The Spanish Alumbrados: Origin of the Term ‘Illuminati’

Illuminati. the past participle of illuminare, meaning to “light up,” or “illuminate.” The plural term, “Illuminati” (Lat. illuminatus; Ital. Illuminato). The term has earlier religious uses, with no historical connection between the use of the term by the Spanish Alumbrados Catholic mystics and the later Illuminati Order in Bavaria.

LINGUISTIC HISTORICAL USE OF THE TERM IN EUROPE

The Alumbrados (in Spanish meaning “Illuminated ones”), or Aluminados was a sixteenth-century c. Spanish Catholic mystical movement, led by Spanish mystic Sister María de Santo Domingo, or La Beata de Piedrahita (c. 1485 – c. 1524). The Alumbrados, active mainly between 1520s-1620s emphasized inner spiritual illumination, direct experience of God, and quietist prayer. The sect was investigated by the Inquisition for heterodoxy, but they were not a secret society and had no political agenda.

This term appears later under the Illuminés, spread to France from Seville of Andalusia, Spain in 1623, joined in a cause with the Guérinets under Pierre Guérin in 1634. Another little-known group of Illuminés arose in south France, who were called the “French Prophets.” They were an off-shoot of the Camisards (French Protestant militants) of the Bas-Languedoc and Cévennes regions, from circa 1722-1794. The Alumbrados were first recorded in 1492 Spain and had three edicts issued against them by the Catholic Inquisition.

Josef Wäges explains in his book, The Secret School of Wisdom, an early version of Knigge’s Preparatory Essay for potential recruits alludes to these condemned mystics (the Illumines of Spain persecuted by the Spanish inquisition) as the possible precursors of the Illuminati. He also states though, that there is no evidence that Weishaupt took any deeper interest in the history of the Alumbrados. Therefore, the Alumbrados is not connected to the Illuminati. The Alumbrados were mainly active in Castile and Andalusia, that flourished more than 150 years before the Bavarian Illuminati were founded.

Besides the similarity in name, we can establish that there is no historical or organizational link to the Illuminati of Ingolstadt, Bavaria (repressed in 1785) founded in 1776. Although the Spanish Alumbrados and the Bavarian Illuminati both used language of “illumination,” they emerged in different centuries, in different countries, and with different aims. The linguistic similarity in name is coincidental, and modern historians do not consider the Alumbrados to be predecessors of the Illuminati.

Before the name ‘Illuminati’ was finally adopted in 1778, founder of the ‘Order,’ Adam Weishaupt initially began with his idea of a ‘School of Humanity.’

Discarding this idea, he drafted up a new secret society, and its members were to be called PERFECTIBILISTS:

“believers in the possible, constant improvement of human nature and society.”

Weishaupt contemplated on the name ‘bee order,’ or ‘bee society,’ an allusion to the Eleusinian mysteries, before adopting the name ‘Illuminati’ in 1778. Adam Weishaupt adopted the name “Illuminati” to evoke the Enlightenment of intellectual illumination through reason and its classical meanings in relation to Reason (LOGOS) and PRIMORDIAL FIRE. Adam Weishaupt taught by Jesuits, though abhorring the Society of Jesus, closely examined its structure and constitutions. Weishaupt then utilized elements from Catholic religious orders, the Greek mysteries and Freemasonry to add to its sophistication — creating rules, titles and degrees, and continuing to emphasize the idea of the Perfectibilist meaning improvement of self-knowledge and constant self-scrutiny of one’s own flaws.

During the eighteenth-century, the first European translations of the AVESTA (notably by Anquetil-Duperron in 1771) would influence many Enlightenment thinkers. The philosophy of Weishaupt demonstrates, that he emulated and valued the systems and philosophy of the Avesta and may have been inspired by his readings.

Weishaupt embodied

1. Protestant and Enlightenment thinking of his time;
2. Held deistic and republican ideals;
3. Fought for secular education in Bavaria;
4. Defined ‘enlightenment’ and ‘illumination’ in both the theosophic (or mystic) and secular sense, emphasizing ethics, morality, intellectual and character development.

Helena P. Blavatsky’s Theosophical Glossary (published in 1892) references the term “Illuminati,” and defines it from Latin as a reference to the “Enlightened,” or the initiated adepts (Lat. adeptus. “an expert”).

The liberality to which this term is used is a great abuse. An ILLUMINATI describes a circle of Adepts and Magi, and cannot refer to a group of financiers, elite bureaucrats, plutocrats and technocrats as in the distortions of popular culture and conspiracy theory. Hence, for example the Twelve Disciples of Christ in the New Testament may be technically called an ILLUMINATI.

H.P. Blavatsky explains that the term is of ancient Persian, or Avestan Zoroastrian origin, and a reference to the ancient magi, or the Wise Men of Chaldea, India, Greece, Persia, Egypt and so forth.

Adam Weishaupt likewise once said to Franz Xaver von Zwack (Cato was his pseudonym), a judge in Munich and high-ranking member of the Order on February 6, 1778, refuting the idea of a secular atheism in his philosophy:

“The allegory on which I am to found the mysteries of the higher order, is the Fire-Worship of the Magi. We must have some worship, and none is so apposite.”

Originally published in Einige Originalschriften des Illuminatenordens (Munich: Anton Franz, 1787), 215. Digitized by the Bavarian State Library)

Many argue that Zoroastrianism, the religion of the Magi, often demonized as “the fire-worshippers” and deliberately polemicized by Muslims and Christians, provided a conceptual framework that influenced Judaism during the Babylonian Exile (6th century BCE), which in turn shaped early Christian thought. Also, during the 1st-4th centuries, Christianity existed alongside mystery religions like Mithraism, which had roots in Persian (Magian) tradition. Weishaupt was not ignorant of this lineage and used Magian allegory.

Blavatsky furthermore referred to Confucius, Jesus and Siddhartha as composing a spiritual Illuminati, the Paracelsists as an Illuminati, and uses this term to also describe a clandestine network in her time in the Orient she refers to as the “real Rosicrucians.” Blavatsky taught that this true hidden Illuminati, or body of initiates exists, and the ancient magical religion of the Chaldeans survives. Blavatsky explains, that “the word “Chaldean” does not refer merely to a native or an inhabitant of Chaldea, but to “Chaldeism,” the oldest science of astrology and occultism.”

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Recommended Reading

1. Alumbrado, Encyclopaedia Britannica, online.
2. The Illuminati: Bavarian Order, Philosophy on the Fringes, podcast.
3. Alastair Hamilton, Heresy and Mysticism in Sixteenth‑Century Spain, 1992.
4. Camisard, Encyclopaedia Britannica, online.
5. Terry Melanson, Perfectibilists
6. George Orwell, Politics and the English Language (1914).