Angels & Demons: Illuminati 101

Angels and Demons

“Jesus Motherf**king Christ It’s Alive..”—Robert Anton Wilson

By Stella Maris February 28, 2009

The first thing you need to know about the Illuminati is that nothing is real. As soon as you begin to take any of it seriously, they’ve got you.

Therefore, always remember that the overriding immutable rule of the intrepid Illuminati investigator is not to believe anything that you can’t independently verify for yourself. Especially don’t believe anything you read on the internet. And, if you watch a television documentary where someone is talking about the Illuminati in a grave tone of voice, then take immediate evasive action–such as changing the channel or going for a pee. In fact, don’t even believe anything you read in this article.

Yes, I know that the Author’s Note at the beginning of Dan Brown’s bestseller Angels & Demons categorically states that “The brotherhood of the Illuminati is also factual”. He does the same thing with the Priory of Sion in The Da Vinci Code.

But this is a literary device. It’s how fiction writers hook you in. It’s not real.

Okay, granted, technically the Illuminati did indeed once exist. Historically, the Order of the Illuminati was founded at Ingolstadt University in Bavaria, on Walpurgisnacht, May 1st, 1776 by a Jesuit-trained law professor by the name of Adam Weishaupt. However, the movement lasted all of eight years, becoming officially defunct when secret societies were banned by the government in 1784.

The most interesting aspect of the brotherhood were its members, allegedly including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Beethoven, and the mysterious Comte de Saint Germain, who was thought to have attained the Philosopher’s Stone of immortality.

Conveniently for fiction writers, the Comte de Saint German went on to travel throughout Europe as a spy, leading to an endless underground stream of colorful spin-off adventures, and Adam Weishaupt himself refused his university pension and fled into exile, thereby opening the door to panoplies of possibilities.

The most popular theory regarding the demise of the Illuminati is that Weishaupt was used as a stand-in for George Washington, due to their close physical resemblance, thereby deftly tying covert Illuminati influence into the success of the American Revolution. In some versions of the story, Weishaupt actually permanently performed the duties of the first US President in order to cover up Washington’s untimely early death, and it’s therefore Weishaupt’s own portrait that’s featured on the US dollar bill.

Embroideries abound when a swift glance at the genealogy of John Adams, Washington’s Vice-President and successor as second US President, reveals that his family emigrated to Boston from Barton Saint-David, the ultimate center point of the Glastonbury Zodiac on Albion’s mythical Saint Michael Line. For good measure, Adams’ ancestor was said to have been a member of a secret Dragon Order, dedicated to restoring the Stuart monarchy to the British throne.

And so it goes.

Inevitably, astonishing “secret information” has been “revealed” over the years, tracing the inception of the Illuminati either from a lineage of shadowy Sufi mystics or from Noah via John the Evangelist and thence to the Knights Templar, thereby incorporating centuries of hidden knowledge into Freemasonic and Rosicrucian degrees of initiation. Even Aleister Crowley manages to get in on the act—and I’m sure there’s probably an Illuminati sex ritual sequestered somewhere obscure that hasn’t yet been discovered. If not, we can happily invent one.

The most creative conspiracy theorists attribute everything from UFOs to McDonald’s hamburgers to the current global Credit Crunch to the power of the Illuminati’s ultra-secret New World Order manoeuvres.

Fortunately of all of our collective sanities, in the 1970s, former Playboy magazine editor Robert Anton Wilson actually “got” the surrealist joke and ran with it, generating a veritable cottage industry of thirty-five books and even a theatrical production based on the Illuminati, which indelibly influenced modern popular culture for years to come.

As it happens, Robert Anton Wilson became my own personal Cosmic Trigger, as result of “accidently” being introduced to him by my friend Mark Chorvinsky when I was going through my angst-ridden bohemian film student phase at Maryland University.

