He died with a Gaytime sticking out of his jacket pocket

It is an interesting non-fact that of all the great
dualities that underpin, or if you like permeate
reality, 'stop-start' receives surprisingly little
attention. It is a disinteresting fact that this unity
underlies all others. Figure that out, dipshit.

- Anonymous,
Anonymity for Dummies

I first encountered the Illuminati in a manner not unlike most of you, my temporarily distracted readers. In other words, I can't recall. But it sits there, in plain obscurity - knowledge of knowledge, of a feeling, of something. That was a long time ago, you see. Certain things have come to pass and I'm now in a position to say something more substantial about the Illuminati. To all but a demented few, this will be news. He died with a Gaytime sticking out of his jacket pocket.

Also in his jacket pocket were a mobile phone, some maroon-coloured lint spiced with sand, and a soggy, ink-stained piece of paper torn from a notepad and folded a single time, haphazardly. We'll get to that presently. The phone contained no contacts, no user generated files and a single sent message. The text of that message was !, an exclamation point. This isn't the placetime to recount that mysterious phoney tale. The lint had built up over six months, three weeks and 45 seconds. And continued to do so. Blurry ink notwithstanding, upon the paper was a triangle with a circle in it. The circle was supposed to be an eye. Underneath the seeing pyramid was written "Stop then Start."

The whole point of the Illuminati is that they're a secret society - a secret within a secret, if you care to check. If you're gagging to check, you'll also find a thousand and one unravellings of this secret. Most often it's power, sometimes chaos, occasionally order, rarely tantra. Yet these are all false and furphy. The real truth about the (232 year old?) Illuminati is that they are an unfaith-based society.

Specifically, their tenets are agnosticism and infidelity [in several senses, as we may not come to later]. Absense of belief, absence of commitment. Two shadows reflecting each other. We're imprisoned by our beliefs - as soon as we've got them we stop thinking! Like you'd ever stop thinking, you idiot. Well, I'm thinking about stopping, that I might start. So they say. As for infidelity, it's the secret to life on earth, so they say.

What's the point? What do they mean, what would they achieve by these dual idiocies? Could they really achieve anything? Further exposition would mean me getting into a whole heap of arcane, mundane, scientific, pseudo-spurious psychoriffic playgrounds of thought. If the intrigued reader really is, I recommend The Illuminatus Trilogy, by Bob Shea and R.A. Wilson. Just know that it's out of date by several decades, and wrong. That said, I've never read a better account of them and I doubt one exists. Alright, off you go.