The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome

by Michael Hoffman

  The fidelity of “Ramban” (Nahmanides) is to the Kabbalistic pagan doctrine, not the Biblical doctrine. This can be seen in his commentary on the Book of Job reflecting the Kabbalistic Zohar (1:180 a-b), which teaches that Job was a reincarnated soul from a Levirate marriage. As demonstrated, Rabbi Nahmanides regurgitates this unscriptural delusion.

  Genesis 38, involving the obligations of levirate marriage, is also a vessel of Kabbalistic reincarnation falsification, as noted in connection with the Renaissance’s Rabbi Abarbanel, yet the “proof-texts” for this delusion are in the Chumash and Midrash, non-Kabbalistic rabbinic texts of mainstream Orthodox Judaism.

  In the Old Testament Jews and Israelites are constantly sinning and portrayed as evil doers. Genesis 38 concerns a proud Jewish leader, Judah, who, in the denouement, declares that Tamar, a (presumed) Canaanite, is “more righteous than I!” (Genesis 38:26).

  In Genesis 38, Judah has taken up residence in the Canaanite territory of Adullam, southwest of Jerusalem. The woman Tamar,24 who is of unspecified ethnicity, marries Er, the thoroughly wicked eldest son of Judah and Judah’s Canaanite wife.25 We do not learn Judah’s wife’s name, only the name of her father; consequently she is called merely “Shua’s daughter.” The Talmud cannot stomach the fact that the Bible identifies Judah’s wife as a Canaanite, so the rabbis transform Judah’s wife into the daughter—not of a Canaanite—but of a “merchant” (cf. BT Pesachim 50a which considers it impossible that Judah would marry a Canaanite woman).

  God kills Er. While God had killed masses of people in the Flood and in Sodom and Gomorrah, Er is the first person in the Bible that He singles out for death. In the Biblical account given in Genesis 38, as it concerns Judah and Tamar and the sons of Judah, the focus is on levirate marriage: the obligation of the brother of a deceased husband to marry his brother’s widow. Orthodox Judaism in its sacred texts, the Babylonian Talmud and the Midrash, teaches the doctrine of reincarnation in explaining the supposed “secret” (sod) layer of meaning of Genesis 38, beneath the literal (pshat). This is the spiritual disease of the rabbis, and of the occult in general, the conceit that the plain meaning of Scripture almost always conceals a deeper esoteric significance which only the cognoscenti can plumb.

  In the rabbinic exegesis of Genesis 38 we are at the level of sod, which, though it appears in Talmudic texts, is suffused with delusions from the Kabbalah: “They knew the secret significance of levirate marriage: how it enables the soul of the deceased brother to be reincarnated.” 26 In rabbinic Judaism levirate marriage 27 is known as yibum, which has come to signal, over millennia of accumulated traditions, the process by which the gilgul (reincarnation) of the deceased brother is reborn through the child conceived by his surviving brother and his surviving widow.

  In the Word of God, Onan, the yabam (brother-in-law) of Tamar, had the right to decline the obligation to serve as a levir, but he would be subject to ritual public humiliation (the widow would remove his shoe and spit in his face). Onan committed several transgressions: 1. He attempted to deceive God by appearing to accept the levirate duty and then faked it. 2. His means of faking was coitus interruptus, taking his pleasure of Tamar in the sex act and then practicing contraception by spilling his seed on the ground rather than inseminating her. 3. He compounded the latter sin by committing it repeatedly (“whenever he went into his brother’s wife he spilled his seed upon the ground;” 38:9). The syntax shows that this happened more than once. 4. All of these offenses were committed out of lust, obviously, but also from jealousy and greed, so that Onan will inherit his deceased brother’s estate, rather than his brother’s male or female offspring who would inherit had Onan caused Tamar to conceive. God kills Onan for these transgressions. After the death of Onan, the only surviving son of Judah is the youthful Shelah, who Judah promises to Tamar after Shelah reaches adulthood.

