John Robison

So a few years later, whenever he attempts to explain the cause of all his misfortune, he is not going to look fondly upon a secret society which had apparently been promising the kind of revolutionary change that he has now seen.

At precisely the same time that Barruel is writing his book, there is a stern Scots, uh, physicist, uh, by the name of John Robison, who is a Freemason.

Uh, he's also been quite badly ill. He's been in a lot of pain.

He's been isolated.

But it's not just this captain's approval they need.

As the ship docks, the board's representative, John Robison, now sets up his astronomical instruments.

He measures and remeasures the angle of the sun, checks his tables, and, after much calculation, finally establishes the local time.

Then he and William fix the longitude of Port Royal by the time difference between here and their starting point in England.

I have multiple copies in my office in case [laughs] somebody ever needs one.

Uh, it's called Proof of a Conspiracy, and, uh, it's written by a high-level Scottish Freemason by the name of John Robison.

It was published in 1798, and what he explains is that he was going through the Masonic lodges of continental Europe.

He was in Paris.

Hmm

... about this nefarious group.

Uh, that's one of the ways that, um, that John Robison learned some of the information that he had about this network.

Um, and so the idea was, we're gonna create this secret corps.

You're probably saying you knew they were up to something.

This is where Augustine Beruel and John Robison arrive.

Beruel was a French Catholic priest.

Robison was a Scottish professor of natural philosophy.

In 1797, both published works arguing, in different ways, that the French Revolution had been shaped by a conspiracy involving philosophers, Freemasons, and the Illuminati.

This is a huge transition.

And that's when the name mutates.

Beruel sees a long attack on Christianity, monarchy, and social order.

contributing to widespread awareness of the secret machinations of secret societies in those days that has largely been lost in contemporary times.

So, among the English-speaking world, the Illuminati's operations were first widely exposed to the public in the 1797... 1797... book Proofs of Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the secret meetings of Freemasons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies by John Robinson, a university professor Freemason and the first general secretary to the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

So there's your book to get, Chris.

You know I'm talking to you.