A collection of 8,128 generative NFTs.
50% of the mint and secondary royalties will go into the Illuminati Collective, a governance DAO for the community.
To you who bear witness, we say WELCOME.
We are the stern prescient, the unrepentant present who enter the secret and serpentine nests of KNOWLEDGE and pursue the tenets of TRUTH without resentment.
We are the knowing unknown. We are those who REMAIN.
After centuries of ritual, calculation, sacrifice, and research, we present to you few:
The Illuminati Non-Fungible Token—the COUNTERSIGN for a secret society on the blockchain.
These 8128 generative TOKENS, crafted in chaos, fire, and MAGIK, will be delivered only to the DEVOUT at an undisclosed time. This iconography, revealed to the minds of our priesthood in visions through the whispers of spirits and daemons, is available only to those who crave KNOWLEDGE and WISDOM, and who seek to lift high those of great MERIT and those of great ACHIEVEMENT.
If you wish to see the TRUTH, if you wish to take your place in the CIRCLE, you must be brave enough to look.
Although it is widely rumored that Alex Taub is in fact three identical and highly motivated clones, the truth is both much simpler and much stranger: he possesses both a keen and focused will, and an ancient arcane power known as the Great Do. The Great Do allows AJT to multitask at superhuman speed, while also directing any number of groups of like-minded mortals, spirits, and constructs to accomplish tasks of almost unimaginable variety. Although it is unclear how the Great Do is acquired, it is believed that only one person in a generation can control this power, and that throughout history, most of its most famous wielders were generals (notably Cyrus the Great, Julius Caesar, and George S. Patton). AJT has put the power of the Great Do to a more peaceful use - writing blog posts, founding several companies (including Upstream, a social professional network), and teaching business development classes, all while acting as one of the Illuminati’s Triumvirate of Ancients. Just try to keep up.
As one of the Illuminati’s summoning ancients, Kuriyama has traveled the globe assembling teams for various missions, all dedicated to freeing minds and souls trapped by the structures that seek to keep us all bound and thoughtless. It is unclear if his recurring visions of the future are predictive, or if he actually alters the path of the future with his mind, though some have speculated that his moniker “Timehacker” suggests the latter. He is the founder and CEO of 1 Second Everyday, an app that allows users to record the events in their lives in safety and privacy. Now he also acts as a member of the Illuminati Triumvirate, bringing forth and uniting disparate spirits, entities, forces, and talented individuals, and wielding them as one. His landscape-altering plans for the Illuminati Collective will be unveiled as time passes.
Possessed of the ability to create pocket universes with their own physics, rules, and dimensional organization through his artwork, the origins of Process Grey are unclear. References to the “bearded grey oaken man” seem to be a recurring theme throughout history. The figure appears in the journal of Michelangelo (the “mystic oak-dwarf”) and even our own Kit Marlowe, who calls him “that broad grey spirit of terrible, divine pictures,” and dating as far back as the recently-recovered diaries of Ur-Nammu (21st c. BCE), who mentions “the grey wood spirit who draws futures and speaks nonsense.” We are unsure if he is immortal, having lived through the past 4000+ years, or if he has become “unstuck” in time, and that his timeline passes in and out of our common experience. He may even be both, experiencing time backward relative to the rest of us. Regardless, he is the most mysterious of the Illuminati Triumvirate.
The result of Erisian ritual combined with advanced robotics and black-market surgery, and steeped in the chaos magick that pervades the U.S. capitol, the cyborg known as FREEGAS refers to himself as a “brain-in-a-tank,” though in this case the “tank” is a fourteen-foot tall humanoid robot with four arms and a disquieting grin. Although major reconstruction to the ancient Illuminati headquarters had to take place to keep FREEGAS from shattering every doorway he passed through, bringing him and his Niftylabs code-ghost partner Neo into the sanctum has been well worth it. Plus, the new vaulted ceilings are awesome. No longer in need of physical nourishment, FREEGAS literally devours bits of code, with an epicurean taste for viruses (which he describes as “tangy”), bugs (“juicy”), and bots (“salty”) of all kinds.
Not so much a “sorcerer of code” as a “sorcerer within the code,” the being known as Neo has shed its mortal and corporeal shell in favor of an entirely digital existence, subject only to the whims of its own feed and certain underlying patterns invisible to the rest of us. It seems to spend much of its time swimming the servers near New York City, though its origins have been traced as far back as Ann Arbor, Michigan. Neo came to the attention of The Ancients after they received a message from Eris to seek out “my favorite child among those who reside in the third web.” Neo has formed a strange sort of symbiosis with the cyborg known as FREEGAS. No one completely understands the nature or purpose of this relationship (which they call NiftyLabs), but it certainly seems to make them far more powerful. Don’t even try playing video games with it - it’s not remotely fair.
Pentabruce the Saturated was spawned during a blizzard on a clifftop after a three-day Discordian ceremony that went hilariously wrong and - rather than summoning a spirit of salvation - brought forth a Raven daemon. It goes this way sometimes, especially with Eris. His mind is a labyrinth made of squishy, polished stones in a slurry of wet chalk, and he has dedicated his existence to rectifying the propositions that: 1)Everything anyone can think of is true, and; 2)Nothing at all is true, and it never has been. He likes making things (music, video, art, puzzles, furniture, food), some of which actually see the light of day from time to time. He wants you to solve his puzzles, but he doesn’t mind you losing some hair doing it. He’s not at all convinced that you exist, and given the opportunity, he will poke you with a stick to find out.
Actually two complete psyches inhabiting a single body, Müde Augen received his moniker in this realm after explaining how hard it was to focus on films or video games “with only these two tiny eyes.” After traveling to our universe via astral projection, the being known as the High Priest of the Spider made contact with a willing host - an already mysterious figure known only as “Scott.” The Scott body has since developed the unnerving habit of disappearing for brief periods to “feed on the shadows.” It is currently unclear if he performs this ritual rather than sleep or if he’s actually eating… something, but he no longer seems to either sleep or eat in the conventional fashion. His two entwined personalities also tend to talk to each other out loud when they believe they are unobserved. He has a puppy named Carnaxias, Destroyer of the Endless and Terror of the Six Realms (Alton for short).
Outer Planes
The Illuminati’s very own nocturnal Pythia, All-Seeing (known in other realms as Sydney Brafman) acts as the organization’s link to worlds both terrestrial and stygian. Somehow able to communicate equally well to new aspirants and primordial beings of dark and distant universes, she is further able to communicate through the language of kinetic light pathways. The origins of her scrying and far-speaking powers are unknown, as she provides a different tale each time she is asked. She has claimed apprenticeship to an Aztec curandero, training under the philosopher Ramanuja, time spent at the knee of Sun Tzu, and battle-hardening as a shield-maiden with Harald Hardrada. Perhaps none of these things is true, and she’s merely a brilliantly-gifted witch of some kind. Or perhaps they are all true, as her particular sensitivity to daylight suggests that her powers may indeed be of the occult and supernatural variety.
Summoned by the ancients to manage the Creative Horde when the circle was on the brink of collapse, the multi-universal being known as SEINAHPETS extrudes herself into this dimension in the form of a human, but it is commonly believed amongst the faithful that the entity we know is only a tiny fraction of her true form, like a fingertip poked into the water of a fishbowl. This makes sense, given what she has come here to accomplish, which is the creative equivalent of herding rabid hippogriffs. It has been estimated that in order to accomplish this she must actually have at least five brains and twenty-three arms, but the one member of our circle to ever accidentally see her true form has been remanded to the custody of St. Hypocrates the Ghastly’s Hospital for the Criminally Skittish ever since, so we may never know.