The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome

by Michael Hoffman

  2 Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (1968), p. 241-243.

  3 The “Ovide Moralise (“Moralized Ovid”) is perhaps the most important work of the later French Middle Ages…written by an anonymous Franciscan. The Ovide Moralise played a pivotal role in transmitting descriptions of the pagan gods, of mythological figures like Orpheus…and over 60,000 lines of philosophical and theological commentary to future authors and artists of the Western tradition.” https://moralizingovid.wordpress.com/

  4 Wind, op. cit., pp. 248-249; 251.

  5 Seznec, op. cit., p. 98.

  6 Charles H. Lohr, “Metaphysics,” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (1992), pp. 548, 550, 553 & 556.

  7 Jill Kraye, “Moral Philosophy,” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (1992), p. 314. In this particular case concerning “the depravity of post-lapsarian man,” the reformers were restoring the original theology of the Catholic Church prior to the rise of the occult Church of Rome.

  8 Thomas Molnar, Utopia: The Perennial Heresy, p. 112. Prof. Molnar was a conservative Catholic philosopher.

  9 Clark Trinkaus, The Sixteenth Century Journal (no. 4, 1990), p. 709.

  10 Cf. Ficino’s preface to his 1492 translation of Plotinus Neri; as well as the research of Johannes Irmscher (1994).

  11 Niketas Siniossoglou, Radical Platonism in Byzantium (2011), p. 6.

  12 Because “Platonism is made the measure for interpreting Christian doctrine.” Siniossoglou, op. cit., pp. 77 and 109. It is highly instructive to read Siniossoglou’s entire section on the smokescreen mounted by Psellos (pp. 71-85). Siniossoglou affords his readers an education in how outwardappearing advocates of conservative Christian orthodoxy can be the opposite of what they appear. He explains well the intricate mechanism of their doublespeak, which has considerable relevance to Renaissance and post-Renaissance papal documents.

  13 Siniossoglou, p. 83.

  14 Cf. Francois Masai, Plethon et le Platonisme de Mistra (1956).

  15 Masai, pp. 300-314: Plethon’s secret society had first formed in Mistra, in southern Greece.

  16 Masai, p. 300; Igor P. Medvedev, Neue philosophische Ansatze im spaten Byanz (1981), pp. 547-548.

  17 George of Trebizond, Comparatio Platonis et Aristotelis, folio V63.

  18 Later, long after the horse was out of the barn, for public consumption Rome had some of Plethon’s books burned. This pacified conservatives, even as Plethon’s ideas continued to be adapted and espoused by the Catholic hierarchy.

  19 Patrick Nold and Alison Frazier, “Introduction,” in Essays in Renaissance Thought and Letters (2015), p. xxxiii.

  20 Cf. J. Monfasani, “A tale of two books: Bessarion’s In Calumniatorem Platonis and George of Trebizond’s Comparatio Philosophorum Platonis et Aristotelis,” in Renaissance Studies 22, pp. 1-15. Also cf. Sotheby’s auction catalog: http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/lot.8.html/2008/continental-and-russian-books-and-manuscripts-including-science-and-medicine-l08409

  21 “George of Trebizond” in The Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature (1880).

  22 Cf. M.H Blanchet, Georges-Gennadios Scholarios [Vers 1400-Vers 1472]: Un Intellectuel Orthodoxe Face a la Disparition de L’Empire Byzantin (2008).

  23 Christopher Livanos, “The Conflict Between Scholarios and Plethon,” in Modern Greek Literature: Critical Essays (Routledge, 2003), p. 25. Plethon’s murderous, would-be dictatorship screened by a facade of enlightened liberalism, is the pattern of the western secret societies, from the Medici to the Masons. For example, those who swallow the masonic propaganda that “freedom of speech for all citizens of the Republic,” is a right sincerely promulgated by Freemasonry, do not know its real history, wherein David C. Miller’s anti-masonic printing plant was burned by Freemasons in Batavia, New York (cf. Thurlow Weed and Harriet A. Weed, Autobiography of Thurlow Weed [1884], pp. 218-219). Eighteen years afterward, in 1844, the Nauvoo Expositor, an Illinois newspaper opposing masonic leader Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormons, was destroyed by his order (cf. Hoffman, “Masonic America,” in Revisionist History, June-July, 2014, p. 5). Masonic “freedom of speech” is propounded in a nation to obtain that right for the initiates of the Lodge, and not necessarily for the mass of humanity, the non-masonic “cowans,” from whom any and all rights may be withdrawn at will by the pyramid-and-obelisk men. This is the true essence of that “Abbey of Thelema” which is the template of the secret societies that are derived from the Neoplatonic-Hermetic fish-hook: a big front proffering hippie-bait—freedom, bliss and enlightenment. Once hooked, the processed initiates encounter an even bigger back: an occult church with rules far more rigid and draconian than in the maligned, “repressive” medieval church.

