The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome

by Michael Hoffman

  “Despite the seemingly-binding nature of the new Catechism, some point to the fact that it was not prepared by a full Council and are able to take some refuge in Ratzinger’s comments that the Catechism seeks to leave debated questions as open as possible. Ratzinger also views doctrinal formulations as having an ‘infinitely broken nature’ in ‘man’s continual effort to go beyond himself and reach up to God.’

  “An explanation closer to the heart of the matter is that it is typical of Roman Catholicism to say both ‘yes’ and ‘no’ at the same time to biblical doctrine. It says ‘yes’ to the authority of Scripture but simultaneously ‘no’ by exalting the Church’s teaching above it. This is also part of that ‘all deceivableness of unrighteousness’ (2 Thess. 2:10) with which the system presided over by the man of sin is characterized. It is well able to bring together the incompatible as well as the diverse. There is a deceivability that goes beyond any other…” 24

  The demonic delusion at the heart of the occult “isms” (Platonism, Neoplatonism, Hermeticism and Kabbalism), which is fundamental to the western secret societies, whether in the Latin West or the Greek world, is the principle that man, through his theurgy, is a partner with God in wonder-working in this life, and God, whose existence is linked to the “World Spirit,” is in some sense dependent on man. The Biblical truth concerning the reality of God is absolutely separate from the preceding matrix of enchantment:

  “What is remarkable is that the triune God—self-existing, perfect and independent—would nevertheless create and enter into covenantal relationships with creatures in freedom and love…God transcends heaven itself, which He has created (I Kings: 8:27); Matthew 24:35). As Paul explained to the Athenian philosophers, this is one of the attributes that highlight the contrast between God and the idols: ‘The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is He served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since He himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything (Acts 17:24-25).

  “…in Isaiah, God’s name 25becomes especially understood as referring to God’s eternal and independent existence apart from the creation (e.g. Isaiah 40:28; 41:4; 43:10-20; 44:6; 48:12). God reveals His name in the midst of demonstrating His eternal purpose and immutable nature…Yahweh can be trusted to bring to pass everything that He has promised. His Name can be invoked with total confidence, both because He is faithful to His promise and because He is not dependent on creatures for realizing His purposes. Egypt’s pantheon is the foil. In contrast to the various nature gods, limited by their specific areas of provenance, Yahweh is the Sovereign God (Deuteronomy 4:34-35). Precisely because God is not dependent on anyone or anything He has created, we are assured that nothing will keep Him from being there for us…the gospel itself is embedded in the very name of Israel’s God. The fact that God is incomparable and transcends the world…(e)vil powers never have the last word, because although God enters into the matrix of creaturely powers, He is never simply one player among others. God remains qualitatively and not just quantitatively distinct from creation…

  “…according to Platonism, Neoplatonism…(t)he world does not exist as a free choice and act of God but as the necessary emanation or aspect of His being…God…needs the world for the realization of His existence, happiness and perfection: God’s being is in His becoming.

  “…In Paul’s Mars Hill speech, Paul points out that ‘in (God) we live and move and have our being’ rather than vice versa (Acts 17:28). There is relatedness, but it is that of the world to God rather than of God to the world. Even in the Incarnation, the eternal Son assumed our humanity rather than vice versa. It is precisely in God’s independence and freedom from contingency that a hospitable space is opened for the freedom of contingent reality…this ‘unbounded, limitless, absolutely undetermined, unqualified’ view of God is irreconcilable with pantheism ancient and modern: ‘Babylonian, Hellenistic, Neoplatonist, Kabbalistic and Spinozistic.” 26

  According to occult fable, Plato was a master of Egyptian magic, deeply immersed in Pharaonic occultism. This is silly stuff but it persisted as Neoplatonic-Catholic legend. In the third century A.D. Diogenes Laertius, in his Lives of Eminent Philosophers, wrote that Plato sojourned in Egypt five years while gaining its “wisdom.”

