The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome
Page 3
It is true that in the minds of some followers of the Church of Rome, Mary has been ascribed goddess-like qualities as the so-called “Co-Redemptrix of the Universe.” There is indeed such a phenomenon as mariolatry, and it exists among some percentage of the followers of Rome.
In our study of the incursion of paganism into Renaissance Catholicism and the concealed veneration of the witch-goddess Isis, we acknowledge that the witch-goddess cult existed in the Church in the Renaissance and to give but one example, in the papal apartment itself. This was not, however, “Mary disguised as Isis.”
The Papal Isis
Regarding the papal apartment in the Vatican, art historian Anja Grebe writes, “Although the pope had “his bed chamber, living quarters and treasure chamber there, the front areas in particular…were used for official occasions such as diplomatic receptions, audiences…consistories (meetings with cardinals), the signing of treaties and even parties. In his diaries, the pope’s master of ceremonies, Johannes Burchardus (1440-1506) distinguishes between the more public areas and the ‘secret rooms’ (camere secrete) accessible as a rule only to a small number of religious and secular dignitaries. The pope also provided high-ranking visitors with guest rooms…Among his first guests were King Frederick I of Naples and Marquis Gianfresco II Gonzaga of Mantua, as well as the latter’s adversary, Charles VIII of France, in January, 1495. In response to the newly completed frescoes, the French king is reported to have declared that in no other palace had he seen ‘decoration of this kind.” 21
The papal apartment in question comprises six rooms and side-rooms located on the first floor of the papal palace. It was constructed by order of Nicholas V, who reigned from 1447-1455. The papal apartment of the late fifteenth century was designed by members of the Curia, including Annio da Viterbo and Bartolomeo Platina, and painted by “Pintoricchio” (Bernardino di Benedetto di Bagio; 1453-1513). In those environs, Mary’s image is entirely separate from the pagan images and depicted correctly, chastely and reverently, without occult symbolism. In that space, Isis is never equated with the Mother of Jesus: “…in the Vatican itself…there is a mural by the master Pintoricchio that shows Isis, seated on a Renaissance throne, instructing Hermes Trismegistus at her right hand and Moses at her left—which surely suggests…that the wisdom shared by the pagan and Hebrew sages was originally revealed neither by Yahweh nor by Jove, but by the consort of the dead-and-resurrected Egyptian Savior Osiris.” 22
This is depraved in and of itself. Because it did not defame Mary by incorporating her into the cult of Isis, does not exculpate this Renaissance papal devotion to pagan Hermetic syncretism. In this realm the Christian treads the razor’s edge between the extremes of papalolatrous credulity and Protestant denial of Mary’s significance. It is a minefield where precision, attention to context and respect for details that contradict one’s thesis, are essential if an accurate account is to be rendered.
The Isis iconography in the papal apartment was no mere artwork, or whimsical elucidation of the follies of mythology. Its expression was pedagogical and worshipful—an evocation of the Neoplatonic-Hermetic theology which had been alien to the Church until the Renaissance. This fact is critically important if we are to maintain fidelity to the facts, rather than pursuing the highly partisan agenda of the nineteenth century researcher Hislop and an extremist faction within the Leftwing of seventeenth century Calvinism.
Pool, in his influential Annotations, while superior to Hislop, would nonetheless have us believe that the Church defected after six hundred years. He says this occurred because he opines that a literal belief in the words of Jesus Christ in John 6:53-57 is a sign of the Antichrist: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him.” Why are Catholics acolytes of the Antichrist if they believe the preceding words of the Gospel of St. John as the Church interpreted them from Justin Martyr onward?
Some Protestants forget what a struggle it was to win and hold formerly pagan lands for Christianity and its civilization. The very formation of what it means to be English occurred in the century Matthew Pool decreed to be the century when Rome lost the Faith. It was Arthur, his Catholic son Edward and equally Catholic grandson Athelstan, who laid the foundation for taking Wessex and Mercia from the savage Viking hordes, and uniting them under Athelstan, who was the first to rightfully bear the title Rex totius Britanniae. These Catholic kings fashioned the Anglo-Saxon nation. There is something repellant about an armchair Fundamentalist from the comfort of his study, dismissing this titanic Christian struggle and subsequent victory, as smacking of Antichrist because Catholics took Jesus at His word in John 6:53-57. Retroactive criminalization of the past is often a signpost of revolutionary dictatorship.