Synchronistically, Mark’s mother and my mother were best friends back when we were kids. I used to go Trick-or-Treating on Halloween with Mark and his brother, when I was far too young to know what I was getting myself into. We inevitably lost touch when my family moved to England, which made the coincidence even weirder when I literally ran into Mark in the corridors of Maryland U’s television studios out of the blue.

By this time Mark was an internationally renowned Magician and Fortean investigator. He had established a magic-themed bookshop in Rockville, Maryland called Dream Wizards (which unsurprisingly hosted amazing Halloween parties!) and founded Strange Magazine, dedicated to the serious investigation of the weird and wonderful.

Being more experienced in these matters, Mark immediately recognized the significance of our chance reunion and invited me to meet his friend Robert Anton Wilson, who was in town lecturing.

It’s taken me years to unravel just how the Ariadne’s Thread of RAW’s connection to the Maryland-based Prometheus Society and the DC-based L5 Society corresponded to my personal close encounter with Andrija Puharich, who was working with an intriguing group of scientists in a lab around the corner from where I was living in Silver Spring… but, that’s another story.

For now we just need to be aware of Robert Anton Wilson’s role in the resurrection of the Illuminati archetype at the precise moment that the public mindset was ready to absorb it. In fact, I would even go as far as to suggest that Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons would have been an entirely different book if it hadn’t been for Robert Anton Wilson’s preliminary Illuminati performance art.

Sadly, Mark Chorvinsky passed away in 2005, followed closely by Robert Anton Wilson’s demise in 2007, so neither of them will be around to witness the contemporary resurgence of the Illuminati in Angels & Demons when the film is released in May 2009.

But the first question that we’ll be asking ourselves as we watch the movie is… did Ron Howard’s team get the joke? And, if not, then who’s gonna deliver the punchline?

All Hail Eris!

Angels & Demons: Illuminati 101

Angels & Demons

“Jesus Motherf**king Christ It’s Alive..”—Robert Anton Wilson

By Stella Maris February 28, 2009

The first thing you need to know about the Illuminati is that nothing is real. As soon as you begin to take any of it seriously, they’ve got you.

Therefore, always remember that the overriding immutable rule of the intrepid Illuminati investigator is not to believe anything that you can’t independently verify for yourself. Especially don’t believe anything you read on the internet. And, if you watch a television documentary where someone is talking about the Illuminati in a grave tone of voice, then take immediate evasive action–such as changing the channel or going for a pee. In fact, don’t even believe anything you read in this article.

Yes, I know that the Author’s Note at the beginning of Dan Brown’s bestseller Angels & Demons categorically states that “The brotherhood of the Illuminati is also factual”. He does the same thing with the Priory of Sion in The Da Vinci Code.

But this is a literary device. It’s how fiction writers hook you in. It’s not real.

Okay, granted, technically the Illuminati did indeed once exist. Historically, the Order of the Illuminati was founded at Ingolstadt University in Bavaria, on Walpurgisnacht, May 1st, 1776 by a Jesuit-trained law professor by the name of Adam Weishaupt. However, the movement lasted all of eight years, becoming officially defunct when secret societies were banned by the government in 1784.

The most interesting aspect of the brotherhood were its members, allegedly including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Beethoven, and the mysterious Comte de Saint Germain, who was thought to have attained the Philosopher’s Stone of immortality.

Conveniently for fiction writers, the Comte de Saint German went on to travel throughout Europe as a spy, leading to an endless underground stream of colorful spin-off adventures, and Adam Weishaupt himself refused his university pension and fled into exile, thereby opening the door to panoplies of possibilities.

The most popular theory regarding the demise of the Illuminati is that Weishaupt was used as a stand-in for George Washington, due to their close physical resemblance, thereby deftly tying covert Illuminati influence into the success of the American Revolution. In some versions of the story, Weishaupt actually permanently performed the duties of the first US President in order to cover up Washington’s untimely early death, and it’s therefore Weishaupt’s own portrait that’s featured on the US dollar bill.