  24Siniossoglou, demonstrates in Radical Platonism in Byzantium: Illumination and Utopia in Gemistos Plethon, the fact that Plethon clearly rejected Christ and that Plethon’s “pagan Platonic paradigm” brought to fulfillment latent tendencies among Catholic humanists toward a distinctive anti-Christian and pagan outlook.”

  25 Siniossoglou, ibid., p. 187.

  26 “Co-redemptrix” and “Co-redeemer” denote an impossible human equality with the divine which is classic Neoplatonism. Cf. in Church of Rome theology, Acts of the Fifth International Symposium on Marian Coredemption, Mary at the Foot of the Cross-V: Redemption and Coredemption under the Sign of the Immaculate Conception (Franciscans of the Immaculate, 2005). Also: “Mary is the intermediary through whom is distributed unto us this immense treasure of mercies gathered by God, for mercy and truth were created by Jesus Christ. Thus as no man goeth to the Father but by the Son, so no man goeth to Christ but by His Mother.”—Octobri Mense, Encyclical of Leo XIII, Sept. 22, 1891. Here Pope Leo taught falsehood, “For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus.” (I Timothy 2:5). Giving Mary a higher place than God’s Word allows is a slippery tactic for dismissing her altogether by causing the appropriate veneration of her to be falsely equated with “Mariolatry.” Terming Mary, who is indeed the Theotokos, as Mary the “Coredemptrix” of the Universe (and consequently the alleged co-Redeemer of herself), is not appropriate veneration, but inordinate adoration, amounting to the idolatry of a human being. Jesus Christ is our only Redeemer. Mary is without doubt the greatest human who ever lived, conceived without sin (because Jesus, the new Adam, could only incarnate inside an uncontaminated “Eden”). It is exceedingly sad that many Protestants have a higher opinion (and esteem) for Sarah, Ruth, Judith and Deborah, than for the woman who said to the angelic messenger of YHVH, “Be it done unto me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38), thus making possible the Incarnation; the woman who William Wordsworth rightly described as “our tainted nature’s solitary boast.” The papal occultists nearly always exalt Marian devotions, and often practice them personally and publicly, for they know that by showing themselves to be her supposedly earnest acolytes, they are sure to gain faith in their rule, in the eyes of some “Marian” Catholics. (This tactic was Pope “Saint” John Paul II’s specialty).

  27 Siniossoglou, op.cit., p. 386 and 409.

  Chapter IV

  The Priest and the Platonists

  “I am a real Christian, that is to say a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus, very different from the Platonists, who call me infidel and themselves Christians and preachers of the gospel, while they draw all their characteristic dogmas from what its author never said nor saw. They have compounded from the heathen mysteries a system beyond the comprehension of man, of which the great reformer of the vicious ethics and deism of the Jews, were he to return to earth, would not recognize one feature.”

  Thomas Jefferson

  The founding of the occult movement inside the Catholic Church in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was the work of three seminal Catholic thinkers: Ficino, Giovanni Pico and Reuchlin, supported by a network of collaborators. Keep in mind as we follow the trail of their conspiracy that other than farcical tok
en punishment for public consumption, as for example the brief, theatrical incarceration of Pico, no significant repression was ever directed against this trio of diabolic occultists by the Pope of Rome or the Inquisition. On the contrary, the record shows that to the extent that the Renaissance pontiffs could do so without exposing their own complicity, these three pivotal founding members of the occult infiltration of the Church of Rome, were generally shielded by the highest elements in that Church.

  While there were many hoaxes embedded in the Hermetic mythos, the two principal ones were the contention that the main Hermetic texts, the Asclepius and Ficino’s translation of the Corpus Hermeticum, were written in remote antiquity by an all-wise Egyptian priest. The second principal hoax associated with the advancement of Hermeticism in an overwhelmingly Christian society and culture such as existed in the fifteenth century in Italy, was the insistence by the leading Neoplatonic-Hermetic “Catholics” that Hermes Trismegistus testified of Christ.