The Renaissance popes lacked the candor to publicly declare any such criminalization. Rather, they resorted to skullduggery as reflected in the papal apartment that paid latria to goddess Isis and her putative disciple Hermes Trismegistus—the infernal patron of the Catholic popes and theologians of that era (with honorable exceptions, among them Savonarola).
“It may seem astonishing that in the apartment of the pope, Christ’s representative on earth, and moreover in a room dedicated to the lives of the saints, a number of whom sacrificed their lives in the fight against paganism, the ceiling is decorated with…Isis…the traverse arch depicts…a beautiful woman assuming her throne as the Egyptian queen Isis….Despite the fact that the legend takes place in ancient Egypt, Pintoricchio depicts the figures in fifteenth-century dress.” 23
The papal worship of Isis in the late fifteenth century is apart from the dulia (veneration, as distinct from latria, i.e. worship), which the orthodox theology of the pre-Renaissance ecclesia accorded to Blessed Mary. The Renaissance popes were conveying by means of the high art of the Italian masters (more seductive because of their incomparable aesthetic), a symbolic continuity between the Egyptian religion and the papal religion—a culmination of the Humanism which was derived from Neoplatonic-Hermeticism. Renaissance Rome’s occultism was an Egyptianizing religion for which Isis was “Mistress of the Word in the Beginning.” After the sorcery had taken sufficient and deep root, the Inquisition was revived to maintain a stage play for the non-initiated who needed to believe that the post-Renaissance Church was the same bastion of anti-occultism as the pre-Renaissance ecclesia had been. This hoax depended as much upon the psychology of self-deception among conservative Catholics, as the elaborate inquisitorial theatricals themselves, wherein expendable small fry were sacrificed for the sake of a public image of reaction that prevailed over the covert reality of revolutionary occultism installed in the depths of the Church.
Our sleuthing mission is concerned with the conspiracies of the sons of Belial boring into the bowels of the Church of Jesus Christ. Yet in this process of detecting the Judas theology and its agents, one must exercise caution so that all is in proportion, and we do not commit the reverse error and strain at gnats (Matthew 23:24), becoming like “Zeal-of-the-Land-Busy,” the character in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair: a Protestant fanatic who mistook a basket of gingerbread-men pastries for “popish idols.”
The Puritan concern for a living faith in conformity with the Gospel and an end to criminal politics was admirable. But much good will was squandered because a “Zeal-of-the-Land-Busy,” such as Oliver Cromwell, suppressed the English Christian people’s day of rest at Christmas, which paid honor to a date said to commemorate the glad tidings of great joy over the incarnation of Israel’s Messiah. Zeal-of-the-Land-Busy condemned it as pagan. Protestant scholar Ralph Woodrow writes:
“But wasn’t December 25th an evil day? Did not pagans honor this day as the birthday of the sun-god? Without attempting to go into details, let’s assume Dec
ember 25th was indeed an ancient, popular, pagan celebration in honor of the sun-god. Assume, also, that church leaders, seeking to do away with this pagan celebration, gradually replaced it with a celebration to honor the birth of the Sun of righteousness, Jesus Christ—on the same day. Was this substitution a dangerous compromise? Or an opportunity to “overcome evil with good” Romans 12:21)? This could all be debated, I’m sure. But regardless of how this came right or wrong, Christmas became an established day on our calendar. The result has been that every year in many parts of the world, and in millions of cases, the story of Jesus Christ, his birth and life, is told. The Sun of righteousness (Mal. 4:2) has so far out-shined any former supposed sun-gods, Sol, Osiris, Horus, or Mithra do not even cross our minds…I have known people who would rather argue (even with unconverted people) that Christ was not born on December 25, than to put emphasis on the fact that He was born—regardless of when—and what He can do in our lives now!” 24
The Church-period predating the Renaissance was not perfect and some seeds of the occult—principally Neoplatonism—had been planted well before the Quattrocento. There were also terrible errors committed during the Crusades, including the Sack of Constantinople in 1204, which fatally sapped Christendom’s eastern Byzantine outpost and contributed to its long decline, and eventual catastrophic fall to the Ottoman Muslims in 1453.
