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Sunday, February 18, 2024

'News democracy' website explains 'Illuminatus!'

 


Harriet "Hattie" Brewis, eating a sandwich in between scoops (official portrait on X). 

The Illuminati, and the Illuminatus! trilogy, get a writeup in a new article, "Who are the Illuminati and why are they taking over TikTok?" The piece at the Indy100 website includes  a discussion of Discordianism  and how it gave rise to the trilogy.

I did feel a bit uncomfortable with how writer Harriet "Hattie" Brewis, the "chief reporter at Indy100," treated the trilogy. After describing the Discordian pranks of Wilson and Shea, she writes, 

"Wilson and Shea became so invested in the whole endeavour that they penned a series of three novels titled ‘The Illuminatus! Trilogy’, which pinned some of the great mysteries of the time on the Illuminati, including who killed President Kennedy," she wrote.

"Among the most far-fetched theories they put forward was that Weishaupt (the society’s original Bavarian founder) had assassinated George Washington and assumed his identity as president of the US," she wrote.

Brewis obviously did a lot of research for her piece, but I did wonder whether she quite internalized that all of this was satire, and not meant to be taken seriously.

You can read her other stories here, such as "Taylor Swift's message to Travis Kelce after the Super Bowl leaked in new audio."

The Indy100 is a project of the Independent, a British newspaper. The idea is that readers pick what the top stories are. The site is billed as "The News Democracy." 




1 comment:

Jesse said...

"In 1963, a text emerged out of America’s LSD-fuelled Summer of Love, titled ‘Principia Discordia’."

I'm impressed how this manages to misdate both the Summer of Love *and* the Principia Discordia.