Conspiracy charts are obsessed with bloodlines. So here is theirs — 230 years of one continuous document being edited. Unlike the arrows on those charts, every link below is a dated, citable publication.
Founded 1 May 1776. Suppressed by edicts of Karl Theodor of Bavaria between 1784 and 1787. It existed for about a decade, and then it was over.
Two books, months apart, independently blaming the French Revolution on the Illuminati infiltrating Freemasonry. The founding texts of the entire modern genre. The defect is present at birth: the order had been dead a decade when these books said it steered Europe.
The panic crossed the Atlantic and Jefferson was smeared as an Illuminati agent in the 1800 election. Elapsed time from invention to campaign attack: about three years.
Appears in Russia. The Times of London proves in 1921 that it was plagiarized from Maurice Joly's 1864 satire about Napoleon III. Exposure doesn't kill it — it makes it portable.
Webster reached Barruel and Robison through the French Revolution, then fused their Illuminati story with the Protocols into an explicitly antisemitic system. She was involved with the British Union of Fascists. Before her: an anti-Masonic panic about a dead Bavarian club. After her: a theory of Jewish world control wearing the Illuminati's name. Everything downstream carries this join, whether or not the person repeating it knows.
'The Insiders' and the CFR framing bring the lineage into mainstream US politics; Allen's paperback sells in the millions.
A bestseller carrying Webster-descended material to mainstream evangelical audiences. Critics at the time traced the sourcing back through Webster to the Protocols.
Reptilians grafted on. Structurally the 'Babylonian Brotherhood' is the same architecture with a species swapped in for an ethnicity — which is precisely why it feels safe to repeat while staying the same shape underneath.
Industrialized distribution.
The innovation isn't content, it's format. The audience became co-authors — 'do your own research' as a decoding hobby — which made the belief identity-bearing, and therefore argument-proof.