The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome

by Michael Hoffman

  Lazzarrelli’s Crater Hermetis was deeply influenced by the Zohar and Sefer Yetzirah books of the Kabbalah; in particular the passage in the Sefer Yetzirah dealing with instructions for the creation of life. 11

  Ludovico Lazzarelli died in his hometown peacefully at age 53 from some type of pulmonary complaint. He is entombed at the Church of San Lorenzo in San Severino. No inquisition touched him. From the time of his death his influence inside the Church and among Catholic intelligentsia and royalty grew exponentially.

  Superficial profiles of Franciscan Fr. Pietro Galatino (1460-1540), who was one of Medici Pope Leo X’s most heavily favored Vatican scholars and who also enjoyed the protection and favor of Pope Paul III, present him as an “anti-Semitic Catholic friar” who wrote “against the Jews.” Score one for the orthodoxy of Leo X and the Renaissance Church, yes? If image prevails over reality, then yes. If truth matters, Galatino emerges as a very different creature altogether, in keeping with the chameleon character of the operatives under examination. Galatino was commissioned to mount a defense of the Kabbalist Johannes Reuchlin by Pope Leo X.12

  As Italian scholar Caesare Vasoli has demonstrated, the deceitful pope executed this sleight of hand commissioning Galatino to come to Reuchlin’s rescue in 1518, with the publication of his treatise De arcanis Catholicae veritatis. We are dealing with both a two-faced pope and a covert support network inside papal Rome. In the papally-authorized De arcanis, Galatino praised the ancient rabbis who compiled the Kabbalah. Reprinted in 1550, 1561, 1603 and 1672, Galatino’s De arcanis “was one of the most widely dispersed books of the Renaissance.” Though modernist Catholics and academics describe it as representing the “familiar medieval anti-Jewish polemic,” this is a superficial reading. De arcanis mixes cosmetic denunciations of contemporary Judaism while putting forth a sympathetic “change in attitude toward the Talmud,” while offering a “real appreciation of the substantive and independent value of Kabbalah for Christians.” 13 In order to perpetrate this hoodwink, Rev. Fr. Galatino:

  “…included both material from the long-standing tradition of Christian controversial writing against the Jews, and alluring scraps of Christian Kabbalah. He praised the ancient rabbis who, he claimed, had foreseen the coming of Jesus and proclaimed, long in advance, the truths of Christianity. But he damned their more recent successors, who had corrupted the true doctrines of Judaism in order to support their own stiffnecked refusal to convert.” 14

  This split-personality type of doctrine is a template of the modus operandi of the Church of Rome.

  In a burst of claims predicated on a Judaizing delirium, about which Isaac Casaubon was dubious, occult priest Galatino alleged that the rabbis he quoted in De arcanis had made accurate prophecies concerning the Virgin Mary, the Messiah and the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist. Galatino stated, “He (Rabbenu Haccados; i.e. the “Holy Sage,” “Holy Rabbi”), was rightly called the holy teacher, since with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit he opened up all the mysteries of Our Lord Jesus Christ so clearly…Casaubon simply could not accept the idea that an otherwise unknown sage had spoken ‘a good bit more clearly about the mysteries of our faith than the prophets…but also more openly in many cases than the Evangelists or the Apostles.” 15

  In Galatino’s defense of Reuchlin and the Kabbalah in De arcanis Catholicae veritatis, written under the patronage of Pope Leo X, he avers that the Pharisee Rabbi Simeon the Just (“Shimon Ha Tzaddik”) blessed the baby Jesus in the Temple. Here we encounter the profession of one of the oldest of the legends of the Cryptocracy, that the Simeon mentioned by St. Luke in Luke 2:25-35, is actually Rabbi Simeon the Just. This tangled papist legend is part of the larger object of the rehabilitation of the Pharisees in general and Hillel and Gamaliel specifically, by means of the repetition of the myth of Simeon the Pharisee blessing Our Lord.

