From Cosmos to Chaos

66. Triumph of Chaos

In order for the modern world to triumph, it was necessary to wipe out the last Christian-medieval remnants of Europe, thus allowing chaos to spread across the planet. Protestant countries and Great Britain in particular covertly manoeuvred Italy and Germany, two artificially unified countries, to carry out this subversive plan. The Kingdom of Italy, controlled by atheist and anticlerical secret societies in the service of London¹, with the support of organised crime, the mafia², dismantled the prosperous principalities that protected the pope and consequently laid siege to the Papal States. The Heritage of St Peter’s, which in the Middle Ages had prevailed over temporal power, after the Counter-Reformation linked itself to the Empire as the esoteric bastion of Western tradition. The illegal annexation to the Kingdom of Italy marked the beginning of the involvement of the Church in political and social diatribes that led to its ruinous deterioration. The Protestant kingdom of Prussia, on the other hand, took upon itself to weaken Catholic Austria by taking away its central European territories, leaving it marginalised in the Balkans. The First World War ended with the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the last legacy of Charlemagne’s Empire. At the same time, the All-Russian Empire, heir to Byzantium, and the Caliphate of the Ottoman Porte collapsed³. The West had thus freed itself of the last weakened state structures of traditional origin⁴. In this manner the last century and a half has served as stage for the most extreme aberrations, and it all have occurred at a disturbingly rapid pace involving the religious, philosophical, scientific, artistic, political and social spheres. The situation got even worse with the Second World War, which really shook the whole world⁵. If for a time the leadership of such degeneration was an initiative of the Western countries, soon after the Eastern nations assumed full autonomy in their anti-traditional activities. The period of the most oppressive colonialism was replaced by a hasty and culpable decolonisation⁶. An example of this is the British Raj of India, which, after the usurpation of the imperial throne, carried out a systematic repression of tradition by pitting the Muslim community against the Hindu majority, and by targeting its most sacred social structures. In the end, the British hastily abandoned the Subcontinent, dividing it into India and Pakistan, thus starting a bloody civil war⁷ and an unresolved series of conflicts. Post-colonial India was prevented from returning into a situation in harmony with the Dharma by the spread of Rāmakṛṣṇian, Vivekānandian, Aurobindian and Gandhian neo-Hinduism promoted by all media and parties, playing on the peaceful nature of the people and their inferiority complex vis-à-vis the West.

Three foreign interventions bear a heavy responsibility in this regard: Christian missionaryism, constant Islamic violence⁸ and the hammering and suffocating propaganda of first the Soviet and now the Chinese communism⁹. However, India has not been affected that much, compared to other areas. The massified Maoist communism has completely wiped out the tradition in China¹⁰, and pushed the country to a political and economic recovery through an ambitious expansionist policy in Asia¹¹ and in the rest of the world. It is to the imperialism of this country that we owe the colonial invasion of Tibet, the concluded genocide of the Manchurian people and the ongoing genocide of the Turkmen peoples of Central Asia. It is alarming that are those who had the audacity to deny the existence of the Yellow Peril!

On the other hand, countries of the Far East have completely adopted the lifestyle of the Far West, retaining their tradition only as a scenographic ornament, in this way the division between West-anti-traditional and East-traditional no longer makes really sense. Savage decolonisation has left the rich countries of Africa in the hands of greedy and corrupt dictators, at the mercy of criminal organisations and of the systematic exploitation of Chinese neo-colonialism. To this it must be added the sudden deterioration of the Islamic world, which the taṣawwuf neither knows how nor makes an effort to control, a phenomenon that was indeed unforeseeable until a few decades ago. At the same time we witnessed the ignominious end of the Catholic Church and the brutal upheaval in Palestine. These events are a clear sign of the approching conclusion of the historical cycle of monotheistic hegemony¹². This phase of modern civilisation has produced new generations devoid of any religious, ideal or philosophical roots; even today’s trendy ideologies that everyone has to endure are appallingly elementary and crude. Even the very same animals have a greater sensitivity to the balance of nature than all the blabbering, and exhibitionist ecologists. Similarly, the beasts recognise without hesitation the obvious distinctions between sexes, races and species, whereas our young people have a total mental confusion in this regard, having been subjected to pressing and constant conditioning since their earliest childhood. Even the value of life is unappreciated, as people’s indifference has been nurtured with abortions and euthanasia, proposed as great achievements of humanity¹³. If with the invention of printing mankind had given up cultivating memory, with information technology the new generations have stopped thinking, only relying on the ‘myth’ of artificial intelligence. As logical consequence, such a mankind ‘democratically’ votes and chooses the most witless people as its elected representatives to govern public affaires¹⁴. Although the three western religions claim the supremacy of their own revelation over the others¹⁵, within themselves they proclaim equality among the faithful, imposing the same beliefs, rituals and behaviour on everyone without distinction. It is no coincidence that the democratic system arose from the secularisation of this egalitarianism. At present, since monotheisms are in state of serious decline or total disappearance¹⁶, the democratic system is also collapsing in all states, and it is not yet been defined the future regime that will replace it where international finance, multinationals and non-governmental organisations will play a main role.

