The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome

by Michael Hoffman

  20 “God, the creator of all, made a visible God to be with Him, and He made Him first and only; He took delight in Him and loved Him greatly as His own Son, who is called the Holy Word.”

  21 “Receive Egyptians the laws and letters” (intended as an invocation).

  22 Bruno Santi, The Marble Pavement of the Cathedral of Siena (1993), p. 13.

  23 Brian P. Copenhaver, “Hermes Theologus: The Sienese Mercury and Ficino’s Hermetic Demons,” in Humanity and Divinity in Renaissance and Reformation (1993), p. 152.

  24 Ibid., p. 159.

  25 Paola Zambelli, White Magic, Black Magic, op. cit., p. 72.

  Chapter X

  The Grand Egyptian Lodge of Vatican City

  “Our records inform us that the usages and customs of (Free)masons have ever corresponded with those of the Egyptian philosophers, to which they bear a near affinity.” 1

  Thomas Smith Webb, The Freemason’s Monitor (1818)

  “To come again on Rome…(t)he narrow streets, devoid of footways, and choked, in every obscure corner, by heaps of dunghill-rubbish, contrast so strongly, in their cramped dimensions, and their filth and darkness, with the broad square before some haughty church: in the center of which, a hieroglyphic-covered obelisk, brought from Egypt in the days of the Emperors, looks strangely on the foreign scene about it…It is stranger still, to see how many ruins of the old mythology: how many fragments of obsolete legend and observance, have been incorporated into the worship of Christian altars here; and how, in numberless respects, the false faith and the true are fused into a monstrous union.”

  Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy (1846)

  “I saw the horror and unwholesome antiquity of Egypt, and the grisly alliance it has always had with the tombs and temples of the dead…offering unnameable sacrifices to indescribable gods…And behind it all I saw the ineffable malignity of primordial necromancy…”

  H.P. Lovecraft, Under the Pyramids (1924)

  “…they are your people and your heritage whom you brought out of Egypt, that iron furnace.”

  I Kings 8:51

  When the Fifth Dynasty obelisk which Caligula erected in Rome, circa 40 A.D., was installed in St. Peter’s Square in 1586 by Pope Sixtus V, it marked the transformation of the Vicar of Christ into the Pharaoh of the world. The obelisk is symbolic of the reigning occult power as that power is conveyed in the phallic cult-image. “In Middle Egyptian, obelisks are thn; the pyramidion is bnbn. Both may be taken to describe the shape of the monument, but they also imply regeneration through sexual action, alluding to the act of ‘rising’ or ‘becoming erect’…The Egyptian monuments employed this common form in part because it was efficacious, suitable to their roles as cult objects.” 2

  Representations of the male genital organ in erection are common to pagan religions from Sumer and Egypt onward. “Numerous Sanskrit texts and ancient sculptures such as the Gudimallam lingam from the third century B.C. define this image unequivocally as an iconic representation of the male sexual organ in erection, in particular as the erect phallus of the god Shiva.” 3

  A Renaissance illustration depicts Domenico Fontana from Della transportatione dell’obelisco vaticano et delle fabriche di Nostro Signore papa Sisto V. 4 Published in 1590, this book describes one of the most impressive engineering feats of the early modern world, Fontana’s most famous undertaking, the removal of the Egyptian obelisk (brought to Rome in the first century A.D.), weighing 327 tons, from its place in the circus of the Vatican, and its subsequent erection 275 yards from its old position, at the new one in front of the basilica in the Square of St. Peter’s. This engineering achievement took the concerted effort of 900 men, 75 horses and countless pulleys and yards of rope. Fontana gives a detailed account in Della transportatione dell’obelisco Vaticano e delle fabriche di Sisto V. A large-format folio, the book contains dozens of full-page plates depicting the engineering processes involved in moving the obelisk. The stunning detail of these drawings invite careful perusal. Many of the images combine detailed architectural depictions with pagan allegorical and mythical figures such as “Concordia” and “Firmitas” who preside over the engineers’ labor.

  It is the gravitational pull of consensus reality which has impaired the vision of the “Faithful” and kept them from a shock of recognition at the sight of the dull totem of pagan Egypt that dominates the square named for Jesus Christ’s chief apostle. As part of the majestically clever disinformation saga of the occult Church, its mentally trapped disciples have been led to believe that because the giant obelisk has a tiny cross at the top, that the thing is “a glorious symbol of the defeat of the pagan world by the Cross.”

