Dan Brown’s Illuminati
Dan Brown, like many authors, resurrected the Illuminati as little more than boogeymen for his first Robert Langdon novel, Angels & Demons. Using the Illuminati allowed Brown to engage his characters in Enlightenment-style dialogues about the supremacy of science over religion. In the end (stop here if you haven’t read the novel), it turns out that the mysterious head of the Illuminati, Janus, has perpetrated a hoax and resurrected the name of the Order as a diversionary tactic to hide his own individual treachery. It’s a favorite Brown tactic use the bad guy to spout your most controversial ideas, so you have a back-door escape hatch. “The brotherhood of the Illuminati is also factual,” says Dan Brown in his “Author’s Note” in Angels & Demons. Not the way he wrote it, it isn’t. Brown’s fictional Illuminati was supposed to have been a group of scientists who rebelled secretly against church dogma in the 1500s. According to his story, scientists who failed to knuckle under to church teachings and demands were arrested, tortured, and branded on the chest with a superspecial branding iron identifying them as members of the subversive group, and their bodies pitched into the streets of Rome as a warning. According to Brown, astronomer Galileo Galilee was a member, and they met secretly in an underground Church of the Illumination. Eventually, in the 1600s, this Illuminati became dedicated to the toppling of the church and Christianity itself. They became Satanists and were referred to as Shaitan the Islamic word for Satan by the Catholic Church. Breathlessly, Langdon describes them as the “world’s oldest and most powerful satanic cult.” Brown even gave this Illuminati a spiffy logo, a clever bit of calligraphy that spells out their name, which looks identical upside down or right side up. Far from being an artifact from history, this “ambigram” as Brown calls it, is an invention of his friend, artist John Langdon, whose name he attached to his fictional hero Robert Langdon in gratitude. Brown uses a clever device in his books, dressing up old, secret, and often fictional societies to get in his licks against the church. The history of the Catholic Church’s activities is long, exciting, and sad enough without Brown exaggerating it to an absurd degree. And one thing is for certain: The one thing the real Illuminati was not was satanic.