The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome

by Michael Hoffman

  Alphonsus Liguori (1696-1787), a post-Renaissance saint of the Church of Rome whose Moral Theology sparked a prolonged controversy in Victorian Britain.

  Usury Pope Pius VIII (1761-1830) carried on the sedia gestatoria, a ceremonial Roman throne.

  Four Occult Popes of the Renaissance

  Top: Alexander VI (Roderic Borgia), 1431-1503. Leo X (Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici), 1475-1521. Bottom: Clement VII (Giulio di Giuliano de’ Medici), 1478 -1534. Paul III (Alessandro Farnese), 1468-1549.

  The insignia of the Medici usury bank.

  Filippo Strozzi the Younger (1489-1538), one of many usury bankers who bought and sold appointments to the Sacred College and other high offices in the Church of Rome.

  The Sefirotic Tree of the Kabbalistic Ten Emanations.

  The Holy Roman Emperor’s Kabbalah

  An illustration of Jesus Christ on the Cross corresponding to the Sefirotic Tree of the Kabbalistic Ten Emanations.

  From the Syriac New Testament, published by Ferdinand I (1503-1564), future Holy Roman Emperor, while he was the Catholic King of Hungary and Bohemia, and Archduke of Austria.

  [Liber sacrosancti evangelii de Iesu Christo Domino, 1555].

  Antonin Scalia, Associate Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, in conversation with attorney Nathan Lewin concerning how to apply Talmudic halacha to the American court system.

  “Synagogue and State in America,” November 6, 2013. Zahava and Moshel Straus Center for Torah 1 Yeshiva University, New York.

  An excerpt from Associate Supreme Court Justice Scalia’s dissent in Caperton v. A. T. Massey Coal Co., 556 U.S. 868 (June 8, 2009).

  At left is an excerpt from the Moral Theology of Alphonsus Liguori, 2 in which, concerning oaths sworn by Catholics, this ‘Doctor of the Church,’ establishes escape clauses, whereby the obligation of Catholics to fulfill what they have sworn to do or uphold, need not be fulfilled:

  “Either of the opinions is probable, but the first is more probable: for the reason of the second opinion supposes it as certain that such an oath, made without the mind of binding one’s self, is a true oath. But it is a more probable, and common opinion, as Salm. c. 1 n. 19. with others as above, and even Viva on proposition 25. of Innocent XI. num. 13. (against Lessius in the mentioned num. 37.) assert that such an oath is not a true oath: both because it wants the necessary conditions to the nature of a promissory oath, such as is the intention of binding one’s self; and because an oath follows the nature of the promise which it confirms, as is certain ap Bus. n. 280. cum Less. Bon. etc. But a promise made without such a mind is not, indeed, a promise but simply proposed; therefore, the promises being evanescent, the oath is also such, and is considered as made without the mind of swearing, which certainly, as we have seen, is null and void. But if no oath exists, there is no obligation of fulfilling that oath.”

  The Catholic lay preacher, Brandano da Petroio (1486-1554), scourge of the occult Church of Rome.

  1 By “Torah” is meant Judaism’s supreme law derived from the oral tradition, the Torah she’Beal peh , i.e. the Talmud Bavli.

  2 R.P. Blakeney, Extracts Translated from the Moral Theology (1852), p. 130.

  Chapter IX

  Renaissance High Art: An Initiation

  Some aesthetes believe that the theological abominations of the Renaissance era are vitiated by the fact that it nurtured and played host to the temple of art that is its most renowned achievement. In the introduction to his 1964 translation of Charles Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil and Other Works, Wallace Fowlie wrote of Plato’s doctrine in Phaedrus according to which “beauty is a mark left on the soul which the soul never loses no matter how low it may sink.” This is a doctrine of the Kabbalah as it was visually imparted to the masses for the first time in Christendom through Renaissance High Art. Here we have Plato vs. Jesus, who taught no such abomination. If the spirit of a man sinks into depravity, it is not redeemed by possessing “beauty.” Transgression of the laws of God removes true beauty from within ourselves. To say that beauty is impervious to the effects of depravity is itself depraved.

