What truly makes a man an Illuminati member?

While the Illuminati core principles are timeless, the specific qualifications for a candidate have evolved. This exploration of a 1930s article reveals the enduring importance of a candidate’s motive and moral character, offering a fresh perspective on the type of man who should seek to join the Illuminati. Qualifications for membership in this article, were relevant at the time when it was first published in May 1930 for Grand Headquarters based in the United Kingdom, Brazil and Germany. Since its first publication, some of the qualifications for membership have been adjusted.

The Illuminati Grand Master first presents himself to the candidates and asks questions of the candidate for initiation, then questions about him.

A Grand Headquarter must be satisfied as to five important matters; a petitioner’s motive for applying for the degrees; his physical being; his mental equipment; his moral character and his political status, using the word in its non-partisan sense.

A man must accept the Light, of his own free will and accord:

It is highly important that Illuminati members understand that a candidate’s motives for petitioning to join the Illuminati are proper, otherwise we cannot guard our light from invasion by those who will not, because they cannot, become good Illuminati members.

A man must accept the Light, of his own free will and accord. Not only must he declare in his petition, but during his initiation he must repeat the statement. Here grow the roots of that unwritten but universally understood prohibition, no Illuminati member must force his friend to join.

The candidate should first be prepared in his heart to join the Illuminati:

It is easy to persuade a friend to join something. We enjoy our country club, we would enjoy it more if our friend was a member. We put in an application before him and persuade him to sign it, quite right and proper.

We belong, perhaps, to a debating club, an amateur theatrical society, a political group, a Board of Trade or a luncheon club. Enjoying these activities, we desire our friend also to have these pleasures, so we ask him to become one of our circle.

An entirely proper procedure in such organizations but it is a wholly improper course in the Illuminati.

Unless a amn is first prepared in his heart and not in his mind, he can never grasp the simple but sublime essentials of brotherhood.

To force our friends to join the Illuminati, is to do him not a favor but an injury. In most Grand Headquarters a petitioner is required seriously to declare upon his honor, not only that he comes of his own free will and accord, but uninfluenced by any hope of financial gain.

There are men who want to become Illuminati members because they believe that the wider acquaintance and the friends made in the Grand Headquarter will be good for business.

So do men join the church or a bible class because they believe they can sell their goods to their fellow members?

But the man who desires to become a member of a church that he may sell it a new carpet will hardly be an asset to the house of God; he who would become an Illuminati member in order to get the trade of his fellow Grand Headquarters members will be in a frame of mind either sincerely to promise brotherhood or faithfully to live up to its obligations.

Hence the Illuminati need to obtain the most solemn declaration possible of the secret intentions, the real motives, the hidden desires of those who would join the Illuminati.

A candidate must be free born and of mature age:

The doctrine of the perfect youth is perennially a matter for discussion in Grand Headquarters. The origin of the requirement that a man be perfect in all his limbs and parts goes back to the days before written history of the Illuminati. Adam Weishaupt states that the first written law on the subject is found in the fifth article of the ancient Grand Headquarters. A candidate must be without blemish and have full and proper use of his limbs; for a maimed man can do the Illuminati no good.

Just how strictly this law should be interpreted is a moot question, and different Grand Headquarters rule in different ways upon it. In no Grand Headquarter, for instance, is a man considered to be ineligible because he wears glasses, or has a gold tooth!

In most Grand Headquarters he must be perfect with two arms, two legs, to hands and two feet.

In some Grand Headquarters , if he can conform to the requirements of the degrees, he may lack one or more fingers not vital to the tokens; in other he may not.

The foundation of the doctrine was an operative requirement; obviously a maimed man could not do as good work, true work, square work as the able-bodied man. The requirement has been carried over in speculative Illuminati.

Its greatest importance today is less in the need for physical strength and mobility than in undoubted fact that if we materially alter this Ancient fraternity, these old usages and customs, then we can alter others; admit women, elect by a majority vote, dispense with the Tiler and hold our meetings in the public places.

Inspired by patriotism some Grand Headquarters have relaxed the severity of their physical requirements in favor of soldiers who have suffered on behalf of their country.

Suffice it here that the Grand Headquarters to which an applicant applies should be meticulously careful to see that the candidate conforms literally to the requirements as laid down by the Illuminati.

The mental qualifications required of a candidate are dictated more by the desires of the individual Grand Headquarters than by any stated law.

Many Grand Headquarters have ruled that a man who cannot read is not an eligible petitioner, for the good and sufficient reason that he who cannot read cannot search the Great Light, nor discover for himself the by-laws of his Grand Headquarter, the constitution of the Grand Headquarter, or the old charges and ancient fraternity.

