The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome

by Michael Hoffman

  In 1608 a former member of the Jesuit order, Johann Cambilhon, charged the Jesuits with promoting the occult. His charge was given currency by the fact that numerous books of “Catholic magic” remained in print in Catholic countries and not listed on the Vatican’s Index of Prohibited Books. Cambilhon’s accusation led to the papacy placing Trithemius’ book Steganographia on the Index the next year. Trithemius had been dead for 94 years during which time his Steganographia had circulated freely. Protestants amplified Cambilhon’s testimony and the Church scrambled to impose damage control, and thus a wave of anti-Trithemius declarations were issued. The sincerity of these can be judged in light of the fact that in 1614, at the Jesuit headquarters at Ingolstadt in Bavaria, Adam Tanner S.J., chairman of the theology faculty at the University of Ingolstadt, established a Jesuit forum for the rehabilitation of the posthumous reputation of Abbot Trithemius. His oration pro-Trithemius was published by the Jesuit Order itself. It was followed by a vindication of the Catholicism of Trithemius’ magical doctrines by the Benedictine Abbot Sigismund of Seeon.

  “Instances of demonic magic, Tanner held in his Ingolstadt oration of 1614, no more entail the rejection of magic in principle than instances of heresy entail the rejection of theology in principle. The same rule applies to magic as to religion with which it is fundamentally bound up: the winnow must be separated from the chaff. Taking up the question of Trithemian magic in particular to illustrate his point…as evidenced by large tomes of his historical and spiritual writings recently coming to light, exhorted Tanner, Trithemius proved himself to be not only a piously faithful Christian and reform-minded monk but an illustrious paradigm of Christian erudition sought out for counsel by the foremost princes and ecclesiastical dignitaries of his age…Moreover, by conjoining to this understanding a further appreciation of the abbot’s exceptional contributions to the literature of Christian piety…he will allay his suspicions even further, seeing him for what he really is, ‘a man very learned and orthodox in his Catholicism, in which capacity he served not only as a monk but as a high priest of monks…Tanner’s Ingolstadt appeal was to find significant resonance…among his fellow Catholics, including other Jesuits…” 21

  “The great Trithemius stands readied with illustrious weapons, and by their use will vindicate his own reputation.’ In this way a Benedictine abbot following the example of Trithemius in more than the conventionally monastic manner, Sigismund of Seeon (d. 1634), signaled his intent, in an introductory ode of his Trithemius sui-ipsius vindex (1616), not so much to defend his subject’s cryptographical brand of magic, as to have him articulate his own defense. Expressing puzzlement as to how the esteem for ‘so great a man, one who had been so aptly commended by the Catholic Church for his letters and learnedness, had fallen to its present nadir…

  “Posing the question of whether, by his choice of the suspicious language in which the writing was cast, Trithemius played at least some part in bringing his troubles upon himself, Sigismund replied that this decision was made for good reason. ‘Trithemius was warranted in employing numbers, signs, and strange names belonging to spirits and other entities,’ the writer explained following the usual esoterist guideline, ‘so that he might so fully envelop his art in mysteries that it would not be easily penetrated by anyone who was not first, in honesty and piety, initiated into its precepts.’ In adopting this esoterist expedient, continued Sigismund, Trithemius was but following the example of the ancient sages, who likewise, ‘if they discovered any arcana, either of nature or of art, lest they came to the notice of depraved men, concealed them by various modes and figures.’ And if that were not enough to prove the legitimacy of this practice, we have the testimony of holy scripture itself, with examples like that of Moses, who found it necessary to explain ‘the arcane and ineffable mysteries of the creation of heaven and earth’ in the language of riddle and enigma…In like manner ‘the Greeks and Egyptians always used figures and obscurities for the concealment of sacred and divine things.’ In parallel fashion the jurists, mathematicians, musicians, rhetoricians, poets, alchemists, and even strategists of the military art have long recognized the need to hide their ideas under the mask of cryptic enigmas—this to make them inaccessible to those for whom they were unintended.

