The Best Books About the Illuminati

The literature about the Illuminati is enormous, sprawling across more than two centuries, multiple languages, and a wide range of genres: serious history, partisan polemic, occult speculation, popular history, thriller fiction, and conspiracy theory. The most important books for any reader who wants to understand the historical Bavarian Illuminati, the modern myth, or the phenomenon of the Illuminati in popular culture fall into a relatively small number of recognisable categories. A serious reader should approach the literature with some sense of which category any given book belongs to, and what kind of evidence the book is in fact offering.

Foundational Historical Works

The single most important modern scholarly edition of the historical Illuminati is Reinhard Markner and Monika Neugebauer-Wölk’s Die Korrespondenz des Illuminatenordens (2005), a critical edition of the surviving correspondence of the order. The book is, a work of archival scholarship, and it is not available in English, but it is the standard scholarly reference for the original documents of the Bavarian order. Any serious student of the historical Illuminati should at least know of it.

The single most important English-language scholarly work on the historical Illuminati is Hermann Schüttler’s introduction to the 2005 Markner-Neugebauer volume, which is available in English as a separate article. Schüttler’s introduction is the most accurate and up-to-date single account of the historical order. Schüttler’s 1991 Die Mitglieder des Illuminatenordens 1776–1787 remains the standard edition of the order’s membership rolls.

Reinhard Markner’s short scholarly overview Die Illuminaten (in the Beck’sche Reihe series, 2006) is the most accurate and up-to-date single account of the order in any language. The book is short, scholarly, and accessible, and it is the best starting point for a German-reading reader who wants a careful, modern account of the historical Illuminati. The English-language equivalent is, in the standard assessment, no single work, but several chapters in the various collections on the Enlightenment and the German secret-society tradition.

J. M. Roberts’s The Mythology of the Secret Societies (1972) is a short, clear, and reliable book that sets the historical Illuminati in the context of the tradition of European secret-society myth. The book is a useful starting point for any reader who wants to understand the modern myth and the way it has been constructed.

The 18th-Century Anti-Illuminati Texts

The two books that began the modern mythology of the Illuminati are Augustin Barruel’s Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du Jacobinisme (1797–1798) and John Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Displayed in the Secret Meetings of the Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies (1797). Both books are available in modern reprints, both are widely cited in the conspiracy literature, and both are, in the standard academic assessment, the principal sources of the modern Illuminati myth.

Barruel was a French Jesuit whose four-volume work argued that the French Revolution was the result of a long-standing conspiracy on the part of the philosophes, the French Freemasons, and the Bavarian Illuminati, all of whom, in his account, were agents of a much older conspiracy that dated back to the medieval Manichaeans. The book was a massive commercial success in its day, and was, in the years after its publication, translated into English, German, and other European languages.

Robison was a Scottish natural philosopher and Fellow of the Royal Society whose book, published the same year as Barruel’s, made a similar case for an English-language audience. Robison’s book is shorter, more polemical, and more directly concerned with the Bavarian Illuminati, whom Robison treated as the principal agents of a single vast conspiracy.

A third important 18th-century work is the Abbé de Pradt’s Du Congrès de Vienne (1815) and his later L’Europe et l’Amérique depuis le Congrès d’Aix-la-Chapelle (1820), which extended the Barruel-Robison narrative into the post-Napoleonic period. De Pradt’s works are less well-known than Barruel’s or Robison’s, but they were, in their day, widely read in the European right-wing press.

Modern Conspiracy Literature

The most important modern conspiracy book on the Illuminati is William Cooper’s Behold a Pale Horse (1991), a long, wide-ranging, and deeply polemical work that synthesises the modern American Illuminati narrative. Cooper’s book is the principal single source of the late-20th-century American Illuminati myth, and it is the foundation of a substantial fraction of the modern conspiracy literature on the subject.

A second important modern conspiracy book is Jim Marrs’s Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids (2000), a wide-ranging account of the alleged modern conspiracy that connects the Bavarian Illuminati to the modern American political and financial establishment. Marrs’s earlier Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (1989) is a major source of the modern American conspiracy narrative.

A third important modern conspiracy book is David Icke’s The Biggest Secret (1999) and his later Children of the Matrix (2001), which extend the conspiracy narrative into a broader account of alleged reptilian-human hybrid elites. Icke’s work is the most ambitious and the most thoroughly fantastical of the modern Illuminati narratives.

Academic Histories

The most cited academic work on the modern mythology of the Illuminati is J. M. Roberts’s The Mythology of the Secret Societies (1972), already mentioned above, and his earlier The French Revolution (1962), which sets the French Revolution in the context of the modern Illuminati myth.

A second important academic work is James H. Billington’s Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (1980), a wide-ranging account of the revolutionary tradition in modern Western thought. The book is the most important single account of the revolutionary and esoteric traditions that the modern Illuminati myth draws on.

A third important academic work is Michael Barkun’s A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (2003), which is the most thorough single account of the modern American conspiracy tradition. The book is the standard reference for any serious study of the modern Illuminati phenomenon.

Fiction and Pop-Culture Books

The most important single work of fiction in the modern Illuminati literature is Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003), the massive-selling novel that brought the Priory of Sion myth to a global mass audience. The book is a work of popular fiction that draws on the speculative claims of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982).

A second important work of fiction is Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum (1988), a dense and elaborate Italian novel that treats the modern conspiracy tradition with a mix of sympathy and irony. The novel is the most intelligent single fictional treatment of the modern conspiracy tradition.

A third important work of fiction is Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975), the three-volume work that brought the modern Illuminati myth to the counter-culture of the 1970s. The trilogy is the most influential single work of counter-cultural fiction in the modern conspiracy tradition.