“In eighteen days the tower, cribs and scaffolding had been cleared and on September 18, 1586 the obelisk appeared in full view and was duly consecrated. It had taken Fontana just one year from the time of winning his commission to complete his task and to leave the obelisk standing practically as we see it today. Only the bronze eagles at its base and a more elaborate balustrade were later added…
“Rewards and honors were then showered upon Fontana. He was made a Palatine Count and a Knight of the Golden Spur and he was also granted a pension of 2000 gold scudi as well as the recipient of an immediate gift of 5000 more. He received, gratis, all the wood and equipment left over from the operation.
“Architectural commissions also were thrust upon him. He was required to supervise the restoration and erection of three additional obelisks in Rome. One, a few feet shorter than the Vatican obelisk, was re-erected by him in the Piazza del Popolo, the second he placed in the Piazza di San Giovanni Laterano. This is the tallest obelisk known, even though we think that part of the base of the shaft had, at some time, already been cut away. The third is behind the church of Santa Maria Maggiore and stands 48 and 1/2 feet tall. However, the pedestal upon which it stands is 17 feet high, thereby giving it the appearance of good overall height. Two of the above, those at San Giovanni and Santa Maria, had been buried and lost, but once in a conversation between Sixtus, Fontana and Mercati it was urged that more obelisks be hunted. Fontana, using an iron bar, probed the fill in the Circus Maximus and came upon two obelisks, both fallen and both broken into three parts. Fontana joined the broken sections with the use of stone dove-tail mortises.
“…At the time of Fontana’s obelisk operations the facade facing the Piazza consisted of an assembly of five old buildings. These were torn down and the grand facade of St. Peter’s, as we know it today, along with the additional portico, were built by Fontana’s nephew, Carlo Maderno, but this was not completed and consecrated until 1626, nineteen years after the death of Domenico Fontana. The old facade was demolished in 1605 and the nave was lengthened in the direction of the obelisk. The familiar encircling colonnade moving out in a converging line and then embracing the piazza with the obelisk as its center was not built for another 71 years (1656-1657): it consists of four rows of 284 Doric columns and 88 pillars, surmounted by some 300 statues and was the masterpiece of Giovanni Bernini (1598-1680).
“Of the two fountains flanking the obelisk, one was set there by Sixtus V, and the other by Clement IX (1700-21). In 1723 a rose-of-the-winds was placed around the foot of the obelisk, and in 1817 the astronomer Gilii traced a meridian curve around it. To the balustrade and four small posts that Fontana added to protect the odd base of the obelisk pedestal against vehicles, eight more posts were added by Urban VIII (1623-1644). Under Clement IX (1700-1721) the original four columns were replaced by a larger ornamental marble balustrade and a quadrature of sixteen heavy granite circular columns surrounded by a circular travertine walk. To cover the unsightly holes that remained when the old Roman ornaments were removed, the architect Lodovico Sergardi added a gilt bronze garland of oak leaves surmounted by an eagle, on each of the four faces of the obelisk.” (End quote from Bern Dibner).
Honor is due to Fontana and his crew for their genius and daring. If this had been an installation at a secular museum of Egyptian antiquities, completely separate from the Church and its environs, we could also congratulate the Bishop of Rome on saving a historical artifact for study by future generations. Most people will feel that we have placed an over-emphasis on what is essentially a relatively benign restoration of a monumental art work. This is the liberal-humanist view and in our post-modernist world it will appear eminently reasonable and compelling. For Christians it is another matter entirely, however: the claims of Jesus Christ are total and exclusive. For believers, who are obviously in the minority (Matthew 7:14), and who are faithful to those claims, the erection of Pharaoh’s obelisk at what is supposed to be the heart of the Christian Church, will be seen for the occult pagan exaltation which in fact, it is.
It is advantageous for the Cryptocracy that the civic bonds of the Rome-London-NY-Washington nexus should be strengthened through the placement of obelisks, and that the public should espy in both masonic capital cities and the capital of the Church of Rome, a towering obelisk, conveying to percipients an unmistakable and ultimately demoralizing message of a control system of lithic continuity.
