The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome

by Michael Hoffman

  The Magi: A Cautionary Tale

  Furthermore, Weyer’s use of the Magi in the Jesus infancy narrative as an alibi for the Christian practice of “natural” or “white magic” in Catholicism is a vexation that is still with us. Close students of the Bible whose integrity is intact can see that the Word of God makes zero distinctions between “good” and “bad” magic: they are all condemned without reserve. The assumption that the Magi were benevolent is not found in the New Testament. It is a widely held assumption which would seem to be at variance with a crucial, overlooked fact: the Magi revealed the existence of the infant Jesus to the murderer Herod. St. Matthew’s description of them, using the Greek word, magoi, derived from the Persian word magus, denotes a priest of the Persian religion, i.e. Zoroastrianism. The numerous Biblical injunctions against magic, whether of Zoroaster or anyone else, gives pause to the widespread assumption that the Magi were unambiguously virtuous. It seems that they may perhaps have became so in the presence of the Christ child, when they bowed to worship Him (Matt. 2:11); although even that may have been a ruse. If they were sincere in their alleged adoration, then their days of practicing the magic of Zoroaster would have come to an end at that moment, yet the Scripture is silent on any such possible conversion. Ficino promulgated the identification of the Persian Magi as Zoroastrians.

  One Bible commentary states, under the heading, The ‘Star’ Seen by Astrologers after Jesus’ birth:

  “The ‘astrologers from eastern parts,’ hence from the neighborhood of Babylon, whose visit to King Herod after the birth of Jesus resulted in the slaughter of all the male infants in Bethlehem, were obviously not servants or worshipers of the true God. (Matt. 2:1-18) As to the “star” (Gr., a’Ster’) seen by them, many suggestions have been given as to its having been a comet, meteor, a supernova, or, more popularly, a conjunction of planets. It is also notable that only these pagan astrologers ‘saw’ the star. Their condemned practice of astrology and the adverse results of their visit, placing in danger the life of the future Messiah, certainly allow for, and even make advisable, the consideration of their having been directed by a source adverse to God’s purposes as relating to the promised Messiah. It is certainly reasonable to ask if the one who ‘keeps transforming himself into an angel of light,’ whose operation is ‘with every powerful work and lying signs and portents,’ who was able to make a serpent appear to speak, and who was referred to by Jesus as a ‘manslayer when he began,’ could not also cause astrologers to ‘see’ a starlike object that guided them first, not to Bethlehem, but to Jerusalem, where resided a mortal enemy of the promised Messiah.” 50

  Those who may be offended by a skeptical view of the delightfully quaint, Christmas-themed interpretation of a star which is followed by benevolent Magi, should be aware that this interpretation has been repeatedly cited by occultists and employed as a loophole through which to drive their claim of the existence of “good magic” in the New Testament. On June 23, 1439, during the Council of Florence, in the city which would become the citadel of the Neoplatonic-Hermetic infiltrators of the Catholic Church, reggimenti of the city of Florence engaged in an extravagant ritual dressed like the Magi. These Palleschi 51 were members of a Florentine secret society, the Compagnia de’ Magi, which was organized and funded by the Medici.

  In 1459, Cosimo de’ Medici spent a large sum for an art work executed by Benozzo Gozzoli, The Journey of the Magi, a fresco which was displayed at Cosimo’s palace. He had another Magi-fresco installed in his monastic quarters in San Marco. The Medicis’ obsessive identification with the magicians from the East culminated in Sandro Botticelli’s breathtakingly beautiful 1475 painting, Adoration of the Magi, which depicts Cosimo as the Magus kneeling in front of the Virgin, and his two sons as the other two Magi. Brigitte Tambrun asserts that Cosimo’s Magi fixation was an integral part of his mission for the revival of Neoplatonism in Florence. 52 Time and again in occult literature we find reference to the Magi having used “white magic” in the “Christmas story,” with the implication that this lends support to the practice of other forms of “good magic.”

  Brigitte Tambrun: “Plato makes his return because he is the inheritor at the same time of the Magi…and of Hermes…The fresco of Benozzo Gozzoli presents a genealogy of wisdom: the Magi — Plato — Christ, doubled by a geographical orientation…Orient—Greece—Florence…while at the same time always recalling and referring to the point of origin: the oriental Magi are the originators of the wisdom of the Greeks—Pythagoras, 53 Plato, Plotinus, Plethon—are the inheritors, and this wisdom comes to Florence thanks to the Medici who gather it.”