  “Simeon the Just” was a Pharisee who was the son of Hillel, and the father of Gamaliel. The documentary record provides no knowledge of the identity of the Simeon that St. Luke mentions. His identity is unknown to history, but amply illustrated in the rabbinic fantasy concerning him, which was dutifully imported into the disinformation of the Church of Rome, which advanced it. The Pharisee Simeon the Just is reputed to have led the Sanhedrin. He was a hero in the annals of the Talmud:

  “As Kohen Gadol and head of the Sanhedrin, he embodied both religious and political power…The Talmud relates that five miracles occurred in the Bais Hamikdash during his tenure. First, the red string that was hung in the Bais Hamikdash during the Yom Kippur services turned white, symbolizing Israel’s purity. Second, on Yom Kippur two sacrificial goats were designated—one to be offered in the Kodesh HaKodoshim, one to be cast off a cliff. The Kohen Gadol drew lots in each hand to determine which goat should be used for which purpose. During Shimon HaTzadik’s 40 year-tenure, the lot indicating the goat to be offered in the Kodesh HaKodoshim, always turned up in his right hand, a sign of Divine favor. Third, every evening a full night’s supply of oil was put into each lamp of the Menorah. Miraculously, the oil put into the western lamp burned for twenty-four hours, demonstrating the constant presence of G-d in the Bais Hamikdash. Fourth, although each Kohen received only a small portion of the Lechem Hapanim (the showbread), he felt satiated as if he had eaten a full meal. Fifth, the fire on the Altar burned steadily without constant addition of wood. Sadly, after Shimon HaTzadik’s death miracles of such magnitude were no longer manifest in the Bais Hamikdash.” 16

  Simeon the Just is consequential to Catholic occultists both as a channel for synthesizing rabbinic Judaism with Catholicism, and in terms of the occult use of the name of God, the Tetragrammaton YHVH (Yahweh), in pagan magical rituals. Yahweh’s Divine Name was forbidden to Catholics and Protestants in worship and verbal prayer by Scripture translators from St. Jerome onward to the King James scribes. They placed the commands of the rabbinic Mishnah in this regard above the Word of God—which states that His people shall be known by His name. Instead, His Name was suppressed and clandestinely reserved for use in occult rituals of crucial significance to the Cryptocracy. A good deal of the prolix texts of the Neoplatonic-Hermetic theology are derived from, or concerned in some way with, the correct employment of the wonder-working power of the Hebrew name of God—reserved for the occult-Catholic elite and denied to what we can term the latter-day Catholic am ha’aretz. To ensure the efficacy of Yahweh’s name in their magical ceremonies, papal Rome in the Renaissance continued its suppression in the liturgy and verbal prayer life of the Church. As recently as the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI this prohibition against the use of the name of Yahweh was reinstated. In Judaic lore and the Neoplatonic-Hermetic-Catholicism that is guided by it, Simeon the Just is considered to be the last Jewish High Priest to employ the Tetragrammaton in the Temple rite.

  The enthusiasm for the murderous Sanhedrin-Pharisees among “traditional” Catholics is a perverse residue of the superstitions and rabbinic folklore emanating from deep within the Church of Rome’s Neoplatonic-Hermetic Cryptocracy. The conspirators inside the Renaissance Church were the forefathers of our contemporary “traditional” Catholics, who fantasize that the good Simeon of St. Luke was the son of Hillel, i.e. “Simeon the Just,” the leader of the Jewish Sanhedrin. 17 Subversive operatives and useful idiots 18 inside “traditional” Catholicism today have made a saint out of the evil Hillel, just like the modern secular world, which lauds him as the “good Pharisee” whose “benevolence” is equivalent to that of Jesus. For evidence of the quasi-canonization of this archetypal Pharisee by “traditional” Catholics, consult the article, “Saint of the Sanhedrin” which was published in the December 2009 issue of The Angelus magazine, an official periodical of the SSPX “traditional” Catholic priests’ fraternity in the U.S. (the “saint” in the headline is a reference to Hillel).

  Jean Thenaud (1480-1542) was a Frenchman “born near Poitiers into the household of Louise of Savoy, the mother of King Francois I. Thenaud was instrumental in enticing the Kin
g into a fascination with the “Catholic” Kabbalah. In response to the King’s requests, he produced a manuscript, Le saincte et trés chrétienne cabale (circa 1519).19 Thenaud draws heavily on Pico’s Heptaplus, Ficino’s Platonic Theolgia and Reuchlin’s De arte cabalistic. In Thenaud’s own 1521 volume, Traicté de la cabale, he makes a show of attacking the Kabbalah’s superstitions and deceptions and were we to quote solely from those passages, an impression of stalwart Catholic orthodoxy would be conveyed. Thenaud’s attacks however, were merely frosting intended to sweeten his advocacy of Kabbalah and his many “positive assessments of the many layers of meaning in Hebrew letters” and “Thenaud’s interest in Kabbalah is apparent in his fascinating diagrams and also in his angelic cosmology, much indebted to Pythagoreanism, Neoplatonism and pseudo-Dionysius…based upon Reuchlin’s De Arte Cabbalistica” 20

