tax bracket, with property worth more than 15,000 gulden; and in the same year he was listed as the tenth richest man in the Judengasse with taxable wealth of over 60,000 gulden. Thanks largely to Mayer Amschel, the Rothschilds had become one of the eleven richest families in the Judengasse by 1800.”

Mayer Amschel had been a moderately successful antique coin dealer and small-time stock broker, but he had nowhere near the wealth of his contemporary Jewish bankers in the 1770’s. And so, while the Rothschilds ultimately rose to positions of world power, it is very unlikely that Mayer Amschel Bauer, the Rothschild patriarch, played any significant role in the French Revolution of 1789. And he had no money to finance Adam Weishaupt and his Illuminati in 1776. His role came later after rising in wealth that gave him respect among his wealthy Jewish peers.

Besides Moses Mendelssohn, Weishaupt associated with other Jewish bankers. Nesta Webster says on page 228 of her book, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements,

“It has frequently been suggested that his [Weishaupt’s] real inspirers were Jews, and the Jewish writer Bernard Lazare definitely states that ‘there were Jews, Cabalistic Jews, around Weishaupt.’ A writer in La Vieille France went so far as to designate these Jews as Moses Mendelssohn, Wessely, and the bankers Itzig, Friedlander, and Meyer. But no documentary evidence has ever been produced in support of these statements.”

Webster does not even list Rothschild among the known associates of Weishaupt. She writes on page 230,

“Whether, then Weishaupt was directly inspired by Mendelssohn or any other Jew must remain for the present an open question. But the Jewish connexions of certain other Illuminati cannot be disputed. The most important of these was Mirabeau, who arrived in Berlin just after the death of Mendelssohn and was welcomed by his disciples in the Jewish salon of Henrietta Herz. It was these Jews, ‘ardent supporters of the French Revolution’ at its outset, who prevailed on Mirabeau to write his great apology for their race under the form of a panegyric of Mendelssohn.”

The Jewish Encyclopedia’s article on Freemasonry says, “Jews have been most conspicuous in connection with Freemasonry in France since the Revolution.” No doubt this influence was purchased by financial support. Nor was this influence only monetary. In the late 1700’s the basic three degrees of Freemasonry was expanded to 33 degrees. The 32nd degree culminated with teachings directly from the Jewish Cabala. Anyone who has studied Albert Pike’s Morals and Dogma can see plainly that the upper degrees of the Scottish Rite from the 26th to the 32nd degree teach directly out of the Cabbala, the mystical Jewish writings.

In other words, the plain goal of Masonry is to Judaize non-Jews in the upper degrees. This, in turn, was designed to prepare them for the more “enlightened” (i.e., Satanic) degrees in more secretive organizations that stood above the 33rd degree of Freemasonry.

Weishaupt’s Successors

Perhaps the most revealing evidence of Weishaupt’s Jesuit connection is found in an article from The Catholic Encyclopedia under “Weishaupt”. There we learn that this same man who continually expressed utter contempt and hatred for the Church, died in 1830 as a reconciled Roman Catholic!! It reads:

“As early as 16 February 1785, Weishaupt had fled from Ingolstadt, and in 1787 he settled at Gotha . . . After 1787 he renounced all active connexion with secret societies, and again drew near to the Church, displaying remarkable zeal in the building of the Catholic church at Gotha. He died on 18 November 1830, ‘reconciled with the Catholic Church, which as a youthful professor, he had doomed to death and destruction’— as the chronicle of the Catholic parish in Gotha relates.”

The article above is unclear as to when Weishaupt reconciled with the church. It just says that this happened “after 1787,” shortly after the Illuminati had been exposed and officially suppressed. His reconciliation with the Roman church, which he had professed to hate for so many years, is difficult to believe, unless it was part of the overall “holy alliance” between the Masonic kings and the popes. In other words, the alliance made room for Freemasons within Catholicism itself, though officially they remained at odds. This probably gave Weishaupt opportunity to do his revolutionary work in a safer environment hidden within the Roman church.

When the Illuminati Order was suppressed officially in 1785, Weishaupt’s exposure ended his primary usefulness. Most Freemasons left the Illuminati. Weishaupt’s mission suffered a huge setback. Nonetheless, the French Revolution continued as planned, showing that the plot to overthrow France was bigger than Weishaupt. In fact, it was carried out, not under the direction of Weishaupt’s Illuminati, but under the watchful eye of the Masonic monarchs, who led the lodges in each of their countries.

Even so, The Illuminati organization continued covertly under new names. We do not know if Weishaupt himself was a Satanist, but certainly his successors were. Weishaupt remained as the secret head of the Illuminati until his death in 1830. In 1834 he was succeeded by Giusseppe Mazzini of Italy (1805-1872), a 33^rd degree Mason. Mazzini’s Luciferian protégé in America, Albert Pike, was fast-tracked in 1859 to become the head of Scottish Rite Freemasonry that was based in Charleston, SC.

Albert Pike set up five strategic Councils around the world: Washington D.C., Montevideo (South America), Napes (Italy), Calcutta (India), and Mauritius (Africa). He conspired with Mazzini, Lord Henry Palmerston of England (1784-1865, 33o), and Otto von Bismarck from Germany (1815-1898, 33o).

When Mazzini died in 1872, Pike appointed Adriano Lemmi, a banker from Florence, Italy to head up their subversive European activities until his death in 1896. The fact that Pike was able to appoint Lemmi shows that Pike himself was, by this time, the (hired) head of the Illuminati organization as a whole. It had not disappeared when Weishaupt was exposed, nor did Weishaupt cease his secret activities. He simply found opportunity to work covertly within the Roman church to give the appearance of piety and philanthropy (in building a church). One might also ask where he accumulated enough money to finance building a church. It seems probable that he was receiving regular dues from members of a secret organization.

Weishaupt’s reconciliation with the church was part of a general plan for Freemasons to infiltrate the Catholic Church and eventually to take over its leadership. Rather than keep the two sides distinct, we find thereafter many Catholic Freemasons, and by the twentieth century we even see Freemason popes leading the church. This is the ultimate result of the Holy Alliance.