“Whenever ‘the mysteries of the ancients’ were invoked by…Ficino or Pico della Mirandola…they saw the early mystery cults through the eyes of Platonic philosophers who had already interlarded them with mystéres littéraires. Thus Plato appeared to them…as the heir of an ancient wisdom for which a ritual disguise had been invented by the founders of the mysteries themselves. And the philosophical cunning thus imputed to those early sages was ascribed also to the Neoplatonic magicians…” 27
Pico merges Pharaonic Egypt, Plato and the Kabbalah in the belief they contain at least some of the waters of the rivers of Catholic truth. His papally-protected disciple, Lodovico Lazzarelli, was more specific. In his Crater Hermetis, Lazzarelli quotes approvingly Porphyry’s statement that with regard to occult tradition (“wisdom”), “The first of those who began to pass on the tradition drank the clear waters of the Nile” and “it was by way of him (Hermes), that wisdom reached the Hebrews.”
When Pope Pius X wrote against the “synthesis of all heresies” here it was, the perverted syncretic claim that Egyptian diabolism, as filtered through its subsequent manifestations in the sorcerers of Babylon, Orphic and Attic Greece, Persia and the heirs of these cumulative traditions—the rabbinic descendants of the Pharisees—proved the truth of Jesus Christ and the Bible.
If we limit ourselves to a study of Neoplatonic-Hermetic and Kabbalistic usurpation of the Church solely in terms of the decay of divine dogma and the infiltration of the hierarchy, then we will fail to see the result of this revolution within the Church of Rome. One cannot adopt the theology of Judaism in its Talmudic and Kabbalistic forms, and the Babylonian and Egyptian paganism from which it derives its gnosis, without aspiring to be that ‘god’ in the Garden of Eden which was the destiny promised to Adam and Eve if they would disobey their Creator. The first disaster was brought about by pride; by manplaying-God. The Church prior to the Renaissance and the post-Renaissance eras, had labored ceaselessly to teach man his place in the universe. He could advance by the talents of his God-given reason within the bounds of Revealed Truth and Natural Law. But he could not aspire to be himself a god by manipulating creation, whether through nuclear power, genetic modification of crops or cloning humans. The way forward for these civic forms of black magic was paved by the Renaissance ideology as birthed in Catholic Italy by Cusa, Plethon, Ficino and Ficino’s pupil, Pico.
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola died in Florence on November 17, 1494 at the age of thirty-one. He would not live to see his ideology ascendant in the Church of Rome but he would not die until he had made that ascendancy certain. Agrippa, Erasmus and Johannes Reuchlin were his intellectual heirs, students and admirers. By the time Reuchlin’s career was at its nadir we have indisputable evidence of the role that the Church of Rome played in providing cover to Reuchlin, who was an alter-Pico. Pico had suffered no lingering negative consequences for his diabolism. His philosophy was so lightly (though with much theatrical fanfare) interdicted by Pope Innocent VIII 28 that it gained posthumous circulation throughout Europe and Britain, becoming the Reuchlin movement, and branching out into many other sectors of the papist vineyard, through Steuco, Lazzarelli and numerous neo-Catholic conspirators and infiltrators.
“Despite his papal troubles, Pico found time in these years for intense textual studies, most of them conducted in Florence or in the villa at Fiesole that Lorenzo de’ Medici gave to Pico…In this period Pico composed the Heptaplus, Commentary on the Psalms, On Being and the One, Disputations against Divinitory Astrology, and a number of other works.” 29
His text with the title that refers to an opposition to astrology is not what its name implies. “…the text’s main arguments…are in total harmony with the cosmological ideas that Pico introduced eight years earlier in the Nine Hundred Theses. Pico never doubted that (astrological) influences of some sort flowed from the heavens to earth. The question was how those influences operated.” 30
Pico disputed horoscope astrology and predictions related to individual destinies. He did not deny what he termed “true astrology,” which he said consisted of astrological magic as it related to the cosmos—magical power derived from the stars. This star-cult is the mandate of the state religion of Pharaonic Egypt. 31 In addition to citing its core stellar theology in his Disputations, he simultaneously denounces Egyptian black magic and declares vehemently that he is “no magician” of that tradition. By the time Pico wrote the Disputations he was seeking cover for his diabolic Kabbalism in the Nine Hundred Theses, and his Neoplatonism in his Concord of Plato and Aristotle. Consequently, in the pages of his Disputations one finds denunciations of the evil emanations of Chaldeans, Egyptians and even “Hebrew magistri.” Beware of this dissimulation.