The main motor of Freemasonry was papally-enabled Hermetic Neoplatonism, which had translated ancient Egypt into a living mythos in the Renaissance Church of Rome. The erection of the obelisk in St. Peter’s is the culmination of a process which began to reach its summit with the idolization of the legendary figure of Hermes Trismegistus and the secret knowledge his cult personified. The erection of the obelisk of the Pharaohs in the sacred precinct of St. Peter’s basilica had been prepared ritually and visually in stages prior to that—in the pope’s apartment, and in the Cathedral of Siena, where unambiguous veneration had been paid to Hermes, and in the former case, to an elaborate allegory centered on the Egyptian goddess Isis, who in mythology is “equated with Sothis (Sirius)” and “the snake goddess.”13 Occult images were enshrined in the apartment of the “Vicar of Christ on earth,” and a cathedral church, and no pretext of having altered the nature of these icons of demonic deities through the sprinkling of holy water, or papal circumambulations, or other forms of putative exorcism or baptism, cancels the blasphemy of their installation in the name of Jesus Christ. Centuries later these fetishistic monstrosities remain in place in the “Eternal City,” no less hallowed than before.
1 Webb was Grand Master of the Masonic Grand Lodge of Rhode Island.
2 Molly Swetnam-Burland, Egypt in Italy: Visions of Egypt in Roman Imperial Culture (2015), p. 69. One of the most ominous depictions of an obelisk in cinema is in the 1981 film, “Clash of the Titans,” where an obelisk is shown standing sentry at the entrance to the abode of the Stygian witches.
3 Wendy Doninger, The Hindus (2009), p. 22.
4 Though the book is designated as “volume one,” it was the only volume printed.
5 Bern Dibner, Moving the Obelisks: A Chapter in Engineering in which the Vatican Obelisk in Rome in 1586 was Moved (1952).
6 “Shaitan…derives from the ancient Egyptian god Set…which blackens everything…Modern etymology regards Sheitan, or Shaitan, as an Arab word, possibly based on the Hebrew Satan…” (Bogdan and Starr, Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism [2012], p. 194).
7 Sir E.A. Wallis Budge, The Mummy: A History of the Extraordinary Practices of Ancient Egypt (1989) pp. 231-232.
8 Bob Brier, Egyptomania (2013), pp. 115 and 125.
9 “Though the (New York) obelisk is often called ‘Cleopatra’s Needle,’ Cleopatra…had nothing to do with its creation….the Obelisk predates her by more than a millennium. Approximately 3,500 years ago in the ancient Egyptian city of Heliopolis, stonecutters carved two obelisks out of granite. Each one was formed from a single piece of quarried stone, and the enormous feat of extracting and erecting the monolith was symbolic of the reigning pharaoh’s power. Both obelisks were inscribed with hieroglyphs praising Pharaoh Thutmose III, who reigned from 1479 to 1425 BCE, and were erected outside of a temple. The obelisks were toppled…during an invasion by Persians in 525 BCE; for more than 500 years, they remained buried in sand until Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus discovered and transported them to Alexandria. They were erected in a temple built by Cleopatra to honor Julius Caesar, which may explain how they individually came to be known as Cleopatra’s Needle.” — http://www.centralparknyc.org/things-to-see-and-do/attractions/obelisk.html The “needle” moniker derives from the Muslim conquest, when obelisks came to be known in Arabic as “mislah,” a sewing needle, and messalat fafun, “pharaoh’s needles.”
10 Brian A. Curran et al., Obelisk: A History (2009), p. 308, quoting Mercati, Obelischi (Rome, 1589).
11 Curran, p. 67.
12 An obelisk that had been er
ected in A.D. 14 and torn down by the early Christians, was the subject of an attempted erection by Pope Leo X in 1519. In 1587, Pope Sixtus V, who sought a pagan obelisk “in front of every church,” succeeded in raising the obelisk in the precinct of Santa Maria Maggiore Basilica, in Esquiline Square. In the 18th century, Pius VI was responsible for the erection of ancient Egyptian obelisks in the Piazza del Quirinale in 1786, and in 1789 (the year of the French Revolution), at the top of the Spanish Steps, in front of the Trinita dei Monti church.
13 Hornblower, op. cit., The Oxford Classical Dictionary Third Edition, p. 768.
Chapter XI
The Cabal’s Co-conspirators
Ludovico Lazzarelli (1447-1500; also spelled “Lodovico”), referred to his birth on February 4 as inauspicious, in keeping with traditions of the ancient Roman calendar: “A troublesome day for Egypt, and no less for me” (De Gentilium Decorum Imaginibus). “Throughout the Middle Ages the belief was also widespread that certain days were inherently ill-omened, especially the so-called Egyptian Days, which derived from the ancient Roman belief that Egyptian magicians had determined certain days to be unlucky… 1
The most likely candidate as Ludovico Lazzarelli’s Judaic handler in his youth is Leone Ebreo, a physician and alchemist in Lazzarelli’s home town of San Severino, where Alessandro Lazzarelli, Lodovico’s father, was physician to the Christians.
