The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome

by Michael Hoffman

  Savonarola regarded “sacred scripture as the sole, exclusive and absolutely infallible source of true knowledge: the certainty given to absolute faith in the Bible…See the opening sentences of Savonarola’s treatise against astrology: 17

  “The foundation of Christian religion is the sacred Scripture of the New and Old Testament, which we are obliged to believe down to the smallest iota, and we must approve all that it approves, and disapprove of all that it disapproves of, since it is made by God, who cannot err.” 18

  Some Catholics will aver that Savonarola was skating dangerously close to the thin ice of the Protestant tenet of sola Scriptura (the Bible only). In fact, he was on the solid ground of Catholic theology from Apostolic times onward: no church doctrine, canon, pronouncement or practice can contradict the Bible.

  One legacy of the suppression of the Church’s most indefatigable foe of anal intercourse is the fact that permission for rectal sex entered the official theology of the Catholic Church. One of its leading theologians, Rev. Dr. Father Heribert Jone, O.F.M, Cap., J.C.D., in his 1929 manual, Moral Theology, which was reprinted seventeen times in German and English, ruled directly contrary to Savonarola concerning a husband sodomizing his wife: “…it is neither sodomy nor a grave sin if intercourse is begun in a rectal manner with the intention of consummating it naturally, or if some sodomitical action is posited without danger of pollution.” 19

  Aftermath

  “Some preachers stirred the apocalyptic cauldron, claiming a share of Savonarola’s prophetic and charismatic gifts. Martino di Brozzi, ragged, self-styled holy madman, appeared in Florence at the end of 1500 to declare that the killing of Savonarola proved that Florence and Rome were about to be scourged…He was imprisoned….To possess Savonarola’s writings was a criminal offense. His books were to be surrendered, confiscated, destroyed…San Marco and its allied houses were enjoined from conducting services and ceremonies in honor of the three martyrs or from singing Ecce Quam Bonus (which was) Fra Girolamo’s favorite psalm.”

  In the city-state of Florence, still a Republic in keeping with Savonarola’s reform, his surviving “devotees resumed their campaigns for moral and political renewal…(and) their determination to prevent the return of the Medici…To achieve these objectives as well as to protect it against the continuing hostility of the papacy and the Holy League, Florence needed political unity, and this favored the continuation of the governo civile and Great Council with its indelible Savonarolan imprint…In 1502 the Great Council voted to make the Gonfaloniere of Justice a lifetime office and elected Piero Soderini, brother of Paolantonio, Savornarola’s old political ally and mentor. Piero…promoted many Savonarolan goals.

  “…Florence regained Pisa through its own initiative. Backed by (Savonarolan) Gonfaloniere Soderini, Niccoló Machiavelli, secretary of the Ten, was able to create a citizen militia and reduce the city’s dependence on foreign condottieri of uncertain loyalty. The new model army was part of the force that laid siege to Pisa and took its surrender in June 1509.

  “…In August of 1512 soldiers of the Spanish viceroy in the service of Pope Julius and Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici seized the town of Prato, a few miles from Florence, sacked it and killed hundreds of its (Catholic) inhabitants. When the Florentines learned that six thousand Spanish troops were on their way to the city, they abandoned all thought of resistance. Soderini fled. Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici and other members of his family returned to the city as conquerors. They enlisted the support of leading citizens (many former republicans now becoming good Mediceans); convened a Parlamento, which appointed a balia, or civic commission, and proceeded to demolish the key (Republican) institutions of the intervening two decades. Great Council and Council of Eighty were no more. They dissolved the militia (for his involvement in the Soderini government Machiavelli was imprisoned and tortured) and trashed the Great Hall of Five Hundred, symbol of the Savonarolan governo civile. Florence would now be ruled from Rome by ministers of Cardinal Giovanni, soon to be elected Pope Leo X (1513-1521).