  It is now generally agreed that the Greek text of the Corpus Hermeticum was written around 300 A.D., approximately the same time when it is surmised that the Kabbalah and Babylonian Talmud were beginning to be compiled. Gilles Quispel, in the book The Way of Hermes, writes that Poimandres, the first of the fourteen Hermetic texts that comprise Pimander (Corpus Hermeticum), “echoes the main theme of esoteric Judaism.”

  Furthermore, Walter Scott, editor of the four volume Oxford University text, Hermetica: The Ancient Greek and Latin Writings Which Contain Religious or Philosophic Teachings Ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus (1924-1936), asserts that Plato and his Timaeus were a powerful influence on the writings attributed to Hermes.

  The Egypt of Isis, Osiris and Anubis was the master theological image of this process of transformation. This is reflected in several of Ficino’s treatises, in particular De voluptate and Di dio et anima. In the former he describes Hermes Trismegistus as “the wisest of all Egyptians,” whose god is the source of all creation. In the latter he writes, “Mercurius Trismegistus, an Egyptian philosopher far more ancient than the Greeks, whom Greeks and Egyptians called a god because of his boundless understanding and knowledge…”

  “The other significant development of the Renaissance…was the spreading influence of Kabbalah in European magical thought. The mystical system of Kabbalah…had been percolating into Christian magic before the late fifteenth century, but it was its espousal by another Florentine philosopher and natural magician, Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), that introduced it to a new readership and led to renewed engagement with its occult promises. Johannes Reuchlin, a German humanist scholar and expert in Greek and Hebrew, further advanced its influence north of the Alps.” 27

  The Catholic trio of Ficino, Pico and Reuchlin represented highly placed and connected Neoplatonic Catholic “Humanists” whose Egyptian Hermeticism and rabbinic Kabbalism would give birth to Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry from within the Renaissance Church of Rome itself.

  “The importance of the work of Marsilio Ficino of Florence…in the awakening, transmission and dissemination of esoteric knowledge in the West cannot be overestimated…In the Renaissance, this wisdom was assumed to originate with…the Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus, and…passed down via Pythagoras and Orpheus to the ‘divine Plato’ and his interpreters…Ficino played a major role in the ‘rebirth’ of classical learning we know as the Renaissance, through his commitment to the renewal of Platonic and Hermetic philosophies and his determination to integrate their metaphysics into Christianity…His ordination as a priest (in 1473) and later as a canon of Florence cathedral enabled him to ‘sanctify’ the pagan philosophy while confirming the supremacy of the established religion.” 28

  “Ficino…translated the Corpus Hermeticum, which he saw as containing a core of teachings handed down from very ancient times through Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato and Hermes himself.” 29 “Ficino’s pupil, Pico della Mirandola…used Qabalistic 30 and Neoplatonic ideas in an attempt to find common ground between Christianity, Judaism and Islam…Another advocate of Qabalism was the Franciscan (friar) Francesco di Giorgio…whose De Harmonia Mundi combined Qabalism with a preoccupation with the ideas of universal harmony…” 31

  “Plato Hermeticised”

  “In the geneaology of ancient wisdom, Ficino places Hermes (or his analogue in Roman mythology, Mercurius), at the beginning of theology. Insisting upon the continuous transmission of one and the same doctrine of esoteric thought from Hermes to Pythagoras, and from Pythagoras to Plato, Ficino goes so far to assert that when Plato is treating certain ideas, ‘he does not present his own view but that of the Egyptians.’

  “…it is fair
to say that the Plato…(we) meet…upon reading Ficino’s Theologia Platonica is Plato significantly Hermeticised. For Ficino, Plato merely reproduces the Greek philosophy that Moses has already established in the Scriptures, and what Hermes has revealed in the Corpus Hermeticum. Believing Hermes to have been contemporary with Moses and to have communicated a parallel wisdom to a line of adepts through the ages, Ficino not only grants Hermes the status of Christian prophet, but wonders whether Hermes Trismegistus is in fact Moses. In the Theologia he writes, ‘Mercurius Trismegistus has expounded this same origin of the world’s generation even more plainly. It should not seem surprising to us that Mercurius knew such things if he was the same man as Moses.’ Reading Christian theology back into Plato, and thence back into the Hermetica, Ficino propounds a syncretic philosophy in which Hermes Trismegistus is the one authorial and originating source of all other philosophies….The philosophies of Plato, Plotinus, Pythagoras and Christianity, are all stirred together in an incongruous literary-philosophical mixture…Showing a complete agreement between the teachings of Hermes, Moses, Plato and Christ, Ficino suggests that (the Book of) Genesis may be made to yield to the same message as the Timaeus, and both to yield to the one philosophy expounded in the Pimander. The idea of Hermes as the originating fons et origo of a tradition of wisdom which leads to an unbroken chain from Moses to Plato was the dominant genealogy for two centuries.” 32

