The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome

by Michael Hoffman

  “…you will save the last seventy books so that you may pass them on to the wise among your people. For in them is the heart of understanding and the fountain of wisdom and the river of knowledge. And so have I done.’

  “These are the words of Esdras. These are the books of the knowledge of Cabala. Esdras proclaimed at the beginning in a clear voice that in these books was rightly the heart of understanding, that is, an ineffable theology of supersubstantial deity, the fountain of wisdom, that is, an exact metaphysics of intelligible angels and forms, and the river of knowledge, that is, a most sure philosophy of natural things. Pope Sixtus IV, who preceded Innocent VIII under whom we happily live, provided with the greatest care and zeal, that these books should be translated into Latin for the public advantage of our faith. 13

  “Moses on the mountain received from God not only the law which, as written down in five books, he left to posterity, but also a more secret and true interpretation of the law. But God commanded him to publish the law indeed to the people, yet not to pass on in writing the interpretation of the law…” 14

  Pico’s buncombe is a classic restatement directly from the rabbinic storehouse of fairy tales which they have woven outside the Bible and which Jesus Christ denounced in solemn warnings in Mark 7 and Matthew 15 as the “traditions of men.” Here these fantasies of rabbis are proposed by Pico as the basis for the clandestine theology of the Renaissance Church of Rome. To justify this Judaizing, the scoundrel Pico della Mirandola will drag Jesus down into this stew of mendacity, but first he sought to rehabilitate the Hermetic magicians of Egypt, Persia, Babylon and Attic Greece by stating that to the extent to which those sorcerers accepted the notion of an extra-Biblical Mosaic revelation, they were not idolaters, but members of the perennially true religion. This led to the formation of the legend, revived by the New Age Theosophists in the late nineteenth century and accepted as true by the Nazis, that Moses himself was a magician.

  Pico then proceeds to mount an outlandish hoax concerning the contents of the satanic Kabbalah, claiming that these rabbinic texts contain a refutation of those who argue that Jesus was not the Messiah. He adds that the Kabbalah affirms the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, Christ’s atoning sacrifice and, to top it all off, the same theology “which we read daily in Paul and Dionysius, in Jerome and Augustine”! 15

  What a disgraceful farce from a shameless liar. The misfortune for the Catholic Church is that, along with Fr. Ficino, Pico was among the most influential of papist writers for Catholic intellectuals in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His brazen deceit helped to convert numerous Catholic leaders into Kabbalists and Talmudists, who nonetheless remained inside the Church, burrowing ever deeper.

  These were not democratic levelers. Infiltrators in this era were in favor of a gloriously elaborate liturgy, cappa magna gowns, an aristocratic Church and an elected papal monarch who was sovereign above all laws, just as Chazal (the collective authors of the Babylonian Talmud) were sovereign above all laws, having overruled God Himself, and having convinced God to confess their superiority over Him (Bava Metzia 59b). Meanwhile, the demands of the Dialectic are such that contemporary disinformation takes the form of “conjecture” which posits the likelihood that Pico only praised and promoted the Kabbalah as part of an “apologetic attempt” to use it as “an anti-Jewish tool of conversion.” 16

  Christ, the Trinity, the saints and ceremonial magic; imagine that; and in rabbinic texts that are actually Christian texts, only the rabbis don’t know it yet. This is Catholic?

  Pico himself assures us that this is the case. After restating his belief that “the traditions of Egypt” and “the philosophy of Plato” agree with “Catholic truth,” he writes concerning the rabbis of the Renaissance, “If they agree with us anywhere, we shall order the Hebrews to stand by the ancient traditions of their fathers; if anywhere they disagree, then drawn up in Catholic legions we shall make an attack upon them. In short, whatever we detect foreign to the truth of the Gospels we shall refute to the extent of our power, while whatever we find holy and true we shall bear off from the synagogue, as from a wrongful possessor…” 17

  Academics insist that it is so — that Pico’s project was a fully Catholic, “apologetic and polemical” conversion mission to the Jews, and that he honestly believed that the Kabbalah was a Christian series of volumes which, once the Jews understood the true nature of their own rabbinic writings, as revealed to them by Pico, they would be converted to Catholicism. These claims are completely divorced from reality.