  The Catholic artist “Hieronymus Bosch” (Joen van Aken; 1450-1516), included in his painting of the visit of the Magi to the Christ child, The Adoration of Magi (circa 1494), macabre and foreboding details which haunt the scene and subtly undercut the benevolent aura surrounding the Magi.

  As the Magi approach Mary and the infant Jesus, “Staring out from the (doorway of the) crumbling, thatched-roof stable…is a red-faced figure usually associated with the Antichrist…With an unsettling grin; naked, creamy white limbs; glittering jewelry and golden spiked headdress, he suggests not the subject’s solemnity but what will become a constant theme in Bosch’s paintings—the inescapable dualism in the world of good and evil. Additional details—such as the grim, ghostlike face that peers through the rotting wall at right; an ominous owl in the rafters clutching its prey; and in the distance, a tiny figure pulling a horse ridden by a monkey (the latter a symbol of lust) and approaching a brothel (its flag a giveaway)…” 54

  A project of gargantuan megalomania

  The texts attributed to Plato and Hermes, and later the rabbinic Kabbalah were advertised in various guises, as “harbingers of Christ,” and “testifying to the divinity of Christ.” This pretense of the prisca theologia and philosophia perennis was embraced by many Renaissance Catholic intellectuals at the highest levels of the Vatican and widely proclaimed by Johannes Reuchlin and many others, in opposition to Judaic converts to Catholicism such as Johann Pfefferkorn, who contested it vigorously. True Catholics however, perceived that Hermetic Neoplatonism and Kabbalism seemed to agree with Christianity only on “a surface level of common signifiers.”

  The central tenet of the Kabbalah is a project of gargantuan megalomania: making an Absolute of the human intellect. Neoplatonic humanism, expressed by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in his Oration on the Dignity of Man, reflects a similar perverted hubris; the spirit of autonomy which seduced our first parents—that salvation lies in grasping Being, not God’s grace. The line of “old sages” who “grasped this Being” were dubbed by Barlaam of Calabria, “Enlightened-ones, Illuminati,” on the Neoplatonic model of an elite consisting of “true philosophers.” 55

  Neoplatonic-Hermeticism infiltrated the Church under an aura of intense Catholic piety and devotion. The conspirators went through the motions and assumed the forms of devotion.

  “When Ficino publicly commented upon St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans in the Cathedral of Florence, some time at the end of 1497, he was not only echoing a long tradition of ancient and medieval exegesis of the Pauline epistles. He was also reiterating a position that he had started to develop in the 1470s in his treatise on St. Paul’s rapture (De Raptu Pauli) and in his Platonic Theology, regarding the soul’s divine powers. At the time he delivered his interpretation of Romans, he had completed his commentaries on Plato, Plotinus and other major Neoplatonic philosophers, and he was about to publish his commentary on Dionysius the Aeropagite. These works had a profound impact on Ficino’s reading of Romans…Ficino saw Plato and his Neoplatonic successors as theologians rather than philosophers, that is to say, as divinely inspired…In this context, St. Paul perfectly embodied the model of Christianity as Ficino understood it: a form of mystical spirituality in agreement with Neoplatonic metaphysics…” 56

  Hermetic Renaissance Catholicism is supposed to be a religion purified of negativity and illusion; the hig
her type of Christianity. But it is not Christianity. It is the gnostic religion of Buddha and Ammon-Re, not of the God of Israel, or the Bible, or Jesus Christ. In this religion the world is a horrible place. “Hermes tells Tat that those who partook in the gift of God regard time spent here as a misfortune. ‘Disregarding the gross and the subtle, they hasten to the One alone.” 57 In this religion magic talismans are recommended by Catholic clerics like Ficino: “If you obtain these Phoebean stones which we have been talking about, you will have no need to impress images on them. You should hang them, encased in gold, around your neck, on a yellow silk cord, when the Sun passes through Aries or Leo and is ascendant, or when it is mid-sky and facing the Moon.” 58 It is this Ficino who, on October 6, 1487, Lorenzo de’ Medici recommended be made Bishop of Cortona.59 Some seventeen years earlier, Cosimo de’ Medici had appointed Fr. Ficino head of the Platonic Academy of Florence, which featured research, publications and public lectures by Cristoforo Landino and others for the indoctrination of the Catholic hierarchy and elite laymen into the new religion.60

  The Inquisition in Legend and Reality

  The magical doctrine of Hermes Trismegistus circulated unimpeded in Spanish universities, monasteries and the Escorial library of the Spanish kings throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is our contention that “notoriously repressive,” papally-chartered institutions such as the Spanish Inquisition were not only friendly toward Neoplatonic-Hermeticists such as Ficino — by the time of the Renaissance the Inquisition had been mostly captured by those intellectual forces.