  The reference to the two-century limit of influence is more properly an allusion to a Renaissance time-frame when Hermes was literally believed to have been the actual contemporary of Moses (or to have been Moses himself under another name). This literary hoax was overturned most famously and resoundingly by the French Protestant scholar Isaac Casaubon, over the objections of Cardinal Cesare Baronius, with the appearance, in 1614, of Casaubon’s irrefutable critique of the provenance of the Corpus Hermeticum, which proved philologically that it could be no older than the first century A.D. This later dating not only disproved the widespread Catholic belief that the texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus were contemporaneous with Moses, but it also demolished the myth that Trismegistus had been the source of Plato’s thought. (Substantial fragments of ancient Egyptian doctrine were indeed present in the writing attributed to Hermes, however).

  Baronius was the author of a twelve volume Counter-Reformation history of the Church, Annales Ecceliastici, written from 1588 to 1607. He sought to prove the bona fides of the Church of Rome against the Protestants, with a long section on alleged “gentile testimony” to the truth of Jesus Christ. Among the sanctified gentiles in his list are “Mercurius Trismegistus” and the Sibyls, according to the lore of Lactanius. By crediting as foundational to the Catholic Church what amounted to the occult genealogy of the Neoplatonic-Hermetic conspiracy itself, Baronius revealed a devastating truth about the Church of Rome since the Renaissance, which made for a rather poor argument against Protestantism.

  The Hermetica of Trismegistus and the oracles of the Syballines were no kind of corroboration of Christianity. Proceeding from that fact, Casaubon, in his De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticus exercitationes, discredited Baronius and the papist Church itself for continuing to promote the Neoplatonic-Hermetic narrative. By relying upon Lactanius as his source, Cardinal Baronius, a Catholic scholar highly favored by the hierarchy, furnished evidence of the fact that the occult theology was still predominant in papal Rome. Baronius was aware that Lactanius’ account of gentiles who allegedly heralded the coming of Jesus, was hopelessly tainted with the Neoplatonist claims made for Hermes (“Mercurius”) Trismegistus, as a prophet of Catholicism. Casaubon proved that the account of Hermes Trismegistus had been concocted sometime after the coming of Christ, and that this fraudulent prophet and the forged texts attached to his name, had been created by conspirators in the early centuries after Christ and then reintroduced during the Renaissance, which appears to have been the case. What was worse for the Counter-Reformation, was that the other forgeries—the texts said to have been composed by St. Paul’s convert, Denys (also known as Dionysius) the Aeropagite—were defended as authentic not only by Cardinal Baronius, but by Rome’s principal apologist against the Protestants, Cardinal (later Saint) Robert Bellarmine, who was thus implicated in an imposture.

  The cult of Hermes Trismegistus is not limited to the two centuries before Casaubon debunked it. It is alive and well in the present, in part because the point of the hoax that survived into the Renaissance—to disseminate Egyptian paganism under Christian auspices—has of course been dropped, in favor of accessing the traces of Pharaonic-Egyptian magic and theology present in the Hermetic texts, without the need to justify them by asserting they prophesied of Christ. Furthermore, history has yet to adequately account for the possibility of a conspiracy of forgers (if indeed there was an enterprise deserving of such a title), conceivably launched by Neoplatonic-Christian deceivers, who not only tricked the West into accepting the Trismegistus texts as having been written in deep antiquity, but who also successfully assigned the voluminous writings falsely attributed to St. Paul’s convert, Dionysius the Areopgite. These pseudoepigrapha may have been produced near in time to one another, and if that is so, they may suggest the existence of a cabal organized for the purpose of propagating the prisca theologia. It is also worthwhile to recall that the Old Testament pseudoepigrapha known as the Mishnah and Gemara (comprising the Talmud Bavli), were created in the same approximate time period, the first few centuries A.D.

