The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome

by Michael Hoffman

  History testifies that the leading Neoplatonic-Hermetic-Kabbalist conspirators inside the Church of Rome (not the low level patsies consigned to the flames, along with those who failed to submit to papal supremacy, like Bruno), were largely immune to serious and enduring interdiction and punishment. In spite of whatever slap on the wrist had to be administered to tranquilize and outfox the remnant of outraged true Catholics, the top conspirators went to their graves secure in their persons and positions—their influence growing exoterically and then waxing and waning esoterically, as circumstances and situations required, finally emerging under Pope Paul VI at the Second Vatican Council. Here was the fruition of five hundred years of Renaissance and post-Renaissance conspiracy. Here was manifested within the Church of Rome the spirit of Ficino, Pico, Reuchlin and the rest of the Vatican’s Renaissance gang. Masonic ideology had manifested in Neoplatonic-Hermetic Rome long before “Freemasonry” arrived in the garments of the neo-Protestant world as a sometime rival of the masonic popery of the neo-Catholic world. “Continuity…was assured…by the continued progress and popularity of Hermetic doctrine, which issued in Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, and varieties of alchemical and astrological arts.” 46

  Let us not call ourselves followers of Jesus Christ and then be seduced by artful deception: usury was not first revived in Christendom by John Calvin but by the Church of Rome while Calvin was a child; Masonic ideology was not born out of the Reformation or the Enlightenment (though certain forces in both those camps most certainly served as its booster rocket). Masonic ideology was born inside the papist, ecclesiastical magisterium’s Neoplatonic-Hermetic imperium. For elite Catholics, the Renaissance papacy nurtured and harbored a supra-religious, supra-national philosophic universalism that would serve as the cornerstone upon which its supposed deadly enemy, the Masonic Lodge, would be constructed. 47

  The diabolic genius of this rarefied two-tiered process consisted in the fact that among the lower tier of common people and parish priests, Rome maintained a milieu of inquisitorial antipathy for the occult, just as it instilled an antiusurious social gospel among the same peasants and priests which gained for the Robber Church of the Great Usurpation, a permanent, undeserved aura of militance on behalf of the poor and against “the bankers and the Masons.”

  Thus was the double-mind institutionalized. Double-minded Catholics have a cavernous black hole at the center of their minds that allows them to maintain two mutually contradictory ideas simultaneously and fail to detect that fact. They run to false shepherds for a remedy. Pope St. Pius X is a hero of theirs, yet they do not ask themselves why his famous encyclical Pascendi Domini Gregis (1907) failed utterly in its alleged intention of interdicting modernism. How could any honest prelate who is not mentally feeble warn of religious syncretism making its way inside the Church, while refusing to unmask the progenitors of this spiritual infection?

  In similar fashion, Pope Pius IX denounced, in his Syllabus of Errors, as one of the deceptions of Satan: “Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true. Man may, in the observance of any religion whatever, find the way of eternal salvation, and arrive at eternal salvation.” Pope St. Pius X enlarged the indictment put forth by Pius IX: “Here it is well to note at once that, given this doctrine of experience united with that of symbolism, every religion, even that of paganism, must be held to be true. What is to prevent such experiences from being found in any religion? In fact, that they are so is maintained by not a few. On what grounds can Modernists deny the truth of an experience affirmed by a follower of Islam? Will they claim a monopoly of true experiences for Catholics alone? Indeed, Modernists do not deny, but actually maintain, some confusedly, others frankly, that all religions are true. That they cannot feel otherwise is obvious. For on what ground, according to their theories, could falsity be predicated of any religion whatsoever?”