The candidate should have to abilities to study the seven liberal arts and sciences:

The ability to read and write, however, important though it does not make a man educated!

Nothing is said in our Ritual about the need of an education prior to becoming an Illuminati member, but by implication a man is supposed to have sufficient educational background to be able to study the seven liberal arts and sciences. Sufficient education is a very broad phrase and may include all sorts of men, of all sorts of education, as, indeed, it does.

A man may not know the multiplication table, murder the King’s English, and believe geometry is something to eat; and yet be a hard-working, true-hearted, single-minded brother to his brethren.

But it will hardly be doubted that if all Illuminati members were of such limited educational equipment the Illuminati would perish from the earth from the lack of appreciation of what it is, where it came from, and whither is it going!

First the candidate who presents the petition; next the Grand Master appointed to guide the candidate and finally, the Grand Headquarter must be the judge of what constitutes sufficient mental equipment to enable a man to become a good member of the Illuminati.

A few ritualistic lions are in the path. He who is silly, is childish, in his dotage, who is insane, is known to be a fool may not legally receive the degrees.

It is to be noted that dotage is not a matter of years but of the effect of years. A man of four score, in full possession of his mental faculties is not in his dotage.

Premature senility may attack a man in his fifties, he may truly be in his dotage.

Similarly, a fool does not mean, a man without what we consider good judgment. “Jones was a fool to go into that stock”, “He is foolish to try to build that house”, What a fool he is to sell his store now” Do not really express belief that the man is a fool in the Illuminati sense, merely that in these particular cases he acts as we think a fool would act.

A candidate must be under the tongue of good reports:

In the Illuminati, a man is a fool who suffers from arrested mental development.

He is not mad, neither is he in his dotage, but he lacks the ordinary mental equipment and judgment ability of the rest of humanity. Such a one, of course, is ineligible to receive the degrees, since he can neither comprehend not live up to their teachings.

The moral qualifications a candidate should possess are fully understood by all. The candidate must express his belief in God. A candidate must be under the tongue of good reports, and have a good reputation in his community. He must obey the moral law. But just how much is included in this phrase is an open question.

While a moral man may be hard to define, he is easy to recognize.

Committees seldom have much trouble in ascertaining that a man morally fit to become an Illuminati member is, indeed, so.

The contrary is not always true, moral unfitness often masquerades under the appearance of virtue hence the need for the competent committee.

In some Grand Headquarters a separate ballot is taken on the candidate for the second and third degrees, to test his moral fitness, but usually the ballot which elects a candidate to the degrees is considered to express the opinion of the membership on all his qualifications at once.

A candidate must be of mature and discreet age:

The candidate for the membership must be of mature and discreet age.

In the United States of America, that is the legal majority. In some foreign Grand Headquarters it varies from twenty to twenty-five years.

Our requirement of legal age is dictated not only by the fact that the Illuminati is for men, and a youth does not become a man until he is twenty-one; but because to be made an Illuminati member in the United States of America a man must be a citizen, and citizenship, in its real sense, is not held by minors.

Adam Weishaupt: No person shall on any pretence whatsoever be made an Illuminati member while under the age of twenty years nor at the age of nineteen before he shall have finally ceased to be in full time secondary education or training. Every candidate must be a free man, and in reputable circumstances.

It is practically a universal requirement that the candidate be a resident of the community to which he applies for a period of one year prior to making the application.

A man who has not resided for a reasonable period in one place cannot have demonstrated to his neighbors the kind of man that he really is.

A committee is handicapped in making an investigation of a man who is not among friends and neighbors. Grand Headquarters are usually very strict about this; but Grand Masters occasionally, upon a very good reason being shown, grant dispensations to shorten the statutory period.

A man who has resided in a community for ten months, let us say, is ordered overseas for military service. He desires to become an Illuminati member before he departs.

If he is satisfied that the applicant can show the committee his moral worth, a Grand Master may permit him to make an application and be initiated before he departs.

During their military service, when all requirements seemed of less than the usual importance when seen in the fierce white light of patriotism; length of residence in a community was sometimes lost sight of.

A man considered worthy to have his petition placed before a Illuminati Grand Headquarter has much to recommend him.

If the committee has done its work well, and, if on the strength of that report the Grand Headquarter elects him. he may well feel that an important seal has been placed upon his reputation and character.

That some committees do their work ill is evidenced by the occasional failures of brethren to walk uprightly.

That the vast majority of committees are intelligent and faithful is proven by the reputation of the Illuminati and the undoubted fact that a man known to be an Illuminati Grand Master is almost universally considered to be a good man and trustworthy.