erience, intercourse, reading of
the graduated writings and information, you will necessarily have
formed the idea that the final aim of our Society is nothing less
than to win power and riches, to undermine secular or religious
government, and to obtain the mastery of the world, and so on. If
you have represented our Society to yourself from this point of
view or have entered it in this expectation, you have mightily
deceived yourself....[574]

The initiator, without informing the Minerval of the real aim of the
Society, then goes on to say that he is now free to leave it if he
wishes. By this means the leaders were able to eliminate ambitious
people who might become their rivals to power and to form their ranks
out of men who would submit to be led blindly onward by unseen
directors. "My circumstances necessitate," Spartacus writes to Cato,
"that I should remain hidden from most of the members as long as I live.
I am obliged to do everything through five or six persons."[575] So
carefully was this secret guarded that until the papers of the
Illuminati were seized in 1786 no one outside this inner circle knew
that Weishaupt was the head of the Order. Yet if we are to believe his
own assertions, he had been throughout in supreme control. Again and
again he impresses on his _intimes_ the necessity for unity of command
in the Order: "One must show how easy it would be for one clever head to
direct hundreds and thousands of men,"[576] and he illustrates this
system by the table reproduced on the next page, to which he appends the
following explanation:

I have two immediately below me into whom I breathe my whole
spirit, and each of these two has again two others, and so on. In
this way I can set a thousand men in motion and on fire in the
simplest manner, and in this way one must impart orders and operate
on politics.[577]

Thus, as in the case of Abdullah ibn Maymun's society, "the
extraordinary result was brought about that a multitude of men of divers
beliefs were all working together for an object known only to a few of
them."

Enough has now been quoted from the correspondence of the Illuminati to
show their aims and methods according to their own admissions. We shall
now see how far their apologists are justified in describing them as
"men of the strictest morality and humanity."[578] Doubtless there were
many excellent people in the outer ranks of the