Why does jay z make a triangle

Okay folks, are you ready for the, "Yes, we are actually talking about this" story of the day? Of course you are. In last night's booty-shaking-but-no-lip-syncing Super Bowl halftime extravaganza featuring Beyonce, Destiny's Child and that random person playing guitar brought to you by Pepsi, Beyonce was seen making the symbol of a triangle with her hands. To some folks, this was the clear, definitive proof that Beyonce was in fact a member of the Illuminati, and yes, the Illuminati is shaping your life as we speak.

Seriously, they dictated that sentence to me and I copied it, verbatim. Plus, I tried to make about seven Illuminati jokes in this article and my computer froze every time. You've all been warned. From Jay Busbee of Shutdown Corner :. On Judgment Day, people will wake up and see that they have been duped. But it will be too late. This was the kind of thinking that led to the building of a case against the West Memphis Three. The occult imagination had come too far, though.

And if a musician is still accused of being in league with some secret occult cabal, all the better. The tools of the magician to mystify are the most powerful of all. Printed by permission. Rolling Stone. Log In. To help keep your account secure, please log-in again. You are no longer onsite at your organization. Please log in. Other reports of rituals are harder to confirm, but we know that members were very paranoid and used spy-like protocol to keep one another's identities secret.

But while they were following these bizarre rituals, they also promoted a worldview that reflected Enlightenment ideals like rational thought and self-rule.

Anti-clerical and anti-royal, the Illuminati were closer to revolutionaries than world rulers, since they sought to infiltrate and upset powerful institutions like the monarchy. Historians tend to think the Illuminati were only mildly successful — at best — in becoming influential.

Though, of course, there are also those who believe the Illuminati successfully took over the world — and still control it today. If an all-powerful group does dominate the world, we probably wouldn't know about it. It's also difficult to untangle the success of the Illuminati from that of the Freemasons, which they infiltrated and commingled with. It's just as tough to tell what influence the Illuminati actually had as opposed to the influence people think they had.

We do know the Illuminati had some influential members — along with many dukes and other leaders who were powerful but are forgotten today, some sources think writer Johann Goethe was a member of the group though other sources dispute the claim.

In a way, Illuminati influence depends on what you believe about them. If you think their revolutionary ideals spread to other groups, like the French Revolution's Jacobins , then they were successful.

If you think those ideas would have prospered regardless, then they were mainly a historical curiosity. In , Duke of Bavaria Karl Theodor banned secret societies, including the Illuminati, and instituted serious punishments for anyone who joined them. Most of the group's secrets were disclosed or published, and, if you believe most historians, the Illuminati disappeared. From the moment of the disbanding, however, the myth expanded.

As described in Conspiracy Theories in American History: An Encyclopedia , documents found in the homes of high-ranking Illuminati members like Xavier von Zwack confirmed some of the spookiest Illuminati theories, like their dreams of world domination and cultish behavior even though those documents may exaggerate the truth about the group.

Almost immediately after the Illuminati were disbanded, conspiracy theories about the group sprang up. The most famous conspiracy theories were authored by physicist John Robison in , who accused the Illuminati of infiltrating the Freemasons, and Abbe Augustin Barruel , whose history of the Jacobins promoted the theory that secret societies, including the Illuminati, were behind the French Revolution.

Historians tend to see these as the first in a long line of conspiracy theories though, again, for those who believe the Illuminati run the world today, this is arguably proof of the group's power. Later on, some of the Founding Fathers managed to stoke interest in the Illuminati in the United States. In , George Washington wrote a letter addressing the Illuminati threat he believed it had been avoided, but his mentioning it helped bolster the myth.

In the panic caused by the anti-Illuminati books and sermons, Thomas Jefferson was baselessly accused of being a member of the group. Though these early Illuminati panics fizzled out, they gave the group a patina of legitimacy that, later on, would help make a centuries-long conspiracy seem more plausible.

Conspiracy theories have always been popular in the United States, but for centuries, the Illuminati were less feared than the Freemasons.