  Rabbinic Judaism represents the infernal marriage of the occultism of ancient Egypt with the Bible. The rabbinic claim for the Talmud and Kabbalah is that they are Bible-rooted books that explain and elaborate God’s Scripture. Ficino, Mirandola, Giorgio (1466-1540) and the other members of the Church of Rome’s occult coterie were the crypto-rabbis of the Catholic world. When Pope Pius X wrote against the “synthesis of all heresies” here it was, the syncretic claim that Egyptian diabolism, as filtered through its subsequent manifestations in the sorcerers of Babylon and Orphic and Attic Greece, and the heirs of these cumulative traditions—the rabbinic descendants of the Pharisees—proved the truth of Jesus Christ and the Bible. Ficino asserted in his Concordia Mosis et Platonis (Basel, 1561) that Plato proved Moses true. The Hermetic philosophy of the Corpus Hermeticum was regarded by the Catholicoccultists as an ancient theology, parallel to the revealed wisdom of the Bible, supporting Biblical revelation.

  Ficino’s De triplici vita libri tres (“Three Books on Life”), or simply De vita,33 considered a “classic of Catholic Humanism” is, in its volume three, titled De vita coelitus comparanda (“Life matched to the heavens”), a complex amalgam of philosophy, magic and astrology including, in fidelity to Egyptian magic, advocacy of talismans and amulets. Trismegistus is featured in the final chapter of volume three which treats of the man-isgod thesis of the Asclepius, wherein Hermes laudes the Pharaonic Egyptian veneration of statues into which spirits had been imbued:

  “You must know, O Asclepius, the power and force of man. Just as the Lord and Father is the creator of the gods of heaven, so man is the author of the gods who reside in the temples. Not only does he receive life, but he gives it in his turn. Not only does he progress towards God, but he makes gods.

  “Do you mean the statues, O Trismegistus?’

  “Yes, the statues, Asclepius. They are animated statues full of sensus and spiritus who can accomplish many things, foretelling the future, giving ills to men and curing them….What we have said about man is already marvelous, but most marvelous of all is that he has been able to discover the nature of the gods and to reproduce it. Our first ancestors invented the art of making gods. They mingled a virtue, drawn from material nature, to the substance of the statues, and since they could not actually create souls, after having evoked the souls of demons or angels, they introduced these into their idols by holy and divine rites, so that, the idols had the power of doing good and evil. These terrestrial or man-made gods result from a composition of herbs, stones, and aromatics which
contain in themselves an occult virtue of divine efficacy. And if one tries to please them with numerous sacrifices, hymns, songs of praise, sweet concerts which recall the harmony of heaven, this is in order that the celestial element which has been introduced into the idol by the repeated practice of the celestial rites may joyously support its long dwelling amongst men. That is how man makes gods.” 34

  It is not difficult to perceive from what occult motives some manifestations of the abuse of the Roman Catholic tradition of statue veneration (dulia) degenerated into statue worship (latria), which is God’s definition of hatred of him: Exodus 20: 4-5, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image…Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.” Hermes in Asclepius surpasses even this heinous evil with his praise for humans who “invented the art of making gods” by having “evoked the souls of demons or angels.”

  This is black magic of the deepest dye. It emanates from the doctrine of man-is-god as expressed by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in his Pope “Saint” John Paul II-certified book, Oratio de hominis dignitate (“Oration on the Dignity of Man”), which he borrowed from Ficino’s edition of the Asclepius: “And so, O Asclepius, man is a magnum miraculum, a being worthy of reverence and honor. For he goes into the nature of a god as though he were himself a god; he has familiarity with the race of demons, knowing that he is of the same origin; he despises that part of his nature.”