Ancient and Illuminated Seers of Nigeria Exposed!

I know that lately the sorts of articles I used to post here have fallen by the wayside. It turns out that it takes time and planning to put together the material for the Ritual Night Talks, especially now that I am running the workshops in-person and am also creating and posting the Tuesday night videos. I hope to get back to some content besides the Ritual Night Talks soon, and here's a bit of a preview. Have any of you ever been contacted by the Illuminati? My guess is that many of us have probably seen this particular spam email. It's been around for a long time - I even posted an article on an earlier version of it all the way back in 2014.

While I always have dismissed this as a scam (and it is), I also have idly wondered what happens if you actually reply. Back in 2019, intrepid YouTuber Pleasant Green did just that - he responded to see what would happen and recorded his results in the video embedded above. As it turns out, it's a whole lot less weird than you might expect, and is pretty much a straightforward advance fee scam that can be linked back to - you guessed it - Nigeria. Just like the spam email I mentioned in my 2014 article. The scammer did go to a little more effort than some of the others I've seen debunked, though. In order to make it look like the scammer was in New York, they were using a server farm there located that passed a cursory investigation.

There is of course no "real Illuminati" today. At this point the rumors endure because it's become something of a joke in the music industry. The real Illuminati order was founded by Adam Weishaupt in 1776 in Bavaria as an alternative to Freemasonry, and didn't even last twenty years. Far from being an all-powerful secret society, it quickly folded in the face of repression by the Bavarian government. The modern idea of the Illuminati owes a lot to Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's Illuminatus! trilogy than to anything historical. While it's true that there are a few very wealthy people who run a lot of things all over the world, most are simply pursuing their own self-interest rather than coordinating on some grand scale.

As I've noted here on Augoeides multiple times, the way to get power in the world is to get vast amounts of money, and people who are that focussed on getting vast amounts of money are not generally going to be occultists. You might find some interest among the super-rich who inherited their wealth, but to be a successful entrepreneur at that level requires a degree of obsession that leaves little time and energy for other interests that are time-consuming and require significant effort. That pretty much rules out super-rich magicians - or at the very least super-rich effective magicians.