  “…Trithemius was ‘a lover of a more secret philosophy’ (secretioris philosophiae amator) who, far from enlisting demons in his steganographical operations, was always careful to employ only ‘licit and natural means.’ In further fulfillment of his promise to have Trithemius act as his own vindicator, Sigismund appended the expressly demonological fifth, sixth and seventh books of the Octo quaestiones, the effect of which, Sigismund agreed with their author, was to establish a clear-cut boundary between Trithemian magic and that of wicked sorcerers.” 22

  Other Catholic support for Trithemius came from the eminent Catholic Bishop and casuist-probabilist Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz. 23 He was called to the occult citadel of Prague to head the Benedictine monastery of Montserrat, known for its conservative Counter-Reformation mission. For four years of his Prague station he served on a body charged with the extirpation of heresy. Also during his time in the heavily occultic and Judaic city of Prague he collaborated with several rabbis of the Prague Jewish community. “Caramuel notes that the pope has far less to fear from the Jews than the emperor does from Swedish mercenaries.” 24

  He was the author of influential works of theology including his Rationalis et realis philosophia (1642), and Theologia moralis fundamentalis (1652). Caramuel y Lobkowitz left Prague for Rome in 1655, the year his old friend Chigi was elected to the papacy as Alexander VII. 25 He was named Bishop of Vigevano in Lombardy in 1673. His theology is outwardly impressive in its erudition and inwardly thoroughly distorted as befits a high member of the Neoplatonic-Hermetic conspiracy who enjoyed the protection and promotion of popes and Catholic kings in the seventeenth century, and who wrote in his Pax Licita, “There are no such things as sins in themselves.”

  In 1635 Caramuel reprinted Trithemius’ Steganographia. He inveighed against its detractors and he urged the Inquisition to pursue the critics of Trithemius, not his defenders. Concerning demonology in Trithemius, “Caramuel indicates that demonic ‘incantations’ are only encoded texts whereas the names of demons represent the code of messages.”26 Caramuel never suffered for his occult views. He enjoyed consistent promotion in Catholic royal and religious ranks under popes and Catholic kings.

  Trithemius attracted additional posthumous support from the Dean of Münster Cathedral, Bernhard von Mallinckrodt, as well as the theologian and Benedictine Prior, Jean d’Espieres.

  “Believing magic to be just as deserving as any other ‘handmaiden’ to theology in the traditional artes liberales, Trithemeius considered it to be an adjunct to sound Catholic doctrine.” His own Benedictine Order regarded his views on Catholic magic as a “minor digression of the abbot in light of the larger picture of his eminently pious way of life and unrelenting commitment to his monastic vows” and the Benedictines proceeded to distinguish “Trithemius’s good, natural and Cabalistic magic from the wicked magic of the demonically inspired sorcerers.” 27

  Abbot Trithemius, like Catholic Fr. Ficino, Catholic Giovanni Pico and Catholic Reuchlin, was a Catholic theological bridge to the very Rosicrucian, masonic, theosophist and modernist trends that Leo XIII and Pius IX, Pius X and Pius XI would make declamatory expostulations upon, to “warn the faithful.” But any genuine warning would include a revelation of the origin of the toxic thought, and that origin was a Renaissance papacy which consistently shielded, covertly protected and in those instances where orthodox Catholics became too vigorous in opposition, imposed token “punishments” which today are cited by dupes to “prove” that the papacy combatted the Neoplatonic-Hermetic Kabbalists. The documentary record gives evidence that in each generation occult Catholics went from strength to strength, giving form and content to the very conspiracy which Right wing Catholics imagine they are battling by their loyalty
to “conservative” and “traditional” Catholicism.

  Paraphrasing Trithemius’ biographer Noel L. Brann, we observe that “in the culminating Rosicrucian and theosophical stages of the Catholic magical movement, what heretofore were relatively minor subterranean streamlets of Catholic thought—astrology, Pythagorean numerology and Hermetic and Cabalistic magic—became expanded into major streams and rivers.” 28

  How the Catholic Church became famous for fighting against these “streams and rivers” which it permitted to arise and flourish within its bosom, is among the most neglected lacunae in the chronicle of Christendom. It testifies to a dual Church, the one visible for the benefit of the well-intentioned but sadly ignorant and bamboozled priests and parishioners who tend toward conservatism; and the other diabolic, led by numerous popes who were either active conspirators or mute accomplices to the covert escalation of magic, homosexual predation upon children, usurious money power, and lying and deceit advanced by a hierarchical “magisterium” shrouded in the blackest folds of an institutionalized secrecy which is the sine qua non of most of the western occult camarilla.