In his most famous work, Crater Hermetis, Lodovico Lazzarelli casts Ferdinand I, King of Naples and Sicily and nicknamed “Ferrante,” as his pupil. Ferrante was the ally of Pope Pius II in the war with Duke Jean II d’Anjou. From 1462-1464 Lazzarelli lived in the household of, and was tutor to, the son of Duke Matteo di Capua, who at the time was the governor of Atri under Ferrante. Beginning in 1464 and for the next two years, he obtained a position with Bishop Giovanni Antonio Campano. Bishop Campano was a patron of Rev. Fr. Marsilio Ficino. In 1466 Lazzarelli relocated to Venice for reasons that remain unclear. What we know is that while still a youth he had been marked for promotion and prestige. At age twenty-one his high level contacts with Pope Pius II took him to meet the Emperor Frederick III, who crowned Lazzarelli with laurels in San Marco church in Pordenone, Italy on November 30, 1468. By 1473 he was in the company of the astrology-obsessed Lorenzo Zane of Venice, the future Catholic Patriarch of Antioch, with whom he entered Rome. Here Lazzarelli joined the Roman Academy, ostensibly dedicated to keeping alive the classical heritage of the Rome of the Caesars, but in fact a secret society comprised of the lay elite of the Church of Rome (Paolo Marsi, Aurelio Brandolini, Publio Astreo, Bartolomeo Platina and Sulpizio da Veroli), engrossed with reenacting pagan rituals in the ruins of the city and accused of ceremonial sodomy. With the death of Paul II and the election of Sixtus IV, the Academy reinvented itself as the “pious” Catholic Societas Literatorum S. Victoris in Esquilis.
In 1480 Lazzarelli dedicated his long Hermetic poem Fasti to Pope Sixtus IV, the Ferrantes and King Charles VIII of France. In it Lazzarelli positioned the usual markers of the syncretic religion which was enveloping Rome and the papacy: “Jesus is the Logos and the Word, the Mind and Wisdom, who first was Pimander 2 in the mind of Hermes…called Thrice Greatest.” 3
Giovanni Mercurio da Correggio. Some time around November 12, 1481, Lazzarelli fell under the influence of a mysterious, peripatetic false-messiah figure, Giovanni Mercurio da Correggio, who had addressed the College of Cardinals in Rome. As Correggio’s disciple, Lazzarelli subsequently became ever more immersed in “alchemy, magic and astrology.” 4 Correggio “came from a well-known, old and powerful family belonging to the higher nobility…” 5 Correggio mixed traditional medieval eschatological preoccupations with the doctrines of Hermes Trismegistus. Lazzarelli called his spiritual master Correggio, by Hermes’ alternate name, Mercury/Mercurio, and addressed Correggio in writing as follows, “You alone have gone through the secret caves of father Hermes, by roads unknown to all, and have returned from there.”
Correggio suffered various arrests and brief imprisonments, episodically in the 1480s. The year 1497 found a costumed Correggio free and out and about in Venice, preaching Hermetic occultism from street corners and calling himself “Mercurio.” Now he worked completely untouched by the Catholic authorities. His exhortations were published in Rome in 1499. Lazzarelli excerpted parts of Correggio’s writing in his books, the Fasti and the Crater Hermetis. Though he posed as a mendicant, Correggio had sufficient funds from mysterious sources. These in turn supported his large family and funded their trips around Italy and France. In the latter nation, upon meeting King Louis II, he gave the king a costly sword as well as magical books (including the Corpus Hermeticum), and delivered occult speeches to the French court, proclaiming himself Hermes/Mercurio, master-magician of all knowledge. He arrived at the court of the French king in ritual attire, riding on an ass, holding a scimitar and a mirror-like shield, “shining like the sun.” Correggio received gold from King Louis, who sought his counsel, as did the king’s physician, Symphorien Champier, who, in 1507 would publish Lazzarelli’s occult book, Diffinitiones Asclepii. 6
Correggio subsequently roamed freely across Catholic Europe proclaiming himself the Hermetic Christ, a reader of minds, teller of fortunes, and herald of the coming syncretic religion that bears remarkable resemblance to what emerged in the Church of Rome in the pontificate of Pope “Saint” John Paul II. Correggio, it seems, was protected by forces inside the Church. In 1506 he published a foul work of alchemy and magic dedicated to Pope Julius II (Giuliano della Rovere): De Quercu Julii Pontificis sive de lapide (“The Oak of Pope Julius,” 7or the Philosopher’s Stone”). No inquisition laid a hand on him. He suffered no fate in anyway similar to that of Savonarola. His doctrine subsequently spread into the bowels of the Church, as it was intended to do.