  The Spanish Inquisition in the Renaissance was tasked with crushing conservative Catholics who were on the trail of executive members of the Church of Rome’s occult Cryptocracy. Evidence of the former is provided by the nineteenth century Spanish-Catholic historian Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo in his Historia de los heterodoxos espanoles, in which he records that Marsilio Ficino was left untouched by the Inquisition in Spain and his works and the influence of Hermes Trismegistus were allowed to flourish. “If the Sainted Office of the Inquisition can be accused of anything, it would be in not having restricted the circulation of books that well-deserved its rigors.” 61

  Catholic libraries in Spain in the sixteenth century were well-stocked with occult books admitted into circulation by the Inquisition. The works of Marsilio Ficino, the magical treatises attributed to Hermes Trismegistus and “Hermetic works in general” enjoyed “orthodox status.” 62

  Ficino’s magical doctrines were disseminated throughout “Inquisitorial Catholic Spain” by such luminaries of Throne and Altar as Pedro Mexia (1497-1551), secretary to the Spanish Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and an author of books such as Silva de varia lección, patronized by Spain’s bishops, cardinals and royalty. In his Silva, Mexia popularized Father Ficino’s treatise on the occult properties of stones, including the use of aetites, which is related to the stone magic of the Babylonian Talmud, in tractate Shabbat 66b. In pagan lore, aetites are reputed to ward off the female demons who cause complications for pregnant women. Superstition of this sort from Ficino pertaining to avoiding a gaze from a menstruating woman, evil eye bewitchment and the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus, were published in popular books approved by the Church in Spain. One of the high Spanish officials responsible for circulating the works of Ficino and Hermes in Spain was Charles V’s ambassador to London and Venice, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza.

  The Spanish government’s slow decay into an impenetratable thicket of bureaucracy and regulation can be traced in part to its faith in the pagan model of law that Ficino’s followers were free to disseminate under the Holy Inqusition. Hugo de Celso, author of the highly influential 1538 magnum opus, Las leyes de todos los reynos de Castilla (The Laws of All the Kingdoms of Castile), was one of sixteenth century Spain’s most eminent legal authorities. In his book, Celso informed the Church and aristocracy of Spain that their laws were derived, “According to Marsilio Ficino” from “the philosopher Plato” and “Prometheus” who “received the laws that Mercury (Hermes) gave him.”

  Hector Pinto (1528-1584) 63 Professor of Scripture at the University of Coimbra (Portugal), in his seminal book, Imagen de la vida cristiana (Image of the Christian Life), which was translated from Portuguese and circulated widely in Spain, elaborated upon Ficino’s claims concerning the sources of the law of Catholic nations. Pinto listed these as Osiris, (Egypt’s god of magic), Zoroaster and Mercury (Hermes). Pinto adds that “anyone who wishes to see this in detail should read Ficino on Plato…” 64

  The eminent Spanish-Catholic jurist associated with the School of Salamanca, Jerónimo Castillo de Bobadilla, in his legal treatise, Política para Corregidores y Señores de vasallos, en tiempo de paz y de guerra y para prelados en lo espiritual y temporal (“Policy of Magistrates and Lords of Vassals in Peacetime and in War, and of Prelates Spiritual and Temporal”), which formed the administrative foundation of the law in the reign of the arch-papist, King Philip II, specifies that the laws of Spain are derived from Hermes Trismegistus, Zoroaster and Plato.

