The Illuminati, Illuminism, & Conspiratorial Bastards

Many years ago, I annoyed another magician. He felt, for reasons I cannot blame him for, that I was going out of my way to mess with his life. And so he took action.

So one day I woke up and found a threatening image and some song lyrics that were vaguely threatening on one of my blog's... And I did what probably any noob magician would do: I assumed I was being cursed. And so, in the grips of paranoia, I promptly began cursing myself.

It was only later, when we finally made a few amends and started chatting, that he explained that he'd never cursed me. Rather, he allowed me to project my own internal fears and paranoia onto the exterior images and words he'd given me. He explained, “people normally consider the threat of violence the same as violence itself.”

It was a lesson in ambiguity, and how we respond to it. Oddly enough, that lesson has also shaped my approach to various topics: we tend to project our fears on ambiguous, ephemeral constructs that we don't completely understand. If something pings the “Fear Meter,” it's all too easy to get carried away and begin letting our imagination over-crowd what is actually there.

What, you might ask, does any of that have to do with the Illuminati, and why do I bring it up?

Most people know very little about the Illuminati beyond what they can read in conspiracy circles. The ritual of the Bavarian Illuminati – a Freemason Order dedicated to the ideals of the Enlightenment and with potentially revolutionary aims – have been around for a few hundred years. Despite the fact that their rituals, and manuscripts, are actually held in Historical hands and could have been translated at any time, they were not.

Rather, people took the over-arching revolutionary themes, and ran with them while simultaneously projecting their fears onto the Order. The fact that the order was suppressed by political authorities is overlooked, and instead it's imagined to thrive to this day in the Halls of Worldly Power.

John Michael Greer ended up translating the material he found collected together, and presented a lecture and initiation ritual at Pantheacon many years ago. What he found was an emphasis on equality – for all people, including (despite the time at which the Bavarian Illuminati was formed) women – rationality, and so forth. These are the ideals that formed Enlightenment thought.

And so a number of us ended up being members of the newly re-founded Illuminati.

The rituals are – like most quasi-Masonic or Masonic rituals – quite boring. There was absolutely no nudity, certainly no sex magick, and there was a suspicious lack of revolutionary sentiment... Largely because to a certain degree, our country and the world has inherited the foundations of Enlightenment thought already. While true and pure equality does not yet exist, it is something our social systems continue to strive for and which most liberals agree with.*

When I recently posted the entry on the Occulists, some of whose symbolism I've begun stealing for my own ends, it was because of precisely what they were up to and their methods. Hidden within the depths of their cipher-texts is the desire to overthrow the “three-headed monster” of the Church, State, and Aristocracy. The focal points of power and privilege which have governed the world since time immemorial. Had they been discovered, much like the Bavarian Illuminati were, they would not only have been accused of sodomy (as was a common accusation against the Freemasons of their era), but also of sedition and treason. Recognizing that the powers that be could not be fought on traditional terms, they instead decided to cloak themselves within the confines of cryptographic secrecy and to keep their cherished ideals more or less hidden.

One can only imagine whether or not the Bavarian Illuminati would have survived if they, too, had kept to the shadows and encoded their texts.

While I do not hold to the entirety of Enlightenment thought, I recognize it for what it is and I recognize how it has impacted the society we currently live in. I do not consider “rational thought” to be the End-All-Be-All of modes of communication, nor of modes of being. However I consider rationality and the ability to judge things rationally to be marks of a magicians. It is one of many ways of viewing any given material, and of judging it without letting the “fear complexes” and our own irrational responses from outweighing the reality of what is versus what we imagine is going on.

In a world of scaremongering and fear-mongering, we must fight back (internally, anyway) with what few methods we have left to us. Emotional intellect and communication is wonderful – until a Black Swan event arrives, and the world around us begins quite simply freaking out.

In short: “some of us have set ourselves up, looking always to the Eye of Providence and to the fore-thought aspects of Providentia (the relationship of which to Prometheus should be obvious to anyone who takes the time to ponder it) rather than becoming like the Sleepy Dormouse, or basing our assumptions on those made by the Sleepers.”

Become an agent of your own goddamn enlightenment. There is no other time to do it, and the methods are available to you. You, too, can become a conspiratorial bastard and seek equality for all - but if you do so, you may want to consider keeping to the shadows. It sure as hell beats being accused of sodomy and suppressed for desiring the rights endowed to your fellow man to be enshrined in the hearts of all.

Be seeing you,

St. Jack Faust

Mad Profit of Eris.

* There are, of course, still Patriarchal Authority Figures the world over and who pretend to be part of all manner of movements. I'm exempting them from this discussion because they are not worthy of consideration, beyond undermining their desires at every opportunity.