  To paraphrase C. Wright Mills, here we are approaching a curious juncture in the history of human insanity. There is nothing in the text of the Kabbalah that even remotely testifies of Jesus Christ or the Gospel. The nine volumes of Daniel Matt’s complete English translation of the Zohar (Sefer haZohar, “Book of Radiance”), which comprise the major corpus of the Kabbalistic books, as well as Nathan Wolski’s tenth volume in the series, Midrash ha-Ne’lam, representing the earliest edition of the Zoharic texts (published by Stanford University), all testify to the fact that the Kabbalah consists of a pottage of magic, superstition, demonology, hallucinatory fantasy, and relentless falsification of the Bible. The light of Jesus Christ is entirely absent from the Kabbalah, while the goddess, denominated “Binah” and “Shekhinah” and symbolized by the moon, is omni-present (cf. Zohar 3:19b). The Kabbalah offers a catalogue of pipe-dreams about Biblical patriarchs and matriarchs. A few examples:

  •Adam engendered female demons from his spilled semen. Eve copulated with Satan and conceived Cain (Zohar 1:55a).18

  •The nocturnal emissions of males are caused by Na’amah, the mother of the king of demons who titillates men in their sleep (Tishby, Zohar, 3:1365-66; pp. 309-310).

  •The patriarchs Amram, Levi and Benjamin were conceived without sin (Zohar, 1:57b).

  •The manner in which Abraham attempted to sacrifice Isaac was wrong and God holds a grudge against Abraham for this wrong (Zohar 2:33a).

  •Moses used a speculum-like device (akin to a crystal ball) to view invisible beings (Zohar 2:23b).

  The Kabbalah spans the gamut from pornographic and nonsensical to profoundly Satanic:

  •Israel must make sacrifices to Satan so that he will leave Israel unmolested (Zohar 2:33a.)

  •The evil impulse is good, and without the evil impulse Israel cannot prevail in the world (Zohar 1:61a).

  There is much more like this, enough to fill many dozens of pages. Pico was either a deliberate deceiver concerning the contents of the Kabbalah, or he was a fraud who had scant knowledge of the Aramaic language,19 taking the word of Flavius Mithradites and other Judaics concerning its contents.

  One of the objectives of the Cryptocracy during the Renaissance was to raise the status and prestige of rabbinic Judaism by absolving it of traditional Catholic charges of diabolism, counterfeiting the Bible and exhibiting an antichrist hatred. Whether or not Pico was a conscious conspirator or a useful idiot in misrepresenting the Kabbalah and achieving this objective, the mission was indeed accomplished. The Kabbalistic theology which crept into the Roman Catholic Church stoked the trend toward Renaissance paganism in papal Italy:

  “Pico set out to prove the Christian truth by means of Jewish Kabbalah…In the attempt to apply midrashic techniques such as gematria, temurah and notarikon which had formerly been restricted to Jewish circles…unheard-of new possibilities seemed to open up for scriptural exegesis and metaphysical speculation. Not only did the biblical text reveal hidden levels of meaning never suspected before, but the correspondences that could be established with pagan mythology and philosophy seemed simply stupefying…The dialectics of concealment and revelation are central to Jewish kabbalah…not only did kabbalah become an integral part of the Renaissance discourse of ancient wisdom, but this innovation resulted in a very strong emphasis on ‘esotericism’ in the specific sense of a concern with hidden or concealed secrets…such concerns were already implied by the very concept that Christian truth
s lay concealed under the surface of ancient pagan myths and philosophies, but could be uncovered by means of allegorical or symbolic exegesis.

  “This potential came to full development under the influence of a tradition, Jewish kabbalah, which had always been esoteric to its very core. It lies entirely in the line of this development that—to give only one famous example—Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa published his great compendium of ancient wisdom in 1533, he called it De occulta philosophia…His wellknown dedicatory letter to Johannes Trithemius confirms that he saw his work as an attempt to revive the science of the Magi and other sages of antiquity, and its third and final book was dominated by the kabbalah.” 20

  “Pico’s other esoteric methods were equally extreme. Following the fact that numbers were represented by letters in Semitic languages and Greek, various techniques commonly known as gematria were developed in antiquity for transforming words and texts through their numerical values…These methods were employed widely in antiquity in dream analysis, mystical and prophetic exegesis, apocalyptic composition, as well as for syncretic ends, and following predictable patterns became progressively more complex and systematic in the Middle Ages. Thus (Gershom) Scholem notes one kabbalistic manuscript that lists seventy-two methods of gematriot, presumably one for each of the characters in God’s secret name of seventy-two letters…

