Round Table Groups
The Round Table Groups are a network of elite policy-planning organisations established in the early 20th century, originally conceived by British diamond magnate and imperialist Cecil Rhodes and subsequently formalised under Alfred Milner. Researchers including Fritz Springmeier, in his landmark work Bloodlines of the Illuminati, identify the Round Table Groups as a critical structural layer of the Illuminati's global governance apparatus — sitting above publicly visible institutions like the Council on Foreign Relations but below the innermost elite councils. Their stated purpose was the promotion of Anglo-American world governance; their alleged deeper function, according to multiple researchers, was to embed New World Order ideology into the foreign policy establishments of Western nations.
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Historical Origins
The intellectual and organisational roots of the Round Table Groups trace back to Cecil Rhodes, who amassed enormous wealth through diamond and gold mining in southern Africa. Rhodes was consumed by a vision of Anglo-Saxon global dominance and sought to create secret structures capable of steering world affairs across generations.
In 1891, Rhodes — together with his mentor William Stead and his banker Lord Nathaniel Rothschild — established what he called the Society of the Elect, a supersecret inner circle whose existence was concealed even from most participants in the broader network Rhodes was building. Rhodes envisioned this as operating like a Jesuit-style order: disciplined, hierarchical, and long-lived, capable of outlasting any individual member.
Fritz Springmeier has documented that Rhodes's inner society was structured in initiatory degrees, and that the outermost tier of the Illuminati's first degree of initiation was functionally equivalent to initiation into societies such as Skull and Bones at Yale. This is significant: it suggests that university-based elite secret societies were not independent phenomena but recruitment funnels for the broader network.
After Rhodes's death in 1902, Alfred Milner — former British High Commissioner to South Africa and a devotee of Fabian-tinged imperialism — took over the organisational task of formalising the Round Table network. Milner worked with a group of Oxford-educated associates known as the Kindergarten (including figures such as Lionel Curtis and Philip Kerr, later Lord Lothian) to restructure the movement, stripping away overt Masonic ritual and making the organisations appear to outsiders as respectable think tanks rather than initiatory brotherhoods.
The Rhodes Scholarship system — funded from Rhodes's personal estate — was established as the primary recruitment pipeline. Top graduates from Britain's dominions, the United States, and select other nations were brought to Oxford, where they were shaped ideologically and, according to Springmeier, introduced to the outer degrees of the Illuminati structure under the guise of academic mentorship.
Key Institutions
The Round Table Groups formalised into several distinct organisations, each with a different national context and — according to researchers — a different position within the initiatory hierarchy.
Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House)
Founded in 1920 following the Paris Peace Conference, the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA), commonly known as Chatham House, is the preeminent British foreign policy think tank. According to Springmeier's mapping of the Illuminati's organisational structure, the RIIA functions as the fourth-degree cover organisation of the Illuminati in Britain — meaning that its visible public membership constitutes an outer ring, while decision-making power flows from a deeper, less visible inner council.
Chatham House is famous for the Chatham House Rule, which permits attendees at meetings to use information received without attributing it to a speaker — a practice that has drawn sustained criticism for enabling elite consensus-formation away from public scrutiny.
Council on Foreign Relations
The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) was established in New York in 1921 as the American counterpart to the RIIA, with shared intellectual heritage from the Paris Peace Conference milieu. Funded heavily by the Rockefeller Foundation and connected to the major American banking dynasties, the CFR has shaped US foreign policy through every administration of the modern era.
Springmeier identifies the CFR as occupying the same structural layer in America as the RIIA does in Britain — an outer-ring policy body that conceals a deeper initiatory structure. The CFR's membership roster has consistently included Secretaries of State, CIA Directors, Federal Reserve chairmen, and major media executives.
The Pilgrim Society
Less widely known than the CFR or RIIA, the Pilgrim Society (founded 1902) is described by Springmeier as the cover organisation for the sixth-degree Princes of the Illuminati in both America and Britain. It brings together Anglo-American elites — banking dynasties, hereditary aristocrats, senior intelligence figures, and heads of state — under the nominal banner of promoting friendship between Britain and the United States.