  What passes for “Catholic art” in the Renaissance by Michelangelo, Botticelli, Pintoricchio and others, is part of a disguise at the heart of the Neoplatonic attitude of contempt for the common man, in line with the words of Horace, “Odi profanum vulgus et arceo” (“I hate and avoid the profane crowd”). The common people have no right to the truth, which is reserved for the elite alone, as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola stated, “Sicut secretam Magiam a nobis primum ex Orphei hymnis elicitam, fas non et in publicum explicare” (“Just as the secret magic that we first described from Orpheus’ hymns is not to be explained in public”).

  “Michelangelo’s works were indeed of pagan inspiration and like other masterpieces of the Renaissance were designed specially for initiates into pagan theology and Neoplatonic thought.” 1

  Michelangelo was a creature of the Medici. He lived for two years (1490-1491) in the palace of Lorenzo de’ Medici where the frequent visitors and sometime guests were Father Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico. “…in the years after Michelangelo’s return to Florence in 1516 he was closely involved in the Neoplatonic circle of Ficino’s pupil and philosophical heir, Francesco da Diacetto.” 2

  Giovanni Pico della Mirandola is synonymous with religious syncretism, Kabbalah and the occult secrecy and duplicity that inspired Sebastino del Piombo in his letter to Michelangelo of July 17, 1533. In that missive, he urged Michelangelo to disguise Ganymede 3 in his fresco for the Medici chapel, as St. John the Revelator, by giving Ganymede a halo.

  Analyzing this epoch’s art, Edgar Wind writes that, “…in the study of the Renaissance mysteries…it may help to remove the veil of obscurity which not only distance in time…but a deliberate obliqueness in the use of metaphor, has spread over some of the greatest Renaissance paintings. They were designed for initiates; hence they require an initiation.” 4

  When we consider that Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel 5 is regarded as one of the holiest sanctuaries in Christendom, we begin to grasp the depth of human credulity. The Sistine Chapel is the realm of Plato; not Jesus Christ. Our Lord was not a nude, despite the lustful allure of the several revolting depictions of Him hanging virtually nude on the Cross, which we encounter in “Catholic” art after the Middle Ages and which is by no means limited to the Renaissance.

  Neither were the apostles, disciples or the holy women who followed Him naked, yet the Church of Rome’s Sistine Chapel consists of a riot of nudity which marks one of the most startling departures from the true Church of the previous millennium.

  In the western occult imperium there are two phases of time: the time of keeping secrets and the time of revealing them. The former is father to the latter. The Neoplatonist Denys, or Pseudo-Dionysius, (mistaken, as we have noted, for Dionysius the Aeropagite, who was the contemporary of St. Paul), described the stages to be followed in the crucible of change: “…the theological tradition is double, being on the one hand a tradition which is not expressed in words and which is mystical, and on the other hand, a tradition which makes manifest and is better known.” 6

  First, the secret gnosis takes deep root, grows and flourishes and hence, must not be made known to the masses of the people of God. Giovanni Pico was adamant about the requirement for absolute secrecy for the ideology, designs and activities of his own work and that of his co-conspirators, lest the still-orthodox Catholic people discover it and demand its extirpation, or effect that extirpation themselves through an uprising. This secrecy was not intended to be perpetual, however. The Renaissance art under consideration, like Renaissance pagan syncretism itself, appears to function as a time capsule consisting of a once-and-future revelation: once for the insiders at the top of the pyramid of gnosis, and then in the future, when the vulgus have been so thoroughly processed that the truth “which makes manifest” can be revealed to them without risk of revolt. It seems that this is the stage in which we find ourselves in
the twenty-first century, when what would have shocked and enraged our ancestors elicits barely a shrug now.

