booknetsaWebster-secretSocietiesAndSubversiveMovements

way of duplicity and imposture.
More than this, Illuminism was not only the assemblage of all errors, of all ruses, of all subtleties of a
theoretic kind, it was also an assemblage of all practical methods for rousing men to action. For in the
words of von Hammer on the Assassins, that cannot be too often repeated: Opinions are powerless so long
as they only confuse the brain without arming the hand. Scepticism and free-thinking as long as they occupied
only the minds of the indolent and philosophical have caused the ruin of no throne.... It is nothing to the
ambitious man what people believe, but it is everything to know how he may turn them for the execution of
his projects.
This was what Weishaupt so admirably understood; he knew how to take from every association, past
and present, the portions he required and to weld them all into a working system of terrible efficiency-the
disintegrating doctrines of the Gnostics and Manichæns, of the modern philosophers and Encyclopædists,
the methods of the Ismailis and the Assassins, the discipline of the Jesuits and Templars, the organization
and secrecy of the Freemasons, the philosophy of Machiavelli, the mystery of the Rosicrucians-he knew
moreover, how to enlist the right elements in all existing associations as well as isolated individuals and turn
them to his purpose. So in the army of the Illuminati we find men of every shade of thought, from the poet
Goethe[109] to the meanest intriguer-lofty idealists, social reformers, visionaries, and at the same time the
ambitious, the rancorous, and the disgruntled, men swayed by lust or embittered by grievances, all these differing
in their aims yet by Weishaupt's admirable system of watertight compartments precluded from a
knowledge of these differences and all marching, unconsciously or not, towards the same goal.
Although this was not the invention of Weishaupt but had been foreshadowed many centuries earlier in
the East, it was Weishaupt, so far as we know, who reduced it to a working system for the West-a system
which has been adhered to by succeeding groups of world-revolutionaries up to the present day. It is for this
reason that I have quoted at length the writings of the Illuminati-all the ruses, all the hypocrisy, all the subtle
methods of camouflage which characterized the Order will be found again in the insidious propaganda both
of the modern secret societies and the open revolutionary organizations whose object is to subvert all order,
all morality, and all religion.
I maintain, therefore, with greater conviction than ever the importance of Illuminism in the history of
world-revolution. But for this co-ordination of methods the philosophers and Encyclopædists might have
gone on for ever inveighing against thrones and altars, the Martinistes evoking spirits, the magicians weaving
spells, the Freemasons declaiming on universal brotherhood-none of these would have " armed the hand
" and driven the infuriated mobs into the streets of Paris; it was not until the emissaries of Weishaupt
formed an alliance with the Orléaniste leaders that vague subversive theory became active revolution.
Nesta H. Webster — Secret Societies and Subversive Movements — Part I
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