  “A reading of the De perenni philosophia libri decem, a long work by Agostino Steuco (1497-1549), Bishop of Gubbio and a learned fixture of the Vatican Library…The author’s basic position consists in maintaining that the similarities, even the superficial ones, between Christianity and ancient philosophies (from those of Hermes, the Chaldaeans, and Orpheus, down to Plato) derive from a common point of inspiration; thus he ignores the fundamental differences between Christian dogma and pagan thought. Like Lazzarelli, Steuco takes up Ficino’s concept of pia philosophia…Steuco’s demonstration of a continuity between Christian revelation, on the one hand, which occurred in a specific time and place with the coming of Christ, and the theosophies that preceded it, on the other, is based on continuous scholarly research Steuco’s work adheres to a fundamental concept, that of philosophia perennis, which he adopts as a kind of motto of his thought.

  “In his De perenni philosophia libri decem Bishop Steuco writes: ‘In order to realize that all ages, all places, all peoples concur in preaching the truth, you must read what Mercury Trisemegistus has to say about this Mind…’ Steuco is “seeking the harmony among Greeks, barbarians and Christian theologians in their teaching of a single ‘pious theology.’…For Steuco…this search is constituted by the simple juxtaposition of ancient theological writings (Chaldaean, Hermetic, Orphic) for the purpose of drawing from them the essential conclusion.”

  Bishop Steuco taught that “Mercury, a most ancient theologian, who lived around the time of Moses, knew the Holy Spirit, since he called it ‘fine intelligent spirit.’…In the (rabbinic) book Beresit Rabba, that is, maximus genesis, this spirit is said to be the spirit of the Messiah…” 21

  Prof. Francesco Patrizi of Cherso (1529-1597), of the papal university, was born “to an Italianized noble Croatian family in Cherso (Cres) Dalmatia, a city that is now part of the republic of Croatia but which in Patrizi’s day was ruled by the Venetian Republic.” 22

  “Not to be confused with the earlier humanist and political theoretician, Francesco Patrizi of Siena (1413-1494)…Patrizi began his initial scholarly training in his home city, followed by studies in Venice and Ingolstadt, before enrolling at the University of Padua in 1547.” 23 “There, Patrizi moved in important circles, being associated with men like Niccolo Sfondrati, later Gregory XIV; Ippolito Aldobrandini, later Clement VIII; and Gerolamo della Rovere (nephew of Sixtus IV), Scipione Valiero and Agostino Valiero, who would all end as cardinals.”24

  With reference to his future impact, we read, “That Hermeticism is still so deeply engrained in the mind of a pious Jesuit as late as the seventeenth century, may suggest that (Francesco) Patrizi’s advice to the Jesuits to take up Hermeticism was not out of place….in this survival in seventeenth-century Jesuitism of the most enthusiastic type of Renaissance religious Hermeticism we have something like another of those esoteric channels through which the Hermetic tradition is carried on…” 25

  After Patrizi published his heretical occult treatise, Nova de universis philosophia 26 Pope Clement VIII promoted Patrizi to Professor of Philosophy at the papal university of Rome, the Sapienza. Patrizi was thereby directing the channel of Hermetic diabolism into the youthful elite of the Church.

  In his New Philosophy of Everything, the Renaissance papacy’s Professor of Platonism celebrated the replacement of fixed dogma, as represented by Thomistic scholasticism, with the situation ethics of Neoplatonism. Patrizi taught that “On the basis of what the most illustrious and ancient wise men said (i.e. Zoroaster, Hermes…Orpheus, Pythagorus)…it can then be deduced that a most ancient doctrine was passed down according to which the world has a soul.” 27

  In his appendix to the Nova, Patrizi celebrates the Oracula Chaldaica, a compendium of Platonic, neo-Pythagorean, Gnostic and Persian doctrines. In his introduction to the Oracula, “Patrizi affirms that it contains ‘such admirable, such divine laws concerning the Trinity, the divine orders (celestial hierarchies), and the excellency of the soul…Zoroaster can be seen, not without justification, as the one who before all others as it were, laid the foundations of Catholic faith, however unpolished they may be…Plato…transmitted the Hermetic-Zoroastrian ‘secret doctrine’ of the Chaldeans and Egyptians orally to his pupils.” 28