Embroideries abound when a swift glance at the genealogy of John Adams, Washington’s Vice-President and successor as second US President, reveals that his family emigrated to Boston from Barton Saint-David, the ultimate center point of the Glastonbury Zodiac on Albion’s mythical Saint Michael Line. For good measure, Adams’ ancestor was said to have been a member of a secret Dragon Order, dedicated to restoring the Stuart monarchy to the British throne.

And so it goes.

Inevitably, astonishing “secret information” has been “revealed” over the years, tracing the inception of the Illuminati either from a lineage of shadowy Sufi mystics or from Noah via John the Evangelist and thence to the Knights Templar, thereby incorporating centuries of hidden knowledge into Freemasonic and Rosicrucian degrees of initiation. Even Aleister Crowley manages to get in on the act—and I’m sure there’s probably an Illuminati sex ritual sequestered somewhere obscure that hasn’t yet been discovered. If not, we can happily invent one.

The most creative conspiracy theorists attribute everything from UFOs to McDonald’s hamburgers to the current global Credit Crunch to the power of the Illuminati’s ultra-secret New World Order manoeuvres.

Fortunately of all of our collective sanities, in the 1970s, former Playboy magazine editor Robert Anton Wilson actually “got” the surrealist joke and ran with it, generating a veritable cottage industry of thirty-five books and even a theatrical production based on the Illuminati, which indelibly influenced modern popular culture for years to come.

As it happens, Robert Anton Wilson became my own personal Cosmic Trigger, as result of “accidently” being introduced to him by my friend Mark Chorvinsky when I was going through my angst-ridden bohemian film student phase at Maryland University.

Synchronistically, Mark’s mother and my mother were best friends back when we were kids. I used to go Trick-or-Treating on Halloween with Mark and his brother, when I was far too young to know what I was getting myself into. We inevitably lost touch when my family moved to England, which made the coincidence even weirder when I literally ran into Mark in the corridors of Maryland U’s television studios out of the blue.

By this time Mark was an internationally renowned Magician and Fortean investigator. He had established a magic-themed bookshop in Rockville, Maryland called Dream Wizards (which unsurprisingly hosted amazing Halloween parties!) and founded Strange Magazine, dedicated to the serious investigation of the weird and wonderful.

Being more experienced in these matters, Mark immediately recognized the significance of our chance reunion and invited me to meet his friend Robert Anton Wilson, who was in town lecturing.

It’s taken me years to unravel just how the Ariadne’s Thread of RAW’s connection to the Maryland-based Prometheus Society and the DC-based L5 Society corresponded to my personal close encounter with Andrija Puharich, who was working with an intriguing group of scientists in a lab around the corner from where I was living in Silver Spring… but, that’s another story.

For now we just need to be aware of Robert Anton Wilson’s role in the resurrection of the Illuminati archetype at the precise moment that the public mindset was ready to absorb it. In fact, I would even go as far as to suggest that Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons would have been an entirely different book if it hadn’t been for Robert Anton Wilson’s preliminary Illuminati performance art.

Sadly, Mark Chorvinsky passed away in 2005, followed closely by Robert Anton Wilson’s demise in 2007, so neither of them will be around to witness the contemporary resurgence of the Illuminati in Angels & Demons when the film is released in May 2009.

But the first question that we’ll be asking ourselves as we watch the movie is… did Ron Howard’s team get the joke? And, if not, then who’s gonna deliver the punchline?

All Hail Eris!

Angels & Demons Exposed

Illuminati Angels and Demons

Below is an exceprt from Mark Dice’s book, The Illuminati: Facts & Fiction from the section about Dan Brown’s novel Angels & Demons.

Published in the year 2000, Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons is a fictional novel revolving around the Catholic Church and the Illuminati, and is a prequel to The Da Vinci Code which was later published in 2003. The common theme in The Da Vinci Code, as many know, is that the Catholic Church allegedly has been trying to cover up a family tree containing the bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene which still exists today.

