The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome

by Michael Hoffman

  “…in this book he (Trithemius) deals with natural magic; he teaches with extreme elegance with the strongest arguments and a multitude of testimonies as did recently the erudite Pico that this magic is different and has to be distinguished from the magic which is impious and criminal. Indeed, no person who has read Pico’s Apologia could be in doubt that ‘magic is twofold;’ as the author says, the one is concerned with the entire work and authority of the demons, a practice most certainly abominable and unnatural. The other is, when correctly examined, nothing but the absolute perfection of natural philosophy.

  “…Agrippa (Trithemius’ disciple), then in his early twenties, showed in 1510 the first manuscript draft of his De occulta philosophia to Trithemius. Both were attached to Johannes Reuchlin and they had a frank discussion…in regard to a good many secrets and the ‘two ways’ of magic. The abbot urged him not to stop at the mere natural magic…but to probe under the veil of initiation into the prodigies of magical practice.” 5

  It is seldom that we have a clear admission from one of the significant infiltrators inside the Church concerning the twofaced strategy of deception which was one of their tools for duping the public. “…what interests us in this document is Trithemius’s instigation to double-dealing; he revealed this attitude only to the few disciples who had arrived at the final initiation. Certainly also, Trithemius’s game with magic and witchcraft amounts to double-dealing. In his form of magic, the aspect of ceremonial magic is present; indeed it is prevalent. In the Steganographia…there is to be found, apart from a strange cryptography, spiritual magic of the cabalistic type. His letters to Joachim von Brandenburg, beside the one to Agrippa…leave little room for doubt; and yet Trithemius wrote three works against witches who engage in the same practices.

  “(Trithemius) advised (Cornelius) Agrippa over his decision whether to present his work De occulta philosophia (and the hermetic tradition that lay behind it) openly, or in secret, i.e. through a circle of initiates. It is very remarkable in this context that Trithemius, a prelate, advised Agrippa, a layman, to keep an initiatic attitude.

  “…All this leads me to believe that in his maturity Trithemius had not forsworn that Reformatio hermetica’ which Noel L. Brann, his recent biographer, has read into his letter of 1499 to Arnold Bost (‘Bostius’)…I cannot…trace a change in Trithemius’s attitude toward the Hermetic conception…” 6

  One of his chief areas of study and expertise was cryptography, and more than mere codes and ciphers, masked language understood only by the initiated. This was a practice of Plethon, Ficino, Giovanni Pico, and Reuchlin as well. (The latter personage Bishop Trithemius had met on more than one occasion.) It took the form of hypocritical double-talk laden with Catholic pieties, along with an esoteric language for communicating actual arcana to insiders. It should be noted that when time and place were auspicious, concealment was abandoned and the occult doctrine was communicated in public with revelatory potency, most often in the form of Catholic works of art executed by initiates. Trithemius has the distinction of having combined the occult orientation toward extreme secrecy with an intermittent inclination toward a stratagem of the Cryptocracy in the 20th century, dispensing with the customary dissimulation in favor of the Revelation of the Method (making manifest of what is concealed by the one who initially concealed it).7 These episodes of conceal-and-thenreveal (the “cryonic freeze-thaw process” denoted by James Shelby Downard), are a mark of the magical praxis of Trithemius. He was preoccupied both with secrecy and with making proclamations of secrets. There is a mocking trickster aspect to this phenomenon.

  “Trithemius was a notorious follower of the magical sciences. He had unashamedly maintained that ceremonial practices were indispensable in magic and had criticized those who, following Ficino and Pico, claimed not to go beyond ‘natural’ magic. He kept in manuscript form most of his magical works, sharing them only with a close circle of initiates; some of these writings were published many decades after his death, others are to this day unpublished…” 8

