40 Fun Facts About The Illuminati

Which symbol, floating above an unfinished pyramid on the US one-dollar bill, is often called an Illuminati mark?

The Eye of Providence was a Christian emblem long before any secret society claimed it: Renaissance artists set it in a triangle to show the Holy Trinity watching over mankind.

Two popular books of the 1790s accused the supposedly surviving Illuminati of secretly masterminding which upheaval?

The French Revolution was blamed on the order by a priest and a scientist writing in the 1790s, though the real Illuminati had been crushed in Bavaria years before the Bastille fell.

The Bavarian Illuminati's founder, a professor of canon law, took which ancient name as his secret alias in the order?

Spartacus was his choice, after the gladiator who led a slave revolt against Rome. Every member took a classical codename, and his first student recruits included an Ajax and a Tiberius.

Before settling on Illuminati in 1778, the society's founder seriously considered naming his order after which insect?

Bee Order was on the shortlist until April 1778, when the two-year-old society finally became the Order of Illuminati.

Which star of The Office played Reed Richards on the Illuminati council in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness?

John Krasinski got the part after years of fans suggesting him for Mister Fantastic, and his Illuminati last only minutes before the Scarlet Witch kills nearly all of them.

The authors of The Illuminatus! Trilogy mined conspiracy letters sent to which magazine, where both worked as editors?

Playboy had both men answering readers' mail on civil liberties, and the paranoid rants that arrived gave them a premise: a novel in which every conspiracy theory is true.

Which actor plays Robert Langdon, racing to foil an apparent Illuminati plot against the Vatican, in Angels & Demons?

Tom Hanks had already played the Harvard professor in The Da Vinci Code, a film made first even though the Angels & Demons novel was published three years earlier.

The date MDCCLXXVI on the dollar bill's pyramid marks the year of which event, not the Illuminati's founding that May?

The Declaration of Independence is what MDCCLXXVI honours, and the seal's designer said the pyramid's Latin motto marked the beginning of a new American era.

Which Founding Father wrote in a 1798 letter that Illuminati doctrines had spread to the United States?

George Washington said so in a letter to a clergyman who had sent him a book on the supposed plot, though he doubted that American lodges were the ones spreading the ideas.

Illuminati is the plural of a Latin word with which meaning, apt for a society born in the Age of Reason?

Enlightened is what illuminatus means, and the founder's men saw themselves that way: their stated aims were to oppose superstition and abuses of state power.

Which Bavarian law professor founded the Illuminati with four of his students on 1 May 1776?

Adam Weishaupt was 28 and the only lay professor at a church-run university when he started the order. He lost his chair and fled Bavaria once it was banned.

The Bavarian Illuminati copied their grades from which older fraternity, whose lodges they later set out to take over?

The Freemasons struck the founder as too expensive and too closed to his ideas, so he built a rival, then joined a lodge himself in 1777 to gather material for his own rituals.

The Bavarian Illuminati's Minerval grade took which bird, shown perched on a book, as its emblem?

The owl was the companion of Minerva, Roman goddess of wisdom, and initiates of the grade were called Minervals after her.

Which Catholic order, suppressed by the pope in 1773, still ran the university where the Illuminati's founder taught?

The Jesuits kept the purse strings and harassed lay staff who taught anything liberal, and resentment of them pushed the young professor to start a secret society of his own.

The Illuminati began in which Bavarian university town, where Mary Shelley later sent Victor Frankenstein to study?

Ingolstadt is where Shelley has the creature brought to life, and it was the birthplace as well as the workplace of the order's founder.

Which German poet joined the Illuminati alongside Karl August of Weimar, the duke who made him a government minister?

Goethe was enrolled along with his fellow writer Herder and the reigning duke himself, the kind of well-placed patrons the order's recruiters prized most.

Which Elector of Bavaria banned the Illuminati and every other secret society in a series of edicts beginning in 1784?

Charles Theodore acted with the Church's encouragement, and his 1785 edict proved the death blow: the order's seized letters were then published by his government.

Which baron, whose surname is now German shorthand for good manners, became the Illuminati's most effective recruiter?

Adolph von Knigge helped turn a student club into a network of hundreds before quarrelling with its founder and leaving in 1784. His later book on human relations made his name a byword for etiquette.

What did the Illuminati's founder first call his followers in 1776, a name he later dropped for sounding too strange?

Perfectibilists belonged to what he called the Covenant of Perfectibility. The name lasted two years, by which time the order still had only about a dozen members.

Which country's Inquisition hunted the Alumbrados, mystics also called Illuminati, long before the Bavarian order?

Spain's Alumbrados were among the Inquisition's early targets, and even Ignatius of Loyola and Teresa of Ávila were accused of sharing their ideas.

