The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome
Page 37
“G.B. Picotti 82 has reviewed the known facts and documents and…believes that Leo X seized upon Petrucci’s indiscretions and intrigues to create a ‘plot’ against his own life as a means of destroying his opponents, extorting huge sums of money from them (especially from Riario), and preparing the way for the drastic enlargement of the Sacred College (of cardinals) by the appointment of neutral and pro-Mediciean cardinals…Almost as remarkable as the supposed conspiracy by five cardinals to kill the pope was the astonishing nomination of thirty-one cardinals in the great creation of 1 July 1517, after which Leo had a firm hold on the College and the Curia.” 83
The main records of the trial of the putative conspirators is missing. It appears that Leo’s friend and ally, Cardinal Pucci of Florence, was the presiding judge. The accused cardinals (other than Petrucci) escaped execution only by confessing guilt and agreeing not to question or appeal the outcome of the “trial.”
The thirty-one new cardinals created by Pope Leo on July 1 paid him for the privilege of their office. This simoniacal money-glutton also profited handsomely from the immense fines he exacted from the “guilty cardinals.” 84
Nothing is static in history or inside the Vatican and the endless wheeling and dealing in Rome regularly caused alliances to shift. One of the thirty-one cardinals newly named was Tomasso de Vio (“Cajetan”), a formidable theologian and Superior General of the Dominican Order. He and Erasmus had been bitter rivals since the early sessions of the Fifth Lateran Council when Erasmus attacked Cajetan for writing in favor of the acts of Pope Julius II, who Erasmus vilified in his Dialogus Julius Exclusus e coelis (1513), which he published anonymously (his authorship has since been established). In Julius Exclusus, Erasmus verbally pummeled Pope Julius for disparaging the French King Louis XII’s Council of Pisa. Certain that his cloak of anonymity in Julius Exclusus was secure, in correspondence with Leo X and also with Cardinal Campeggio, Erasmus felt confident to denounce the French monarch’s 1511 Council of Pisa as “schismatic.” To say that Erasmus was two-faced is an error in arithmetic by a factor of five.
While Rome was firmly in the camp of the conspiracy there were two opinions about how the occult should advance inside the Church — slowly and quietly, or rapidly and publicly. Leo X had favored the latter policy, which appeared to be a judicious exploitation of the Renaissance Zeitgeist. It had infuriated conservatives like Hoogstraeten and the test for the psychological warriors in the hierarchy was: how much change can the conservatives bear before they reach the breaking point and revolt, thereby threatening all of the progress made for the past seventy-five years? Reuchlin and his “Cabala” had nearly been canonized. Pfefferkorn’s campaign against the Talmud of Babylon had been obliterated when Leo X granted Bomberg permission to print and distribute it.
For the time being fortune favored the bold: in 1519, Reuchlin’s second edition of his Letters of Illustrious Men (“Illustrium vivorum epistolae”) 85 boasted of the support he had received from across the spectrum, from humanist to Lutheran to papal, in the form of endorsements from Erasmus, Martin Luther and Pope Leo X!
Furthermore, Count Hermann von Neuenahr published, under the nose of the Dominicans in Cologne, Bishop Giorgio Benigno’s Defense of Reuchlin. Benigno was Bishop of Cagli in Umbria and a member of the Medici inner circle, from the time of Lorenzo onward. With the fall of the Medici in Florence and the rise of Savonarola, Benigno had been charged with infiltrating Savonarola’s followers.
Neuenahr launched an assault on Pfefferkorn’s principal ally inside the Church, Jacob Hoogstraeten, the theology professor and Dominican priest who was Inquisitor of the German archdioceses of Trier, Mainz and Cologne. The German people in those archdioceses watched as Hoogstraeten was dragged through the mud in print, along with his Dominican Order in Germany. This was perpetrated by the papal agents Neuenahr and Benigno.
In 1519 the German Catholic warlord Franz von Sickingen was recruited by allies of Reuchlin inside the Church, to harass the German Dominicans in general and Hoogstraeten in particular. Sickingen was the author of a pamphlet, Demand and Announcement to and against the Provincials, Priors and Convents of the Order of Preachers (Dominicans) in Germany, and Especially Friar Jacob von Hoogstraeten on Account of and in the Name of the Highly Learned and Famous Johannes Reuchlin. Sickingen ordered the Dominicans to halt the publication of any books harmful to Reuchlin and pay monetary compensation to him.