“Anyone doubting that Pico was capable of intentional duplicity of this sort only needs to recall the subtle debating traps planted on every page of the nine hundred theses…Pico (had) an obvious motive for seeking whatever intellectual cover the Disputations Against Divinitory Astrology might provide.”32
Indeed, in the first sentence of his Nine Hundred Theses he refers to the “Theologicis, Magicis, Cabalisticis, cum suis tum sapientum Chaldeorum…Aegyptiorum…” (“Theological, Magical, Cabalistic opinions, including his own and those of the wise Chaldeans and…Egyptians…”).
The study of the lives of these occult initiates is akin to the vigilance necessary in approaching Talmudic, Kabbalistic and other rabbinic sacred volumes where unscrupulous techniques for subterfuge and duplicity, found under technical exegetical terms such as Gezara shava and pilpul, are rampant and institutionalized. 33 Pico, as a close student of the Kabbalah and other sacred rabbinic texts, adopted these crooked and disingenuous methods for his own. His nephew, Gianfrancesco, seems to have followed suit.
Though Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola was disinherited by his Uncle Pico, in favor of his enemy inside the family, Giovanni’s brother, Antonmaria Pico, Gianfrancesco nonetheless gained control of some of his uncle’s posthumous manuscripts, which were eventually sold to Cardinal Domenico Grimani and deposited in Rome. For the remaining four decades of his life Gianfrancesco spinned his uncle’s views into a pious conservative, Catholic-Orthodox milieu and painted an equally cosmetic and distorted picture of him in his 1495 biography, the Vita Ioannis Pici Mirandulae (published in 1496 along with the collected works [Opera] of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola; Gianfrancesco’s biography was subsequently translated and published in England by Thomas More).
Gianfrancesco is often identified as a zealous follower of Savonarola and this allegation is “proof” to some people that Gianfrancesco was indeed a true Catholic. Yet we must ask, what true Catholic would falsify the life and work of his uncle to the extent that Gianfrancesco did in his Vita Ioannis Pici? We also note that in the pivotal battle between the Neoplatonists and the Thomists over the ethical validity of the views of Aristotle, Gianfrancesco sided with Plato against Dante and Aristotle. Gianfrancesco was not an unambiguously orthodox Roman Catholic. It seems he may have been tasked with ensuring that his Uncle Giovanni Pico was presented to the uninitiated Catholic posterity as an eccentric thinker who was nonetheless within the bounds of what constitutes a good Catholic. That “good Catholicism” would however, soon bear fruit named Reuchlin. Moreover, before his decease, Pico gained a papal ally, Alexander VI. There were more to come.
The conservative Protestant scholar Casuabon saw in the philosophers of the Church of Rome, the heresy of syncretism. Casaubon, in his De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis, eloquently denounced Rome’s syncretic attempts to link Hermes and Christ, stating that they “are without value, seeing as how not even the apostle uses profane sources when discussing the faith…Shall we be of such little faith as to defend Christian truth by means of pagan evidence?…I resolutely condemn and detest this project with all my heart. For he offends the truth with his assumption that it required a defense of lies, that is, the support of the devil.”
Pico’s syncretism, which views superstition-steeped rab
binic antichrists as a bridge to a profound understanding of the Old Testament—and therefore the roots of the Church itself—is also the theology of Cardinal De Lubac, the Second Vatican Council, and Popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI, Francis, and many other “princes of the Church.” De Lubac was to such an extent an epitome of dissimulation that he manages the thaumaturgic balancing act of lauding Pico, the personification of the spirit of the Renaissance, while reproving the Renaissance. 34
It is not the case that Pico was condemned in the sixteenth century and only revived by the modernist enablers of the Judaizing delusions of the twentieth. We should be mindful that “traditional” popes and “Catholic saints” are numbered among Pico’s followers, including Thomas More, one of the favorite saints of contemporary conservative Catholic intellectuals. 35
Pico himself thanks Pope Sixtus IV for publishing “with the greatest care and zeal” the satanic Kabbalah into Latin “for the public advantage of our faith,” and causing “delight among the Hebrews” who “cherish” these books with “religious awe.” 36
When the usurper Church of Rome synthesized these pagan traditions in the name of the authentic Roman Catholic Church, the Protestant Reformation was given invaluable ammunition against it, provided by Rome itself. Many Catholics became Protestants after witnessing the desecrating synthesis. The Huguenot philologist Casaubon rightly demolished the papist Hermes Trismegistus hoax and when he did so before the literate elite of Europe, with that demolition went much of the credibility of the Church of Rome itself, which had failed to thoroughly cleanse itself internally (as opposed to rhetorically) of the spiritual infection of the Hermetic occultism it had fostered and extended.
