The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome

by Michael Hoffman

  “Hence, the Mercury in the fresco who kills Argus would be Hermes Trismegistus, and the next scene would show him in Egypt, as the lawgiver of the Egyptians, with, beside him, the law-giver of the Hebrews, Moses. This would be the usual Hermes- Moses comparison with which we have become so familiar in our study of Magia and Cabala.

  “Why did the pope have such a program painted early in his reign, a program which glorifies the Egyptian religion…associates Hermes Trismegistus with Moses? The answer to this question is, I believe, that the Pope wished to proclaim his reversal of the policy of his predecessor by adopting Pico della Mirandola’s program of using Magia and Cabala as aids to religion. 50

  “The most startling manifestation of Roman ‘Egyptology’ appears in the decorative scheme of the ‘Room of the Saints’ in the Appartamento Borgia, the series of residential and ceremonial rooms in the Vatican Palace that Pinturicchio 51 frescoed for Alexander VI in the early years of the second Borgia pontificate…In the Pinturicchio ceiling, Io-Isis sits enthroned, teaching the Egyptians, with Moses and Hermes Trismegistus at her side. The next scene shows her marriage to Osiris…then Osiris was murdered by his evil brother, and the pieces of his body scattered over all Egypt. Isis manages at length to gather the bodily parts of her former consort, and erects a pyramid over his tomb. There he appears as Apis, the bull, and is worshipped by the Egyptians as the living image of the resurrected god. In the last scene, the bull, elevated by his priests, is borne triumphantly before the faithful, before the beginning of sacred rites. At the head of the procession appears a child blowing a horn decorated with another Borgia heraldic emblem, the double crown of the royal house of Aragon. These elements suggest a final metamorphosis of Apis-Osiris into the Borgia pope himself and have a parallel in the pope’s own ceremonial appearance raised aloft on his sedia gestatoria (ritual throne)…in the Pinturicchio ceiling, Io-Isis, the link between Hellenic and Egyptian civilization, and Osiris-Apis, the image of the slain and resurrected divine king, are the sacred progenitors of the Borgia pontificate…” 52

  In the papal apartment we observe an exquisite illustration by Pinturicchio of the transmigration of a repeatedly reincarnated soul who begins as Io, becomes Isis and eventually reincarnates as Alexander VI, Pope of Rome! The occult-Renaissance Church is thus established symbolically inside the Vatican itself. Our Borgia pope has been well camouflaged by the Church of Rome. To historians both Catholic and secular, Alexander VI is notorious for having fathered eight children by three different women, and that among these offspring were the murderous Cesare and his amorous sister, Lucrezia; and that Alexander sold on occasions too numerous to number, the rank of cardinal to the highest bidder, and in general put the Roman Church up for auction (less remarked upon is his judicial murder of Savonarola).

  This is essentially “Borgia Pope” Alexander VI’s profile in pop history. In our post-modern world these details are not particularly galvanizing, being mainly fodder for cynicism and a demoralizing, shoulder-shrugging retort, along the lines of, so what else is new? The Vatican can absorb cynics. In some respects it has turned cynicism back upon its critics by painting them as holier-than-thou Puritan bibliomaniacs who make no allowance for human flaws and failings. The point would be well taken were it not for the suppressed fact that Pope Alexander’s theology was Neoplatonic-Hermetic-Kabbalism. Rome cannot so readily dismiss or spin (at least not yet), transgressions against the First Commandment committed by a pontiff. Popular history does not report the singular marvel of Alexander VI’s papacy, which has nothing to do with simony or fathering children out of wedlock. This prodigy is something that remains “too hot to handle” for the spin-doctors. Even at this late date, it is an occult success so spectacular and damaging that even Rome’s confidence tricksters would have difficulty explaining it to the marks in the pews. Consequently, Alexander’s major crime isn’t written about to any appreciable extent in most papal biographies or mainstream histories.

  This pontiff opened a Pandora’s Box that has never been closed. He safeguarded, cultivated and unleashed upon the world none other than the master architect of the occult Trojan Horse inside the Church, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Even with the lapse of more than five hundred years, for having secured this world-historic objective of the dark forces, Alexander VI receives scant acknowledgement. His secret remains potentially explosive and for that reason it is still being kept.

