I asked the C's about whether the undergrounders had created the Illuminati and other human secret societies:
There may be some parallelism happening, with the Freemasons possibly emerging from the Atlantean survivors that founded Egypt, deep-level punctuators such as Sargon doing extra 'civilisational founding work', and the later "Rosicrucians" infiltrating the Masons, although we also have this question of "bloodlines":
This, plus the the other excerpts you quoted, suggest to me that the name "Illuminati" is fairly recent, the name perhaps coined by Weishaupt, although it may have been infiltrated and used as a new 'front' for a Rosicrucian secret cabal that has changed names many times throughout the last few thousand years of history. So, I tend to agree with Approaching Infinity:
Regarding the origin of Bramley's "Brotherhood of the Serpent", Pierre's question about "Frankish cabalists" is interesting. One wonders what the relationship between said cabalists and the Rosicrucians is?
Laura wrote about the Franks in
The Wave, Chapter 31:
Interesting that the whole "Priory of Sion" scam was set up to get the
Holy Blood, Holy Grail book written and try to create the association between the Merovingians and the "bloodline of Jesus". Were the 'Illuminati' behind this effort? How inbred are the Merovingian genes at present, I wonder?
There are a number of interesting threads to pull on here, but I'll leave it at that for the moment.