  1 Noel L. Brann, The Abbot Trithemius (1462-1516): The Renaissance of Monastic Humanism (1981), pp.15, 18-19.

  2 Ibid., pp. 27-28.

  3 Heinrich Kunrath of Leipzig, author of The Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom. He is described “as ‘one of the most remarkable theosophists and alchemists of the late sixteenth century,’ and ‘one of the greatest Hermetic philosophers…” (Forshaw, p. 108). Kunrath was another heir of the FicinoPico-Reuchlin contagion by way of Paracelsus. His critic, the Lutheran physician and chemist Dr. Andreas Libavius of the University of Jena, correctly identified the ideology of Paracelsus and followers like Kunrath, as being predicated on “the search for power by summoning of evil spirits” (Allen G. Debus, The French Paracelsians, [1991], p. 61). Libavius was that rare breed: a practitioner of alchemy who “objected strongly to the introduction of mysticism and the occult into the sciences,” and to the opposite extreme: inquisitorial mentalities such as Jean Riolan the Elder (1539-1605); Censor of the Parisian Medical Faculty and a leading physician and anatomist, who suspected most any science, however thoroughly rational, of being infected by the black arts. Jean Riolan the Younger was court physician to the Queen Mother of France, Marie de’ Medici, and an opponent of William Harvey. Riolan pere and fils were Galenists.

  4 Stuttgart, Staats-und Stadbibliothek, Codex in Folio 212 (Peutinger), ff. 118r-130v, 236r-245r, codex M 61. ff. n.n.

  5 Paola Zambelli, White Magic, Black Magic (2007), pp. 53-54.

  6 Paola Zambelli, ibid., pp. 60-61; 69; 74.

  7 As analyzed in this writer’s Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare (2001).

  8 Zambelli, p. 75.

  9 The original Pelagius was an actual person and originator of what has come to be known as the “Pelagian heresy” through his commentary on St. Paul. Cf. Thomas P. Scheck, “Pelagius’s Interpretation of Romans” in A Companion to St. Paul in the Middle Ages (2013); and Dominic Keech, The Anti-Pelagian Christology of Augustine of Hippo, 396-430 (2012).

  10 “From Cracow in Poland we get as early as 1504 a Libanius: Epistolae translated from the Greek by the Italian humanist Francesco Zambeccari…This Libanius is printed for the Cracow publisher Jo. Haller by one Joannes Clymes, who is never heard of again…” (E.P. Goldschmidt, The First Cambridge Press in its European Setting [1955], p. 45).

  11 Cf. Saverio Campanini, “Talmud, Philosophy and Kabbalah: A Passage from Pico della Mirandola’s Apologia and its Source,” in The Words of a Wise Man’s Mouth are Gracious, Mauro Perani, ed. (2005), pp. 444 and 447.

  12 Zambelli, op. cit., p. 100.

  13 Banquo in dialogue with Macbeth, Act 1, Scene, 3: 105 and 120-124.

  14 http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2016/07/appeal-to-cardinals-text-revealed.html

  15 http://2n613ar7ekr056c3upq2s15c.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/45-theologians-censure-AL.pdf

  16 Noel L. Brann, Trithemius and Magical Demonology, p. 30.

  17 Ibid., p. 175.

  18 Ibid., p. 155.

  19 Ibid., p. 173.

  20 Ibid., p. 175.

  21 Ibid., pp. 192 and 194.

  22 Ibid., pp. 201-203.

  23 Cf. pp.77-78 herein. Caramuel is a Spanish-version of the name Cramer. His father was of Luxemburgh; his mother was a De Vries, which is Flemish, but her mother, Caramuel’s maternal grandmother Regina, was the daughter of Jan Popel von Lobkowitz. Bishop Caramuel was educated at the University of Salamanca in Spain and among his teachers were leading Catholic theologians: Benito Sanchez Herrera, Juan Martinez de Prado, Angel Manrique, and the Jesuit Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza. In 1638 he was awarded a doctorate in theology from the University of Louvain and through the intervention of Philip IV, King of Spain, and Fabio Chigi, the papal nuncio in Cologne, he was named abbot of a monastery in Germany. In 1646 he was appointed Spanish Counselor at the Imperial Court, where he was a confidant of the Jesuit-educated Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III. Cf. below, Fleming, Defending Probabilism.

  24 Julia A. Fleming, op. cit., p. 62.

  25 Caramuel and Chigi sometimes clashed after the latter was elevated to the papacy, but never to such a degree as to impede his consistent promotion in the hierarchy.