  “In one thesis he (Pico) claimed that unspecified gematria- like techniques were the key to his syncretic fusion of natural magic and Cabala. Pico employed related esoteric methods that involved anagrammatic manipulation of Scriptures, drawn mainly from the thirteenth and fourteenth century writings of the Spanish kabbalist Abraham Abulafia and his commentators. In the Apology, Pico compared this ‘science of the revolution of the alphabet’ (scientia alphabetariae revolutionis) or ‘art of combination’ (ars combinandi), as he variously called it, to the method known to the Latins as the ars Raymundi—that is, to the anagrammatic methods of the Christian Spaniard Raymond Lull…Pico syncretically fused gematria with other numerological techniques in his ‘way of numbers’ (via numerorum)…His goal here was to unite the numerological symbolism of the Pythagoreans—syncretically fused with Neo-Paltonic metaphysics in deep antiquity—with gematria and less formal types of number symbolism in Scriptures, in the Greek and Roman church fathers, and in various scholastic and esoteric sources, in order to unveil secret harmonies buried there…

  “The origins of the gnostic aeons, Christian, Buddhist and Hindu trinities, Neo-Platonic henads, kabbalistic sefirot, and countless analogous constructs can all be traced to compilational processes like these…Correlations like this were not systematically ‘neutral.’ They were a powerful force in the progressive movement towards transcendentalism, ethical and religious universality…(t)ransformed by repeated syncretic fusions…” 21

  This is the theological basis for Pope John Paul II’s 1986 Assisi prayer assembly of the world’s religions, including leaders of Talmudic-rabbinic, Buddhist, and animist (pagan) religions in Italy, nearly 500 years after Pico published his Nine Hundred Theses in Italy in 1486. Father Marsilio Ficino’s pagan magic expressed in his De vita coelitus comparanda became the synthesis of the magical theology (magia naturalis) of Pico, and both derived direction from Ficino’s 1463 translation of the Corpus Hermeticum, which was presented to the Church and the West as benevolent Renaissance white magic.

  The Neoplatonic-Hermetic objective of penetrating the Church sufficiently to derogate its faithful witness to the Biblical proscription against all forms of magic and sorcery, by concocting a category of “natural” or “white” magic, was achieved by the new “enlightened” attitude toward rabbinic texts. Pico wrote: “I have proposed theorems about magic, too, wherein I have signified that magic is two-fold. The first sort is put together by the work and authorship of demons, and is a thing, as God is true, execrable and monstrous. The other sort is, when well explored, nothing but the absolute consummation of the philosophy of nature…Zoroaster’s magic is nothing but that knowledge of divine things wherein the kings of Persia educated their sons…the magic of Xalmosis is medicine of the soul…When we shall have well explored these wonders by means of this natural magic we are speaking of, we shall be inspired more ardently to the worship and love of the maker…”22

  More often spelled “Zalmoxis,” in Greek legends of Thrace, the magician Xalmosis/Zalmoxis is a Pythagorean trickster who fakes his own death and resurrection.23 Pico invokes his name as a signal to his fellow initiates, conveying the occult doctrine that prevarication and duplicity are necessary tools and truth cannot be revealed to non-initiates. As we have already noted, in the argot of the Pharisees and the Talmud of Babylon, Judaic peasants who preferred the written Torah (Old Testament) and scorned the man-made Oral traditions, were derided as peasant ignoramuses. About them, the Talmud states in BT Pesahim 49: a-b: “Our Rabbis taught: Six things were said about the ignoramuses: We do not commit testimony to them; we do not accept testimony from them; we do not reveal a secret to them; we do nothing for their orphans; we do not appoint them stewards over money; and we must not join their company on the road. If an am ha’arertz loses something, the scholar is not required to notify him; the am ha’arertz should not benefit from any physical good in this world!” 24

  “We do not reveal a secret to them.” This is the two-tiered law system of an anti-Biblical ideology. Jesus was hounded by the Pharisees for speaking freely and openly to the peasants of Israel. Why would he not? They were “the people” who loved Him and John the Baptist. But the insider/outsider, lord/peasant dual-standard, is ever present in the organizations of the occult. It is one of the most telling signifiers of the western secret societies.