  Where in either statement by these “great traditional” popes is a single indictment of the Renaissance “Catholic” fathers of modernism? Why is not one of the conspirators who started it all named and unmasked? Nowhere in the renowned encyclicals of the two popes will we find this vital information. It has been omitted. Pius IX and Pius X did not cite them. Citation would have fatally undermined the pillar of the occult conspiracy: the inculcation of blind obedience to the “ecclesiastical magisterium” (notwithstanding the fact that the papist conspirators deny that the obedience they require is blind). Modernism and syncretism were produced by the ecclesiastical magisterium itself after 1450. The two “anti-modernist” popes cannot admit this. They rail against the modernist idol while they make an idol out of obedience to the heads of the Church. This is bipolar. As long as obedience to the heads of the Church takes precedence over the Word of God, modernism and diabolism will flourish. Like usury after Vix Pervenit, modernism grew after the Syllabus and Pascendi Domini Gregis. These are double-minded papal documents. Observe what Pope St. Pius X teaches about the doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas:

  “And let it be clearly understood above all things that when We prescribe scholastic philosophy We understand chiefly that which the Angelic Doctor (Thomas Aquinas) has bequeathed to us…We admonish professors to bear well in mind that they cannot set aside St. Thomas, especially in metaphysical questions, without grave disadvantage.”

  On the contrary, Your Holiness, your Church of Rome began to “set aside” Aquinas’ doctrine against profit on loans of money 392 years before you penned your encyclical! Isn’t 392 years sufficient time for one of the subsequent members of the august fraternity of those who are called the “Vicar of Christ on earth” to name names, indict the guilty and reinstate the immemorial dogmatic and Thomistic prohibition against all profit from loans of money?

  To the contrary, while it is true that Pope St. Pius X died before the 1917 Code of Canon Law could be promulgated, the Code had been compiled largely on his watch, by periti selected by him. This Code of Canon Law removed all prohibitions against profiting from loans of money. “They cannot set aside St. Thomas…without grave disadvantage.” Yet this is precisely what this double-minded pope, who is lionized by “conservative” and “traditional” Catholics as the paragon of what it means to be a pontiff, perpetrated in the 1917 Code, against the same St. Thomas Aquinas who he counsels others not to abandon.

  Does one imagine that this blatant contradiction is lost on the Cryptocracy? Does one imagine that they will fail to exploit it by making their subordinates and initiates cognizant of how even the pontiff with a reputation as the supreme opponent of modernism, had succumbed to situation ethics? Patrician gnostics do not pride themselves on believing as do the plebes. They take pride in being an elite above humanity who perceive that which is veiled. One such not-so-arcane secret which they detected is the tragic case of Pope Pius X who, in allegedly thundering against the evils that had infiltrated the Church, managed to steer clear of any direct threat to the root and branch of the conspiracy, though during his relatively brief pontificate he did indeed vex sundry low and mid-level flunkeys and patsies regarded as expendable by their elite masters.

  Pius X concludes his encyclical Pascendi with an admonition to Catholics to obey “the ecclesiastical authority in any of its depositories.” This is a message of conformity well-pleasing to the post-Renaissance Cryptocracy which, since the late fifteenth century, has maintained control over the Church of Rome no matter who occupies the Chair of Peter. The Pyramid and Obelisk Men prevail.

  The blind alleys and dead ends into which those who have earnestly sought to contend for the Gospel of Jesus Christ have instead been repeatedly dispatched and neutralized, is a powerful contributing factor in the success of the diabolic process. We have engendered a tradition of defeat and grown accustomed to it. We wear our defeat like a comfortable leather coat of long usage. We have God on our side and yet we continue to abandon Him to follow the well-tread path of hypnotic bondage to the Pyramid-and-Obelisk. Is this dark fate what Jesus Chr
ist intended for His people?

  Giovanni Pico told the hierarchy of the Church that by using the ancient Egyptian magical gnosis with which Pharaoh’s sorcerers confronted Israel and Moses (Exodus 7:11), and which later became the Kabbalah, we can teach the world to know the divinity of Christ. As we have seen, this lunacy infiltrated not only the Church of Rome. By means of Catholic agents, it slithered into Protestant denominations as well.