  “While Soderini and his allies had been trying to save the popular republic, (the) Piagnoni (group) kept Savonarola’s apocalyptic teachings alive. San Marco friars spread the word locally and their exiled brothers were making fresh converts in outlying Dominican houses and lay circles in Tuscany and beyond. Those teachings were received and interpreted in various ways. Some grasped the essential unity of Savonarola’s prophetic apostolate in which he fused Christian living (il ben vivere)…republican government and civic apotheosis in a single glorious vision.” 20

  Florence would lurch back and forth between a Savonarolalike republic and a Medici tyranny until another Medici Pope, Clement VII, imprisoned or killed the last of the Piagnoni friars and Medici rule was definitively imposed over Florence.

  Pico

  It is necessary that we return to the vita of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, to address tall tales about his “persecution” by the Church and the papacy, his “imprisonment” and his “friendship” with Savonarola. These tales are shot through with the thick veils of misdirection which accompany the accounts of the lives of many of the Neoplatonic-Hermetic conspirators. The story behind the story of poor, pitiful Pico’s imprisonment by the “Inqusition” due to “his writings” is one such case of occult propaganda. In May, 1486 in Arezzo, Pico made off with the wife of a low ranking Medici official, the tax collector Giuliano Mariotto de’ Medici, who pursued his bride and Pico to the border with Siena. A fight ensued and men in Pico’s large contingent of bodyguards were injured and slain. Pico was locked up in the Arezzo prison and the woman was restored to her husband. None of this had anything to do with heresy, the Church or the Inquisition, and as usual Pico had a golden parachute. Lorenzo de’ Medici, putting Pico’s interests ahead of his kinsman Giuliano, obtained Pico’s release.

  Then in January, 1488, near Lyons, France, to placate conservative Catholics, a charade was arranged for their benefit: Pico underwent a farcical arrest and imprisonment in Vincennes, “by order of the pope.” Upholders of the notion that the Church of Rome was hot on the heels of the heretic Pico conclude the narrative at this point. They omit the following fact concerning his quick release: “Influential admirers and supporters set diplomatic wheels in motion and won his release. Among them was Lorenzo de’ Medici,” in whose villa at Fieole, Pico took up residence, allegedly in great piety and observing strictest continence (but actually in the company of his concubine). 21

  Tales of Giovanni Pico’s supposed “friendship” with the anti-Medici Savonarola, of his collaboration with Savonarola on anti-astrological treatises, and alleged desire to take the Dominican habit shortly before his death from natural causes,22 mostly emanate from Pico’s nephew Ginafrancesco, the enigmatic mover and shaker who attached himself to Savonarola as a disciple, but who was likely a spy charged with keeping an eye on the reformer while cleansing his Uncle Pico’s legacy of its more extreme occult associations.

  After Giovanni Pico’s death, Savonarola prayed for the soul of Pico and mercifully opined that he was in purgatory rather than hell. The notion that Pico the sexual libertine and Kabbalist who made no public recantation or repentance for either of these transgressions, was a devout and sincere convert to Savonarola’s Catholic orthodoxy, is untenable. Giovanni Sinibaldi, one of the inner circle at Savonarola’s San Marco monastery, wrote that Pico was deceiving Savonarola. Sinibaldi claimed that while volunteering to submit to Savonarola’s regimen of severe asceticism, Pico was keeping a prostitute on the sly. 23

  What we know for certain about Savonarola undercuts all the legends of him lending support to Pico’s views. The monk’s relentless “disparagement of humanist intellectuals who were more Platonic than Christian” 24 puts paid to the myth that there was some sort of alliance between the two. Fraternal relations, such as they were, could be maintained only through the pagan Pico’s occult traits of shameless hypocrisy and masquerade: “From the humanist Crinito we have the idyllic story that whe
n Pico smiled indulgently at Savonarola’s denunciation of the pagan philosophers, the Frate (Savonarola) embraced and saluted him as the most learned philosopher and expert on Christianity of the age.” 25

  “The portraits of the later Pico drawn even by avid piagnoni (friends of Savonarola)…more often remind us of the bold magician-priest of the nine hundred theses who was literally prepared to marry the world,’ than of the self-effacing Christian of his nephew’s Vita, where we find the humble (and even self-flagellating) Pico vowing to wander barefoot preaching the simple word of Christ once his current literary projects were complete. Suggestions, in fact, exist of serious conflict between Pico and Savonarola…” 26

  1 “To the conquered all crimes, to the victors all holiness.” This “victor’s justice” apothegm is attributed to the Medici. Cf. Fire in the City: Savonarola and the Struggle for the Soul of Renaissance Florence (2006), p. 285.