  Patrizi was professor at the Sapienza, imparting the occult stew of Neoplatonic Hermeticism to a new generation and enjoying the protection of Cardinal Ippolito Aldobrandini (the future pope). By 1594 his book had been in print for nearly three years. During those years Vatican Prof. Patrizi was invulnerable from repression under the supposedly harshly anti-occult Pope Clement VIII. This protection continued until significant unrest arose among orthodox Catholic churchmen, which in turn led to the Nova de universis philosophia being placed on the Index of Prohibited Books. It is at this point in Patrizi’s biography where, typically, New Age writers as well as Church of Rome apologists, halt their accounts. They surmise that Patrizi’s career was “destroyed” by “bigoted prelates” (the New Age tale), or “vigilant conservative prelates” (the papist’s story). Despite this disinformation from two symbiotic wings of consensus history, in reality, Patrizi’s occult paganism inhered in the Renaissance Church and was never extirpated.

  The case of Patrizi is instructive for the purposes of our study. His career illustrates the Machiavellian tactics whereby the papacy would promote radical occult syncretists. Then, when there was a sustained outcry from true Catholics, a token gesture of disciplining or punishing the occultist was performed in public. Patrizi was one such occultist. Catholics point to the Index’s theatrical ban on his book Nova de universis philosophia. They don’t see (or refuse to see) what came before the discipline, and more importantly what came afterward, in terms of how Patrizi fared in his future life and prospects:

  “Patrizi developed a thorough and vehement critique of the then still-dominant Aristotelian-Scholastic philosophy and his own alternative Hermetic-Platonist system, which was to replace the former at the curricula of the universities of all Christendom. Patrizi’s plea for a new Hermetic-Platonist philosophy fully in accord with Catholic faith at first seemed to find considerable resonance. None other than the pope himself (Clement VIII, as indicated, a former fellow student at Padua), called Patrizi to the newly created chair of Platonist philosophy at the Sapienza, the papal university in Rome.” 29

  1 Michael David Bailey, Magic and Superstition in Europe (2007), p. 88

  2 Pimander is another name for the Corpus Hermeticum translated by Father Ficino.

  3 Cf. Marco Bertolini, ed., Lodovico Lazzarelli: Fasti Christianae Religionis (1991).

  4 Eugene F. Rice, The Prefatory Epistles of Jacques Lefevre DEstaples, n. 3, p. 136.

  5 Wouter Hanegraaff, Lodovico Lazzarelli: The Hermetic Writings, p. 23

  6 Hanegraaff, Lodovico Lazzarelli, op.cit., pp. 40-41.

  7 The “Oak of Pope Julius”—the Rovere family’s coat of arms included an oak tree.

  8 The reference is to part 4 of the Corpus Hermeticum titled, “A Discourse of Hermes…Mixing Bowl or the Monad.”

  9 Specifically, the Kabbalistic text, Sefer Yetzirah; of this genre is the aforementioned text by Eleaza
r of Worms.

  10 James D. Miller, Singularity Rising, p. xviii. For a study of the probable dire consequences of Singularity, cf. James Barrat, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence (2015).

  11 Claudio Moreschini, Hermes Christianus: The Intermingling of Hermetic Piety and Christian Thought, transl. Patrick Baker (2011).

  12 Caesare Vasoli, “Giorgio B. Salvati, Pietro Galatino e la edizione di Ortona -1518- del De Arcanis Catholicae Fidei,” in Cultura Humanistica (L’Aquila, 1984), pp. 183-210.

  13 Robert Wilkinson, Orientalism, Aramaic and Kabbalah in the Catholic Reformation, p. 59; and Wilkinson, Tetragrammaton, p. 329.

  14 Grafton and Weinberg, I Have Always Loved the Holy Tongue, (op. cit., 2011), p. 37.

  15 Ibid., pp. 39-40.

  16 Yosef Eisen, Shimon Ha Tzaddik (Simeon the Just), http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/2833935/jewish/Shimon-Hatzadik-Simeon-the-Just.htm

  17 Upon Hillel’s death the mantle of the School of Hillel was passed to his son Simeon. Upon Simon’s death the mantle of the school of Hillel passed to Gamaliel. This Gamaliel is mentioned in Acts 5:34-39. He was the teacher of Saul the Pharisee (Acts 22:3), the future St. Paul.

  18 “Useful idiot”: for an account of how revolutionary change agents exploit gullible persons who are not in themselves conspirators, cf. chapter 3, p. 17 of usurer Ludwig von Mises’ treatise, “Planned Chaos,” reprinted in Socialism: An Economic & Sociological Analysis (1951).