  Occultists are consummate hoaxers. They convinced the western world that their fraudulent pagan superhero Hermes Trismegistus, was a factual historical personage. It took considerable intellectual effort, most effectively undertaken initially by Casaubon, to prove that Hermes was an elaborately concocted myth. Giovanni Pico’s fraud corresponds to the sly syncretism which the “Catholic” Kabbalists employed to gain acceptance for the black magic texts of the rabbis, on whose behalf Pico della Mirandola employed an energetic apologetic apparatus, arguing that the major religions, including Catholicism, were all reflections of the primordial religion “of Adam.” The true Adam of Scripture was not Pico’s focus, however. For the occult Renaissance, Adam is the “Adam Kadmon” of the Kabbalah, not the Book of Genesis. The Neoplatonic-Hermetic gnosis teaches that pure wisdom from deep antiquity emanated from the Kabbalistic Adam who preceded the Adam of Genesis. “The concept likely evolved from the older idea—prominent in Philo’s writings—of a heavenly man who was created at the same time, or prior to, the earthly Adam…While Adam Kadmon is said to take the shape of a human, it may well be that this is intended in much the same way various constellations of stars are identified in astrology. Thus Adam Kadmon could be understood as a constellation of stars in the shape of a man…Above all, Adam Kadmon is part of the complex Kabbalistic theory of God’s emanations of the world, containing the ten sefirot.” 48

  This “Adam Kadmon” is a symbol of counterfeit reality: Satan as the ape of God. All of Satan’s spiritual and intellectual systems reflect this characteristic. Like Hermes himself, the essence of this Kabbalistic-Gnostic-Neoplatonic entity serves to represent an idea: that Satan is worthy of a worship which bestows upon the worshipper secret knowledge of the universe withheld from others. The account of Adam Kadmon in the rabbinic Midrash relates that when “he was created…he was so awesome the angels mistook him for God and began to worship him.” Since he was an androgyne, most Christians would be appalled to encounter Adam Kadmon in the flesh in view of the fact that he possessed a bosom like a woman and the genitalia of both male and female. This creature would be stylized in the nineteenth century by the “Catholic” mystic Eliphas Lévi, as “Baphomet,” the infamous sigil of modern devil worship. Renaissance-Catholic conspirators endeavored to drag Jesus Christ into this cauldron by claiming that the New Testament links Jesus to Adam Kadmon in I Corinthians 15:45-50. The passage from Corinthians reads: “Thus it is written, ‘The first man Adam became a living being; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first but the natural, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust, and as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven. I tell you this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.”

  There is no hidden meaning in the preceding Scripture passage. The opening line refutes the Kabbalistic absurdity that is being foisted upon us. Contrary to the Kabbalistic “Adam Kadmon” buncombe, the first Adam was a flesh and blood living being. It is the last Adam who is the spiritual Adam—Jesus Christ. The reference to His “spiritual body” is an allusion to His imperishable, post-Resurrection body, animated by the Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.

  To non-initiates, the Renaissance conspirators used the Adam of the Bible as the primordial reference point of their appeal to divine cosmic knowledge preserved from antiquity. Among initiated insiders it was understood that the “Kadmon” Adam of the Kabbalah is the one regarded as the source of this knowledge which, when fully rediscovered in the future, will reanimate the image of Adam. It would appear that the Neoplatonic-Hermetic future is here, as versions of Kadmon’s androgyny are being created through the powers of surgery, as well as the pharmakos (φάρμακος, οῦ, ὁ), warned of in the Book of Revelation, which gave notice in Revelation 18:23 and 22:15, of the forthcoming employment of pharmaceutical agents to sustain Satan’s illusion—his disfigured mimic of God’s natural creation. Writing in 1487 in Heptaplus,49 Pico stated: “Because what is said by the Hebrews is new to the Latins, it could not be easily understood by our people unless, hatched from a twin egg, I explained a great part or almost the totality of ancient teachings of the Hebrew dogmas…showing how much these ideas agree with Egyptian wisdom, how much with Platonic philosophy and how much with Catholic truth.”

  Rabbinic Judaism’s root is in the sorcery of Pharaonic Egypt, which is also represents a treasured repository of theology and symbolism for Freemasonry. Pico candidly links his twisted version of “Catholic truth” to Judaism through “Egyptian wisdom.”