  26 Ioan P. Coulianu, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, p. 169.

  27 Brann, op. cit., pp. 240-241.

  28 Ibid., p. 253.

  Chapter VIII

  Reuchlin’s Revolution

  “…of the Christian cabalists who may be considered ‘humanists’—i.e. who came to cabala as to an ancient fountain of wisdom…Johannes Reuchlin, by far the most important and productive, was Pico’s disciple.” 1

  Before we take up Johannes Reuchlin, the foremost contemporary heir to the legacy of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, we will return to the Catholic-Kabbalist and Fifth Lateran Council luminary, Giles of Viterbo (1469-1532), who is a link to other popes of the occult Renaissance: Julius II (Giuliano della Rovere), who was the patron of Michelangelo and whose papacy had been made possible by Sixtus IV (Francesco della Rovere). Julius was the immediate predecessor of Leo X (Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici).

  “It was during Julius’ 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. Earlier, following Annio da Viterbo’s lead, Giles had pursued Egyptian lore. But around 1507 he returned to the serious study of Hebrew and Aramaic he had begun a dozen years earlier in Florence. Giles devoted attention to Talmudic literature, but above all he cultivated the cabala, the esoteric medieval Jewish theosophy, which he and other Renaissance cabalists believed contained the hidden divine wisdom revealed to Adam, Moses and the other patriarchs, and from them descended in oral transmission down the centuries.

  “Roman interest in the cabala did not originate with Giles….Julius II’s uncle Sixtus IV (who had made Julius a cardinal), sought to have a Latin translation made of it. To Sixtus’s pontificate also belongs the Good Friday 1481 sermon of Flavius Mithridates. This converted Sicilian Jew, who had come to Rome through the patronage of Cardinal Cibo, the future Innocent VIII, dazzled his Vatican audience in the course of his two-hour oration with citations from Latin, Greek, the Hebrew ‘arcana,’ and ‘Chaldean’…In 1486, at Perugia, this same Mithridates undertook to teach Pico the rudiments of Hebrew and initiated him into the profundities of esoteric Jewish lore….Most important, Mithridates made accessible to Pico the cabala, translating for him the basic texts. Pico, who eventually returned to Florence…became the pivotal figure in advocating cabalistic exegesis of the Old Testament as the key to finding a hidden concordance between Neoplatonist metaphysics and Christian revelation. Foremost among those taking inspiration from Pico’s efforts was Giles of Viterbo. Like Pico, the Roman Augustinian was drawn to the esoteric richness of the cabalistic method. By means of metaphor, number mysticism and
the riddles of acrostics, hidden depths in the Scriptural text could be revealed…Cabalistic studies preoccupied Giles for the remainder of his life…the cabala determined the basic structure of his Historia XX saecolorum, the universal history he composed for Leo X in the years 1513-18.” 2

  Ficino and Pico’s theology was transmitted to many leading Catholic prelates and laymen in Europe in the decades ahead. One of the earliest and most influential of these was Johannes Reuchlin (1455-1522), the celebrated German-Catholic Renaissance humanist from Pforzheim, 3which at the time of his birth was administered by the Margrave of Baden. Reuchlin studied at the Pforzheim Latin School, the University of Freiburg in Breisgau, and the University of Paris under Robert Gaguin (a translator of Pico’s works into French), and at Basle University. Reuchlin’s handler in Rome, who personally directed his path up the ladder of the occult Catholic Brotherhood, was Rabbi Obadiah Sforno.

  “He (Reuchlin) returned to his native country and obtained an appointment as personal advisor to Count Eberhard im Bart of Würtemberg…The following year, 1483, he went on the first of his visits to Italy as one of the group of advisors who accompanied the Count. He appeared before Pope Sixtus IV in his capacity as Count Eberhard’s Latin interpreter and his legal negotiator concerning Tübingen University which had been founded in 1477 by Count Eberhard to provide qualified staff for his court. 4 Pope Sixtus IV presented the Count with the ‘Golden Rose’…the granting of such a symbol to Eberhard indicated he was a person who the Pope could rely on for his loyalty. Thus Reuchlin in his role as private secretary was known for his scholarly ability at a very early stage to the most powerful person in the Church. While in Italy they were also introduced to Lorenzo de Medici…and to several other scholars, among them Giovanni Pico della Mirandola…” 5