Sickingen was a war criminal. This butcher had been turned on the German Dominicans by elements within the Church of Rome. As a result, the German-Dominican Prior General, Eberhard of Cleves, arranged a deal with Sickingen wherein Hoogstraeten would be silenced and further negotiations with Sickingen to arrange for Reuchlin to receive compensation, would be opened. This took place in Frankfurt in May, 1520, before a commission of Catholic judges well-disposed toward Reuchlin. Among the judges were Sickingen’s brother-in-law, Philipp von Flersheim, Joanes Vigilius and Simon Ribysen, personal friends of Reuchlin. They stripped Hoogstraeten of all of his offices and forbade him to write against Reuchlin. The Dominican Order in Germany, under duress, had abjectly surrendered to the Neoplatonic-Hermetic-Kabbalistic conspiracy.
Observing this tawdry spectacle of dishonor and disgrace were the German people. They reasoned that if a commission of the Catholic Church in Germany had ruled that the Dominicans were men of low character and deficient in morals and that their leader, Rev. Dr. Hoogstraeten, was a wicked and foul cleric, then it must be true, and Martin Luther had been correct all along. The shabby treatment of Hoogstraeten and the German Dominicans contributed to the growth of the Lutheran movement. Here is an enigma: can it truly be said that this was not foreseen by Rome?
Here is another: with one hand Pope Leo had permitted the situation in Germany and the degradation of the Dominicans and Hoogstraeten. With the other he allegedly acted against Reuchlin, in 1520. But if that is the case, how is it that no record exists of any direct papal order contra Reuchlin? The existence of the order has the status of hearsay. The Dominican faculty in Cologne claimed to have seen a copy of the papal order and they claimed that the Pope’s order permanently silenced Reuchlin. This we know to be a falsehood. Reuchlin remained a full professor in good standing at a Catholic university. Moreover, even though the rumored papal judgment against Reuchlin was supposed to contain a lifting of the ban on Hoogstraeten and his complete freedom, the record shows that from 1521 onward to the day he died, Hoogstraeten never again spoke against Reuchlin or the Talmud and Kabbalah.
Ingolstadt University Prof. Johannes Eck, Luther’s nemesis and the Fugger banking dynasty’s Catholic usury advocate, played a cruel game with Hoogstraten, feigning friendship toward the Dominican theologian and enmity for Reuchlin. In a letter to Hoogstraeten of July 24, 1519, Eck sought “to encourage Hochstraten (Hoogstraeten) to use his influence to expedite a decision” by the theology faculty of the University of the Sorbonne in favor of Eck. To gain Hoogstraeten’s friendship, Eck posed as Reuchlin’s enemy, telling him that Reuchlin and Luther were two grammatici (grammarians) from the same noxious root. 86 In the same year that he was peddling this malarkey to Hoogstraeten, Eck was entertaining “Johannes Reuchlin as an honored guest in Ingolstadt.” 87 Hoogstraeten, the loyal papist and author of Destructio cabale seu cabalisticae perdiae, was surrounded by treachery, most of it emanating from his fellow papists.
When he died on June 30, 1522, in Stuttgart, Reuchlin was a member of the faculty of the Catholic University of Tübingen where he was a professor teaching classes until he became too ill to do so. Daniel Bomberg continued to dedicate books to him. Bomberg reminded the world that Pope Leo X had commissioned the printing of the Talmud, “a work of great labor and expense that the Supreme Pontiff entrusted to me,” Bomberg wrote.
The misinformed among Catholics and Protestants imagine that Reuchlin became a Protestant with the rise of Luther. The Luther Monument in Worms, Germany, erected in 1868, perpetuates this hoax. It features life-size sculptures of th
e “Four Patrons of the Reformation”—Philipp Melanchthon, Philipp of Hesse, Friedrich of Saxony and Johannes Reuchlin. This myth helps assuage illusions on both sides. In truth, Reuchlin was always faithful to the papacy and the Renaissance Church of Rome. The public spectacle of the degradation inflicted on Reuchlin’s enemies by papal agents, certainly did give impetus to the Lutheran movement.