  If a giant swastika, 88 feet tall, were placed in St. Peter’s Square, with a tiny cross atop it, would people accept the cover story that it was the symbol of Catholicism’s supremacy over Nazism? One can hardly glimpse the cross on the top of the obelisk. The overwhelming symbolic reality of the obelisk is the power of the massive iconic imagery of Pharaonic Egypt which dominates St. Peter’s Square, where one would expect to find a huge Catholic crucifix, or statuary depicting with the resplendence typical of the astonishing craftsmanship of the sculptors of the Italian Renaissance, the signal event of the cosmos, Jesus Christ’s Resurrection, and His victory over the power of death itself.

  But those Christian images are not at all dominant amid Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s ellipsoid piazza, which has come to be known as “Bernini’s Colonnade,” and where towers at the center of it the phallic emblem of pharaonic power, as an obelisk also dominates Washington D.C,. and stands as well in the financial capitals of New York and London: all of these centers of power are symbolically connected through the obelisks.

  Occult ceremonies have been enacted by Catholics (or rather pseudo-Catholics), in the misnamed “St. Peter’s Square.” Among the strangest is the mysterious ritual homosexual rape of an unnamed un puto (boy), who was the godson of Cardinal Francesco Albizzi. This was a violent rape. It occurred in December, 1670, and it left the sodomized child with several fractured bones. It seems that it was intended that he should have died, but he survived his injuries and identified his attacker as Bernini’s own brother, Luigi.

  Was it the case that Cardinal Albizzi’s nephew was selected as a giovane agnello di Dio (little lamb of God), intended as a sacrifice to Satan through an ignominious and torturous death? What we know for certain is that Luigi Bernini sodomized the boy beneath the famed statue of Constantine which had been sculpted by his brother, within his brother’s “Colonnade,” and in the shadow of the obelisk. We also know that Luigi Bernini was found, but never brought to trial. This rapist, who had nearly killed the boy, suffered no punishment other than a token “fine.”

  The Statuta almae urbis Romae (vol. ii, section 49) prescribed death by fire in all cases where “the unspeakable crime of sodomy” had been committed. But the law did not apply to Bernini. Why? By way of a motive, a twenty-first century academic explains that “Luigi must have simply been crazed by sexual frenzy.” Perhaps, but that begs the question of how his savage, open-air crime within the sacred precinct of the Vatican, happened to be excused by Pope Clement X, Cardinal Albizzi and the victim’s family and extended clan.

  Returning to the obelisk itself, the feat of moving it from its old Roman location since the days of the Caesars, to its new location at the heart of St. Peter’s Square, was of one enormous expense and effort. Many contemporary engineers doubted that it could be achieved without death and injury to the regiment of workers that would be required, and destruction to the obelisk, yet the monumental task was obsessively pursued on a tight schedule, as if it were a matter of life and death.

  Bern Dibner, the eminent historian of science and technology, has written the most comprehensive study in English of how the thing was done and at what expense in treasure and effort. In his paper, Moving the Obelisks5 we read, “Many of these ancient monoliths, taken from Egypt as trophies of conquest and symbols of power through the efforts of
extraordinary human labor and engineering ingenuity, were re-established in the capitals and seats of empire that also inherited Egypt’s burden of civilization.”

  Is this what Christ’s Church represents, ancient Egypt’s “burden of civilization”? What was Pharaonic Egypt’s civilization, if not the Satanism of Set/Shaitan (Satan)? 6

  Inheriting “Egypt’s burden of civilization”

  Among the very first, prominent agents of the sexual revolution in the United States was Fahreda Mahzar, who, under the stage name “Little Egypt,” belly-danced at the Chicago World’s Fair (“World Columbian Exhibition”) in 1893, violating obscenity laws and becoming a cause celebré for early sex activists such as Ida Craddock. “Little Egypt” is a slang term for the geographic region in the American Midwest containing many sites named after those in Pharaonic Egypt, such as Memphis in Tennessee, where the ‘King of Rock and Roll’ died and the ‘Black King’ (Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.) was murdered; and Cairo, Illinois where Abraham Lincoln confronted Stephen A. Douglas in fateful debates.