  2 Lauro Martines, Fire in the City: Savonarola and the Struggle for the Soul of Renaissance Florence, p. 25.

  3 Ibid., p. 32.

  4 Donald Weinstein, Savonarola: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Prophet (2011) p. 217.

  5 Martines, op. cit., p. 118.

  6 Ibid., p. 126.

  7 Unfortunately Prof. Martines has fallen for the standard tale that Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino were sympathetic to Savonarola. It is true that they had the wit to pay lip service to him, as did Niccolo Machiavelli. However, these three men were polar opposites of all that for which Savonarola stood, which included his strong animus toward the occult as evidenced by his support for George of Trebizond’s attack on Neoplatonism (cf. Hanegraaff, Esotericism, p. 79). Savonarola’s guide was the Bible, against which he measured everything. No one has doubted his sincerity and no sincere conservative Bible interpreter could endorse Pico’s occult synthesis of Christ and Kabbalah, or Ficino’s amalgamation of magic and the doctrine of the Church.

  8 Martines, p. 137.

  9 Weinstein, op. cit., p. 230.

  10 Martines, op. cit., pp. p. 161 and 286.

  11 Florentine noblemen had their own anti-Savonarola confederacy, loosely organized as the Arrabbiati.

  12 Martines op. cit., p. 206.

  13 Martines, op. cit., p. 248.

  14 Ibid., p. 265. Martines undertakes an analysis of Savonarola’s reported testimony which undercuts the credibility of his trials (Martines, pp. 266-273).

  15 Weinstein p. 297.

  16 Martines. op. cit., p. 284.

  17 Trattato contra li astrologi I, I, in Savonarola, Scritti filosofici, vol. 1, p. 278.

  18 Hanegraaff, Esotericism (op.cit.), p. 81.

  19 Heribert Jone, Moral Theology (Tan Books and Publishers, 1993), p. 539. This pervert goes on to decree that a husband having intercourse while his wife is menstruating, while not recommended, is not morally objectionable (p. 535). Catholics enslaved to a hierarchy that pushes this sewage rather than the Word of God will suffer in body, mind and soul. Jone’s highly touted Moral Theology bears imprimaturs and was published in nine languages by Catholic publishers over many decades.

  20 Weinstein, op. cit., pp. 298-302.

  21 Ibid., pp. 70-71.

  22 Ibid., pp. 141-142.

  23 Ibid., p. 143.

  24 Ibid., p. 144.

  25 Ibid., p. 142.

  26 Farmer, op.cit., pp. 150-151.

  Chapter VII

  The Sorcerer Abbott

  The Catholic occultist, cryptographer and Benedictine Abbot Johannes Trithemius (1462-1516) was born Johann Heidenberg in Trittenheim, Germany on the banks of the river Mosel, near Trier. In the early 1480s he met his first handler, “an unnamed Jew” he had worked under while studying at the University of Heidelberg. Soon afterward he joined the Benedictine order and from the precocious age of twenty-one he headed the Benedictine monastery of Sponheim in the Palatinate for the succeeding twenty-three years, and became renowned throughout Europe. Was he named abbot at such a young age solely due to his merit, or was his career being guided by the Cryptocracy, thanks to his handler? Sponheim was a wealthy monastery with a fabulous library of some 2,000 volumes of arcana, almost too perfectly suited to the requirements of Trithemius to have been a coincidence.

  In 1499 his occult Catholicism was discovered and controversy erupted among the Carmelites of Ghent over his book of black magic and cryptography, Steganographia. (The title refers to his favored technique of composing secret messages delivered by demonic spirits). Later the French Catholic scholar Carolus Bovillus joined the fray on the side of orthodox Catholicism and in correspondence termed Abbot Trithemius a demonic magician.

  In 1505 Trithemius departed Sponheim and its extraordinary library. In 1506 he assumed the leadership of the monastery of St. Jacob of Würzburg. Besides Steganographia he authored three other cardinal occult works: De daemonibus; Antipalus maleficiorum; and De septem secundeis; and at least one exclusively devoted to cryptography, Polygraphia.

