Talk:The Illuminati

Is this even affiliated with the real organization? Did they ever use it for anything? If I don't get a yes in a week (preferably with a citation), I'm going to get rid of the "their "Eye in the Pyramid" symbol, called"

Is this even affiliated with the real organization? Did they ever use it for anything?

Who knows? They were a secret society.

I'm going to get rid of , I'm going to get rid of "the their "Eye in the Pyramid" symbol, "the their "Eye in the Pyramid" symbol,

It's widely considered to be their in pop culture, at very least. What's the squirrel in your pants?

Well, some other groups did use it (and seeing as it is still on the one dollar bill, at least one group still uses it). And it rubs me the wrong way to say it belongs to the Illuminati, perhaps with the implication it belongs to no one else, if they never even used the thing.

Even before I just edited the page to specifically say it is not just theirs, there was nothing on the page saying they had sole use of the symbol. Anyway... page edited to specifically state that somebody else also uses the symbol. That should be enough to shut down this digression.

We're not a history wiki, we're a pop culture wiki. This article does not document the historical Illuminati and explore their philosophy, policies and influence on European culture of the 19th Century. It documents the use of a nebulous bunch of (usually) bad guys who use the name "Illuminati" by dozens of works of fiction. In that context, the Eye of Providence has been associated with the Illuminati in American pop culture at least since The Illuminatus Trilogy came out in the sixties, and the trilogy drew on even older traditions and Conspiracy Theories connecting the real Illuminati (or the mythical boogeymen who grew out of them) to the Freemasons, who did use the Eye as a symbol (and by way of whom it made its way onto American money and into other places).

Plus, are you going to tell Steve Jackson Games that they can't have their trademark anymore because you don't approve of how they got it via the Illuminati card game they published forty years ago? <grin>

Seriously, if you try to purge it, Goo, I'm going to have to oppose you on general principles. It's like saying "because the swastika is originally an Asian good luck symbol, I don't approve of it appearing anywhere we talk about Nazis, so I'm going to delete all those images and mentions". It ignores that, whether you like it or not, there is and for a long time has been an association between the two, and deleting references to it won't make it go away -- it'll just put a bizarre hole in what is supposed to be our reasonably comprehensive coverage.

You make it sound like I want to remove the picture and remove all mentions of the eye from the article description. I want to get rid of the part I put in quotes (which would still leave mentions of the eye in the article description), or failing that, change the word "their" to "the". Maybe the confusion came from the fact I accidentally put the quotation mark one word too early in my post (as it led to my "quote" not come entirely and exactly out of the article).

Upon consideration, I don't see any need to get rid of this phrase in this description text. The symbol is pretty well linked to the group now - the Eye even shows up in anime that include the Illuminati as a rumour - so it's pretty obvious at least to me that there's a link between the symbol and the supposed group.

And it's also pretty obvious to me that the article is not talking about the real, historical Illuminati, so asking what the real group did is something of a red herring... isn't it?

One other thing: considering that we currently have one editor saying the reference should be removed and three apparently saying it should stay, I wouldn't be surprised if somebody else adds it back in if it is removed. Is this really something we need an Edit War over?

I doubt this is going to change any minds, but I would like to point out that the Nazis did appropriate the swastika (instead of it being affiliated with them with no action on their part).

Stuff like Freemasons and other real non-illuminati organizations that are the center of conspiracy theories count too right?

Other conspiratorial groups are The Conspiracy, possibly even the Ancient Conspiracy.

This page is Illuminati-only, as far as I can tell.

I was asking because Tropes Are Flexible and the laconic suggested to me that it could be more broad. I just looked at the pages you mentioned and none of them have an explicit requirement of being a (potentially disbanded or destroyed) real life organization.

Does the real, historical, Illuminati have any connection to the Eye of Providence? Wikipedia stated that the Freemasons used the Eye (the eye wikipedia shows of the Freemasons eye doesn't have the triangle, but it does say 'early version' so for all I know they used a triangle version later)