In 1799 the British parliament passed the ‘Unlawful Societies Act’, a piece of legislature which was only repealed in 1967. It regulated the terms of existence of societies, such as reading and debate clubs or the much more radical ‘United Englishmen’ that were perceived to conspire against political order (Prescott 2002). At the time of passing the act, public opinion had been stirred up by the violent events of the French revolution and fear of an imminent invasion by the victorious Republican armies. In particular the Irish rebellion of 1798 illustrated painfully that Britain not was immune to popular uprising. In what sense is this dramatic governmental infringement of the free right of association related to a discussion of ‘illuminism’? The search for scapegoats who could be held responsible for the overthrow of l’Ancien regime (the ‘Old Regime’) accelerated in the immediate aftermath of the French revolution and played into public opinion during the subsequent decade. The period witnessed the birth of a virulent culture of ‘conspiracism’ (Berlet 2009), which has occupied the Western imagination ever since. Indeed, there is a sense in which conspiracy can be considered a constitutive component of Western political discourse. Most prominent in this regard are the writings of a French émigré to Britain, abbé Augustin Barruel (1741-1820) and Edinburgh professor John Robison (1739-1805), blaming secret societies for orchestrating radical political change (Roberts 2008 and Oberhauser 2013). In part three of his Memoirs illustrating the history of Jacobinism (1798), outlining the ‘antisocial conspiracy’, Barruel established a chronology of the rise of various forms of illuminism. Whereas he devotes the lion’s share of his writings to the historical Bavarian Order of Illuminati, Barruel identified ‘the worst of the whole clan [as] a sort of Illuminees, calling themselves Theosophs’ (Barruel 1798: 119), in direct relationship to Swedenborg and Martinism. Hence it is in this context the term ‘illuminism’ was originally coined and for the first time applied to an analysis of certain ideas and practices that had developed and flourished within Western secret societies.