  “Trithemius was at one with the circle of literary figures he had befriended at Heidelberg before his arrival at Sponheim, a number of whom, headed up by the gifted poet Conrad Celtis, later formed themselves, with the departed Trithemius included, into a kind of academy modeled after the Florentine Platonist circle of Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. The humanists comprising this so-called sodalitas literaria Rhenana generally met on an informal basis in the house of the Heidelberg jurist Johannes Vigilius (Wacker), and in addition to Celtis included such foremost luminaries of the German renaissance as Rudolf Agricola (before his premature death in 1486), Johannes de Dalberg (the Bishop of Worms), Johannes Reuchlin and Johannes Wimpheling.

  “…We are able to pinpoint the exact year in which the legend of Trithemius the magician began because, by Trithemius’ own account, we can specify the precise event which put this legend into motion. The responsible party, as it happened, was not some hostile antagonist anxious to malign his good name with rumors of demon-conjuration and the like, but Trithemius himself, who in 1499 addressed a letter to his good friend Arnold Bostius, a Carmelite monk of Ghent in modern Belgium, summarizing the contents of a handbook the abbot had recently commenced and was furiously attempting to complete as quickly as possible. The subject of the handbook was steganography, that is, the art of writing secret messages and communicating them long distances by occult means.

  “…Regardless of whether Trithemius’ readers were in basic sympathy with the abbot’s audacious extension of the concept artes liberates to include occult subjects like that of steganography, they could not but marvel at the great impact Trithemius was having upon the learned and powerful of Europe simultaneously with the proliferation of his magical legend.” 1

  Among these “learned and powerful” Catholics were Rutger Sicamber de Venray of the Augustinian monastery of Heyna; the Carmelite Johannes Evriponus, Robert Gaguin, Superior-General of the Order of Trinitarians; Dietrich von Bülow, the Bishop of Lebus; Count Philip, the Duke of Bavaria; Matthäus Herbenus, Rector of St. Servatius in Maastricht; Werner von Themar; Dietrich Gresemund the Younger; the Margrave Christopher of Baden; the Margrave-Elector Joachim of Brandenburg; the Dutch Canon Cornelius Aurelius, along with other assorted “princes, prelates, nobles and magistrates” and, in 1512, one Holy Roman Emperor — Maximilian — who studied under Trithemius when the latter became the Abbot of the monastery in Würzburg.

  During “Margrave Christopher of Baden’s visit in the same year…it is made plain that the principal cause of his attraction to Sponheim was the abbot’s specialized knowledge in the occult studies…the Margrave entered Trithemius’ cloistered walls ostensibly with the purpose of ‘seeing the library,’ but at the same time as he was perusing the abbot’s books ‘added to his knowledge and cognition certain arcana in the pursuit of which he had summoned Trithemius to his castle at Lutzenburg the year before’…within two years he returned ‘to see and speak with the abbot Trithemius, with whom he discussed and shared certain secrets in the hidden mysteries of na
ture (in abditis naturae mysteriis quaedam secreta).” 2

  Trithemius swung between two poles of neo-Catholic Renaissance magic: the white or “natural” magic of Ficino and Pico, and black magic which Trithemius utilized in an exceedingly circumspect manner, as for example in his Synusiastes Melanii Triandrici ad Yaymielem, a private treatise he prepared for his wealthy but impotent client, “Joachim,” which advised the invocation of demons. The Synusiastes, printed posthumously in the Paralipomena, eventually was acquired by Heinrich Khunrath 3 (1560-1605). Synusiastes was censored in parts by Busaeus, and uncensored editions are very scarce but can be found in the Antipalus manuscript in the archives of Cornell University. 4

  Trithemius was defended by his Catholic confrére, the monk Johannes Butzbach, who compared him to St. Albertus Magnus, Dominican Prior of Teutonia (1254-1257) and the teacher of Aquinas. Butzbach deceptively described Trithemius in terms of a benevolent, Catholic white magic, which excluded demonic black magic. This, as we have seen, was not true: