The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome

by Michael Hoffman

  15 Francesco Guidi Bruscoli, Papal Banking in Renaissance Rome: Benvenuto Olivieri and Paul III (2007) p. 183.

  16 Cf. Francois Guizot, “Calvin,” in Musee des protestants celebres (1822).

  17 “The Vine Of Israel: A Sermon Delivered by C. H. Spurgeon at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington.” (May 9, 1878).

  18 The Kabbalah consists of several books, the most notable being the Zohar, which was written, like the Babylonian Talmud, mainly in Aramaic. According to academic consensus, it was compiled in the thirteenth century by the Spanish Sephardic Rabbi Moses de Leon (1250-1305). But de Leon himself attributed it to a second century A.D. rabbi, Shimon ben Yohai, whose signature statement was “Even the best of the gentiles should all be killed,” and who is a principal figure in the Zohar, which is a work of sorcery, extravagant superstition and depraved glosses on the Old Testament, though the Establishment press will have none of it, describing it as having a “playful appeal,” and an “endearing mixture of whimsy and sanctity,” as well as a theology of the “universal supremacy of love.” (Jeremy Adler, “Book of Splendour,” Times Literary Supplement, November 4, 2016, p. 29).

  19 London: John Legatt and John Raworth, 1645; reprinted in 1651, 1657, and 1658. The annotations were by a team of scholar-theologians led by Thomas Gataker, John Ley, William Gouge, Meric Casaubon, Francis Taylor, Daniel Featley and John Reading. Their work came to be known as “The Assembly’s Annotations” and “The English Annotations.”

  20 Elizabeth Clarke notes with regard to Protestant annotations (commentary) upon the Bible, that whereas Calvin commenced his religious reform with the idea that the Bible text itself enabled “readers to discern God more clearly,” by the next century Calvinists were of the opinion that, in view of the heresies that had arisen among the Bible readers, good English scholarship was available to prevent the heresies and “fond fantasies” that might result from the reading of an unannotated Bible. “Origen, it is suggested, would not have castrated himself if he had read ‘a Marginal Note upon Matt. 19:12.’ (The note in the Geneva Bible might well have deterred any would-be self-mutilator, insisting that castration is only a metaphor for ‘the gift of continence,’ and that in any case, this gift is very rare: after all, none ‘may rashly abstain from’ that Protestant institution of marriage).” Clarke, Politics Religion and the Song of Songs in Seventeenth Century England (2011) p. 108.

  21 Grebe, The Vatican: All the Paintings (2013), p. 160.

  22 Joseph Campbell, Mythic Worlds, Modern Worlds (2003), p. 153.

  23 Anja Grebe, op. cit., p. 181; emphasis supplied.

  24 Woodrow, Christmas Reconsidered (2006), pp. 20-21 and 41.

  25 W. W. Skeat, Passio Sancti Eadmundi (cf. Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, EETS 94 and 114, vol. II, pp. 314-334); translated from medieval English by Eleanor Parker (http://aclerkofoxford.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/eadmund-se-eadiga-eastengla-cynincg.html).

  Acknowledgment

  As an independent scholar without institutional affiliation, the completion of this book was dependent on benefactors who generously contributed to support our research and writing. Unfortunately, the notion that “error” has no rights has gained a foothold in the United States of late, a fact which would have appalled the Founding Fathers, who considered the doctrine one of the most pernicious aspects of the fratricidal wars of religion in the Old World. Because of this circumstance, we will not name our benefactors in these pages, lest they become a target for loss of reputation, career, or worse. They are known to God and this writer, and our prayer is that their reward will be great, and that tolerance and respect for Christians who radically dissent from the reigning consensus in matters of history and religion, will be restored.

  Chapter I

  More Catholic than the Pope

  The Catholic-Kabbalist Giles of Viterbo gave the inaugural address at the Fifth Lateran Council, where he urged Julius II to crush the aggression of the Islamic Turks. In many cases one can take incidents like that in the lives of the various Catholic players who people our Renaissance chronicle, and extrapolate from those acts the conclusion that they were, for all their “imperfections,” stalwarts of the Faith, who may have “flirted with” or “dabbled in” the occult, or occasionally “went astray” within it, but for the most part they accomplished much good for the true Church in spite of these peccadilloes. That sort of reasoning is like saying that on his way to return the thirty pieces of silver, Judas gave an inspirational, impromptu talk to a gathering of Jews, admonishing them to defend elderly women when they are beset by robbers, and thus we must not be too harsh on him.

  Some of the evil-doers profiled in this book did some good things, in addition to some very bad ones, and they may have uttered pious and orthodox statements from time to time. In San Francisco, at his People’s Temple, Jim Jones funded a soup kitchen that served one and all, no questions asked. Those who would modify the judgment of history on Jim Jones of Jonestown because he distributed free food to an impoverished community, are probably not the ideal audience for this book. The scoundrels we study remain even to this day some of the most accomplished master deceivers in western history. The fraud and masquerade we encounter in these pages is not only a product of a particular conspiracy or cabal, it is older than the pyramids and of an institutional character. One essential element of these diabolists is their doubling: they are two-faced operators for whom double-thinking, double-dealing and double-talk are second nature. The extent of their Janus character would seem to be of an immensity greater than we can imagine. We are in the presence of the servants of an intelligence almost without limit; and second only to God. It is a distant second, but it is nonetheless of a vastness in terms of the extent of its craftiness, guile, deviousness and subterfuge, as to dwarf the ratiocinative powers of mere human beings.