  There were intermediate Thermidorian stages as well. Michelangelo’s festival of pagan nudity in the Sistine Chapel was unalloyed for as long as was necessary to firmly initiate the Catholic hierarchy in the pagan ethos. When the arcane ideology had taken complete root and before the Catholic masses could be stirred to wrath by the buck-naked blasphemy, a staged reaction was brought into play by the Vatican masters of psychological warfare. They costumed their “conservative reaction” in inquisitorial habiliments, for the benefit of the uninitiated. Under Paul IV the Roman Inquisition proceeded to denounce nudity in sacred art. Soon after Michelangelo’s death in 1564, the genitals of the figures in his “Last Judgment” were daubed over by braghettoni (breeches-painters). Later, nudity in sacred places would reappear by papal permission. Situation ethics harnessed to the opportunistic requirements of the Church of Rome as it processed the captive minds of “the Faithful,” waxed and waned between stringency and laxity, on the model of the zugot pairs in Phariseeism, as personified by Shammai, the strict Pharisee, and Hillel, the lenient one. At any given time after the fourteenth century, within Renaissance parameters and without, one would encounter a Pope Shammai or a Pope Hillel, according to the requirements of their zeitgeist god.

  Though there were foreshadowings in other pontificates, in the modern era John Paul II was the first openly Neoplatonic-Hermetic pontiff, as his embrace of Talmudic-Judaism in the synagogue in Rome, voodoo in Benin, Islam’s Koran, the congress of world religions at Assisi and the Aztec rites during his pilgrimage to Mexico, testify. He instituted the open fulfillment of the mandate of Pope Alexander VI and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. There was little that was disguised or ambiguous about this alleged saint’s transgressions against the First Commandment.

  What had been performed under the sign of the witchgoddess Isis by the popes in secret, in the six ritual rooms known as the “Borgia Apartment” of the Vatican Palace—as executed by Bernardino di Betto (“Benedetto”), who signed his works “Pintoricchio” (or “Pinturicchio, i.e “little painter”), and designed by Alexander VI, together with Annio da Viterbo, Paolo Cortesi and the Protonotary Apostolic, Francesco Colonna—was performed in the open air as televised in Mexico City in the second year of the second millennium:

  “To this day, I recall being in Mexico City with John Paul II in 2002 for the canonization Mass of Juan Diego, and watching a female Mexican shaman perform a dancing purification ritual on the pontiff with a bit of shrubbery during the Mass—in effect, the witch doctor exorcised John Paul.” 7

  The pope’s Master of Liturgical Ceremonies from 1987 to 2007 was Italian Archbishop Piero Marini who spoke to the press about this pontifical Aztec witch doctor ceremony: “Marini later explained that the ritual is part of traditional Mexican religiosity, arguing there’s a time-honored thrust in Christianity to ‘baptize’ such expressions of popular faith.” 8

  This is the prisca theologia in the raw, without embellishment, or even the familiar duplicitous rhetoric. The pope’s Master of Liturgical Ceremonies terms witchcraft, “traditional Mexican religiosity” and “popular faith,” and he calls the praxis of Neoplatonic-Hermeticism, “a time-honored thrust in Christianity.” The pontiff who publicly took part in this traffic with demons was not excommunicated or otherwise deposed. He was canonized a saint of the Catholic Church. “Conservative” Catholics who look to his pontificate with profound nostalgia refer to him as “John Paul the Great.”

  These kinds of rites are for initiates, but the fact that they were performed before the eyes of the entire Catholic world in the twenty-first century demonstrates the success of the occult transmutation process in that we are all initiates now. How was this virtuoso psychological and spiritual coup set into motion? Through the cultivation, more than five hundred years earlier, of absolute secrecy and plausible denial in service to the alchemical transformation of the traditional theology of Catholicism into the futuristic Church of Rome’s modernist pagan syncretism, propelled by the exegetical principles of rabbinic Oral Law dogma. For direction we turn to the youthful Michelangelo’s Medici-supported mentor:

  “Pico della Mirandola planned to write a book on the secret nature of pagan myths which was to bear the title Poetica theologia. ‘It was the opinion of the ancient theologians,’ he said in his Commentary on Benivieni’s Canzona d’amore, ‘that divine subjects and the secret Mysteries must not be rashly divulged….if committed to writing at all, must be covered with enigmatic veils and poetic dissimulation…. How that was done… by Latin and Greek poets we shall explain in the book of our Poetic Theology.’