Martin Muslow: “The thesis of concordance held that ancient wisdom, Christian doctrine and contemporary natural philosophies were principally in accord. Especially after the Council of Trent the thesis seemed well-suited for combining a reformed orientation with a reflection on origins…often linked with a certain Egyptophilia as well as a conception of Hermeticism as the oldest form of human wisdom.”
Casaubon was a formidable Protestant Hebraist and according to the script of the papists this should make him a Judaizer in sympathy with the Talmud and cognate texts. This was not so, however. He was a dedicated student of the writing of the Swiss Protestant Talmud expert Johannes Buxtorf (1564-1629), Professor of Hebrew and Rabbinic Literature at the Protestant University of Basel. Authors Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg are incredulous at the fact that Buxtorf, in spite of his scholarly knowledge of Hebrew, Aramiac and Judaism, opposed the religion of the rabbis. “Casaubon had found a way to focus on what still seems the strangest feature of Buxtorf’s work: the unremitting hostility he showed toward the people whose languages, beliefs and rituals he had studied more intensively than any Christian before him.” 37
It is inconceivable to Grafton and Weinberg that a deep knowledge of the inner doctrines of Judaism such as, in Buxtorf’s case, the Shulchan Aruch and its didactic section, Orah Hayyim, would lead to hostility toward Judaism (it seems they have never heard the name Johann Andreas Eisenmenger). Contrary to Romanist claims, Casaubon had no objection to Buxtorf’s loathing for the rabbinic system: “Casaubon noted Buxtorf’s prejudices, but did not make clear the extent to which he shared or qualified them. The nature of his ethnographic interest—like so much of his method as a Judaist—remained steeped in ambiguity.” 38 This is a sly way of sneaking past the reader the fact that there is no evidence that Casaubon had any sympathy for Judaism.
“Buxtorf explained that his primary goal in revealing the true religion of the Jews to his fellow Germans had been religious and polemical: ‘that we may be admonished to set before ourselves as the object of meditation the incredulity of the Jews, and the hardening of God and his equally terrible wrath and severity toward them’…Buxtorf noted that Judaism no longer rested on Moses and the prophets, but instead on the false laws and rules introduced by scribes and rabbis…” 39
“Hoc etiam de ceremoniis, quibus Judaei in feriis et festis inter eos receptis superstitiosam ipsorum fidem exercentes utuntur, dictum adeo sufficit, ut indequilibet satis perspicere possit, quod religio ipsorum non amplius super Mose et prophetis, sed supermendaciis meris, falsique Rabbinorum et Scribarum (id quod ab initio libri huius mihi demonstrandum proposui) constitutionibus fundata sit. Sequitur iam praeterea de consuetudinibus nonnullis aliis, secundum quas in vita ipsorum privata se gerunt.” 40
The Church of the Renaissance introduced into the schools and monasteries of Catholicism the philosophy of the concordia philosophorum which teaches that there is a concord between paganism and Christianity.