Long before Vatican Council I, the idea of the infallibility of the pope had metastasized in the medieval period, as witnessed in the canonizations of saints, in which it was held that the judgment of the pontiff was infallible. We can trace this development to the period 1050-1150 when the Bishop of Rome and his Curia began to usurp from local bishops the one thousand-year-old subsidiary function of proclaiming the sainthood of a deceased local Christian, i.e. the certainty that the person was in heaven. Papal claims to absolute, supreme authority were enlarged by the demise of subsidiarity.
Circa 1040, Pope Benedict IX issued the first decree of canonization. His language was unprecedented in Christ’s ecclesia: “Statueremus et decenemus” (We establish and decree”). His establishment and decree was to the whole Church by apostolic authority, asserting, in this instance, the sainthood of the late Simeon of Syracuse, an itinerant monk. This represented the marginalization of the local church and its bishop, in favor of the bishop of the diocese of Rome. Immemorial Christian practice had granted the right of proclaiming a Christian a saint to the local bishop. It was a species of modernist innovation to take that right away. Over a long and arduous period of evolution, the gradual process of papal monopoly over sainthood culminated in the declaration by Urban VIII in 1634, of the reservation of that right exclusively to the pontiff.
Our concern is for the study of the development of absolute obedience to the Bishop of Rome without which the Tridentine Latin Mass could not have been suppressed (some prefer the term “derogated”), in 1969 and thereafter, throughout nearly the whole Church. The success of the suppression depended upon the loss of memory among the laity and priests, of the Tridentine Mass and its subsequent replacement by a liturgy of the reigning pope (Paul VI). If rights of local bishops in such matters had not been gradually extinguished, prelates such as Cardinal James McIntyre in Los Angeles and an estimated half dozen other bishops and cardinals in favor of the Tridentine Latin Mass in America, would have created comparatively large havens of liturgical preservation. These very likely would have saved generations of Catholics from imposed amnesia with regard to the suppressed rite.
The Middle Ages also saw the rise of a disconcerting obsession with making contact with the physical remains of the corpses of those declared to be saints. This focus on dead matter and anatomical parts of saintly cadavers (“relics”) both real and fake, resulted not only in a lucrative traffic that would become a grievance of the Reformers, it did, under certain (not all) circumstances, come to dominate medieval conceptions of the Gospel, lessening emphasis on the paramount value of a personal spiritual relationship with the living God, adherence to faith in Him and the obedience to His commandments which arises from that faith, and which contributes to the Kingship of Christ. It would be wrong to dismiss relics altogether, or the pilgrimages that grew up around them, but it seems equally wrong that such customs would be allowed to become rife with superstition and an unbalanced emphasis that detracted from the daily struggle to live according to a Biblical standard.
Nonetheless, the medieval Church for all its faults, was still the Church of Jesus Christ, the scourge of usurers, evangelizer of millions of pagans, and the source of laws of liberty by which a free people are governed (such as the Magna Carta, in large part the result of efforts by the Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton). The rule in Britain of King Arthur (sixth century), King Alfred the Great and St. Edmund of East Anglia (ninth century), and St. Edward the Confessor (eleventh century), are among the most exemplary templates of Christian government in the history of our civilization. As Eleanor Parker observes, “AElfric’s description of St. Edmund is a portrait of an ideal Anglo-Saxon king: wise, humble, virtuous and kind to the poor and weak.” AElfric of Eynsham:
“Edmund the blessed, King of the East Angles, was wise and honorable, and always honored Almighty God in noble conduct. He was humble and virtuous and endured so resolutely that he would never submit to shameful vices, nor on either side deviate from his virtuous practices, but was always mindful of the true teaching: ‘Have you been appointed as ruler? Do not exalt yourself, but be among men as if you are one of them,’ (Ecclesiasticus 32:1). He was generous to the poor and like a father to widows, and with benevolence always guided his people to righteousness, and restrained the violent, and blessedly lived in the true faith.” 25
By their fruits ye shall know them. The fruits of the Church prior to the Renaissance were spectacular. Of course, God preserved His people in both the Renaissance and post-Renaissance, as we noted at the outset, and as we discover in the lives of saints such as Joseph of Cupertino, Father Damien of Molokai, Brother André and other post-Renaissance Catholics; preserved by grace miraculous. Surely there are saints today in the surviving traces of the immemorial Church, gripped as it is in a crisis which is not new. Crisis is the condition of the Church. It was in crisis when St. John wrote the Book of Revelation.