  No serious scholar any longer believes that Hermes Trismegistus lived in close proximity to the time of Moses, as the Florentine occult theologian and priest Marsilio Ficino asserted in his dedication (“Argumentum”) of Pimander to Cosimo de’ Medici. Frances Yates asks, “How was a Christian magus to get round Augustine?’ She answers her own question: “Marsilio Ficino did it by quoting Augustine’s condemnation and then ignoring it…” 1

  A Judaic scholar writes, “First and foremost, Kabbalah was studied, translated, and amalgamated into Christian speculation in a very specific intellectual circle, which emerged two decades earlier as part of the efforts of Marsilio Ficino. Ficino was not only instrumental in rendering into Latin the huge Platonic, Neoplatonic, and Hermetic corpora; he was also a thinker who offered a synthesis between the various forms of thought he translated, and Christian theology.” 2

  As Rev. Fr. Ficino progressed deeper into sorcery, some Renaissance Catholics began to ask questions concerning how it was that a priest at the top of the pecking order in Medici Florence, was involved with magic and astrology?

  “What has a Christian to do with magic and images? Ficino counters by pointing out that in ancient times priests always did medicine, mentioning Chaldean, Persian and Egyptian priests; that medicine is impossible without astrology; that Christ Himself was a healer. But above all he emphasizes that there are two kinds of magic, one demonic magic which is illicit and wicked, the other natural magic, which is useful and necessary. The only kind of magic which he has (allegedly) practiced or advised is the ‘good and useful kind’—magica naturalis. He writes: “How elegant, how artistic and refined is this modern natural magic!”

  “…Ficino’s magic was a religious magic, a revival of the religion of the world. How could a pious Christian reconcile such a revival with his Christianity? No doubt the Renaissance religious syncretism, by which the Neoplatonic triad was connected with the Trinity, would account for regarding sunworship theoretically and historically as a religion having affinities with Christianity, but this would hardly account for the revival of it as a religious cult. The moving force behind this revival was…Ficino’s deep interest in the Egyptian magical religion described in the Asclepius…When Hermes Trismegistus entered the Church, the history of magic became involved with the history of religion in the Renaissance.” 3

  The Italian-Catholic Renaissance, pioneered by the Florentine Medici agent Rev. Fr. Marsilio Ficino, summoned from the bowels of the secret occult orders, the understanding of Plato 4 as a theologian from the classical past who had channeled the wisdom tradition of the universal religion of the deep past, the “perennial philosophy,” 5 and “prisca theologia” of Hermes Trismegistus, Zoroaster (“Chaldean Oracles”) Orpheus (“Orphic Hymns”) and the “sages” of the Kabbalah.6 Marsilio Ficino leaned toward a universal theism, with Neoplatonism as its gospel.” 7

  Egypt was the master theological symbol/image of this process of transformation. This is reflected in several of Fr. Ficino’s treatises, in particular De voluptate and Di dio et anima. In the former, he describes Hermes Trismegistus as “the wisest of all Egyptians,” whose god is the source of all creation. In the latter he writes, “Mercurius Trismegistus, an Egyptian philosopher far more ancient than the Greeks, whom Greeks and Egyptians called a god because of his boundless understanding and knowledge…” With regard to the late fifteenth century Church, James Stevens Curl points to “the increasing Egyptianisation of the Bishop of Rome himself.” 8

  He notes that in Catholicism at this time, “It must be remembered that the notion that all magic, all knowledge, all skills, and all basic architectural wisdom came from Egypt, was powerful…” 9

  While the Neoplatonists had already gained a foothold in the Vatican, it fell to the Medici-subsidized Ficino to produce and “baptize” the first accessible translation in print of the central canonical text of pagan Hermeticism:

  “The Corpus Hermeticum were a group of Greek religious and philosophical texts written in the first few centuries after Christ. Although clearly influenced by Greek philosophy, they were thought to encapsulate the far more ancient thoughts of Hermes Trismegistus…Hermetic writings were known in medieval Europe, but their intellectual relevance was boosted massively when, in 1460, a Byzantine monk brought a version of the Corpus to Florence, where it was translated into Latin by Marsilio Ficino (1433–99) and published in 1471. As a consequence, Ficino became a central figure in the world of intellectual occultism. His conception of magic was hugely influential, and the lynchpin of the intellectual magic traditions of the early modern period…