“…concordia philosophorum, the idea that there is one basic, common kernel of truth in all philosophical systems, no matter how different they might be at first sight. This conviction culminated in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s huge and unfinished project to bring to light the common truth of all philosophical and esoteric traditions…This idea was closely interrelated with the notion of a ‘perennial philosophy,’ the conviction that there was one, largely secret tradition of esoteric wisdom, dating back to the first beginnings of creation…This philosophical-esoteric sapientia (wisdom) or ‘secret doctrine’ was passed on from one ‘sage’ or ‘magus’ to the other, thus constituting a tradition that was thought to include figures like Zoroaster, Moses, Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, the Pythagoreans and Plato. The most important, though not the first, representative of this mode of thought was Marsilio Ficino, who affirmed that long before the Scriptures were revealed to man, there was a tradition of prisca theologia (ancient theology) or prisca philosophia that foreshadowed Christian truth…” 41
To achieve the objective of the subversion of the Church, the pillars of authentic Roman Catholicism had to be derogated. “We find that (Francesco) Patrizi had already in 1571 deployed the esoteric/exoteric distinction in order to wipe out Aristotle by maintaining that all of Aristotle’s esoteric and substantial assets were merely appropriated from Platonic thinking.” 42
However, as in the belt of transmission for relaxation of the laws against taking a profit for loaning money, which began inside Catholic circles and then spread to Calvinist ones, the Neoplatonic-Hermetic poison of Ficino, Pico and Francesco Patrizi of Cherso, (the pope’s professor), was spread by Padua University graduate Johannes Jessenius (also called “Jessen”) into Lutheran Wittenberg in 1593, and by Eilhard Lubin in Lutheran Rostock in 1598. Raphael Elgin disseminated it in Calvinist Zurich in 1595 and Marburg in 1609.
Jessenius had been a student of the Catholic Neoplatonic-Hermetic conspirator and Professor at Padua University, Francesco Piccolomini. Prof. Piccolhomini was a disciple of Pico and a colleague of Patrizi. 43 In 1593, Jessenius published excerpts from Patrizi’s Nova de universis philosophia in his own volume, Zoroaster, Nova, brevis, veraque de universo philosophia. “Jessenius follows Piccolomini’s plan of reconciling Plato and Aristotle with the help of Hermetic texts, which was in accord with the dimensions of Pico della Mirandola’s idea of philosophical concord.”44
Let us consider this “secret doctrine” which is the hallmark of Gnostic and masonic sects and offshoots. The maintenance of this secrecy takes precedence over all other duties and obligations to God and man, as George W. Bush showed forth when asked on national television by NBC News host Tim Russert on February 8, 2004 about his membership in the “Skull and Bones” brotherhood: “It’s so secret we can’t talk about it.” 45
The conspirators behind the “Gnostic Gospels” hoax insist that Jesus taught a secret doctrine. The occult imperium operates by this swindle: “Join with us and obtain the secret wisdom.” The Gnostic Gospels we are told, were suppressed by fanatical, uptight Christians because they presented Christ’s revolutionary secret gnosis for freedom and happiness. Like the Talmud and Kabbalah, the Gnostic “scriptures” directly contradict the written Word of Jesus Christ, who established no aristocracy of secrets administered by a priestly caste. The literal meaning of th
e Bible is anathema to all demonic brotherhoods and sisterhoods. “I speak with him face to face, even plainly, and not in dark sayings” (Numbers 12:8).
“All the words of my mouth are with righteousness. Nothing crooked or perverse is in them. They are all plain to him who understands, and right to those who find knowledge” (Proverbs 8:8-9). The Prophet Isaiah declared, “When a King (i.e. Christ) shall reign in righteousness, the eyes of them that see shall not be dim. The heart of the rash will understand knowledge, and the tongue of the stammerers will be ready to speak plainly” (32: 1, 3-5).” Here is liberation.
In addition to the promise of a “secret doctrine,” the gods of the pagans and gnostic sects impart, as noted, the teaching that all religions have the same root. This belief existed in a state of dormancy as the Catholic Faith, in the first millennia of its existence, gained adherents and faithfully taught that Jesus Christ was the one and only door to heaven and the Father. It was masonic popery, the abomination developed in Rome during the Renaissance, which awakened those dormant occult forces. One may quote Leo XIII in Humanum Genus against Freemasonry incessantly, yet when Leo refrained from identifying the root of the masonic conspiracy in Rome’s own Renaissance Hermeticism and the rabbinic Kabbalah which had been empowered by the Renaissance papacy, his Humanum Genus only served to fulfill the same cunning masterstroke of misdirection as did Benedict XIV with his encyclical Vix Pervenit—“against usury”—which provided a gaping loophole on behalf of usury. In the aftermath of Vix Pervenit, “the great papal bulwark against usury,” profit on loans continued to metastasize in the Catholic world virtually unimpeded. Toothless rhetoric had prevailed over the restoration of God’s law, as it has done time and again from the pens of “wonderfully orthodox pontiffs” of the post-Renaissance age.
The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome Page 24