1 Cf. Hoffman, “Chief Justice Roger Taney, A Profile in Courage,” in Revisionist History no. 44.
2 Edinburgh: W. Whyte & Co.
3 Cf. Ralph Woodrow, The Babylon Connection? (2004), pp. 26-27. Woodrow errs when, in considering the significance of the incorporation of the pagan symbolism represented by obelisks, he dismisses it as a mere peccadillo. His mistake however, does not reduce the credibility of much of the rest of his refutation of Hislop’s falsehoods and non-sequiturs.
4 Matthew Lyons, “Richard Topcliffe: The Queen’s Torturer,” June 25, 2013. https://mathewlyons.wordpress.com/2012/06/25/richard-topcliffe-the-queens-torturer/
5 Cf. Elizabeth’s Act of Uniformity (1559), 1 Eliz. Cap. 2 in Henry Gee and William J. Hardy, Documents Illustrative of English Church History (1896), pp. 458-467.
6 Cf. Michael Hoffman, “Edmund Campion’s Jesuit Challenge to Bad Queen Bess,” in Revisionist History, April-May, 2016. Pleas to the queen to spare Campion came from surprising quarters, including at least one principled Protestant. John Foxe possessed a humanity and decency like that of Campion. He was the author of the Acts and Monuments of the Latter and Perilous Days, known popularly as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, an encyclopedic account of — among other acts of persecution—the episodic Catholic killing of Protestants. Foxe was the leading Protestant martyrologist in the Englishspeaking world and it was Foxe who interceded for Campion. The noble Foxe believed that ‘When men of false doctrine are killed, their error is not killed; nay it is all the more strengthened, the more constantly they die.” It has taken Christendom many centuries to apprehend that wisdom.
7 Patricia Turner and Charles Russell Coulter, Dictionary of Ancient Deities (2000), p. 243.
9 “Ockham and Scotus in the Middle Ages…postulated the view that any ‘good’ is nominal, i.e., it is what it is only because God regards it as good. This was opposed to the ‘realist’ view that God wills a thing because it is good Situation ethics, at the level of human value judgments, is likewise nominalistic…The whole mindset of modern man, our mindset, is on the nominalists’ side…(the) flat assertion that there are no intrinsic values and that value exists only ‘in reference to persons.’ Martin Buber is…plain about it; he says that ‘value is always value for a person rather than something with an absolute, independent existence.” Joseph Fletcher, Situation Ethics: The New Morality (1966), pp. 57-58. On the Catholic nominalist school that adopted the equity of usury in the fifteenth century, cf. Hoffman, Usury in Christendom, pp. 162-173.
10 Guenther H. Haas, The Concept of Equity in Calvin’s Ethics (Paternoster Press, 1997), p. 7.
11 Ibid., pp. 8-9.
12 Ibid., pp. 36-37.
13 Howard L. Oleck, “Historical Nature of Equity Jurisprudence,” Fordham Law Review, vol. 20, no. 1 (1951), p. 23.
14 Haas, op. cit., p. 120; emphasis supplied. Haas neglects to take notice of the extent to which Calvin hounded usurers and regarded them as unworthy of membership in the Christian congregation. When he was pastor in Geneva all profits on loans were banned and many capitalist businesses which we take for granted nowadays as supposedly benign and ethical, were severely restricted. Calvin regarded usury as a sometimes necessary but generally (with some exceptions), moral evil. Cf. this writer’s Usury in Christendom: The Mortal Sin that Was and Now is Not (2012), pp. 186-187, 207-208 and 259-261. The Renaissance Church of Rome and its latter-day pontiffs maintained an elaborate pretense with regard to the dogma on usury, while redefining it in accordance with nominalism and equity, and then claiming that nothing had changed. A Conservative Catholic former professor at Notre Dame University contested our statements about the popes and usury by contending that the papist laws contra usury are still on the books. Actually they are not, having been removed from canon law, but even if the assertion were true, what exactly would that signify? The Communist Party’s laws guaranteeing freedom of speech were never formally removed from the Soviet Constitution, yet the significance of those laws for the Russian and other captive peoples, was near zero. In fact, the disparity between what is on paper and what is actually forbidden or permitted in real life, compounds the corruption.