According to Brown and supporters of this widely discredited theory, numerous secret societies have been protecting this bloodline from the Catholic Church, who allegedly will do anything to keep this “secret” from getting out and ruining Christianity and the Vatican’s grip on power.

In Angels & Demons, the Illuminati is set out to destroy Vatican City as retribution for suppressing them hundreds of years ago and forcing them deeper underground. The story is most likely a purposeful whitewash of the real Illuminati, or the result of a creative writer seizing on topics of interest in the underground and making them mainstream. Either way, Brown’s writings and subsequent films which followed can only be seen as a deliberate attack on Christianity and muddying the water for real researchers of the Illuminati.

Thanks to Brown, the brainwashed masses of people think that when someone discusses the Illuminati and the very real effects the organization has on society and Bible prophecy, that one is too wrapped up in Angels & Demons. Many of those who have become victims of the Illuminati’s agendas don’t even believe such a thing exists. Angels & Demons was made into a motion picture starring Tom Hanks and released in May 2009. (See Angels & Demons the movie on page 335)

The main character, Robert Langdon, is a Harvard professor and expert on religious symbology. He becomes involved in trying to stop the Illuminati from destroying Vatican City in Rome by using an anti-matter bomb. Brown cleverly mixes historical facts into the plotline and blurs the line between fact and fiction by referencing actual quotes about the Illuminati from historical figures. Most of Brown’s readers (and viewers of the film) have no idea that the Illuminati he is referring to is a real organization and some of the “historical facts” he writes in his book are actually true.

For example, he writes that the Illuminati infiltrated Freemasonry, saying “…in the 1700’s, the Masons unknowingly became a front for the Illuminati. The Illuminati grew within their ranks, gradually taking over positions of power within the lodges. They quietly reestablished their scientific brotherhood deep within the Masons—a kind of secret society within a secret society. The Illuminati used the worldwide connection of Masonic lodges to spread their influence.”181

Brown even explains that the Illuminati are satanic, writing, “The church claimed Lucifer was a reference to the devil, but the brotherhood insisted Lucifer was intended in its literal Latin meaning—bringer of light. Or Illuminator.”182

Dan Brown even cleverly refers to numerous websites which feature material about the Illuminati and the New World Order. At one point his book reads, “This morning” Kohler challenged, “when I typed the word ‘Illuminati’ into the computer, it returned thousands of current references. Apparently a lot of people think this group is still active.”

“Conspiracy buffs,” Langdon replied. He had always been annoyed by the plethora of conspiracy theories that circled in modern pop culture. The media craved apocalyptic headlines, and self-proclaimed “cult specialists” were still cashing in on millennium hype with fabricated stories that the Illuminati were alive and well and organizing their New World Order.”183

Besides weaving in various historical facts about the Illuminati, Brown also includes some far-fetched ideas that have no basis in reality at all. He makes his readers think the Illuminati were a group of scientists that included Galileo, as well as famous artists such as Bernini, when both men had died a hundred years before the Illuminati had actually formed.184 He also includes other ideas that have never been associated with the Illuminati, and are clearly fictions created by Brown. One such example is his claim that the Vatican holds in its possession several “Illuminati brands” which consist of ambigrams in the names of earth, air, fire, and water, which he says the “scientific Illuminati” had designed to depict the four elements ancient scientists believed made up the physical universe. An ambigram is a design that spells out one or more words that can be read whether looked at right-side up or upside down. These “Illuminati brands” are heated up and used to burn the different symbols into the chests of various Cardinals who the Illuminati murder in the novel as revenge for the Catholic Church allegedly burning a brand of a cross in the chests of heretics in the past.