  This was a ruse on Judah’s part. Judah feared that Tamar was a jinx who would inexplicably also cause the death of Shelah. He thereby deceived her into thinking Shelah would come to her when he matured. Fearing for Shelah’s life if he became intimate with Tamar, Judah unjustly withholds the adult Shelah from fulfilling the promise of levirate union with Tamar (38: 11; 14). The deceiver, Judah, becomes the deceived however, when, after the death of Judah’s Canaanite wife, Tamar disguises herself as a prostitute and seduces Judah, who offers to pay for her services with livestock from his flock. Because he does not have the payment in his possession, he offers her three promissory pledges in the form of his staff, and his seal, which is presumably worn on a cord. Tamar’s possession of his seal, cord and staff is tantamount to possessing Judah’s I.D. card. She will produce these months later when her pregnancy becomes apparent and she is about to be executed on Judah’s order. These identifiers lead to Judah’s exposure as the client of a presumed prostitute and his subsequent contrition for his sin.

  For the rabbis, the sin committed by Onan in Genesis 38 is not chiefly what the text demonstrates it to be, the coitus interruptus practiced by Onan, i.e. “Onanism” (analogous to the sin of masturbation in historic Christianity). In Judaism, Onan’s primary transgression was his refusal to assist the soul of Er, his elder brother, in reincarnating on earth:

  “Onan knew that the child…born of his union with Tamar would be a reincarnation of Er’s soul, and he was too selfish to let this happen…” 28

  The preceding commentary from the Chumash is one of numerous editions that constitute a standard work in Orthodox Judaism. The Chumash is not by any stretch of the imagination a Kabbalistic work. The Chumash commentary incorporates the famous, authoritative exegesis of Rashi and other high rabbinic authorities and gedolim. Without resorting to the text of the Kabbalah itself, Orthodox Judaism presents its reincarnation teaching concerning Genesis 38, as promulgated not in the Kabbalah but in Judaism’s exegesis of the Pentateuch (“Chumash”) found in many, if not most, Orthodox Judaic households, having the status of a revered, standard reference work. Judaism’s belief in reincarnation is taught in this commentary on the Chumash. The persistent propaganda story—that one encounters magic and superstition only when one crosses over the chasm that separates Kabbalah from Orthodox Judaism — is shown to be a falsehood in consideration of the rabbinic gilgul (reincarnation) doctrine as manifested in non-Kabbalistic texts like the Chumash.

  The humbling Biblical account of Israelites in Genesis 38, is overturned in the prideful, racial-nationalist Babylonian Talmud, as well as in rabbinic commentary on the Chumash and the Midrash, which all insist that Tamar was certainly not a Canaanite. With the usual Midrashic resort to fantasy, the rabbis stoop to fabricating a tale of Tamar being the daughter of Noah’s son, Shem (cf. Bereishis Rabbah 85:10). The rabbinic commentary on the Chumash states: “As someone who was to play such a significant role in the destiny of Israel, it is inconceivable that she was of Canaanite descent.”

  The Word of God imparts the humbling fact that the Biblical patriarch Judah was ashamed that he had lusted after Tamar, and that he repented of his fornication with her. He is held to be even more culpable because he lusted after her and succumbed to his lust while she was disguised as a sacred prostitute of the fertility religion of the neighboring pagans, in this case, the Canaanites (the term used to describe Tamar in Genesis 38:21-22 is q’desah, a word for temple prostitute; earlier in Genesis 38 she had been referred to only as a zonah, a common prostitute). Sex with such a prostitute was an act of propitiation to the goddess of the local pagan cult, a condemned act (cf. Hosea 4:14). In the moving turnabout, after seeking to have Tamar, his daughter-in-law, burned to death for having been a whore (38:24), Judah subsequently recognizes his own guilt and bears witness against himself, self-effacingly and contritely asserting her righteousness above his.

  What does the rabbinic mentality do with this noble Biblical lesson in humility? It overthrows it, and in doing so absolves Judah, who is too racially significant in the race-obsessed religion of Judaism to be allowed to bear such guilt, therefore the blam
e must be transferred. Who do the rabbis blame for Judah’s act of lust with a woman he thought was a pagan temple prostitute? In the occult philosophy where man has equalled or exceeded His Creator, the rabbis blame God:

  “Rabbi Yochanan said, ‘Judah sought to pass by Tamar. The Holy One, blessed is He, dispatched the angel of lust to trap him. The angel said to Judah, ‘Where are you going? From where will kings arise? From where will great men arise? Only then Judah detoured to her by the side of the road. He was coerced, against his good sense.” (B’reshith Rabbah 85:8).