  To adhere to Biblical doctrine faithfully without adding to it or subtracting from it is an anti-occult action. The western occult movement historically has sought to tar Moses, the Bible and Jesus Himself as heirs to a “secret tradition.” There are scores of books claiming Jesus was schooled in the forerunner of the Talmudic tradition; that he did not come to found “Christianity” and that he was observant of the occult customs of the rabbis. Occult agents occupying teaching positions in universities, and executive positions in publishing houses and media outlets, repeat these lies and gain credibility from the repetition.

  The New Testament bears witness to the fact that Jesus was not the heir of any “perennial” theology consonant with the beliefs of the Pharaohs, Plato, Zoroaster or the rabbinic Oral Law system. Jesus Christ is completely outside the pagan Weltanschauung. It has nevertheless been the task of mountebanks such as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola to drag Him down into that swamp. The effort is futile.

  Scripture scholar John F. MacArthur summarizes the profoundly disenchanting, anti-occult nature of Our Lord and Redeemer, Jesus Christ: “On one occasion a group of Scribes and Pharisees from Jerusalem chided Jesus for allowing His disciples to ‘transgress the tradition of the elders’ by not (ritually) washing their hands before they ate. Jesus countered by asking, ‘And why do you yourselves transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? (Matt. 15:1-6; Mark 7)…After Jesus’ first cleansing of the temple, ‘the chief priests, and scribes, and elders came to him, and began saying to Him, ‘By what authority are you doing these things?’ (Mark 11:27-28). ‘These things’ referred to not only his driving out the moneychangers from the temple (vv. 15-16) but also to His authoritative teaching (vv. 17-18). Those leaders knew that Jesus had not been educated in a scribal school or personally tutored by a leading rabbi. Nor did He ever credit venerated scribes or rabbis as the source of His teaching…Jesus’ authority did not come from ecclesiastical title, scribal training or sacerdotal position, none of which He possessed. Nor did it come from popular Jewish beliefs of His time, many of which were based on myths, legends, and racial and religious prejudice (cf. Titus 1:14). It clearly did not come from rabbinical tradition Jesus, the sinless and perfect Son of God, limited Himself to speaking nothing during His incarnation except the truth He rece
ived from His Father.” 25

  Pico and his fellow Gnostic-papists professed to possess secret knowledge which placed them on a higher level than mere common Catholics. He and his cohort thought they knew God better than others, but in fact they knew Him not at all. Their deeds show them to be detestable, disobedient antichrists. “Nothing unclean and no one who practices abomination and lying shall ever come into the holy place…” (Rev. 21:27). Occultists proceed “according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience…They attempt to deceive with empty words and because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience.” (Ephesians 2:2 and 5:6).

  Observe Pico the serpent at work as he quotes approvingly the tradition of secrets-keeping occultism: “It was the opinion of the ancient theologians that divine subjects and the secret Mysteries must not be rashly divulged…the Egyptians had sculpted sphinxes in all their temples, for no other reason than to indicate that divine things, even when they are committed to writing, must be covered with enigmatic veils and dissimulation.” 26

  Pico is dropping more than a hint about the methods that are being used when he writes that “divine things…must be covered with…dissimulation.” The definition of dissimulation is “concealment of what really is, under a feigned semblance of something different.” This is how Satan’s work in the world advances—under another name—such as “Christian Kabbalah” and “Vatican II ecumenism.”

  The Church hierarchy was becoming more and more enigmatically veiled during the Renaissance. To unmask child molestation or conspiracy and infiltration inside the Church became ever more difficult as a consequence of this veiling, which violates the Word of God. Jesus declared, “I spoke openly to the world…and in secret I have said nothing” (John 18:20). This is the simple, clean, pure and gloriously straight path to God. It overcomes paganism, Gnosticism, Neoplatonic-Hermeticism, Freemasonry, Talmudic and Kabbalistic Judaism and Rome’s Renaissance usurper Church. This is the test of any institution or organization: is it completely open or does it keep secrets? Concealment became in-grained in the framework of Rome’s hierarchical popery as it cast off the last vestiges of the true Catholic Church. This was its Neoplatonic-Hermetic inheritance which continues in the twenty-first century.