In sum, “As he achieved the ability to form independent judgments on Jewish writings, Reuchlin began to question the substance of anti-Jewish innuendos and, through his readings, ultimately came to the conclusion that specific Christian allegations of blasphemy and heresy within the Jewish tradition were either baseless or trivial. He also took the further important step of repudiating the portrayal of postbiblical Judaism as the enemy of Christianity. That Jews and Judaism were not anti-Christian (and not antagonistic forces in a Christian society) was a foundational principle of his Recommendation…His historical interest in ancient religions and philosophies and his assumption that elements of an original, true theology (prisca theologia) could be discovered in ancient, especially Jewish, texts predisposed him to a favorable reception of historical Judaism…” 88
Reuchlin faithfully transmitted from Giovanni Pico della Mirandola that which he had received, the “true theology,” and then extended it in his 1517 book, De arte cabalistica. 89 He pimped for the Babylonian Talmud, Judaism’s book of hatred, sexual perversion, and bureaucratic micromanagement of Judaic lives, as well as the Kabbalah, Judaism’s book of black magic. His prestige was such that those two tomes would serve as the clandestine guiding light of the papacy until emerging in public in the twentieth century through Henri de Lubac, the eminence grisé of the Second Vatican Council, and in the postconciliar pontificate of John Paul II and his successors, Benedict and Francis.
Reuchlin reached the height of his influence under Pope Leo X, who licensed the publication of the Talmud and endorsed Reuchlin’s Art of the Kabbalah. These facts represent foundational mandates for the development of a secret society inside the Vatican which has never been eradicated.
To what art was Reuchlin referring when he wrote The Art of the Kabbalah? It is the “art” of falsifying the Word of God with gematria and temurah, rabbinic exegetical glosses on Scripture as developed in Kabbalistic works like the Zohar.
In gematria the “mystical secrets” are revealed through the numerology assigned to Hebrew letters in the belief that every Hebrew letter has a numerical equivalent. For example, it is said that 231 is the number of all the possible pairs of letters in the 22-letter Hebrew Alef-Beth (“alphabet”). Hence, number 231 is believed by the Judaic Kabbalists to contain the “mystery of creation,” and it is through these letter combinations that Kabbalistic tradition holds that in Prague in the sixteenth century the god-like Rabbi Judah Loew brought a Golem (artificial man) to life. This is of Christ?
The word for an evil individual in Hebrew is Rasha. The word for a holy individual is Tzaddik. According to Kabbalistic gematria, the numerical value of Rasha is 570 and the numerical value of Tzaddik is 204. The difference between them is 366. The Kabbalist searches for words in Scripture that taken together add up to the number 366. This is supposed to reveal something. What it reveals is that the Kabbalistic soothsayer can manipulate the meaning of the Word of God by choosing whatever letters supposedly are derived from words which, when added together, equal 366. He can then declare that he has solved the “mystery of the creative fire that unites the polarities.”
This is the occult “art” derived from Pharaonic Egypt and pagan Babylon. It has no connection to the God of Israel or His Word. A spurious “connection” was forged by deceivers whose spiritual patrimony is the Father of Lies. The gematria of which Reuchlin was so inordinately besotted and which infatuated Catholics from St. John Fisher to Pope Leo X, and which only “reactionary-inquisitors” and “Jew-hating calumniators” would oppose, represents an ominous counterfeiting of God’s Word. Because it has an avant-garde intellectual patina and is described as “sacred mystical Jewish insight” into the Scriptures such as only God’s People could discover, it becomes a matter of “anti-semitism” to declare it for what it really is.
Temurah is a configuration method of magical exegesis that entails replacing letters in Old Testament words by the letter that either precedes or follows it. The absurdly subjective and contrived nature of this substitution is obvious to any reasonably literate person not ensnared in Kabbalistic delusion. It was by means of Temurah that Reuchlin “confirmed” Giovanni Pico’s declaration that the Kabbalah testifies to the truth of the Holy Catholic Trinity, and serves to prove the identity of Jesus as the Messiah of Israel.
It is painfully obvious that the Talmud and Kabbalah needed good p.r. in the overwhelmingly Christian fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in order to authenticate the validity of the religion of rabbinic Judaism as the planet’s foremost repository of primordial truth, wisdom, kindness and benevolence toward all. The lie required to achieve that objective, that “the Kabbalah confirms the truth of Christianity,” is no longer needed in our time, when the Kabbalah’s prestige is not dependent on confirming the Catholic dogma of the Trinity, or the messianic identity of Jesus. In the post-modernist era, very few, if any, Judaizing Catholic or Protestant theologians employ this lie which was crucial in ensuring the success of the Neoplatonic-Hermetic conspirators in bringing the Trojan Horse of Talmudic and Kabbalistic Judaism into Catholicism, and later, into some centers of Protestantism. 90
Above all, Johannes Reuchlin was a loyal agent of religious syncretism—the synthesis of Catholicism, Neoplatonic-Hermetic paganism and Judaism into a universal, one world Faith, representative of the “Perennial Tradition,” which Plethon, Ficino, Giovanni Pico and their followers believed had always existed on earth. This hybrid Church is an assimilative weapon which has marched relentlessly forward through Catholicism, though on occasion, so as to mislead and placate conservatives and camouflage its true nature, popery has, when necessary, taken one conservative step backward, after having proceeded two or more revolutionary steps forward, in what history teaches has been a remarkably successful and seemingly almost invincible alchemical progression.
