The Secret of the Order of Cosmopolitans

(New Translation)

In 1788, one year before the French Revolution, Christoph Martin Wieland announced the time had come to reveal the secret of an ancient invisible society. For millennia, he claimed, the Cosmopolitans had exerted an influence on world history that surpassed all other secret orders. Their existence had been hinted at, their name occasionally borrowed by impostors, but their true nature had never been disclosed. Until now.

Wieland was no obscure pamphleteer. As editor of Germany's leading literary journal and a central figure of the Weimar circle alongside Goethe and Herder, he had spent decades navigating the currents of Enlightenment thought. Kant had just published his Critique of Pure Reason. Europe was debating the rights of man. Secret societies were proliferating across the German lands, the Illuminati among them.

Into this charged atmosphere, Wieland delivered his revelation. What he unveiled has puzzled readers ever since. The text refuses easy answers, and perhaps that is the point.

First complete English translation, with an afterword on Wieland and the world of eighteenth-century secret societies.