Conspiracy theorists often mistranslate which Latin motto beneath the dollar bill's pyramid as proof of a global plot?

Novus ordo seclorum means a new order of the ages, a phrase adapted from the Roman poet Virgil, though theorists render it as New World Order. It has sat on the Great Seal since 1782.

The Illuminati's ruling council took which name, borrowed from a governing body of ancient Athens?

The Areopagus was filled with the founder's favourites, chosen with the help of members' reports on one another, yet it soon came to find him stubborn and dictatorial.

Which New England minister, also a pioneering American geographer, warned of the Illuminati in a 1798 fast-day sermon?

Jedidiah Morse was the father of telegraph pioneer Samuel Morse, and his sermons set off a short-lived New England scare about hidden Illuminati agents.

Which Founding Father shrugged off the Illuminati scare, calling the order's founder an enthusiastic philanthropist?

Thomas Jefferson read the alarmist accounts in 1800 and dismissed one author's claims as the ravings of a Bedlamite.

Which Scottish physicist, who once worked with James Watt, wrote the anti-Illuminati polemic Proofs of a Conspiracy?

John Robison was an Edinburgh professor who also invented the siren. Copies of his book reached America within months and were soon being quoted from New England pulpits.

Which former BBC sports presenter claims the Illuminati are a race of shape-shifting reptilian hybrids?

David Icke was a goalkeeper and then a familiar face on British sports coverage before a 1991 chat-show appearance, in which he predicted global disasters, brought him public ridicule.

Which televangelist's 1991 bestseller The New World Order cast the Illuminati as part of a Satan-guided global plot?

Pat Robertson's book reached the New York Times bestseller list, and political scientist Michael Barkun judged it the most influential work on the Illuminati of its time.

Which US president's speech to Congress, Toward a New World Order, alarmed conspiracy theorists as the Cold War ended?

George H. W. Bush was describing a partnership with Moscow during the 1990 Gulf crisis, but fundamentalist groups read his words as a sign of the End Times, and a bestseller on the Illuminati took the phrase as its title in 1991.

Which Yale society, the oldest of the university's senior-class clubs, is rumoured to be a branch of the Illuminati?

Skull and Bones has counted three US presidents among its members, which helps explain why conspiracy books cast it as a hidden hand in world affairs.

Which US airport, home to a red-eyed blue horse statue, installed a gargoyle that joked about Illuminati headquarters?

Denver International leaned into the rumours about its murals, tunnels and time capsule, even opening a small exhibition on its own conspiracy theories in 2016.

Which tongue-in-cheek religion made a 1960s prank of publicly blaming every calamity on the Illuminati?

Discordianism turned the joke into a standing practice: followers publicly pinned assassinations and national calamities on the long-dead order, hoping to sow the culture with paranoia.

Which American author co-wrote the satirical Illuminatus! Trilogy in the 1970s and followed it with Cosmic Trigger?

Robert Anton Wilson kept returning to the theme for decades: The Illuminati Papers, Masks of the Illuminati and a run of historical novels all followed.

Which Texas game designer turned the ideas of The Illuminatus! Trilogy into the 1982 card game Illuminati?

Steve Jackson decided against a direct adaptation because the rights would cost too much, so he built an original game in which rival conspiracies compete to control the world.

Which British dance act first recorded as The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, a name lifted from The Illuminatus! Trilogy?

The KLF adopted the anarchic philosophy of the novels as well as the name, and in 1991 they were the biggest-selling singles act in the world.

In Angels & Demons, which astronomer is cast as a member of the Illuminati long before the real order existed?

Galileo and his fellow scientists make up the brotherhood in the novel, banding together against persecution by the Church. The real order began in Bavaria more than a century after his death.

In Angels & Demons, the antimatter that threatens to destroy the Vatican is stolen from which real physics laboratory?

CERN answered the novel with a web page of its own, explaining that antimatter takes more energy to create than it could ever give back.

In Marvel Comics, which hero do the Illuminati vote to shoot into space after a rampage destroys Las Vegas?

The Hulk was sent towards an uninhabited world over the objection of Namor, who warned the others that their former ally would come back for revenge.

Which 2000 video game drops agent JC Denton into a struggle between the Illuminati and their splinter group Majestic 12?

Deus Ex is set in 2052 and treats popular conspiracy theories as real, and its Illuminati went on to appear as a major faction throughout the series.

Which 2001 film based on a video game pits its heroine against Illuminati hunting two halves of a mystical triangle?

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider stars Angelina Jolie, with Jon Voight and a pre-Bond Daniel Craig in the cast, and its Illuminati need the artefact before a planetary alignment ends.

Which pop star's 2015 album Rebel Heart includes the song Illuminati, co-written and co-produced with Kanye West?

Madonna conceived the track after being accused of membership herself, wanting to set out who she believed the Illuminati really were.