16th Century SPANISH ILLUMINATI and THE SPANISH JESUITS

The Illuminati is the name of many groups, modern and historical, real and fictitious, verified and alleged. Most commonly, however, The Illuminati refers specifically to the Bavarian Illuminati, perhaps the least secret of all secret societies in the world, described below. Most use refers to an alleged shadowy conspiratorial organization which controls world affairs behind the scenes, usually a modern incarnation or continuation of the Bavarian Illuminati. Illuminati is sometimes used synonymously with New World Order.

Illuminati is a Greek word meaning Illumination a name given to those who submitted to Christian baptism. Those who were baptized were called Illuminati or Illuminated / Enlightened Ones by the Ante-Nicene clergy, on the assumption that those who were instructed for baptism in the Apostolic faith had an enlightened understanding. The Alumbrados, a mystical 16th-century Spanish sect, were among the societies that subsequently adopted the name Illuminati. (Extracted from Crystalinks.com - Illuminati)

Alumbrados of Spain

To the former class belong the alumbrados of Spain. The historian Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo found the name as early as 1492 (in the form iluminados, 1498), but traced them to a Gnostic origin, and thought their views were promoted in Spain through influences from Italy. One of their earliest leaders, born in Salamanca, a laborer's daughter known as La Beata de Piedrahita, came under the notice of the Inquisition in 1511, as claiming to hold colloquies with Jesus and the Virgin Mary; some high patronage saved her from a rigorous denunciation. (Menendez Pelayo, Los Heterodoxos Espa–oles, 1881, vol. V.). Ignatius Loyola, while studying at Salamanca in 1527, was brought before an ecclesiastical commission on a charge of sympathy with the alumbrados, but escaped with an admonition. (Extracted from Crystalinks.com - Illuminati)

CONCLUSION of  the Book - Heresy and Mysticism in 16th Century Spain: The Alumbrados ( You can download the eBOOK in pdf format and READ it HERE.)

How should the alumbrados be assessed? There has been a tendency in Spanish historiography, which can already be perceived in the sixteenth century, to look at the alumbrados with a certain sense of affection: they were indeed heretics, but they were Spanish heretics; their heterodoxy was the outcome of excessive zeal rather than of any deep hostility to Catholicism. The alumbrados of Toledo came close to Lutheranism, but they did not go as far as Lutheranism. Contemporaries and later theologians could thus point to them in order to show how lightly Spain had been let off and to express their gratitude to the Inquisition which had guarded the peninsula so effectively. In judging the heresy we must make certain distinctions. We must distinguish between what the alumbrados of Toledo actually taught and how their teaching was presented by the inquisitors. At an early stage the movement was associated with manifestations of hysteria and of moral depravity which were altogether alien to the doctrine of Isabel de la Cruz, Alcaraz and Maria de Cazalla. We must then detach Isabel de la Cruz and her followers from the later groups of Extremadura and Andalusia, even if the presence of the disciples of John of Avila makes the distinction sometimes less obvious than it might at fIrst seem. There is no doubt of the evangelical aspirations of the first alumbrados, however formless and contradictory their doctrine may sometimes seem to have been. What they would have become had the Inquisition not intervened when it did, how far they would have dared to go in a society preponderantly hostile to them, are among the many questions thrown up by history which can only be answered with speculation. Elsewhere in Europe we see men and women, undaunted by a persecution far more ferocious, who persisted in their beliefs and finally succeeded in founding churches of their own. The most obvious examples are the Anabaptists and certain groups of Protestants. Would the first alumbrados ever have wished to go so far? If we take the development of Juan de Valdes as an indication the answer would appear to be no. Valdes was always cautious in his attitude to the Catholic Church: he never broke with it and enjoyed his ecclesiastical benefices until his death. Such behaviour may have been the result of indifference. The senselessness he attributed to all ceremonies led him and his followers in Naples to practise a form of 'Nicodemism' or simulation, outwardly conforming but actually retaining their own evangelical beliefs. Mter his death, a few of Valdes's admirers did indeed leave the Church of Rome and go over to Protestantism, while others remained loyal to the papacy. Valdes's later works were published by Protestants north of the Alps, but were repeatedly condemned by the more orthodox members of the Reformed Churches.

In Spain men with asimilar background to the first alumbrados and who were directly or indirectly associated with the movement also adopted different positions. Their sentences to the stake suggest that Juan del Castillo, Juan Lopez de Celain and perhaps Alonso Garzon had committed themselves to Protestantism to an unacceptable degree. The majority, however, remained attached to Roman Catholicism. Miguel de Egufa was thus buried in a Franciscan habit, while his brother, with Manuel de Miona and Miguel de Torres, joined the Jesuits. Indeed, the Society of Jesus, which managed to combine so many elements that had seemed to be in conflict with one another earlier on in the century, was an obvious haven for men once attracted
by evangelism and who continued to believe in the reform of the Catholic Church. 

