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 Iscariot was their patron saint. For as a rule, rebels are loyal to each other, and members of a secret society practice loyalty at least in self-defense. But the Illuminati spied upon, cheated and betrayed each other.

Indeed, the downfall of the Order was brought about by two of its own members who, to save their own skin, revealed its high mysteries to the authorities, before it entered upon the tenth year of its "illumination." Whereupon the Bavarian Government issued an edict against it, many of its members were deported, and Weishaupt was deprived of his professorship and banished to Switzerland. Its secret doctrines, however, continued to spread over Europe. They leavened more or less all the subsequent revolutions and found good soil for a time in the United States.

John Humphrey Noyes, who became, through what he called "a second conversion," a perfectionist, founded the Oneida Community and, harking back to the Illuminati and beyond them towards the East