  The epistemological problem an investigator and historian of the actions and impact of this intelligence faces, is in the matter of intention. Much of what the force behind Cryptocracy achieves is so fantastic that humans have difficulty embracing the reality of it, and as a defense-mechanism they dismiss aspects of it which they may occasionally glimpse in their otherwise quotidian world, as “coincidence.”

  Therefore, one hesitates to present what one believes to be true because it is in the nature of mankind to refuse to believe it. The scholar of secret societies takes the risk of damaging his credibility in the eyes of the average reader or listener, by divulging the darkest corners of his research, and hence, there is the temptation to suppress the most freakish and eerie data, and limit oneself to less threatening information and conclusions. If we were to succumb to this temptation, however, then the writing of this book would be pointless. We will risk our credibility in order to convey what we believe to be the whole truth, as we can grasp and articulate it.

  In occult lore the patron of the Vatican is not St. Peter but his double, the deity Janus, who in legend also bears a key. The Vatican, together with the district of London known as “the City,” and Jerusalem, are citadels of occult corruption. The Vatican seems to have had that destiny imposed on it intentionally, from antiquity. The capital of the Church of Rome’s double-talk, double-mind and double-dealing, has as its tutelary deity the Roman god Janus; the god of beginnings, and of doors and passageways. He who held the key of Janus had tremendous authority. The status of Janus was not minor. He was of cosmic significance: “divum deus” (god of gods). 1 These facts were not lost on the Neoplatonic-Hermeticists:

  “According to Aulus Gellius, the word (Vatican) derived from the ancient custom of seeking prophecies (vaticinii) from the guardian deity of the site, and Festus Pompeius 2 similarly connected it to seers (vates)…No student of the Vatican’s pre-Christian importance for occult Rome was more ardent than Giles of Viterbo. Keenly interested in the ancient Etruscans, especially their reputation for esoteric religious lore, Giles points out in his Historia XX saecolorum that Janus, the founder of the Etruscan religion, had been the patron deity… Hence
, the ancient cult of Janus in the Vatican meant that from the earliest times this Roman site had been consecrated for the true religion…A further confirmation of this, Giles suggests, appears in the parallel of Janus and St. Peter as key-bearers.the Mons Vaticanus (w)as the true holy mountain, and from this particular locus of sanctifying grace the whole world came to be governed.” 3

  Hermeticism was an elitist occult philosophy which flourished within the papacy and Neoplatonic Vatican networks from the Renaissance onward. It claims privileged possession of a secret knowledge from antiquity which betokened the potential to revolutionize the believer’s understanding of existence. Access to this knowledge is reserved for the highest levels of the Church of Rome and its agents.

  The occult Church of Rome revealed itself in the art and architecture which it sponsored. In many cases ecclesiastical art and architecture of the Renaissance era is a hieroglyphic representation of theological innovation — the new religion publicly presented in a visual language.

  Here we encounter Humanism opposed to Divinism. As categories, Humanism together with Neoplatonism represent pagan subjectivism advertised as the free spirit’s liberation, just as recourse to the rabbinic texts was presented in the Renaissance in the same terms, as humanity being free at last to access the limitless availability of all knowledge, as a first step in the escape from Catholic bigotry to Catholic liberalism, and from a Scripturally-faithful Catholicism to a pagan gnosis. At the close of the Middle Ages, the early Humanists cultivated the ground for the coming re-entry of Neoplatonic-Hermetic-Kabbalism, a rebirth of the sorcery and heathenism against which the God of Israel had warred in the Old Testament: “It was the fourteenth century crisis of faith in institutions and human virtue that brought into being the first phase of the humanist movement. The hope of Petrarch, his followers Boccaccio and Salutati, and later generations of humanists, was that the sufferings of the present world could be remedied by recovering the virtue of the ancient world they admired so much, and principally the ancient pagan world…

  “As in other humanist works of the fifteenth century…Ficino had a vision of what Christianity could be that is higher and finer than the historical Christianity practiced in his time. The vision was most famously captured in the religious practices depicted in Thomas More’s Utopia, written thirty-two years after (Rev. Fr. Marsilio) Ficino’s apologetic tract (De christiana religione) and…in dependence on Ficino’s theology. Ficino in 1474 is calling for Christians to reform their own theology and praxis along lines similar to those advocated by Pico della Mirandola twelve years later.” 4

  In the course of this pilgrimage, the Humanists picked up, from the Midrash on Noah and Ham, racism, the rabbinic disease, along with the rabbinic theory of Black African subhumanity (Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, in the uncensored Shlomo Pines translation). It is an irony of history that rabbinic racism entered the West in earnest through the popularization, among the ecclesiastical and cultural intelligentsia, of Kabbalistic, Midrashic and Maimonidean texts and traditions.

