Adam Weishaupt was a Bavarian legal scholar and professor of canon law at the University of Ingolstadt in Germany.
On May 1, 1776, he founded the secret society of the Illuminati to spread Enlightenment ideas and oppose superstition and abuses of power. The society drew many intellectuals for a time, but it dissolved around 1785 when the Bavarian government banned secret societies, and Weishaupt was driven out of Bavaria. Conspiracy theories that “the Illuminati survived and controls the world” were passed down afterward, and the society also became the subject of the Illuminati card game.