  “Although the book has not survived (assuming that it was written), the method employed by Pico, as well as some of his conclusions, can be inferred from his other works. He held that pagan religions, without exception, had used a ‘hieroglyphic’ imagery; that they had concealed their revelations in myths and fables which were designed to distract the attention of the multitude, and so protect the divine secrets from profanation: ‘showing only the crust of the mysteries to the vulgar, while reserving the marrow of the true sense for higher and more perfect spirits.’

  “As an example Pico quoted the Orphic Hymns; for he supposed that Orpheus had concealed in them a religious revelation which he wished to be understood only by a small sect of initiates: ‘In the manner of the ancient theologians, Orpheus interwove the mysteries of his doctrines with the texture of fables and covered them with a poetic veil, in order that anyone reading his hymns would think them to contain nothing but the sheerest tales and trifles.’ But having studied Plato, Plotinus, and Proclus with care, Pico felt certain that these philosophers had been initiated into the mysteries of Orpheus, and he proposed with their help to penetrate the arcana of the Orphic Hymns.

  “In praising the wisdom of such religious disguises, Pico claimed that the pagan tradition had a virtue in common with the Bible: there were Hebrew mysteries as well as pagan. The book of Exodus, for example, recorded that on two occasions Moses had spent forty days on Mount Sinai for the purpose of receiving the tablets of the Law. Since it would be absurd to suppose that in each of these instances God needed forty days to hand Moses two tablets inscribed with ten commandments and accompanied by a series of liturgical rules, it was evident that God had conversed with Moses on further matters, and had told him innumerable divine secrets that were not to be written down. These were transmitted among the rabbis by an oral tradition known as Cabala (in which the theory of the sefiroth and the absconded God resembled the Neoplatonic emanations and the ‘One beyond Being’). In relation to the written law of the Old Testament, the Cabala was thought by Pico to hold the same position as Orphic secrets held in relation to pagan myths. The biblical text was the crust, the Cabala the marrow.

  “The law was given to the many, but its spiritual understanding to only a few. With an unanswerable oratorical gesture Pico pointed to ‘the tailors, cooks, butchers, shepherds, servants, maids, to all of whom the written law was given. Would these have been able to carry the burden of the entire Mosaic or divine understanding? 9

  “Moses, however, on the height of the mountain, comparable to that mountain on which the Lord often spoke to his Disciples, was so illumined by the rays of the divine sun that his whole face shone in a miraculous manner; but because the people with their dim and owlish eyes could not bear the light, he addressed them with his face veiled.

  “And the same device, Pico observed, was also used by Christ. ‘Jesus Christ, imago substantiae Dei, did not write the gospel but preached it.’ To the common people he spoke in parables, but to a few disciples he explained more directly the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven. ‘Origen wrote that Jesus Christ revealed many mysteries to his disciples which they did not wish to put down in writing, but communicated only by word of mouth to those whom they regarded as worthy. And Pico added that this was ‘confirmed by Dionysius the Areopagite’, that
is by the Athenian disciple of St. Paul (Acts xvii, 34), to whom a series of mystical Neoplatonic writings, apparently composed in the fifth century A.D. were piously ascribed by their anonymous author. Dionysius was assumed to have received his mystical initiation directly from St. Paul, again in a secret and purely oral manner; but like the late Cabalists and the Platonic heirs of Orpheus, he—or the late scribe whom he inspired—committed the laudable indiscretion of entrusting the revelation to paper. Without so remarkably universal a breach of etiquette, it might have been difficult for the Renaissance to revive the Orphic, Mosaic, and Pauline secrets.

  “In comparing the mysteries to each other, Pico discovered between them an unsuspected affinity. In outward dogma, reconciliation would not seem possible between the pagan, Hebrew, and Christian theologies, each committed to a different revelation; but if the nature of the pagan gods were understood in the mystical sense of the Orphic Platonists, and the nature of the Mosaic Law in the hidden sense of the Cabala, and if the nature of Christian Grace were unfolded in the fullness of the secrets which St Paul had revealed to Dionysius the Areopagite, it would be found that these theologies differed not at all in substance but only in name. A philosophy of tolerance was accordingly worked out in the form of a hidden concordance…” 10

  Four hundred years after Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s modernizing theology was in the process of successfully infiltrating and subverting the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, Pope Pius X declared, “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…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?” 11