  In the name of the expansion of knowledge the Renaissance contracted it. God’s light is all expansive, never ending and unlimited. The Renaissance spirit is the embodiment of fraud: the exploration of the bogus “freedom” the serpent offered in the Garden. The “freedom” of the serpent is not a limitless universe, but a hermetically sealed prison, the claustrophobia and blindness of human subjectivity, the theater of our mirrored ego mistaken for the cosmos. The enemies of this gnosis were Augustine and Aquinas, orthodox Catholic guides to the cosmic mind of God, and God’s unfettered Creation. “We see the things you created because they exist. But they exist only because you created them” (The Confessions of St. Augustine, XII). Reality exists within and is generated by the mind of God, the limitless expanse. During and after the Renaissance this reality was eclipsed and falsified by the doctrine of the Kabbalah: Man, the Measure of All Things. This found its expression in Pico della Mirandola’s On The Dignity of Man, a treatise which Pope “Saint” John Paul II regarded as blessed and seminal. The project of “liberation” was in actuality an occluding, self-referential construct which limited humanity to one severely crippled and warped corner of experience, giving rise to the techno-nihilist hell today, predicated upon, paradoxically, mystical superstitions tempting us to play god. Succumbing to these temptations leads to the death of nature, not its enhancement. The great contest in our time is between medieval-Catholic fidelity to nature and Renaissance neo-Catholic consent for the god-man who will “improve” and “perfect” it.

  From the Renaissance onward, the voice of God and the Word of God were diminished, eclipsed by the human will, proceeding from the exalted image of the Catholic-Kabbalistic man-god, to the Protestant utilitarian epikeia of John Calvin, the lawyer who “reconciles” the divine law on usury, through to an accommodation with the situation ethics of the Renaissance, doing violence to the Logos in the process.

  The vision of humanity as the Creator’s image-bearing beings, endowed by that Creator with unalienable rights, is obliterated by the revolt against the Creator’s Law—statutes and judgments which were transmitted to men and women for the protection and enhancement of their iconic status as imago Dei, with God-given rights that are not to be revoked by man. Any revocation is instituted by rebels against God. The primary motivation for this revocation is the lust for money, which in the Renaissance, for the first time in Christian civilization, began to be formally instituted in the form of ecclesiastical permission for subjecting the human being to exploitation by the renting of money. The image of God would henceforth be commodified: the human endowed by God was lowered to the status of the subhuman, the consumer, degraded by a mechanism for aping creation, the process of money breeding money. Man did not evolve from apes. The ape was once a man and under the spell of the Money Power became the beast we have with us today, in designer jeans and a T-shirt.

  Another rabbinic metaphysic: an artificial dichotomy constructed from the promulgation of the illusion of two beings, the human and the hominid: the humans possessed of the spirit of God, and the hominid representing the clutter of useless eaters, the “supernal refuse” as Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Lyady termed them; the occult teaching that there are people who resemble humans but have no God-spirit. Here is the Jew/goy divide, expressed in the western occult in categories such as the secret society dichotomy of “initiate and cowan,” or “reality and phenomena”:

  “At Cambridge University, Lytton Strachey was a member of the Apostles—more properly, the Cambridge Conversazione Society—whose secret proceedings, the reading and discussion of papers behind locked doors…were governed by principles of absolute candor. In the lingo of the (Cambridge) Apostles, other people were mere ‘phenomena’ while they themselves were ‘realities.”

  Since the Renaissance, Rome has been less the Catholic Church and more its own Church, of Rome that is—a Neoplatonic-Hermetic secret society—the locus classicus of which is the Kabbalah, repository of “secret and most arcane wisdom,” and the legends and texts attached to the mythical figure of Hermes (Mercury) Trismegistus. 5

  The usury, magic and paganism which captured the Vatican in the era under examination is vigorously denied by true believers who simply will not allow themselves to countenance it. They choose delusion over truth and call themselves followers of the world’s greatest truth teller. This bipolar mentality is of enormous utility to the dark forces under study. “Traditional” Catholic Bishop Richard Williamson wrote in his column, Eleison Comments, of April 5, 2014, titled “Canonizations Unreal”:

  “The ‘canonization’ of two Conciliar Popes, John XXIII and John-Paul II, is scheduled for the last Sunday of this month, and many believing Catholics are scared stiff. They know that the Conciliar popes have been (objective) destroyers of the Church. They know that the Church holds canonizations to be infallible. Are they going to be forced to believe that John XXIII and John-Paul II are Saints? It boggles the mind. The Archbishop (Marcel Lefebv
re) said that like the mass of modern men, the Conciliar Popes do not believe in any truth being stable. For instance John-Paul II’s formation was based on truth evolving, moving with the times, progressing with the advance of science, etc. Truth never being fixed is the reason why in 1988 John-Paul II condemned the SSPX (Society of St. Pius X) Episcopal Consecrations, because they sprang from a fixed and not living or moving idea of Catholic Tradition. For indeed Catholics hold, for example, every word in the Credo to be unchangeable, because the words have been hammered out over the ages to express as perfectly as possible the unchanging truths of the Faith, and these words have been infallibly defined by the Church’s popes and Councils.”