From the esoteric point of view¹⁷, the twentieth century began in Europe with some outstanding personalities: René Guénon in France, Professor Arturo Reghini and the “Baron” Julius Evola, in Italy. At first the three esotericists collaborated to a certain extent in order to provoke a change of mentality in the two Latin countries. However, differences in interpretation led to a mutual estrangement, especially between Reghini and Evola¹⁸. Nevertheless, their action was not lost and formed a sort of barrier against the theosophical-occultist encroachment in all fields and milieus. In particular, the writings of René Guénon had the positive result of directing some people towards non-European forms of initiation. His work proved to be of great benefit and led to choices towards Tradition of some of his readers as, for example, for the author of these lines. Naturally, those who have come into direct contact with non-European traditional circles as a result of reading Guénon’s works, have been able to acknowledge, alongside his merits, certain limitations and errors in his conceptions. The traditional attitude of those who made those considerations or discoveries was to correct the errors, without entirely rejecting Guénon’s work. In fact, all the arguments that, for example, he had developed on the critique of the modern world are completely agreeable and exact. On the contrary, the distortions, especially in the domain of metaphysical doctrine, must be rectified in order to expound the true doctrine. In addition to this, it is worth mentioning that while in his books he declared that it was incorrect to indicate to his readers which initiatic paths to take, he contradicted himself by encouraging his correspondents to be initiated into the Masonic lodges and, in particular, into those inspired by his writings¹⁹.

After his death, groups of Guénonians were formed in Europe, some of them turned into fanatical sects. They declared themselves motu proprio “defenders of the work of René Guénon”, proclaiming its infallibility²⁰, the universality of his ‘function’ as an envoy of the ‘Supreme Centre’, and promoting the doctrine expressed in its books as a sort of new revelation. In the absence of a real transmission from Guénon, since their only contact was limited to the simple reading of his books, they then sought some ṣufic connection, which recently is rather easy to get²¹. They grafted the Guénonian doctrines into the praxis of the sharī‘a, creating, in fact, a new syncretic pseudo-religion, completly western made for westerners²². As it can be easily deduced from the above, those circles of western esotericists collaborate in spreading altered oriental doctrines. As it is in the nature of things what is born eventually dies and even traditional doctrines and rituals born in the empirical domain, eventually will fade away. Only non-dual metaphysics is exempt from the vicissitudes of time, being one, eternal and absolute. This is the true meaning of Vincit Omia Veritas.