Brown even says that the Catholic Church murdered Nicolaus Copernicus for introducing heliocentrism, the idea that the earth revolves around the sun, and not vice versa as the church had claimed. I’m certainly not a supporter of the Catholic Church nor a defender of their past and present atrocities, but to say that they murdered Copernicus is simply a lie. He died at the age of seventy, which in the sixteenth century was quite an old age. There are numerous other lies and disinformation in Brown’s book as he repeatedly paints the Illuminati as a group of innocent scientists and artists who the Church had set out to torture and kill. Brown is clearly well informed regarding conspiracy theory culture and at one point has Robert Langdon discuss the mysterious all-seeing eye on the back of the one dollar bill and explains that mysterious symbol is what got him interested in the Illuminati. At one point he also mentions that the Bilderberg group financed the Illuminati. (See Jim Tucker’s Bilderberg Diary page 110)

Brown actually defends the Illuminati in his novel. His character Robert Langdon, who is an “expert” on the Illuminati, fails to see them as a sinister power hungry gang, but instead says, “The Illuminati may have believed in the abolition of Christianity, but they wielded their power through political and financial means, not through terrorists acts. Furthermore, the Illuminati had a strict code of morality regarding who they saw as enemies.”185

Regardless of how entertaining and captivating Brown’s novel may be, it serves only to disarm an already ignorant and degenerate public, leading them to believe that the Illuminati is a fictional creation. When told it is a historically verifiable secret society that continues to exist today, many are only reminded of the doubtful Robert Langdon from Angels & Demons and the sinister satanic cult which plotted to blow up the Vatican with an anti-matter bomb.

At the very end of Angels & Demons, in a very dramatic twist, Dan Brown writes that there is actually no such thing as the Illuminati, and that a demented Vatican official who holds the position of the Camerlengo had concocted the story and was actually behind the plot himself. In the book, it turns out that the Illuminati really did go into extinction in the late 1700s and the Camerlengo played off of people’s fears that they had secretly continued to exist.

The success of Dan Brown’s books are not due to their exceptional quality, but rather that the Illuminati had used their influence to promote both The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons to spread their tainted message about Jesus and the Illuminati. Dan Brown himself has some interesting ties to the real Illuminati, and it’s possible that he was used for the purpose of muddying the waters surrounding Christianity, the Illuminati, and the New World Order. Brown is a graduate of Philips Exeter Academy which is a private boarding school which was set up for the children of the elite. The Illuminati has largely funded this school and used it to educate their children and prepare them for their duties later in life.

In 1930 Edward Harkness donated 5.8 million dollars to the school with the conditions that their method of teaching students would change to what he called the Aristotelian method of antiquity. Harkness was the second largest share holder in Rockefeller’s Standard Oil in the early 1900s and was in John D. Rockefeller’s inner circle. The Rockefeller family has been one of the most powerful Illuminati families for generations. Aristotle was a student of Plato who believed that most people were too stupid to govern themselves, and that society should be structured in a way that “philosopher kings” would rule and decided what was best for the people.

Dan Brown’s publisher for the first printing of Angels & Demons was Random House186 which is owned by the Bertelsmann media group in Germany which was the largest producer and publisher of Nazi propaganda during World War II.187 The Bertelsmann media group is a private company that has its primary owner listed as the Bertelsmann Foundation, the largest “non-profit” organization and think tank in Germany. The Da Vinci Code was also originally published by Random House through its subsidiary Doubleday. The reprint rights for Angels & Demons have since been sold to Simon and Shuster. The Illuminati thread leading through Dan Brown’s education, publisher, and themes of his books, clearly raises strong questions about his novels’ success and the messages they spread. It could very well be that Dan Brown is a willing participant in one of the biggest disinformation campaigns waged by the Illuminati in history.

References

#181 Brown, Dan – Angels & Demons page 38

#182 Brown, Dan – Angels & Demons page 39

#183 Brown, Dan – Angels & Demons page 40-41

#184 Galileo died in 1642 and Bernini died in 1680

#185 Brown, Dan – Angels & Demons page 41

#186 http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780739326756

#187 The London Times German media giant grew fat on Nazi propaganda by Roger Boyes October 9, 2002