  As Frances Yates wrote, “The profound significance of Pico della Mirandola in the history of humanity can hardly be overestimated. He it was who first boldly formulated a new position for European man, man as Magus using both Magia and Cabala to act upon the world, to control his destiny by science. And in Pico, the organic link with religion of the emergence of the Magus can be studied at its source.” 53

  What exactly is the connection between Pico’s Magia and our era’s science? “It is one of the more profound ironies of the history of thought that the growth of mechanical science, through which arose the idea of mechanism as a possible philosophy of nature, was itself an outcome of the Renaissance magical tradition.” 54

  Mechanism divested of the appearance of magic would by deception appear in the modern era to represent the triumph of materialism over Renaissance mysticism, the apparent overthrow of Magia and Cabala by rules of evidence and the scientific method, and the replacement of the magus with the scientist. In truth however, the materialistic scientist who creates artificial intelligence, clones living beings, modifies DNA, tampers with embryos, and engineers plant genetics, fulfills the role of the magus envisioned by Giovanni Pico and Cornelius Agrippa; their Protestant disciple John Dee, and a legion of epigones. Certain scientists harness the power of the material world to the eons-old objective of the sorcerers of antiquity, and the god they serve. To do so, the scientist in the modern age, no less than the Renaissance magus who is his progenitor, rejects the Logos (John 1:1-5) and revolts against the Order of Creation divinely ordained by the Word. This infernal network entered history by means of the imprimatur which Pope Alexander VI first granted to Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.

  1 James J. Bono, The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine — Volume 1: From Ficino to Descartes, pp. 26-27.

  2 Werner L. Gundersheimer, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 26, No. 1/2 (1963), p. 38.

  3 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man, (transl. C.G. Wallace), p. 30.

  4 McIntosh, op. cit., pp. 7-8.

  5 Robert Wilkinson, Tetragrammaton: Western Christians and the Hebrew Name of God (2005), p. 317.

  6 The Vatican preserved copies of the first edition of the Nine Hundred Theses and the Vatican Library in the twenty-first century continues to retain the editio princeps, as does the British Library. A hand-written facsimile of the 1486 printing is in Vienna at the Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna.

  7 Within his Apology, his harshest criticism of Aquinas and the Dominicans will be found in Pico’s section on the descent of Christ into “hell.” (Actually Jesus descended into sheol () i.e. the grave, not the fiery pit of hell (Gehenna-γέεννα, from ).

  8 Stephen A. Farmer, Syncretism in the West: Pico’s 900 Theses (1998), pp. 47-48.

  9 Hoffman, Judaism Discovered (2008), p. 483.

  10 Farmer, op.cit., pp. 314-315.

  11 Pico’s other Judaic “mentor” was Elia del Medigo.

  12 Farmer, op.cit, p. 14.

  13 Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man, (op.cit.), pp. 31-32.

  14 Hanegraaff, Esotericism (op.cit.), p. 56.

  15 Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man, (op.cit.), p. 32.

  16 Pier Cesare Bori, “The Historical and Biographical Background of the Oration,” in Pico della Mirandola Oration on the Dignity of Man: A New Translation and Commentary (2012), p. 104.

  17 Mirandola, Giovanni Pico, “Proem to the Third Book, Third Exposition: Of the Angelic and Invisible World” in On the Dignit
y of Man, On Being and the One, Heptaplus (dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici 1489), transl. by Douglas Carmichael et al. (1965).

  18 In Pirqei de-Rabbi Eli’ezer: 21, Rabbi Yehudah and Rabbi Shimon teach that even Abel was contaminated with the slime which the serpent injected into Eve during their alleged sexual intercourse. (Pirqei de-Rabbi Eli’ezer is an influential text in the writings of Rabbis Amram Gaon, Rashi and his grandson Jacob ben Meir [“Rabbeinu Tam”], and Moses Maimonides).

  19 Pico often refers to the Judaics of his time as “Hebrews,” but the major Kabbalistic and Talmudic texts were written in Aramaic, not Hebrew.

  20 Hanegraaff, Esotericism (op.cit.), pp. 63 and 65-67.

  21 Farmer, op.cit., pp. 63-65; 75-77.

  22 Pico della Mirandola: Oration on the Dignity of Man (1998), pp. 26-27 and 29.

  23 Cf. Burkert, Lore and Science, op. cit.,, p. 157.

  24 Cf. the am ha’aretz section of Judaism Discovered (2008), pp. 29-30. Modern Orthodox Judaism interprets BT Pesahim 49b as stating that “Jewish ignoramuses are greater antisemites than Gentiles.” The Kabbalah (Zohar: Exodus 7b) teaches that at the “end of days” the am ha’arertz, these “wicked Jews,” will become the allies of the enemies of Klal Yisroel” (the “Jewish” people).

