The illuminati was founded on May Day 1776 by Adam Weishaupt, professor of canon law at Ingolstadt and a former Jesuit. Him and his close followers called themselves “Perfectibilists”. Their aim was to replace Christianity with a religion of reason, as later did the revolutionaries of France and the 19th-century positivist philosopher Auguste Comte. The order was organized along Jesuit lines and kept internal discipline and a system of mutual surveillance based on that model. Members pledged obedience to their superiors and were divided into three main classes: the first included “novices,” “minervals,” and “lesser illuminati”; the second consisted of freemasons (“ordinary,” “Scottish,” and “Scottish knights”); and the third or “mystery” class comprised two grades of “priest” and “regent” as well as “magus” and “king.”

Weishaupt gradually extended his recruitment efforts from Ingolstadt to Eichstatt, Freising, Munich, and elsewhere, with special attention being given to the enlistment of young men of wealth, rank, and social importance. From 1778 onward Weishaupt’s illuminati began to make contact with various Masonic lodges, where, under the impulse of Adolf Franz Friedrich, Freiherr von Knigge, one of their chief converts, they often managed to gain a commanding position, It was to Knigge that the society was indebted for the extremely elaborate constitution as well as its internal communication system. (Weishaupt was referred to as Spartacus while Knigge was Philo). All internal correspondence was conducted in cipher, and to increase the mystification, towns and provinces were invested with new and altogether arbitrary designations.

At its period of greatest development, Weishaupt’s “Illuminati” included in its operations a very wide area, extending from Italy to Denmark and from Warsaw to Paris; The order and its doctrines appealed to literary giants such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Gottfried von Herder, as well as the dukes Ernest II of Gotha and Charles Augustus of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. Such notables were members, astronomer Johann Bode, writer and bookseller Friedrich Nicolai, philosopher Friedrich Jacobi, and poet Friedrich Leopold, Graf zu Stolberg-Stolberg.