  “The other significant development of the Renaissance, which would have more of an influence on the development of future grimoires than Hermeticism, was the spreading influence of Kabbalah in European magical thought. The mystical system of Kabbalah that developed in medieval Spain had been percolating into Christian magic before the late fifteenth century, but it was its espousal by another Florentine philosopher and natural magician, (Giovanni) Pico della Mirandola (1463-94), that introduced it to a new readership and led to renewed engagement with its occult promises. Johannes Reuchlin, a German humanist scholar and expert in Greek and Hebrew, further advanced its influence north of the Alps. In 1490 he travelled south and visited Pico—a sign of the developing European network of occult philosophers.” 10

  In 1463, the highly placed papal agent Cosimo de’ Medici gave the gifted Roman Catholic linguist and polymath Marsilio Ficino the lifetime use of the palatial “Villa Medici di Careggi,” but before he did so he set him to work urgently translating a recently discovered copy of the treasured Corpus Hermeticum, the key occult text attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. The aforementioned Latin translation produced by Ficino was renamed by him, Pimander.

  “…word came to Ficino from Cosimo that he must translate Hermes first, at once, and go on afterwards to Plato…Ficino made the translation in a few months…It is an extraordinary situation. There are the complete works of Plato, waiting, and they must wait while Ficino quickly translates Hermes…What a testimony this is to the mysterious reputation of the Thrice Great One! Cosimo and Ficino knew from the Fathers that Hermes Trismegistus was much earlier than Plato…Egypt was before Greece; Hermes was earlier than Plato. Renaissance respect for the old, the primary, the far-away, as nearest to divine truth, demanded that the Corpus Hermeticum should be translated before Plato’s Republic or Symposium, and so this was in fact the first translation that Ficino made.” 11

  And thus begins the peregrination to gnosis, the marriage of Neoplatonism and Hermeticism as part of the grand occult architecture of the esoteric Prisca Theologia, the syncretic religion of the Renaissance Catholic Church, intoxicated with Plato’s concept of a world spirit and a world soul, as well as Egyptian and Zoroasterian influences on Plato (Phaedrus and I Alcibiades respectively). The pantheon of gods, deities and demigod-sages becomes as inclusive as the term polytheism connotes. Orpheus, Pythagoras, Hermes and Zoroaster all had a hallowed pride of place in the pagan firmament
which was invading the Latin Church, to a lesser or greater degree, depending on whether it is Plethon, Ficino or Giovanni Pico who is influencing the direction of this infernal hierarchy. For Ficino, Hermes and Zoroaster trumped Orpheus and Pythagoras. Indeed, like the Medici, Father Ficino was fixated on the primary archetype of the Three Chaldean Magi at the Epiphany of Christ who were there, as he perceived it, to proclaim Jesus as the new Zoroaster.

  It was Zoroaster who was reputed to be the originator of the star-centered astrological magic by means of which the Magi had located the Christ child. In this context, Jesus was viewed as the incarnation of the occult priscus theologus, the reconciler of the Abrahamic faith with the ancient pagan wisdom of Egypt and Greece, as expressed in Platonic and Neoplatonic Catholicism, a syncretism ascribed by Ficino to the Athenian convert Dionysius whose conversion by St. Paul at Areopagus is mentioned in the Book of Acts. A series of treatises attributed to this Pauline Christian “Dionysius the Areopagite,” reflect Plato’s philosophy in his Parmenides.

  Historians now know that the Christian Dionysius who was the contemporary of the Apostle is guilty of none of the fraudulent writings said to be his. In actuality, many of these were actually penned by Pseudo-Dionysius (also called Pseudo-Denys) in the fifth century A.D. It was Martin Luther who said of him, “Dionysius is most pernicious; he platonizes more than he Christianizes.” Pseudo-Denys/Dionysius is a saintly figure in the eyes of Right-wing Catholics and the subject of a panegyric by William Riordan, Professor of Theology at the “conservative-Catholic” Ave Maria University in Florida, in his Jesuit-published book, Divine Light: The Theology of Denys the Areopagite (Ignatius Press, 2008). The author attempts to uphold Catholic Neoplatonism while reproving pagan Neoplatonism. The result is a farrago of contradictory claims and arguments. He is aggrieved, for example, that Jaroslav Pelikan judges Pseudo-Denys/Dionysius to have been a heretic. Riordan alludes to “Denys’ use of certain Neo-Platonic formulations for the purposes of his own properly Christian theological enterprise…in Denys, this transforming assumption of the Platonic intuition into the Christian view, reaches a new, more developed form. His original and specifically Christian contributions gave Neo-Platonism an extended life when its death was very imminent.” 12