  In America’s Little Egypt region, the Mississippi River was equated in the minds of Freemasons with the Nile River, and it was in Little Egypt that these and other masons constructed obelisks and conducted processions, pilgrimages and rituals on the geomantic roads and waterways of an America mystica about which most Establishment historians are oblivious. With regard to the phenomenon of rock-and-roll (which was originally slang for the sex act), after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the binding of the nation’s psychic wounds did not begin in earnest until a “rock and roll” band from England named the “Beatles” debuted on the nationally broadcast Ed Sullivan television program in February of 1964, telling America, “I want to hold your hand.” The response from the nation was a level of popular hysteria so unprecedented it eventually led the band’s leader, John Lennon to opine, “We’re more popular than Jesus Christ.” Those who believe that “rock music” is both an excremental as well as an elemental reversion to the primitive tom-tom rhythm of sub-Saharan Africa, may be interested to know that the “roll” portion of the Beatles “rock” refers to a dung-roller.

  The Beatles rock band maintained that their name was coined in reference to the “beat” of their sound. It is worth noting however, that according to E.A. Wallis Budge, Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum from 1894 to 1924, “Scarab, or Scarabaeus, is the name given by Egyptologists to the myriads of models of a certain beetle, which are found in mummies and tombs, and in the ruins of temples and other buildings in Egypt…The beetle which was copied by the Egyptians in this manner…compose a very numerous group of dung-feeding Lamellicorns…A remarkable peculiarity exists in the structure and situation of the hind legs, which are placed so near the extremity of the body, and so far from each other, as to give the insect a most extraordinary appearance when walking. This peculiar formation is, nevertheless, particularly serviceable to its possessors in rolling balls of excrementitious matter in which they enclose their eggs…These balls are at first irregular and soft, but by degrees, and during the process of rolling along, become rounded and harder…

  These maneuvers have for their object the burying of the balls in holes…and it is upon the dung thus deposited that the larvae, when hatched, feed.” 7

  For those who have eyes to see, the obelisk in St. Peter’s Square is a symbolic, masonic-type of communication conveying the revelation that the theology of the Church of Rome is dominated by Pharaonic Egypt. The obelisk represents acceptance of the supreme value to the Church of the esoteric Egyptian philosophy (Hermeticism as it came to be known), as channeled by Marsilio Ficino and Pico, who were the ambassadors of Hermes Trismegistus to the Church. The supreme value of Hermetic Egypt above Jesus is conveyed by the scale of Christological images in St. Peter’s compared with the Egyptian obelisk that dwarfs them.

  “The Masons had always believed their origins went all the way back to ancient Egypt. This was a holdover from the Renaissance when it was widely believed that Egypt was a repository of all lost or mystical knowledge…Obelisks, Freemasonry and Egyptomania had always been closely related…On July 4, 1848, when the cornerstone of the Washington Monument was laid, Washington’s brother Freemasons conducted the ceremony.” 8

  In addition to Washington D.C., New York City sought its own obelisk—directly from Egypt. The task fell to Freemason Henry Honeychurch Gorringe, a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy who succeeded in transporting an obelisk to New York, where Freemasons presided over the civic ceremony of laying the obelisk’s foundation. In October 1880, five hundred commanders of masonic lodges converged on the city, where they led nearly nine thousand of their lodge brothers in a march past the Grand Masonic Temple on 23rd St. and 9th Avenue to Central Park, to lay the cornerstone for the obelisk which had the common name (actually a misnomer) of “Cleopatra’s Needle.”9 “In the name of the Grand Lodge of the State of New York I now proclaim the cornerstone of this obelisk, known as Cleopatra’s Needle, duly laid in ample form.” (The obelisk was not actually erected until January 22, 1881).

  The installation of an Egyptian obelisk in a place of honor in the city of London, England was also under the supervision of Freemasons: the engineer John Dixon and Sir Erasmus Wilson. The question of siting the obelisk was of masonic significance. Would it be in a public square like St. Peter’s, or imitative of the French masonic-siting of their obelisk at the Place de la Concorde? The masonic duo proposed that London’s obelisk, or “Cleopatra’s Needle” as it was melodramatically and erroneously called, be erected in front of Parliament. A precise replica made of wood was erected there to win public approval, but Protestant evangelical Bible-believers objected that a symbol of pagan empire had no business in front of the houses of a Christian legislature. The Freemasons relented and decided upon a site at the Adelphi Steps at the Thames Embankment, with the approval of the Grand Lodge of England.