  One of occult-Renaissance Catholicism’s most esteemed rabbis, Rashi, quotes approvingly the following passage from the Midrash, “…a tzaddik (saint) of his status would not lower himself to consort with a harlot. Against Judah’s will, however, G-d’s angel drew him to her…A heavenly voice came forth and proclaimed, ‘It was by me that these events were thus directed.” 29

  Orthodox Rabbi Rabbi Nosson Scherman: “Of his own free will, Judah would never have united with her, so an angel forced him into the path of a ‘harlot’ to begin the creation of the Davidic dynasty.” 30

  Here we have a Biblical patriarch exonerated rather than denigrated by the tradition of the rabbis, but the one being denigrated is God Almighty Himself! The rabbis have no shame and they certainly have no fear of their subordinate, Yahweh. Sins of the ancient Jews are palliated, denied or absolved through Talmudic and Midrashic fantasy scenarios such as the one put forth for Judah.

  Talmudic and Kabbalistic Judaism is suffused with egorebellion against the Logos. This revolutionary egoism was infiltrated into the arcane theology of the papacy and the créme de la créme of its theological elite. It is a foundation of tyranny over mankind. For this tyranny to operate successfully, the true Biblical-Hebrew teaching, which is completely separate from the pagan psychodrama which rabbinic Judaism absorbed from the occult lore of Babylon and Pharaonic Egypt, must be cast off. Ellen Myers, commenting on Thomas Molnar’s essay, “The Gnostic Tradition and Renaissance Occultism,” writes:

  “Molnar shows that ‘the Hebrew-Christian concept of separating God and man as Creator and created, of not confusing their natures, their persons, their powers,’ stands apart from ‘practically all other religious and para-religious doctrines and systems [which] identify God and self.’ Molnar believes that ‘Christianity is hard to bear,’ because it requires of man ‘insertion in the hierarchy of creation, acceptance of a role assigned by the Creator above the rest of other creatures, yet definitively and distinctly not divine.’

  “Here Molnar rightly shows that biblical creation ex nihilo is the root and ground of Christianity, as well as of the enmity of almost all other religions and thought systems…What nonbelievers really desire and attempt to bring about is the overthrow of the reality created by the God of Christianity, and to become divine creators of a different reality of their own making…Humanist utopians have perennially written about their ideal ‘city’ as ‘the final symbol for man’s divinization’…” 31

  Authentic conservative Christian philosophers such as Thomas Molnar and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn have observed the trail of destruction of the utopian Renaissance heresy, from the opening salvo of its revolutionary proclamations to the last corpse exhumed from its gulags. The Catholic monk Francois Rabelais’s Renaissance “Abbey of Thelema” was a philosophical utopia where, supposedly, the only rule was, “Fais ce que voudras” (Do what you will). Humanity casts off the God of the Bible and they proceed on their own way, guided by men and women of the past who trod the same, putative “path of liberation,” and who happen to be Neoplatonists and Kabbalists. The occult being mostly lies, this maxim, “Do what you will,” does not denote what it purports to state. It actually signifies, in practice, total freedom only for elite members of the institution, and bondage for “lesser beings.” In this context, “utopia” consists of “Thelemic freedom” for occult tyranny, which is a plausible description of the Renaissance and post-Renaissance Roman Church.

  Returning to the doctrine of the Renaissance Rabbi Abarbanel, he believed that the levirate marriage ordered in the Torah was devised by God to facilitate the reincarnation of souls. This theology is sustained by the Neoplatonic-Kabbalistic belief that the soul is completely independent of the body, and that it is a separate essence that does not come into being with the body.

  “For Abarbanel, who follows here in the Neoplatonic tradition, the separate soul of the individual is able to move through the cosmos, from its place in the supernal realm to the sublunar realm and back again, only by means of the soul vehicle; a minori ad maius, its movement as a non-corporeal entity between two human beings must depend upon that vehicle.

  “Abarbanel’s exposition of the theory of the soul vehicle comes in his Mif’alot Elohim, written in 1499…Within Mif’alot Elohim, he establishes the essential separateness of the human soul from the body, thereby allowing for its separate movement within the cosmos and the possibility of its entrance into a new body upon its circulation out of a previous body. Basing himself on the prisci theologi, who in his interpretation had the Torah as their foundation, he asserts:

  “The Torah Truth is that all of the human souls were created before the existence of bodies, at the beginning of creation. And indeed, this was the opinion of the great ancient philosophers like Hermes Trismegistus who is called Hanoch, and Pythagoras, and Plato, and others beside them. And indeed, we have not found anything [of favor] concerning this within Aristotle.

