But it’s hard to believe that the pop singer, who is preparing for the Super Bowl halftime show, hadn't already heard it all. After all, an entire corner of the Internet believes her daughter is the Antichrist.

Beyoncé and her husband, Jay-Z, are just two of the popular music stars whose ties to the so-called Illuminati have come in for Zapruder-level scrutiny online, on sites like Vigilant Citizen, Media Exposed, and, yes, Beyonce-Illuminati.com.

The fear of the entity known as the Illuminati is neither unique — Bey and Jay join Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Ke$ha, Kanye West, and practically every prominent banker and politician on Earth is under conspiracy theorists' microscope — nor novel. The original Bavarian Illuminati, a short-lived Enlightenment group devoted to overthrowing the local government, would likely have been forgotten, said "Occult America" author Mitch Horowitz, had Scottish physicist John Robison not speciously alleged in 1797 that the group had infiltrated the Freemasons and instigated the French Revolution.

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