  Pope Alexander Adopts Pico’s Theology

  “In the last years of his life, Pico’s situation was greatly eased by the advent to office in 1492 of a new pope. In that year, Innocent VIII was succeeded as the spiritual head of Christendom by Alexander VI, the Borgia pope, one of the most publicized and colorful characters of the Renaissance…the Borgia pope was not at all averse to astrology and magic, but, on the contrary, was deeply interested in those subjects, and he came most impressively to the rescue of Pico’s orthodoxy. The bulls for Pico’s absolution which Lorenzo de Medici had failed to obtain…were promulgated by Alexander VI on June 18th, 1493, less than a year after his elevation to the Holy See.

  “Not only that, the pope wrote a personal letter to Pico himself, beginning Dilecte fili Salute & apostolicam benedictionem.’ In this letter, Alexander rehearses the whole history of Pico’s case, mentioning the nine hundred theses, the Apologia, the commission which had accused Pico of heresy, his flight to France, and ends by completely absolving both him and his works from all taint of heresy. Pico is described as illuminated by a divina largitas’ and as a faithful son of the Church. This letter was printed in all the editions of Pico’s works, thus encouraging readers to accept, on the highest authority, the writer’s views as of unimpeachable orthodoxy. And this would include the view which was the chief cause of the outcry against Pico, and of the commission which Alexander quashed, that Magia and Cabala are valuable aids to Christianity.

  “It was in this changed atmosphere that Pico wrote, about 1493-4, his Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem. This work against astrology used to be taken as proof that Pico was free from astrological superstition. But its title alone shows that the kind of astrology which Pico is against is divinatory astrology, the normal astrology based on belief in the determination of man’s fate by the stars and using calculations based on horoscopes to foretell the predestined future. And it has recently been pointed out that Pico repeats in this book what is practically Ficino’s theory of astral influences borne on a ‘celestial spirit.’ Further, Pico actually cites ‘our Marsilius’ as one of those who have written against astrologers ‘following in the traces of Plotinus, in the interpretation and exposition of whom he has much aided Platonic studies, amplifying and enlarging them.’ This could be an allusion to that commentary on Plotinus, the De vita coelitus comparanda and its Magia naturalis (including Plotinised talismans) as a work indirectly defended through being drawn in amongst those against astrology.

  “In short, Pico is really defending the Fincinian ‘astral magic’ (he does not use this expression) which…is quite a different thing from astrology proper, being a way of escape from astrological determinism by teaching how to control and use the stellar influences. Written about 1493-4, which is about the ti
me that the Pope had exonerated Pico from all blame, the book against astrology is really a vindication of Magia naturalis.

  “It is into the context of the controversy about Pico, in which Alexander VI came out so strongly on the side of the Magus, that one should put the extraordinary ‘Egyptianism’ in the frescoes painted by Pinturicchio for Alexander in the Appartamento Borgia in the Vatican….very strange are the Egyptian scenes in the Room of the Saints. The emblem of the Borgia family was the bull, and the Borgia bull becomes identified in this series with Apis, the bull worshipped by the Egyptians as the image of Osiris, the sun god. It is by a series of allusive shifts in meaning as the frescoes tell their story that the Egyptian Apis bull, or the sun, becomes identified with the Borgia bull, or the pope as the sun.

  “The Egyptian series begins with the story of Io, turned into a cow by Juno, who set Argus to watch her. Argus was killed by Mercury, a scene shown in one of the paintings where Mercury, with drawn sword, is dispatching Argus. Having been rescued by Mercury from Argus, Io escaped into Egypt where she became the goddess Isis. After the scene with Mercury and Argus, there follows in the frescoes, a scene where Io-Isis is seated on a throne, with a figure on her left identified by Saxl as Moses. The figure on her right is obviously the same person as the one shown with the zodiac in the Room of the Sibyls. He is, I suggest, again Hermes Trismegistus…The Mercury who killed Argus was, according to Cicero, Hermes Trismegistus who afterwards went into Egypt and gave the Egyptians their laws and letters. This is mentioned by Ficino in the argumentum before his Pimander text: Hunc (i.e. Trismegistus) asserunt occidisse Argum, Aegyptiis praefuisse, eisque leges, ac litteras tradidisse.’