A Historical Guide to the Secret Societies of The Secret World

The Illuminati

In The Secret World the Illuminati's mantra is "Sex, Drugs & Rockefeller." The Illuminati don't believe in right and wrong. They don't believe in rules, only power and how to keep it. They pack big powerful machine guns and have been depicted as wearing gas masks and meeting in abandoned warehouses. They are the personification of power as an end.

The historical Illuminati are... not as cool. They were a bunch of Bavarian intellectuals and Enlightenment-era thinkers founded by Adam Weishaupt on May 1st, 1776, who sat around all day eating Bavarian cream filled cannolis. The last part of that statement may not have been super historically accurate.

Bavarian Illuminati founder Adam Weishaupt

Writers of that era thought the worst of them, accusing them of conspiracy to overthrow European governments, with Augustin Barruel going as far as to say that they were responsible for the French Revolution. The writers are the ones who gave them the name "Illuminati", because members of the secret society preferred to be called "Perfectibilists." No wonder they didn't last long.

Weishaupt seemed to have really admired Freemasonry because he borrowed extensively from it. Members of the Illuminati were divided into three main classes, each of which had multiple levels, and members swore obedience to their superiors.

They did end up nabbing Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, writer of the masterpiece play Faust, and the despicably named Xavier von Zwack (he can't be up to anything good), but it wouldn't be enough. The Illuminati was outlawed eight years after its inception.

But as much as this just sounds like a grown up's version of a no-girls-allowed secret club, they must have done something, because we still know their name. But that could be because the name itself is awesome, though, and because modern writers associate it with any government that is supposedly pulling the strings behind the history of the world.