When did the Conspiracy theories of illuminati started?

 Is Bill Gates in the illuminati?

Is Donald trump?

 Everyone from to Bill Gates to Beyonce has been accused of being part of illuminati, a secret group said to comprise of the world's most powerful people seeking to establish a new world order. Even you haven't heard of illuminati chances are there you've probably seen one of the symbols associated with them. Pentagrams, goats, eye in a triangle... References have also cropped up in the music videos such as Rihanna's S&M which featured a fake newspaper with a headline declaring her princess of the illuminati

So who are the illuminati?

Are they really a shadow elite that control the world? The illuminati were, to the best of my knowledge, a Bavarian secret soceity formed in the 18th century. It opposed superstition, religious influence and state authority. They even created a rule book which stated that " the order of the day is to put an end to the machinations of the purveyors of injustice. To control them without dominating them. The Bavarian group eventually faded into irrelevance and has nothing to do with modern concepts of the illuminati. The conspiracy theory that we know about today stems from the Discordian movement. The story goes that Discordism began in 1965 in the office of Texas drug attorney. Two schoolmates Greg Hill, Kerry Thornley used the office photocopier to publish copies of the principle Discordia, the movement's founding text. The book promoted the idea that chaos is as important as order and discordianism gathered steam throughout the 60s and 70s with Hill and Thornley actively trying to cause mischief and spread disinformation.

Their mission was expanded even further by two other Americans, a writer called Robert Anton Wilson Robert Anton Wilson and his friend Robert shea. Wilson was editor at playboy, and the two of them decided they would write a novel and they would throw all of the great conspiracy theories into this novel and call it illuminatus. And in fact, they enjoyed it so much that they turned it into a trilogy. They decided that it would be fun to try and spread a little chaos and misinformation deliberately about the illuminati. And they did this by writing letters to the mainstream press,by writing letters which were popular at the time, but also through the letters page of playboy itself. They would aslo write letters from imaginary readers saying that the illuminati weren't real at all. It didn't really matter, what did matter is that all these people seemed to be generating this conversation about the illuminati. And the idea was that you, as the reader were supposed to question that, interrogate it, ask, " Are they really real? ".

The myth travelled far and wide. Wilson and Shea's illuminati trilogy attributed some of the mysteries of the time such as " who shot John F Kennedy? " to the lluminati. Although the multitude of conspiracy theories that appear in the trilogy are imaginary,they're blended with enough truth to make them seem plausible.

        Probably the oddest theory was the suggestion that Adam Weishaupt, the founder of the Bavarian illuminati assassinated George Washington and assumed his identity as president of the USA. Believers of this theory point to Washington's portrait on the US one dollar bill which they suggest is actually the face of Weishaupt. Despite it's lack of mainstream sales the trilogy became a cult favorite. It was even made into a Eight hour stage play in Liverpool.

The 70s print magazine culture seems distant now from our globalised hyper connected internet but illuminati rumors are still on websites such as 4chan and Reddit where belivers swap their favorite versions of the conspiracy and a champion evidence to prove it's still in existence

Is illuminati real? Or still it exist?

Well, I guess it's all up to you