  Abbot Trithemius, like nearly every Catholic occultist examined in these pages, was a liar and extraordinarily dishonest. He was known to produce occult forgeries and imaginary sages (“Pelagius of Majorca”) and colleagues (“Libanius Gallus”). Among contemporary Orthodox Catholics he had a reputation for presenting fables as history (“Ego non pro historico, sed fabulatore omnium falsissimo reputo”). Among “experts” of our time he is however, reputed to be an eminent humanist. Though today most Establishment historians and academics imagine that “Pelagius of Majorca” was an actual historical figure, in the time of Trithemius the name was tangentially associated, at least among those “in the know,” with fraud: Francesco Zambeccari’s 1504 translation of a version of the letters of the early Church heretic Pelagius 9 compiled by a certain “Libanius,”10 was somewhat notorious for containing more than a hundred of the epistles attributed to Pelagius that had been faked by the translator. In terms of cryptography, which too often we associate with numbers rather than conjuring misdirection by means of written words and patter, the mission to deceive is assisted by a sophisticated process of intentional signaling to the percipient that he or she is being deceived, within a context of a macabre joke at their expense. Cryptography like this constitutes psychological warfare. The conjuration by Trithemius of “Pelagius of Majorca” and “Libanius” may have been toward that objective. If so, it affords us insight into the methods—born from a mentality steeped in profound deception—by which the “Catholic” Neoplatonists, Hermeticists and Kabbalists plied their infiltration of the Church.

  The historical record is replete with the chicanery of these scoundrels. Giovanni Pico’s Judaic handler, Guglielmo Raimondo Moncada (alias “Flavius Mithridates”), took the anti-Christian Kabbalistic teaching that declared that the passage in Deuteronomy 31:16 about “playing the harlot” alludes to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and turned this Kabbalistic statement completely around, boldly misrepresenting it as “a Kabbalistic confirmation of Christianity…Mithridates’ skillful presentation of what he wanted Pico to believe, was the input for Pico’s original ‘experiment with the principles’ and stands at the origin of the Christian Kabbalah. This unique constellation was going to have far-reaching consequences…for the standard argument used later by Christian Kabbalists in order to defend the legitimacy and the usefulness of their ‘discovery’ for a Christian readership…” 11

  Shameless liars like Moncada/Mithridates and his theological heirs, such as Johannes Reuchlin and other Renaissance-Catholic intellectuals, are the rule, not the exception in the occult Church of Rome. Non-conspirators among the Christian public not privy to initiation in the conspiracy were viewed as cattle, beasts of burden and wicked persons. This was how the Pharisees of Christ’s time viewed the common Israelites who flocked to His message: deadbeats and evil-doers.

  Students of this subject who take at face value statements of popes, “pope-saints,” and other “Lord Bishops” and high churchmen are going to get quickly lost in coils of delusion, because any underhanded deception, no matter how low or unscrupulous, is justified in the eyes of the occultists, due to their view of the nearly sub-human status of the common people. In a longer preface to Steganographia printed posthumously, Abbot-Bishop Trithemius wrote, “Ancient philosophers, masters in art as well as in nature, when they discovered secrets, concealed them in various ways and figures, to avoid that they might become known to the wicked.”

  The “wicked” to whom Abbot-Bishop Trithemius is pointing are the parishioners and parish priests; that is to say, the vast majority of the people known as Roman Catholics. “Ineffabilium mysteriorum secreta” and the “steganographic” craft must be concealed from the “evil” public according to the occult rationale which itself stems from Kabbalistic-Talmudic Judaism.

  Inside the Church, secrets are to be guarded by distraction, coded language and doubletalk, of which Trithemius was the professor. Almost nothing about the occult is to be stated
in a straight-forward manner. “Magic and all its ceremonies could not fail to attract a man like Trithemius, with his love of prophecies and propaganda, games and forgeries, who put his vast culture at their service. The authenticity or pseudoepigraphy of magical treatises are thus a key which Trithemius used purely and simply to confer prestige and authority on the doctrines they contained and which he simply attributed or denied to their reputed authors. This too was a game that the great humanist played, to the detriment of less cultured or more naive men, like Joachim of Brandenburg. If Trithemius forged the genealogy of the Hapsburgs, if he did not hesitate to write pseudoepigraphic sources, this was all the more reason why he felt entitled to do the same with magical treatises and the sacred figures of their authors. We need not be surprised at this if we remember that even a great philologist like Erasmus did not hesitate to forge and put into circulation a treatise on martyrdom which he attributed to one of the Fathers of the Church in order to send out a metaphorical religious message.” 12