  25 John F. MacArthur, The MacArthur New Testament Commentary: Titus (1996), pp. 126-127.

  26 Pico della Mirandola, Commento (1486).

  27 Edgar Wind, op. cit., p. 7.

  28 Relatively few historians have sought to investigate the extent to which Pope Innocent VIII’s relatively mild strictures imposed on Pico were colored by the fact that in political and legal battles for control of the duchy of Mirandola fought between factions of the Mirandola family, Pope Innocent was allied with Pico’s brother (and heir) Antonmaria, who resided for a time at the papal court, against the faction led by Galeotto della Mirandola (Gianfrancesco’s father), who were backed by the imperial court.

  29 Farmer, op. cit., p. 138.

  30 Ibid., p. 139.

  31 Cf. Richard H. Wilkinson, The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt (2000), pp. 37 and 173; R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz, Sacred Science (1982), pp. 26-28 and 174-179; Rosalie David, Religion and Magic in Ancient Egypt (2002), p. 90.

  32 Farmer, op. cit., p. 149.

  33 These techniques are examined in Judaism Discovered, pp. 169-174; 229-236.

  34 “…the movement of the Renaissance, even without considering its most serious excesses, ended in denying the ideal of Christianity, the whole life of men in society being thenceforth uprooted from the maxims of the Gospel…”—Cardinal Henri de Lubac, “Explication chretien de notre temps,” transl. Anne Englund Nash, in Theology in History (1996), p. 444. “Toward the end of his career he wrote a very favorable monograph on the Renaissance Platonist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola…” (David Grumett, De Lubac, 2007, p. ix). We have published for the first time in English translation an extract from De Lubac’s “monograph” (in chapter fourteen).

  35 On Thomas More, Pico, Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell, cf. this writer’s “Truth Devoured by a Wolf,” in Revisionist History no. 78. In his Life of John Picus (1510), More translates into English the biography of Pico della Mirandola which had been penned in Latin by Gianfrancesco. More adds his own ideas and deletes some parts of Gianfrancesco’s original text, making it almost as much More’s book as that of Pico’s propagandistic nephew.

  36 On the Dignity of Man, (op.cit.), pp. 31-32.

  37 Grafton and Weinberg, I Have Always Loved the Holy Tongue (2001), p. 149. This duo is asserting that Buxtorf has greater knowledge of Judaism than the apostles Peter and Paul and all of the Church Fathers, a tissue of absurdity which Buxtorf would have confuted.

  38 Ibid., p. 149.

  39 Ibid., p. 147.

  40 Johannes Buxtorf, Synagoga Judaica, (1604), chapter 25.

  41 Cees Leijenhorst, “Francesco Patrizi’s Hermetic Philosophy,” in Gnosis and Hermeticism from Antiquity to Modern Times (1998), pp. 127-128.

  42 Cf. Maria Muccillo, “La vita e le opere di Aristotle nelie Discussions peripateticae di Fancesco Patrizi da Cherso,” Rinascimento II. s. 21 (1981), pp. 53-119, and M.J. Wilmot, “Aristotles exotericus, acromaticus, mysticus: Two Interpretations of the Typological Classifications of the Corpus aristotleicum by Francesco Patrizi da Cherso,” Novelles de la Republique des Lettres (1985), pp. 67-95.

  43 Cf. Sandra Plastina, “Concordia discors: Aristotleismus und Platonismus in der Philosophie des Francesco Piccolomini,” in Martin Mulsow ed., Das Ende des Hermetismus.

  44 Tomas Nejeschleba, “Johannes Jessenius,” p. 367, in Francesco Patrizi: Philosopher of the Renaissance.

  45 The interview is online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwJDs1cg9Eo

  46 Thomas Molnar, The Pagan Temptation (1987), p. 76.

  47 See the appendix, “The Influence of Neoplatonic Thought on Freemasonry: Pico della Mirandola and his Oratio de Hominis Dignitate.”

  48 Howard Schwartz, Tree of Souls (2004), pp. 15-16. “Sefirot” is also spelled “sephirot.” Concerning the “ten sephirot,” see chapter 18, “Occult Miscellany.”