We qualify this as “almost” because God is in charge and woe to those who have deceived the world. They shall reap what they have sown.
Jesus Christ promised He would never abandon us, and hell would not prevail against His Church; that His Church exists on earth we do not doubt.
1 Werner L. Gundersheimer, “Erasmus, Humanism and the Christian Cabala,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 26, No. 1/2 (1963).
2 Stinger, op. cit., pp. 307-308.
3 In Pforzheim in 1267, Judaics were alleged to have been guilty of the ritual murder of the Catholic child, Margaret of Pforzheim; Pforzheim became a regional cultural center. It was intentionally incinerated in heavy firebombing by the British during World War II.
4 Tubingen would soon become a hotbed of Catholic nominalism from which sprang the first substantive Catholic theological justification for taking profit on loans of money. Cf. this writer’s Usury in Christendom: The Mortal Sin that Was and Now is Not, pp. 163-168; 171-172 and 176.
5 Daniel O’Callaghan, The Preservation of Jewish Religious Books in Sixteenth Century Germany: Johannes Reuchlin’s Augenspiegel (2012), p. 26.
6 On Reuchlin’s philo-Judaism cf. Max Brod, Johannes Reuchlin und sein Kampf: Eine historische Monographie (1965).
7 Paola Zambelli, White Magic, Black Magic, op. cit., p. 15.
8 O’Callaghan, op.cit., p. 40.
9 Wilhelm Maurer, “Reuchlin und das Judenthum,” in Theologische Literaurzeitung, pp. 535-544.
10 O’Callaghan, op.cit., pp. 2-3.
11 “And would that the church of the Christians did not give so much preference to the Old Testament.” Desiderius Erasmus in a letter to Wolfgang Koepfel, March 13, 1518.
12 O’Callaghan, op.cit., p. 114, footnotes 31 (second paragraph) and 34.
14 Years before, Reuchlin had written a pamphlet, Why the Jews Have Been in Exile So Long, attesting to the anti-Christian content of the Amidah prayer. Pfefferkorn believed Reuchlin’s volte face was due to him being on the rabbis’ payroll. This would not be unusual, as we have seen concerning financial arrangements for Archbishop Uriel and Emperor Maximilian himself.
15 Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Tefillah Unesi’at Kapayyim 2:1. For an elucidation of the amidah, cf. footnote 272 on p. 279 of Judaism Discovered.
16 This is a reference to Gamaliel II who survived the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D.
17 Westminster John Knox Press (2003), pp. 47-66. David Instone-Brewer extended Martyn’s thesis by tracing the Birkat’s origin to the time of Gamaliel I. Cf. Journal of Theological Studies 54, no. 1 (2003), pp. 25-44. Support for Martyn’s thesis has been subjected to excision. The Catholic Study Bible (Oxford University) edited by Donald Senior, in its 1990 edition supported Martyn. The 2011 edition removed the support. Raymond E. Brown endorsed Martyn’s thesis in 1979 in The Community of the Beloved Disciple, but omits it in his 1997 An Introduction to the New Testament.
18 St. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, ch. 96:2. In ch. 137:2 Justin shows he is not deceived by the claim of the rabbis to being Israel: “Do not scorn the King of Israel as the chiefs of your synagogues instruct you to do after prayers.”
19 Cf. for example, Joseph Hertz (Chief Rabbi of England), The Authorized Daily Prayer Book, p. 143.
20 Ruth Langer, Cursing the Christians? (Oxford University Press), p. 45.
21 Nachmanides was treated courteously and paid for his trouble. King James observed that no one so wrong had ever argued so well.
22 Margaritha stayed loyal to the Catholic Faith early in his career and then wandered into Neoplatonic Hermeticism later. His father was Rabbi Samuel Margoles. Anthonius’s brother was Rabbi Moses Mordechai of Cracow. In his book Der gantz Judisch glaub Margaritha described how some Judaics offered a groshen (coin) to Christians so the Christian would become the scapegoat into which the Judaic’s sins were allegedly transferred, rather than the usual kapporoth (“sin chicken”).