Fog The Illuminati

I’m sure many of you will have spent countless nights fretting over just what is to be done regarding the matter of ‘The Illuminati’. You have? Yes, I thought so. Well, you are by no means alone and will doubtless be relieved and delighted to learn that there is hope – an evening spent wasting time on the internet rather than finishing off my new album has lead me to discover an answer of sorts to this age-old question from Wisbech resident and hard-dance maestro DJ Basshammer. Here it is in full:

What are your initial impressions on beholding this artwork? Perhaps you’re already trying to decipher it’s secrets for yourself?  Is it an image of a mushroom cloud looming over a deserted nuclear wasteland? Or a large jellyfish holding an inflatable question mark? Or a skull crowned by a single black banana? Personally I’m drawn to the contradictory presence of both the ‘f-word’  and a parental advisory sticker, the latter’s arrival at the bottom right surely too late to be of much practical assistance after the former’s pride of place in the top left. A bit like warning someone to ‘mind their f**king language’. Or we could say it’s ‘f**king the stable door after the horse has bolted’. Actually, that doesn’t make much sense.  Still, let’s stick to the matter at hand, shall we?  F**k the illuminati. What do you make of it?

Perhaps you are wondering what this phrase  could possibly mean? Some of you might even be tempted to ask just who The Illuminati are? And why should we want or need to ‘f**k them’? How does one spot Illuminati?  Is there a uniform or secret handshake? Is one required to set traps? And more pertinently, is there a specific Wisbech Illuminati chapter upon which this Basshammer fellow is focusing his ire?

His biography is carefully worded and gives nothing away:

hi my names anthony steward aka bass hammer i have bin djing now four about 13 years now i haved played qwite a thew styles from house speed garage to trance hard trance hard house hard dance hardstyle hardcore gabba and drum and bass i love play all kinds stuf. [sic]

Not much help there. This mysterious and elusive fellow is certainly hiding something. You can’t claim to straddle the vast expanses that separate trance, hard trance, hard house, hard dance and hard style without at least implying a certain familiarity with the arcane and forbidden arts. Clearly more research was required, so I immediately asked my friend Victoria. I look to her in all matters of the occult because she once gave me an old reel to reel machine that  came with a spool of tape featuring what appeared to be the voices of the dead. In the end it turned out to be one of Pink Floyd’s gloomier album tracks played at the wrong speed, but it remains closer to the beyond than I’ve ever managed on my own. Plus she once read a whole book by Dan Brown that wasn’t that famous one.

‘Who exactly are the illuminati?’ I asked her.

‘Essentially’, she replied after sighing and putting down whatever it was she’d been doing before I interrupted her, ‘the illuminati as we generally refer to them were the clever and ‘enlightened’ people of the Renaissance period, which marked a fundamental advancement in human knowledge that manifested itself in literature, philosophy, art, music, politics, science, religion, and other aspects of intellectual inquiry; and occurred roughly between 1400 and 1700′.

‘All that in a single afternoon?’, I asked, hilariously mistaking the turning of the centuries with the ticking of the twenty-four hour clock, itself a product of the enlightenment (I expect).

‘No’, she  replied, affectionately slapping me across the face, ‘the Renaissance period existed roughly between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries and it’s movers and shakers included scientists, writers, philosophers and artists. They were called the Illuminati because light is associated with knowledge and these new ways of thinking incurred the wrath of the church who hastily imposed a window tax to hamper their efforts. Window tax stopped clever people from rebelling against church,  government and the established order because the Illuminati would have found it very hard to read in the dark (though it remains unclear whether a lamp and bifocal tax was also instigated). Plus if you flip the word illuminati upside down it still says illuminati even though it is upside down, which is very significant. Dan Brown says so. The black death came just before the Renaissance, you know. That’s also important. Can I go now?’

Thanking her profusely before she made her excuses and sprinted for the door, I turned to that other great bastion of universal truth – the internet. According to a wikipedia article I scan-read while waiting for the kettle to boil, the earliest use of the term refers to the Bavarian Illuminati, a secret society of the enlightenment era founded to oppose superstition, religious influence over public life, abuses of state power, and to support women’s education and gender equality.  It was founded in 1776 by  the first lay-professor of canon law at the University of Ingolstadt: Adam Weishaupt:

All very well, but what possible chain of events could these wise, noble and historically significant Bavarians possibly have set in motion that might incur the wrath of a trance DJ in Wisbech? Well, stand by for a major revelation: In the 17th century certain inhabitants of this particular corner of Cambridgeshire became known as the ‘Fen Tigers’ because of their resistance to a plan to drain the local fenland (in spite of the scheme’s resulting in Wisbech becoming a prosperous and wealthy centre of commerce). Armed with this information and operating on a whim (plus about four hour’s sleep) I discovered that superimposing Adam Weishaupt’s face onto Basshammer’s artwork gives us our missing link:

We see now that Basshammer’s artwork is without doubt a carefully disguised image of Bavarian philosopher Adam Weishaupt’s head exploding into a giant nuclear mushroom cloud in front of a backdrop (if you squint) of devastated Cambridgeshire fenland. Clearly Basshammer still feels the torments of his ancestors most keenly, and like them, looks upon change, progress  and the adoption of radical new ideas with the deepest suspicion. This is further proved by his championing of genres such as  hard dance, hard trance, hard style etc., all of which have been in a state of terminal regression since about 1995.

Ergo, f**k the Illuminati.

My work here is done. I defy anyone to spot a single flaw in my reasoning. And to those of you quick to suggest I’m just turning a pice of inept Photoshoppery into a half-arsed and baseless conspiracy theory, I can only laugh bitterly at your profound lack of insight. I’d like to personally thank DJ Basshammer for showing us the way and if you’re feeling brave why not listen to a couple of his mixtapes here. I managed seven whole minutes. See if you can top it.

I’d also like to thanks the combined forces of Victoria and Wikipedia for helping me get to the truth. Perhaps we could collectively call them Vickypedia? Just a thought…

Next week I’m planning to investigate the ulterior motive and shadowy persuasions of the person who sent me THIS in the post. The dirty blighter:

Hmm, can’t remember what else I was supposed to be doing today. The new album? Oh, I’ll get round to it eventually…