  49 English translation: New York, 1977, introduction to pt. III, pp. 51-52.

  50 Yates, Bruno, op. cit., pp. 113-116.

  51 Bernardino di Betto (1454-1513), known as Pinturicchio (also spelled Pintoricchio).

  52 Charles L. Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome, pp. 304-306. In 1503 Julius II (Giuliano della Rovere), succeeded Alexander VI (after the brief interregnum of Pius III’s pontificate). “It was during Julius’s pontificate, moreover, that Giles of Viterbo, so often an articulator for the Della Rovere pontiff of the papacy’s sacred mission and destiny, developed a deepening interest in Hebraic studies…Giles devoted attention to Talmudic literature, but above all he cultivated the cabala…which he and other Renaissance cabalists believed contained the hidden wisdom revealed to Adam…Roman interest in the cabala did not originate with Giles…(a)s Pico points out (concerning) Julius II’s uncle, Sixtus IV…(to whose) pontificate…belongs the Good Friday, 1481 sermon of Flavius Mithridates. This converted Sicilian Jew, who had come to Rome through the patronage of (Giovanni Battista) Cibo, the future Innocent VIII, dazzled his Vatican audience in the course of a two-hour oration with citations from…the Hebrew ‘arcarea’…(Stinger, pp. 306-307). Establishment historians declare that Innocent VIII was opposed to the occult, yet here he was, while still a cardinal, bringing Pico’s Judaic handler inside the Vatican and facilitating this Kabbalist’s position as preacher to the papal household.

  53 Yates, Bruno, op. cit., p. 116.

  54 Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, op. cit., p. 113.

  Chapter VI

  Bonfire of the Verities

  Omnes nefas vicitis, victoribus omnia sancta.1

  There were many honorable Catholics in the Renaissance era who stepped forth to voice concern, protest or active opposition to the Neoplatonic-Hermetic conspiracy. One of the earliest was George of Trebizond, the enemy of Gemistos Plethon at the Council of Florence and the author, in 1458, of Comparatio philosophorum Platonis et Aristotelis (which was tightly suppressed and not published until 1523 and then only in a handful of copies). Trebizond detected the true nature of the Neoplatonic-Hermetic conspiracy, but was excessive in his assessment of Plato, attributing to him sexual sins for which there is no evidence.

  Girolamo Savonarola, though there are certainly problems with some of his views and approaches to rulership, was the outstanding and implacable, counter-revolutionary defender of the true Roman Catholic Church in the early Renaissance, and as such there was no way he could escape the flames of the papal Inquisition, barring a miracle.

  He was the scion of a respected Italian family: his paternal grandfather Michele Savonarola was the author of learned scientific treatises, professor of medicine at the University of Padua and physician to the princely court of Ferrara. Michele’s brother had been a canon lawyer; his father a wool merchant. Girolamo’s mother was descended from the H
ouse of Bonacolsi, the one-time lords of Mantua. When Girolamo Savonarola was born in September 1452, his godfather was of the House of the Duke Borso d’Este.

  Tutored first by his grandfather, Savonarola matriculated at the University of Ferrara, where he received an advanced degree. At the age of twenty he penned the poem, De ruina mundi. He discovers that the world “esteems those who are the enemies of God and Rome is in the hands of pirates (captained by Pope Sixtus IV)”:

  “Ah, look at that catamite and at the pimp,

  Dressed in purple, frauds looked up to

  By the common people and adored by a blind world.

  “Earth is so pulled down by every vice

  That it will never stand again.

  And Rome, the capital, slips into the muck,

  Never more to rise again.

  “Avoid all those who put on the purple.

  Flee from palaces and ostentatious loggias,

  Speaking to the few alone,

  For you will be the enemy of all the world.”

  Shortly after he joined the Preaching Order of St. Dominic (Dominicans) he was making distinctions between the Church as the pure bride of Christ and the harlot in Rome, from his monastery in San Domenico where he took his final vows. In 1479 he was named Novice Master at the monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Ferrara. In 1482 Savonarola was dispatched to the San Marco monastery in the city of the princely Medici, Florence where he served as professor of sacred Scripture and theology and where Lorenzo the Magnificent was the boss of all bosses. He journeyed there on foot, carrying only his Bible and breviary. In 1484 Sixtus IV died and was replaced by Innocent VIII toward whom Savonarola was also dismissive as evidenced by his poem, Oratio pro ecclesia. In 1487 he returned to San Domenico and the University of Bologna, having made little impression on the Florence of the 1480s.