Illuminati in popular culture

Founded by Adam Weishaupt in Bavaria in 1776, the Illuminati have been referred to in popular culture, in books and comics, television and films, and games. A number of novelists, playwrights and composers are alleged to have been Illuminati members and to have reflected this in their work. Early conspiracy theories surrounding the Illuminati have inspired various creative works, and continue to do so. Books and comics Gothic literature had a particular interest in the theme of the Illuminati. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction states that readers had a "scandalous vogue for German tales of the Illuminati." The Illuminati have a role in Horrid Mysteries, as in Montague Summers' introduction to a later reprint of it. The Illuminati also turn up in two spoofs of the gothic genre, which both also reference Horrid Mysteries, Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen and Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock. A number of writers have pointed out Mary Shelley's familiarity with the early anti-Illuminati text, Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (1797–98), due to Percy Bysshe Shelley's enthusiasm for it. They describe the Memoirs influence in Frankenstein, and point to Frankenstein's monster as an amalgam of Shelley's Illuminati-influenced ideas as well as of the Illuminati itself, with the monster being created in Ingolstadt, where the Illuminati had been formed. The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson is a three-book science fiction series published in the 1970s, which is regarded as a cult classic. An incomplete comic book version of the Illuminatus! was produced and published by Eye-n-Apple Productions and Rip Off Press between 1987 and 1991. A nine-hour theatrical adaptation was produced by Ken Campbell. Robert Anton Wilson also published Cosmic Trigger I: The Final Secret of the Illuminati in 1977, The Illuminati Papers in 1980, Masks of the Illuminati in 1981, and The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles in the 1980s and 1991. Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum is a labyrinthine 1988 novel about all sorts of secret societies, including the Illuminati and the Rosicrucians. Fallen Angels by Bernard Cornwell (under the pseudonym Susannah Kells) (1984). A love story set in the shadow of the Paris revolutionary guillotine and the grounds of Lazender Castle in England.