Addendum

by Mordecai the Foul, High Priest, Head Temple, A.I.S.B.

Ever since it was announced in Illuminatus! that Ludwig was a member of the Illuminati, we at Weishaupt Cabal have been repeatedly asked whether that particular claim was true or just another of the put-ons with which Shea and Wilson salted that trilogy as a Head Test for the readers.

The fact is that Ludwig Van Beethoven was a member of our Order, as were Mozart and Wagner.*

Since it is widely suspected that the Illuminati are primarily put-on artists, allow me to quote some circumstantial evidence from the latest and most scholarly Beethoven biography, Beethoven, by Maynard Solomon (Schirmer Books, New York, 1977).

Pages 26–27: Christian Neefe, Beethoven’s first music teacher (after his father and grandfather), was the leader of the Illuminati lodge in Bonn.

Pages 27–28: Neefe was the strongest intellectual influence on Beethoven during Ludwig’s adolescence, the most impressionable years of anyone’s life.

Page 36: The Emperor Joseph cantata, Beethoven’s first major work, was directly commissioned by the Lese-Gesellschaft, which, as Solomon makes clear elsewhere, and as Robison documents in Proofs of a Conspiracy, was the “front” for the Illuminati in Bavaria after we were illegalized in 1785.

Pages 61, 65: Karl Lichnowsky, Beethoven’s “foremost patron” in the early Vienna years, was a Freemason. Beethoven had arrived in Vienna with a letter of introduction from the head of the Illuminati lodge in Bonn, Herr Neefe; the Freemasonic lodges in Vienna were all, according to Robison, under Illuminati influence.

These bits of evidence are, as we admitted, circumstantial. The real proof is in the Ninth Symphony, for those who can hear it, and who can understand why the joyous finale is both a political and a mystical statement.

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* For Mozart, see Will Durant, Rousseau and Revolution, page 408. For Wagner, see Magick, Liber Aleph, and Book of Thoth by Aleister Crowley, in which many clues will be found by the discerning.