Correggio was Lazzarelli’s occult master and in turn Lazzarelli’s pupil, Angelo Colocci, who he initiated into the mysteries of occult regeneration, became a member of the papal court of Julius II and eventually personal secretary to Popes Leo X and Clement VII. Colocci was later named Bishop of Iesi. Throughout his long ecclesiastical career he proved himself another immune and untouchable ‘Catholic’ Neoplatonic-Hermetic syncretist. Correggio is the man of whom Lazzarelli wrote, “Dear teacher, dearly beloved father Giovanni Mercurio—I have become so absorbed in the study of the divine books of Hermes Trismegistus and also in the most holy words of Moses and the prophets, and most of all in those of Jesus Christ our savior, that all other writings, whether of ancients or moderns, have completely lost their appeal to me…Father Mercurius, teacher by fatherly love, hail to you who are like a god to me.”
Circa 1494 Lazzarelli finished his magnum opus, the Crater Hermetis, also known as A Dialogue on the Supreme Dignity of Man: The Way of Christ and the Mixing Bowl of Hermes.8 This is a typical Renaissance work of syncretic Hermetic-Catholicism. It concludes by offering a path to becoming a god.
To Pontano (“Pontanus”), a scholar who was a member of the court of Ferrante of the King of Aragon and Naples, Lazzarelli wrote, “I am a Catholic, Pontanus, but I am not ashamed to be a Hermetist as well. If you would study his (Hermes) teachings you would find they do not clash with Christian doctrines.” Other founts of wisdom for Lazzarelli were the writings of Maimonides and “Denys” or “Pseudo-Dionysius.” These texts, with emphasis on Platonic-based “divinization” of humans, have considerable influence in twenty-first century “conservative” and “traditional” Catholic circles, being published by the conservative Jesuit Ignatius Press, and sold in “traditional” Catholic bookstores, as we have noted previously, William Riordan’s Neoplatonist Divine Light: The Theology of Denys the Areopagite.
Perish the thought that this god-making would evoke associations with magic. The deniers say that this is not magic, but “the mystery of Christian regeneration.” But is it really? It seems it has more in common with the serpent in the Garden of Eden and the rabbinic Judaism which kept that gnosis alive, emerging in the 13th century writing of Ele
azar of Worms, who gave explicit instructions for making an artificial man in his Pe’ullath Ha-Yetzirah—arcana that was conveyed to Giovanni Pico della Mirandola as well as Lodovico Lazzarelli.
This Frankenstein thaumaturgy, the apologists tell us, cannot have an evil origin, because unlike the black magic of witches, this is the pure gnosis of the benevolent Judaism espoused by our elder brothers in the faith, who do not practice magic, but rather, “divine secrets.” As Lazzarelli writes in Crater Hermetis: “For about the word in Genesis: ‘And Abraham gave all that he had to Isaac, but to the sons of the concubines he gave gifts,’ the Kabbalists say that what was given to the sons of the concubines were the Scemoth Sceltoma, that is to say, the names of impurity, namely the magical arts. But the things that were given to Isaac were certain divine secrets, which they call Kabbalah9 (because they are passed down from mouth to mouth). And that name is beginning to be known to some people in our days.”
The Catholic occult magus is the divinely perfect man, by definition; and also by definition, this god-man has the ability to create life. From this Catholic template, arose Protestant variants, most notably in the work of Dr. John Dee, who was inspired by the Catholic Abbot Trithemius and his disciple Henry Cornelius Agrippa. Dr. Dee prophesied with hopeful anticipation, a future occult imperium led by England, in which the animation of dead matter (as in The Asclepius), would arise and reign over humanity. In our time this hope is centered on autonomous machine super-intelligences. The point at which these stand-alone artificial intelligences (AI) surpass their creators’ intelligence is termed Singularity. We have a generation among us so disconnected from Biblical wisdom that they ardently long for this event. “…non-evil people might find it in their self-interest to risk propelling humanity into a Singularity even if they know that it has a high chance of annihilating mankind.” 10
The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome Page 43
