However, this didn’t stop Twitter lighting up with outlandish ideas. The Independent reported that it was clear “he was referring to the shifting sands of geopolitical relations”. US President Joe Biden fanned the flames of the conspiracy in 2022 when he referred to a coming “new world order” in the wake of the Ukraine crisis.

This has led to claims that some of the American Founding Fathers were members, with Thomas Jefferson accused in the aftermath of the War of Independence. The symbols most associated with the Illuminati include pentagrams, goats, the all-seeing eye in a triangle – such as the one that appears on US banknotes – and the number 666. The group has been linked “to everything from the French Revolution to the assassination of JFK” and served as “inspiration for Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons and Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco”, said .īoth conspiracy theories are rooted in a belief that “a cabal of elites is working behind the scenes to orchestrate global events to enslave the global populace”, explained the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.Ĭonspiracy theorists often analyse public events for “evidence” of Illuminati influence. Theories about how the New World Order operates range from relatively straightforward ideas to the outright bizarre. The New World Order conspiracy, for example, overlaps with the Illuminati conspiracy, but they are “not synonymous”, explained the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. But other similar myths have cropped up over the years. It remains “one of the world’s most widely punted conspiracy theories”, said BBC Future. The internet changed all that, giving conspiracy theorists a global platform to expound their beliefs and present their evidence to a massive audience. The idea of a powerful global elite conspiring to rule the world remained a niche belief upheld by a handful of enthusiasts until the 1990s. These “fizzled out”, but nevertheless “gave the group a patina of legitimacy”, said the site. There were much earlier “Illuminati panics”, said Vox, such as in 1798, when George Washington “wrote a letter addressing the Illuminati threat (he believed it had been avoided, but his mentioning it helped bolster the myth)”. Wilson went on to turn these theories into a book, “The Illuminatus Trilogy”, which became a surprise cult success and was even made into a stage play in Liverpool, launching the careers of British actors Bill Nighy and Jim Broadbent. Followers did this by sending fake letters to magazines, attributing cover-ups and conspiracy theories, such as the JFK assassination, to a secret elite organisation called the Illuminati. One of the main proponents of this new ideology was a writer called Robert Anton Wilson, who wanted to bring chaos back into society by spreading “misinformation through all portals – through counter culture, through the mainstream media”, said Bramwell. The book extolled an alternative belief system – Discordianism – which preached a form of anarchism and gave birth to the Discordian movement, which ultimately wished to cause civil disobedience through practical jokes and hoaxes. “It all began somewhere amid the Summer of Love and the hippie phenomenon, when a small, printed text emerged: Principia Discordia,” explained the broadcaster. How did the myth develop?Īccording to the author David Bramwell, the 1960s “era of counter-culture mania, LSD and interest in Eastern philosophy is largely responsible for the group’s (totally unsubstantiated) modern incarnation”, said BBC Future. Yet, from the moment the real-life group disbanded, “the myth expanded”. “Most of the group’s secrets were disclosed or published, and, if you believe most historians, the Illuminati disappeared,” said Vox. However, it didn’t last long after Karl Theodor, Duke of Bavaria, outlawed secret groups on punishment of death in the late 1780s. The society grew from a handful of men to a few thousand, including some influential members, with the most famous thought to have been the German thinker Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – although this is disputed. (Image credit: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

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