By 1600 the Jesuits were firmly established in Spain. Dominican hostility persisted, but Loyola's movement had won. It was, as it always had been, many-sided. There were cases of apocalypticism, of members ofthe Society who adopted the same Joachist ideas which had once been popular among the Franciscans and who were persuaded that the Jesuits were the men of providence prophesied by the Cistercian. There were also cases of mystical extravagance, of raptures and trances. Yet what prevailed was a more sober spirituality. Loyola's Ejercicios espiriruales, considerably emended since its presentation to the prayer groups in Alcala, was read more widely than ever in the seventeenth century, but another highly popular work, first published in Seville in 1609, was Alonso Rodriguez's Ejercicio de peifeccion yvirtudes christianas. Far longer than Loyola's book, Rodriguez's Ejercicio, reprinted over the years and circulated throughout the world, lays an emphasis on the asceticism which was to characterise Catholic orthodoxy rather than on mysticism.

With the other writers on mystical practices Rodriguez provided the standard aspersions of the alumbrados, condemning their passivity. We must, he said, cooperate with God at all times, even when practising a kind of mental prayer 'extraordinary and outstanding', 'extraordinaria y aventajada', which could not be taught, which was rare and brief, which must not be aimed at but could only be received, and about which Rodriguez was wary in the extreme. The acclaim with which Rodriguez's book was greeted reflected the changes which had taken place in the Society after the death of its more mystical members, Antonio Cordeses and Baltasar Alvarez. By the early seventeenth century the Jesuits owed much oftheir influence both to their gifts as educators and to the confraternities, composed almost entirely of laymen, which they had managed to organise all over Europe.s Like the other sodalities which abounded in the sixteenth century and later, these too had their forerunners in the Middle Ages. But the Jesuit congregations combined devotional practices, including meditation, with an active participation in propagating the Catholic faith and the performance of works of charity, and can perhaps be regarded as the most successful descendants of the prayer groups which Loyola had assembled in Alcala in the 1520s. But prayer groups, as the history ofthe alumbrados shows, could also lead in different directions. The alumbrado conventicles in the south of Spain had been reading respectable devotional literature, including Loyola's Ejercicios espirituales. They had connections with men of unquestioned piety, Jesuits and disciples of John of Avila. Yet, convinced of their own incapacity to sin, they drew ever further away from the orthodox teaching ofthe Church, practised religious ceremonies and performed religious duties only among themselves, and at the same time indulged in various degrees of lasciviousness.

The alumbrados of Llerena and Seville could hardly have been further removed in beliefs and practices from the followers of Isabel de la Cruz. Ecstatic manifestations of mystical unity with the Almighty seem to have held a central place in the conventicles of Extremadura and Andalusia, while it was these very manifestations which the alumbrados of Toledo had repudiated. Their social situation was also different. The later alumbrados may occasionally have been able to beguile reputable members of the Church, but they were far from having the protection of the aristocracy and the support of the learned which characterised the alumbrados of Toledo. The alumbrados of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century are more reminiscent in their behaviour of eccentric religious movements elsewhere in Europe. In the north, in England, the Low Countries and Germany, certain sectarians, members of the Family of Love and of other groups descended from the Anabaptists, displayed the same belief in their own divinity in the 1560s and 1570s. Their members had read works of mysticism, especially the late medieval Theologia Germanica with its description of the 'godded' man. And however common the accusation of lechery, advanced indiscriminately by enemies of heterodoxy, it would certainly appear to have been justified where some of the Familists and their fellow sectarians were concerned.  The relative lack of official control in many parts of northern Europe meant that it was possible for sects to flourish in remote areas. Their members could intermarry or simply copulate; they could organise their own religious services and improvise their own form of priesthood, without too much danger of denunciation and prosecution. Theglimpsesweare afforded of the alumbrado groups in Extremadura and Andalusia suggest that they had little future, even if they were part of a recurrent phenomenon. They were regarded as aberrations examples of the misunderstanding to which the most orthodox devotional literature can lend itself. They played into the hands of the enemies of mysticism who used them, in more or less good faith, to discredit the teaching in all its forms. The evangelism ofthe alumbrados ofToledo, on the other hand, was attended by a genuine desire to reform the Church which found its way into various channels, both orthodox and heterodox, and did have a future, although historians may disagree as to what it was. (You can READ and DOWNLOAD the eBOOK HERE.)