Scottish Enlightenment and Illuminati conspiracy

John Robison

1739 – 1805

John Robison was a Scottish physicist and professor of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, and first general secretary of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, who became convinced following the French Revolution that Freemasonry had been systematically infiltrated by Adam Weishaupt's Bavarian Illuminati. His Proofs of a Conspiracy (1797) seeded the enduring conspiratorial narrative about secret societies orchestrating political upheaval, directly influencing Augustin Barruel's parallel work and establishing the template for anti-Masonic and anti-Illuminati literature that persists to the present day. Ironically, his book made the Illuminati and secret society mythology central to both popular consciousness and the esoteric imagination.