I’m not sure if Eminem has yet managed to escape the grasp of the Illuminati—the secret society of string pullers whose ranks he joined years ago in exchange for wealth, fame, and power—but I know he’s been trying very hard. Numerous people online tell me so. There is, for starters, a Yahoo Answers page that poses the question “Is Eminem trying to break free from the Illuminati?” and offers spirited excavation and analysis of the hidden anti-Illuminati messages Eminem embedded in his song “Not Afraid.” There is a four-page message-board thread titled “Is Eminem an Illuminati slave?” A YouTube video called “Eminem vs. Illuminati” explains, via solemn text and creepy music, that when the Detroit M.C. titled a song “Cinderella Man,” it was not because the redemptive plot of the 2005 Ron Howard film Cinderella Man echoes Eminem’s own comeback from drug addiction, but rather because, like Cinderella with her wicked stepsisters, Eminem was “forced to do the chores for the Illuminati by sending subliminal messages through his music.” Ignore any comment-section sheep who bah that this is ridiculous: When that video ends, the hunt for truth has only just begun. From a list of suggested related videos, you can choose “Eminem: His illuminati sacrifice Part 1”; “Eminem Fights Back Against The illuminati”; “Eminem against illuminati 2011!”; “Eminem My Darling Illuminati” and on and on. Some of the Eminem/Illuminati videos have been viewed 5,000 times. Others, close to 300,000.

Welcome to the world of pop-music trutherism, a bustling, grassroots exposé industry in which Eminem is one of many performers called out by anonymous instigators for Illuminist sympathies. The best conspiracy theories go all the way to the top, and this one goes all the way to the top of the charts. Jay-Z? An “Illuminati puppet.” Lady Gaga? An “Illuminati whore.” Kanye West, Lil Wayne, Beyoncé, Rihanna—Illuminati agents all. (Michael Jackson and 2Pac, it turns out, were victims of Illuminati-ordered assassination.) The Illuminati investigation unfolds sloppily but vigorously across countless sites, from YouTube to Twitter to fan discussion boards to dedicated shops like VigilantCitizen.com. The trained eye can spot Illuminati sartorial choices, like goat-themed jewelry and T-shirts, worn in ostensible tribute to Baphomet, a horned pagan deity who intrigued Aleister Crowley. There is Illuminati semaphore, such as framing one’s eye with the palms tipped together in a pyramid shape or otherwise isolating an eye to evoke the “all-seeing eye” on the back of a dollar bill, an image with Masonic origins. There are Illuminati lyrics, like Eminem’s mention of a “New World Order” on “Lose Yourself” or the references he and Jay-Z have made, separately, to a mysterious, powerful figure they call the “Rain Man” (the theorists are apparently unfamiliar with Dustin Hoffman’s IMDb page).

Spend some time sifting through this stuff and your eyes will roll so far back into your skull you’ll look like you’ve been possessed by Baphomet. The theorists’ “revelations” are presented, variously, in portentous tones and with exclamation-point-riddled urgency: The Illuminati, intent on global domination, treat pop music as a powerful mind-control weapon, weaving secret messages and dark imagery into hits and videos; there is much inveighing that we “wake up” to the “brainwashing.” The Illuminati truthers make 9/11 truthers seem as rigorous and compelling as Woodward and Bernstein on Watergate. The evidence they haul out boils down to little more than far-fetched, oblivious misreads (i.e. Eminem and Cinderella), a stunning allergy to the possibility of metaphor (Lil Wayne rapped that he sold his soul to the devil—smoking gun!), and a hysterical attitude toward occult imagery befitting Ned Flanders. With so many voices chiming in, and with so many of them doing so anonymously, it’s hard to say which of the “theorists” are just having a laugh, but the most prominent—like Vigilant Citizen or the Philadelphia morning-radio host Miss Jones, who grilled 50 Cent at some length about secret-society infiltration in hip-hop—communicate total earnestness.

Weishaupt’s Illuminati ran afoul of Bavarian Elector Karl Theodor, who caught the seditious wind and issued a decree in 1784, Magee writes, “commanding them to disband.” Born as a reformist bogeyman opposed to, and ultimately snuffed out by, entrenched power, the Illuminati went under in 1787, but it has lived on in the conservative imagination. In a 1995 New Yorker article about the rise of conspiracy theories in America, Michael Kelly mentions the Illuminati as major phantasms in the so-called New World Order theory, the basics of which were laid out in, among other places, the John Birch Society’s 1958 Blue Book. (The Order of the Illuminati figures centrally into the Rev. Pat Robertson’s 1991 book, The New World Order, too.) In the New World Order theory, Kelly writes, the Illuminati are just one link in the nefarious chain of “secret and semisecret societies arcing across time and cultures” from “early-Christian-era agnostics,” through the Freemasons, to “twentieth century schemers.” The perceived goal of shadow puppeteers such as the Illuminati is “to destroy the established Christian order of Western nations and replace it with an atheistic, socialistic global government.”

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