  An extraordinary case of Renaissance-Catholic powers importing Judaizing ideas into Christendom is found in the account of the compilation and circulation of the Plantin Polyglot Bible. A Catholic exegete and translator of ancient Hebrew into Latin, who interpreted the Bible in conformity with rabbinic lies and malice, was the erudite Italian-Dominican, Sanctes Pagninus (1470-1536), a one-time student of Savonarola, who had led Pagninus on the path to the authentic Catholic Hebrew Republic of true Israel. Pagninus turned his coat however, and joined the Talmudic/Kabbalistic counterfeit, where he used the rabbinic glosses of David Kimchi and other neo-Pharisees to interpret theological concepts in Old Testament Hebrew. The French scholar Fr. Richard Simon (1638-1712) described Pagninus as “neglecting the ancient interpreters of Scripture to rely upon the opinion of the rabbis.” Pagninus’ Hebrew-to-Latin Old Testament translation was published as the famous Royal Polyglot Bible (“Biblia Regia”), from the distinguished publishing House of Plantin, in Antwerp, under the patronage of King Philip II of Spain. Philip dispatched his own undeniably brilliant Hebrew scholar, his chaplain Fr. Benito Arias Montano (1527-1598; usually referred to as only Arias Montano), to supervise the project. Montano, after having mastered Hebrew under the guidance of Renaissance-Catholic scholars, allied with the Neoplatonic-Hermetic conspiracy. Montano included in the multi-volume Royal Polyglot Bible both Pagninus’ rabbinic-influenced Old Testament, as well as outright Talmudic commentary on the Bible compiled by Franciscus Raphaelengius, and his (Montano’s) own degenerate Kabbalistic theses.

  Readers of this writer’s Judaism Discovered (pp. 236 and 766-768), are aware that the main introductory levels of rabbinic exegesis of the Bible are as follows: the literal meaning, or Peshat, followed by Remez (allegorical meaning), Derush (legal and Midrashic meaning) and Sod (the secret magical meaning). When rabbinic interpretation was first introduced in the conservative early Middle Ages, it had to present its Biblical theology to Christians solely in terms of peshat. By the time of the Renaissance however, rabbinic power and prestige had grown to such an extent that it was bold enough to teach Christians to parse the Bible according to the most distorted and diabolical of all of its levels of falsification, the level of sod. This foothold was achieved by putting forth among Christians the hoax that by mastering the occult interpretive methods of the Kabbalah, the divinity of Christ could be proved at the highest level of intellectual and spiritual understanding. One of the agents of this fraud was Philip II’s Arias Montano, sometime advisor to Spain’s sadistic military officer, the Duke of Alba, whose scorched earth polices in the Netherlands weakened Catholicism’s hold on the Dutch people.

  Montano’s Neoplatonic treatise, De arcano sermone appears in the Apparatus volume of the Royal Polyglot Bible: “De arcano sermone…refers to the symbolic sense of the Hebrew Scriptures…This arcane meaning is not as accessible to everyone as is the literal; it embraces a whole range of nuances…oneiric (oracular), mysti
cal and secret or Kabbalistic senses…Arias Montano envisaged several levels of comprehension and he mentioned both arcane and even more arcane (magis arcanum) significances, reserving the latter, more secret and profound, for the events and types of the Old Testament which point to the person of Jesus or the mysteries of the New Testament.” 65

  “Inquisitorial Renaissance Catholic Spain” was riddled with this type of corrupt occult tradition. Montano’s teacher had been Fr. Cipriano de la Huerga (1509-1560), rector of the Cistercian College at Alcalá and Professor of Biblical studies: “Cipriano de la Huerga believed that there were secret traditions handed down from God to Moses on Sinai and which were subsequently passed on by oral tradition to an unbroken chain of chosen men…” 66 Simple-minded New Age enthusiasts and “conservative and traditional Catholics” alike are in for a rude awakening: high level occult conspirators enjoyed immunity from the Spanish Inquisition because in many instances they were in charge of it. (Montano, for example, was the official papal expurgator of books in Spain).

  Spirited conservative Catholic resistance to the publication of the Royal Polyglot Bible was mounted by Leon de Castro, Dean of the Faculty of Theology and Professor of Ancient Languages at the University of Salamanca, who declared that any Bibles compiled in conjunction with rabbinic advisors were a work of “Judaizing heresy.”

  “It is…important to note that in spite of the declaration of the Council of Trent in favor of the Vulgate as the ‘authentic’ version of the Bible, the Church of Rome neither condemned these independent translations (such as the Royal Polyglot) out of hand nor tried to prevent its adherents from consulting them…They (the independent translations) succeeded in demonstrating the value of Jewish commentaries for a better understanding of the Old Testament…This, in theory, was the standpoint of the Roman Catholic Church during the second half of the sixteenth century, but in fact the violent opposition of Leon de Castro to the Antwerp (Royal) Polyglot would suggest that such broadmindedness towards versions other than the Vulgate was by no means general.” 67