Opening paragraphs.........................

Once upon a time, nearly two and a half centuries ago, there was a secret network that tried to change the world.  Founded in Germany just two months before thirteen of Britain's American colonies declared their independence, the organization came to be known as the Illuminatenorden - the Order of the Illuminati.  Its goals were lofty.  Indeed, its founder had originally called it the Bund der Perfektibilisten (the League of the Perfectibles).  As one member of the Order recalled its founder saying, it was intended to be:

      an association that, through the most subtle and secure
      methods, will have as its goal the victory of virtue and
      wisdom over stupidity and malice; an association that will
      make the most important discoveries in all fields of science
      that will teach its members to become both noble and great,
      that will assure them of the certain prize of their own
      complete perfection in this world, that will protect them 
      from persecution, the fates and oppression, and that will
      bind the hands of despotism in all its forms.

The Order's ultimate objective was to 'enlighten the understanding by the sun of reason, which will dispel the clouds of superstition and of prejudice'.  'My goal is to give reason the upper hand,' declared the Order's founder.  Its methods were, in one respect, educational.  'The sole intention of the league', according to its General Statues (1781), was 'education, not by declamatory means, but by favouring and rewarding virtue'.  Yet the Illuminati were to operate as a strictly secret fraternity.  Members adopted codenames, often of ancient Greek or Roman provenance;  the founder himself was 'Brother Spartacus'.  There were to be three ranks or grades of membership - Novice, Minerval and Illuminated Minerval - but the lower ranks were to be given only the vaguest insights into the Order's goals and methods.  Elaborate initiation rites were devised - among them an oath of secrecy, violation of which would be punished with the most gruesome death.  Each isolated cell of initiates reported to a superior, whose real identity they did not know.
     At first, the Illuminati were tiny in number.  There were only a handful of founding members, most of them students.  Two years after its creation, the Order's total membership was just twenty-five.  As late as December 1779, it was still only sixty.  Within just a few years, however, membership had surged to more than 1,300.

-Niall Ferguson,  The Square and the Tower:  Networks and Power from the Freemasons to Facebook