The Pilgrim Society's membership lists have historically been treated with unusual secrecy, and researchers studying the overlap between Pilgrim Society members and other Round Table-connected organisations have found consistent clustering around the Rothschild banking network, the Rockefeller Foundation, and intelligence community leadership.
The Fabian Society and Political and Economic Planning
The Fabian Society, founded in London in 1884, is ostensibly a gradualist socialist organisation committed to reforming capitalism through incremental legislative change rather than revolution. Its famous logo — a wolf in sheep's clothing — has been cited by researchers as an unusually candid self-description of the organisation's method: patient, concealed, and long-range in its objectives.
Springmeier describes the Fabian Society as an Illuminati front organisation that served the Round Table network's goals by capturing the political left in Britain, ensuring that regardless of which party held power, the long-range agenda of centralised global governance advanced.
Key Fabian figures with Round Table connections include:
- H.G. Wells, who wrote explicitly about the New World Order in his 1940 book of the same name and described a world government administered by a scientific elite — a vision remarkably consistent with the Illuminati programme as described by Springmeier and other researchers.
- George Bernard Shaw, a prominent Fabian who moved in the same Cliveden social circles as the Astor family (see below).
- Lady Nancy Astor, the first woman to sit in the British Parliament, who combined social conservatism with support for Fabian policy positions and whose Cliveden estate served as a key meeting hub.
The Fabian Society's Political and Economic Planning (PEP) group, established in 1931, produced technocratic policy blueprints that fed directly into post-war British governance and the architecture of international institutions such as the WHO and UN.
Astor and Rothschild Connections
The Round Table Groups did not sustain themselves on ideology alone. Behind the intellectual networks stood major dynastic financial interests, most prominently the Astor family in Britain and — through the CFR — the Rockefeller Foundation and Rothschild banking interests in America.
Waldorf Astor (2nd Viscount Astor) was appointed to the governing council of the RIIA at its founding and used his wealth to sustain the institution through its early decades. His wife, Nancy Astor, transformed the family's Cliveden estate in Buckinghamshire into one of the most important informal gathering points for Round Table members, Rhodes Scholars, senior politicians, and allied journalists.
Genealogical and financial research has identified tight linkages between the Astor fortune, Rothschild banking operations, and Rockefeller philanthropy:
- The Rothschild family had financed Cecil Rhodes's original diamond ventures through their associate Alfred Beit.
- The Rockefeller Foundation co-funded the CFR and maintained overlapping board memberships with it throughout the 20th century.
- Researchers such as Carroll Quigley (in Tragedy and Hope) documented that these family networks constituted a coherent financial oligarchy whose policy aims were coordinated rather than coincidental.
Rhodes Scholarships as Recruitment
The Rhodes Scholarship programme remains the most visible public mechanism of the Round Table system. Each year, approximately 100 students from multiple nations are selected and brought to Oxford University for postgraduate study. Selection criteria emphasise not just academic achievement but leadership qualities, character — and crucially — the willingness to exert influence.
Among the most famous Rhodes Scholars is Bill Clinton, who attended Oxford in 1968–1970 before entering Arkansas politics and ultimately the US presidency. The prevalence of Rhodes Scholars in senior government, banking, intelligence, and media positions across the Western world has been extensively documented.
According to Springmeier's analysis, the Rhodes Scholarship is the entry point to the Illuminati's outer-degree network — equivalent in initiatory function to joining Skull and Bones at Yale or similar elite societies at other major universities. Scholars are not necessarily informed of this dimension explicitly; rather, they are cultivated, assessed, and — selectively — brought deeper into the network over subsequent decades.
The connection to Skull and Bones is structural: both systems identify promising young men (and increasingly women), place them in rarefied social environments, bond them through shared experience and mutual obligation, and then track their careers, providing patronage in exchange for loyalty to the long-range agenda.