  Very ignorant “students of the occult,” as it manifested in the “inquisitorial” Church of Rome have been given the opportunity, by Trithemius himself, of claiming him as a witchhunter who was a conservative defender of the genuine doctrine of the Church. It doesn’t occur to them that his writings that buttressed the belief that witch-hunts were justified were a smokescreen for advancing his principal objective, the reconciliation of sorcery and magic with Catholic theology. Behind the front of a witch-hunter was a witchadvocate; this is too much for some people to countenance. Nonetheless, the evidence demonstrates that he penned for public consumption Antipalus maleficiorum and Liber octo quaestionum, as well as De morbo caduco et maleficiis—all of these being works against witchcraft, while clandestinely, for the Neoplatonic-Hermetic brotherhood inside the Church, he wrote apologetics for magic—Nepiachus, Polygraphia and in particular his De Septem secundeis, which entailed Kabbalistic magic.

  Shakespeare deals with this phenomenon in Macbeth: “What, can the devil speak true?…‘tis strange, and oftentimes to win us to our harm the instruments of darkness tell us truths, win us with honest trifles—to betray us in deepest consequence.” 13

  In the summer of 2016, one of the leaders of Britain’s “traditional” Catholics, who is at the same time an apologist for the Talmud, became the spokesman 14 for a group of prominent Church of Rome conservative laity and religious, who signed a theological critique 15 of the “apostolic exhortation” Amoris laetitia of Pope Francis, requesting that the pope condemn certain liberal propositions contained within it and warning of its “dangers to the faith.”

  The notion that the occult is always on the Left is disinformation emanating from the Cryptocracy. We have found in virtually every history of the Renaissance Vatican by an author or authors who can accurately be described as Leftist or New Age, a remarkably conforming insistence that the Vatican and the popes were nearly always a reactionary bulwark against all magic, Kabbalism and Neoplatonic Hermeticism. These Leftist and New Age writers often parrot, nearly verbatim, pre-1960s Right wing papal and Vatican statements to the effect that the Church of Rome has always stood against, and restricted and severely repressed, the occult. On the Right, the conservatives and traditionalists are nearly totally blind to Talmudic and occult infiltration of their ranks. They can’t seem to process Shakespeare’s explanation of occult methodology. It doesn’t occur to them that “Catholics” who go about promoting Mary, the Rosary and the Latin Mass, and who organize against the liberalization of marriage and family law put forth by Pope Francis (“Amoris laetitia”), could be part of the occult imperium.

  After the death of Abbot Trithemius, his occult works (Nepiachus, Polygraphia and De Septem secundeis), began to circulate more widely inside the hierarchy of the Church of Rome as the program they put forth became ever more secretly influential: a Catholic rationale for occultism rooted in the insistence that magic was a divinely sanctified—if necessarily covert—branch of Catholic theology. This arcane doctrine held that the world’s most accomplished magician was the priest at Mass, and the foremost magical act in all of the occult was the transformation of ordinary bread and wine into the literal flesh and blood of God Himself, as effectuated by the priestmagician, who was to be esoterically revered as such.

  Abbot Trithemius and virtually every other Church of Rome occultist cited in these pages established the priest as magician to draw the faithful away from Scriptural standards of behavior without which the the Kingdom of Yahweh on earth (Matthew 6:10) cannot come about. At the center of the “magical” Catholicism of the Neoplatonic-Hermetic conspirators is the depiction of Jesus as a practitioner of “white” magic, which is precipitously close to the rabbinic disparagement of Him as someone who learned sorcery in Egypt and led Israel astray by means of it. The Neoplatonic-Hermetic theology presents a series of “good” magicians who used “benevolent magic”: Hermes, Pythagoras and Jesus. In the third century A.D. Porphyry the Neoplatonist put forth the notion, rejected by St. Augustine, that to successfully create “white magic” the magician had to be a holy person. Neoplatonic-Hermetic Catholics teach that non-Judaics can share in Jewish magical power through the Catholic priesthood:

  “While recently visiting in Rome, Reuchlin reported in his Cabalistically inspired De verbo mirifico, Pico had proposed to him ‘that no names in magical and lawful enterprises possess a virtue equal to that residing in the Hebrew tongue or languages most nearly derived from it.’ The reason, Pico instructed Reuchlin, is that at the beginning of creation all the names given to existent entities ‘were formed from the Voice of God; therefore that in which nature exercises its most potent magic is the Voice of God.’ This was not to say, however, Pico further apprised Reuchlin, the Jews were granted an exclusive monopoly in this regard. Also granted access to the secrets of Cabala were certain specially prepared gentiles. Admittedly, the case for this contention was made harder by the appearance of magical counterfeiters in the ranks of the gentiles; when these pretend to effect miracles, Reuchlin agreed, ‘it proves to be an illusion (praestgium) rather than a true miracle, and takes place not with the help of God, but by a pact with demons.” 16