  Like the “Grand Lodge of Vatican City,” in the modern era sorcerers initiated the process of erecting what is, after the Mummy, the most elemental and recognizable symbol of Pharaonic Egypt. The Catholic Church of the early centuries A.D. had no interest in Egypt except as a lesson in what befalls those who become victims of enslaving pagan dictatorships. By around 1150 A.D. of the medieval period, there was only one obelisk still on display in Rome, the one standing next to old St. Peter’s, in what had been the “Circus.” The others had all been toppled. “Sixtus the V’s obelisk specialist, Michele Mercati, reported that the Circus Maximus obelisk showed traces of fire damage and holes drilled for the insertion of toppling levers.” 10 In Italy the obelisk “needle” was known as a guglia. The Catholic poet Pietro Aretino, who we met in the previous chapter, used this as a simile in his identification of the obelisk with magica sexualis: “In 1524, during a period when Renaissance popes had begun to display a renewed enthusiasm for the excavation and re-erection of obelisks…Pietro Aretino used the term guglia to describe the priapic member of his protagonist in…I modi.” 11

  Priapic symbolism is on view in Rome’s Campo Marzio, at the base of the Monte Citorio obelisk, which had been pulled down by the devout Catholic Duke Robert Guiscard in 1084. It was re-erected with considerable difficulty and expense by Pope Pius VI in 1792. 12 The base features a stone carving of a reclining young man with a large, phallic-like obelisk emerging from his genital region.

  The early Christians in Rome intended to remove all symbols connected with pagan Egypt as befits a capital city of Christendom. They were dissuaded from dismantling the obelisk in Nero’s Circus Maximus however, by a legend that St. Peter had been tortured and murdered in its shadow, which if true, would seem to be more of a reason to take it down than to preserve it. Nevertheless, rescued by the folk tale, the seemingly charmed obelisk remained upright.

  An excerpt from Mr. Dibner’s distinguished monograph, Moving the Obelisks here follows, by which we hope to convey a sense of the immense effort expended, including conferring upon the enginee
r Fontana draconian conscription, confiscation and police powers, all for the purpose of making an emblem of Pharaonic Egypt the most monumental visual motif at the heart of what was supposed to be Jesus Christ’s principal church.

  “…With only the main arches and walls of St. Peter’s completed and the dome still unbuilt, the College of Cardinals met in 1585 to elect one from among them to become the new pontiff to succeed the deceased Gregorius XIII. The choice was Cardinal Montalto and he ascended the pontifical throne as Sixtus V at the age of 64. He, like Julius II, was destined to imprint his vigorous personality upon the face of Rome. It was his determination to…include the majestic old obelisk that had been standing since Caesar’s day on its pedestal behind the sacristy of the new St. Peter’s. Alone among the obelisks of Rome, it had stood erect…Not one other of the many obelisks…had remained upright or unbroken…It had no inscriptions on its faces prior to being brought to Rome, so that its more ancient history could not be determined as accurately as those obelisks having hieroglyphic inscriptions…

  “It required moving this enormous stone 275 yards from its old position to the new one in front of the cathedral, and it therefore became a topic of major interest among engineers as well as among prelates… The…ingredient in this formula of success was the engineer and architect, Domenico Fontana (1543-1607). He was born in Mili (now Melide) on Lake Lugano in the Ticino canton of Switzerland. He thus springs from a nation famous for its engineers and also from a family that had given many sons to the constructive profession. He was the son of the architect Matteo Fontana who had been active in Venice in the 1400s. In the 1500s three Fontana brothers, Giovanni, Domenico and Marsiglio, worked in Rome, often together as engineers and architects. The oldest of these, Giovanni (1540-1614), was retained as hydraulic and military engineer by four popes and by the King of Spain….For Cardinal Felice Peretti de Montalto (future Pope Sixtus V), Fontana had worked as the designer and constructor of the mausoleum of Pope Nicholas IV in 1574, and of several palace buildings. He was then building a small chapel of the Sacrament erected in the Santa Maria Maggiore, one of the four prime churches in Rome. This show of magnificence on the part of Cardinal Montalto seems to have displeased Pope Gregorius XIII, who thereupon suspended the Cardinal’s income.