  “For the soul to be able to transmigrate, it must be a separate entity from the body that, from time to time, enters into a relation with the body. For this to be the case, Aristotle’s theory of the fundamental connection between soul and body must be incorrect. According to Aristotle, ‘we can dismiss as unnecessary the question whether the soul and the body are one: it is as though we were to ask whether the wax and its shape are one, or generally the matter of a thing and that of which it is the matter.’ The soul is the form of the body and only has any real relevance or substance in a state of unity.

  “Abarbanel rejects this idea off hand; for him, as confirmed by the same precedent sources that would be important to the likes of Ficino yet with the ‘Torah Truth’ as the ultimate base, the soul must be prior to the body and ontologically superior to it…Unlike Aristotle, the ‘true’ prisci theologi, who received their ideas in accordance with this true Torah view, support and give credence to the idea of a soul that can transmigrate, both through the spheres and among bodies. The soul is separate and prior to the body, and therefore can logically cycle through the cosmos, and in and out of different bodies.

  “…Through the notions of the world-soul and its emanated astral bodies…Abarbanel…tries to give the idea of the astral body direct Kabbalistic legitimacy by attributing the idea to his Kabbalistic predecessor, Nahmanides. According to Nahmanides in his Sha’ar ha-Gemul, the sinning soul will be punished in purgatory by being burned with a thin fire. 32If this is the case, reasons Abarbanel, then the ‘thin fire’ must be burning the soul through the medium of the thin material that is the astral body; otherwise it would have no effect upon the fundamentally immaterial soul. Nahmanides, then, according to Abarbanel, hints here at the existence of the ethereal, astral body.

  “Notwithstanding Abarbanel’s attempt to frame everything under a Kabbalistic rubric by invoking the sefirot by utilizing the imagery of the emanated spark, and by citing precedence in the Kabbalistic figure of Nahmanides, it is important to note that his language concerning the soul vehicle is much closer to the Neoplatonism of Iamblicus, Synesius and Ficino…Abarbanel uses the term ‘spirit’ for his conception of the astral body, links it directly to Plato, and understands it to move in a naturally circular motion.

  “The human spirit, he writes, ‘is of the nature of the heavens and from the sphere of the upper things, and it always moves in a circular motion from itself, like the movers of the heavens and the stars. And it is according to this that the wise Plato said that the soul moves
by itself in a circular motion, while it is in the body and also when it is outside of the body, before it enters it and also after it is separated from it.” 33

  Since the Renaissance has done its work of subversion of Catholic theology, many Catholics have difficulty finding very much that was in error in the soul-doctrine of Ramban (Rabbi Nahmanides), and while these suppositions have been largely absorbed by Catholic intellectuals without much comment or analysis, almost sub-consciously, they have created an enchanted mentality in Catholics who fancy themselves paragons of anti-occult convictions, yet nevertheless somehow believe that wearing an amulet-like piece of cloth known as the “scapular,” 34 saves them “from the fires of hell;” or that “Jacinta,” a ten-year-old female visionary, had the rabbinic-like power to alter the dogma of the Bible concerning the deadliest sin, by proclaiming that most people are eternally damned not due to the most egregious evil cited by the Word of God (the love of money: I Timothy 6:10), but rather due to sexual lust: “More souls go to hell because of sins of the flesh than for any other reason”—Jacinta Marto. 35As this child’s reputed saying was promoted throughout the Church of Rome after 1920, eventually becoming the folk belief of the Catholic masses, the practice of usury ascended to new levels of ubiquity. Twentytwo years afterward, in 1942, Pope Pius XII established the Vatican usury bank, Instituto per le Opere di Religione (“Institute for the Works of Religion”), without significant opposition.

  If it is assumed that neo-pagan choreographies are confined to the Catholic lower classes, we note that in the intellectual class, under the influence of minds conditioned by Neoplatonic mysticism, we encounter “educated Catholics” just as susceptible to priestcraft (men’s unscriptural inventions added to the gospel under pretense of divine authority), and subject to institutions and traditions ordained not by the laws of God’s Word, but metaphysical addenda.