  So what was the true miracle in the eyes of these occultists? The Catholic Mass. Conservative and traditional Catholics ought to be on high alert against this misuse of the Mass, but mostly they are not. They have been indoctrinated to believe that threats come only from the Left, as well as from “Protestant-leveling and reductionism.” Much of the occult is Right-wing, however: addicted to the courtly theatre of showmanship, elaborate ceremony and costume. Trithemius personified those prelates who were steeped in the occult and engaged in hunting those persons who would not submit to them and were labeled witches and heretics, while reserving to themselves and their court the practice of magic, which was conflated with divine miracles, thus expunging the dividing line between miracle and magic which had existed since the days of Moses and Aaron’s battle with the priests of Egypt, and which had been precisely and solemnly demarcated by Augustine and Aquinas.

  “Trithemius’s demonology throws valuable light on what he was about in his own magic. For while expressly rejecting demonic magic out-of-hand, even showing a willingness to send its perpetrators to the stake, he implied at the same time that angels, with whom pious Christians seek both approximation and similarity, can legitimately be invoked to produce results foreclosed to demons.” 17

  “Echoing the noble sentiments of another great magician of his age who had played a part, if indirectly, in Trithemius’s occult education, Pico della Mirandola, Agrippa passionately proclaimed in his De triplici ratione cognoscendi Dei: ‘O what a great miracle is man, especially he who is a Christian’ (O magnum miraculum homo, praecipue autem Christianus). Expanding on the Christianized reworking of a Hermetic theme, Agrippa characterized the said miraculum Christianum as he ‘who has been established in the world, dominates over the world and effects operations resembling those of the world’s creator.’ The marvelou
s operations (opera) performed by such Christians, declared Agrippa, ‘are popularly termed miracles, of which the root and foundation is faith in Jesus Christ.” 18

  The proclamation of a “Jesus-the-Magician” trope is the culmination of the Neoplatonic-Hermetic conspiracy inside the Church of Rome.

  Abbot Trithemius largely escaped interdiction during his lifetime by his Catholic superiors or any sort of “inquisition.” He was largely free to rule over monasteries and write and publish books of “Catholic magic.” After his death, “on the heels of a generally favorable treatment of the abbot’s monastic career, Bellarmine felt compelled at last to give fair warning against two of his writings, the De septem secundeis and Steganographia, which he correctly perceived to be related through their sharing of an angelic-planetary overview.” Bellarmine’s criticism was comparatively mild and he salvaged Trithemius’ reputation by means of a lie: “Bellarmine claimed, with not an iota of evidence to back up his contention, that their author Trithemius had already started the process for a return to the protective arms of the church by having realized the error of his ways.” 19

  Numerous Catholic Neoplatonist-Hermeticists would build upon Trithemius, just as he had constructed his theology upon Ficino, Giovanni Pico and Reuchlin. Among these would be Francesco Giorgi, a Venetian Franciscan theologian who “pointed the way to this conciliating potential of magic, by calling on a mix of Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, Cabala, and orthodox Catholic doctrine to produce what he termed, in his De harmonia mundi, ‘a man well-harmonized with God’ (homo bene chordatus cum Deo).

  “With the same conciliatory function of magic in mind…Francesco Patrizi da Cherso (1529-1597) declared: ‘The first and most excellent part of magic is nothing else but theology and religion, and if it is not completely true, as the truth subsequently has been revealed by Christ, it nevertheless approaches more closely to that truth than all other studies.’ Patrizi’s aspiration in this writing was to enlist the Hermetica, together with other surviving texts of the so-called prisca theologi, in support of universalist-minded Catholic reform movement…In making his appeal to a reformatio magica, Patrizi recommended to Pope Gregory XIV, in the dedicatory preface to his Nova de universis philosophia (1591), that the hierarchical church vest the program of magical renewal in the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) as its most suitable vehicle.” 20