I’ve just finished reading Lyndsay Popper’s book Who Are The Illuminati. Those expecting to learn more about how a secretive group rule the world from the shadows will be disappointed. It is an excellent study in the ways conspiracy theorists have taken a minor 18th century group of quasi Masons and turned them into a universal bogeyman behind everything they disapprove of.

The Illuminati have featured in fiction – from Dan Brown’s pedestrian works to the wonderful Illuminatus Trilogy of Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. Popper’s book shows that the group have been at the centre of equally fictional plots since they were dissolved in Bavaria after a few years existence in a crackdown on secret societies. Each generation of (generally) right wing writers have placed them behind everything they hate, from the French Revolution, liberal humanism, Satanism, the Jews, big business, big government, Communism, the European Union and other countries in general, and anything else they can tie in with an increasingly complex and unbelievable web of paranoid fantasies.

The great benefit of the Illuminati to such groups is that they no longer exist, so detailing their real presence is impossible to nail down. By the circular logic of the anti rational everywhere, the lack of proof is itself proof as such a group would take efforts to hide its presence. Their evidence is generally claiming the invented conspiracy theories of previous writers is factual rather than fanciful and they are therefore able to add their own layer to the myth. The common thread in the Illuminati’s imaginary plots is that they involve forwarding the interests of whatever the writer disapproves of. To make them especially heinous, they have been tied to other things that the public can see as evil, like Satanism, Witchcraft, Paedophilia, or invading aliens.

There are a number of logical gaps in this lucky bag of conspiracies, the biggest of which is question of why the secret masters would want to take over the world, when most of their supposed pawns are already in charge. The answer given by the writers is that they shouldn’t be. The world should be run by people who think like them, and anyone who thinks differently should be suppressed as harshly as they think their views are. The fact that they are free to publish and promulgate their theories in a world supposedly run by their enemies is another credibility gap and their cries for freedom of speech are a bit hollow when they are clearly exercising that right.

I love a good conspiracy theory for what it is – an exercise in the creative imagination. The workings of our mind to join things together to make sense of the world and fit it to meet our understanding of the environment in which we live. Rather than accept the world is big and complex and ruled by science and statistics with no simple answers, it is a triumph that we can weave a ‘reality’ that is equally complex. In works of fiction like the Illuminatus Trilogy, Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo and Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum conspiracy theories become art. We just have to remember that they are fantastic and not figurative.