Gian Giuseppe Filippi

Oṃ  Tat  Sat

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1. It is no coincidence that most of the Italian revolutionaries were welcomed when they took refuge in England. Garibaldi himself went to London several times to take orders and make agreements, also following Bakunin’s advice who visited him at Caprera.[↩]
2. When the United States replaced Britain as a protestant planetary power, it also relied on the mafia to invade Sicily in 1943. This allowed the mafia to establish itself at government level in post-war Italy. Giuseppe Casarrubea, Storia segreta della Sicilia. Dallo sbarco alleato a Portella della Ginestra, Milan, Bompiani, 2005.[↩]
3. These unfortunate events were the results of the implementation of Wilson’s Doctrine. For the first time in history it became clear that the dissolving action of Britain towards the traditional Western world, already in decline, was about to be replaced by that of the United States.[↩]
4. In truth, these empires were corroded from within rather than weakened by external conflicts. In Austria the ethnic German component was caught up in the pangermanist madness at the expense of the supranationality of medieval origin. Nihilism, anarchy and socialism corroded the backbone of the Czar’s Empire. In the Ottoman Empire, the modernist Young Turk movement, controlled by the dönmeh and that led the government, caused the detriment of the sultan authority; That very same state administration was also responsible for the massacre of the Armenians.[↩]
5. Bernard Faÿ, La guerre des trois foux, Hitler, Staline, Roosevelt, Paris, Librairie académique Perrin, 1966.[↩]
6. The common destiny of decolonised countries heirs of ancient and illustrious civilisation, such as India, and semi-primitive or regressed ones, triggered an unnatural sense of solidarity that is known by the term ‘third-worldism’. Soviet communist propaganda fan the flames on this feeling, attracting all those countries as moths attracted by light that eventually fly into the fire. In this manner even nowadays in traditional Hindu circles there are those who express solidarity with primitive peoples and declare sympathy for Marxist positions. All this without realising that Russia, as heir to the Soviet Union, maintains the largest colonial empire in the whole of North Asia, without any intention of granting independence. The same applies, a fortiori, to the colonialism of ‘People’s’ China. At the same time, in the undeveloped countries that have fallen back into poverty,although they are very rich in natural resources, communism has been transformed into a new ideology: ‘indigenism. This is the practical outcome of the demented ‘happy degrowth’ of the youth movements of the West, which preaches a return to a primitive nature seen as a proletarian Edenic state, on which the Vatican despot attempts to implant the cult of Pachamama, the Catholic-ecologist ‘mother earth’ (Miguel Gullo Omodeo, Madre Patria, Barcelona, Espasa, 2021, pp. 380-384).[↩]
7. The dismemberment was agreed between the Viceroy Lord Mountbatten, the atheist Jinnah, leader of the Muslims, and the politician disguised as sādhu Mohandās Gandhi.[↩]
8. It is shameful that those who give interviews to justify the revenges of the Afghan Taliban and to protest in favour of the ‘democratic’ rights of the Muslim Brotherhood to rule Egypt, show indignation towards the peaceful denunciations by the saṃnyāsins for the continuous provocations, outrages and violences of the Islamic militants against Hinduism. The defence of Dharma can only be mistaken for nationalism by the minds of those who are completely unable to look beyond the shallow political level. Emir ‘Abd al-Qādir, although a great ṣufi, was not as peaceful when he struggled to give birth to nationalism in Algeria, a nation that did not exist until it was invented by French colonialism (Jean Sévillia, Historiquement Correct, Paris, éd. Perrin, 2014). But, being a Muslim, he is forgiven any act of violence.[↩]
9. Actually, the Chinese are not just propagandists, they are also fomenting guerrilla warfare directly or through their vassals: Nepal, Pakistan and Bangla Desh.[↩]
10. The continuing threat of invasion of Taiwan is a serious threat to the survival of Confucianism and Taoism. The island, which throughout its history was annexed to China by the Manchurian Ching dynasty for the brief period from 1683 to 1795, is the last sovereign bastion of the Far Eastern tradition. It would be a paradox if it could only survive in the Chinatowns of Singapore, San Francisco or Melbourne.[↩]
11. “Since 1949, Communist China has more than doubled its territory by annexing ethnic minority homelands and conquering territories of other countries” (Limes, Planet India, 6-2009, “Il Gigante buono”). In this context we mention the recent occupation of parts of Ladakh in June 2021. The new Chinese naval bases in Myanmar (Burma), Bangla Desh, Shri Lanka and Pakistan reveal explicitly their expansionist goals.[↩]
12. Certainly this is not the still very distant end of the Kali yuga, as some followers of monotheistic religions, who claim to be experts in sanātana dharma, venture, but only the closure of a minor cycle.[↩]
13. Consider the evident link between the allegedly excellent quality of life in Protestant countries and their appalling suicide rate. Clearly people must really live happily there![↩]
14. To get an actual picture of this dramatic fact, consider the personalities who in recent years have ruled the destinies of Western states, including the Vatican.[↩]
15. In principle, Islam recognises Mosaic and Christian revelation; Christianity recognises Mosaic revelation, while Judaism recognises none. However, at the same time, the most recent religion in the practice considers its predecessors abrogated by its own latest revelation, at the cost of admitting its own worthlessness. The recent concept of ‘big brothers’ denotes the unworthiness of those who invented this formula to hold the chair of St Peter. Moreover, by the transitive property, the most recent religion should then be that of the ‘little brothers’, a phrase that the pontiff has been careful not to coin.[↩]
16. Although the Russian and Balkan Orthodox churches are in a period of recovery and with a renewed interest in Hesychasm following the collapse of the Communist dictatorship, the Greek and Ukrainian Orthodox churches have been dangerously contaminated by the Vatican ecumenical modernism. See the very recent changes to open Mount Athos to indiscriminate tourism.[↩]
17. We do not use the term ‘initiatic’ because the milieu we are referring to was formed by members of various occult currents, each one of them falsely claiming to represent the continuity of the ancient pre-Christian and medieval mysteries.[↩]
18. The two Italian esotericists shared anti-Christian sentiments in favour of an alleged ‘Pythagorean-Roman tradition’ that mysteriously survived into modern times. They Both considered the ‘fascist mysticism’ that took inspiration from ancient Rome, as an emanation of that secret current. However, while Reghini considered that the Roman tradition had been transmitted from the collegia fabrorum to the Freemasonry of his time, Evola expressed extremely negative judgements on that very same institution. Both of them, although to a different extent, gave importance to the sphere of action rather than to contemplation and this got them involved, although in diverging directions, in the political and even subversive activities of the Italian right-wing. On the contrary, Guénon correctly sustained the superiority of knowledge over action. However, as long as he lived in France, he meddled in many unrealistic and over-ambitious ventures for a re-establishment of Tradition originating from the most disparate tendencies, founding or promoting centres, study groups and oracles, always in collaboration with the occultists he associated with.[↩]
19. Guénon wrote from Cairo to Edmond Gloton on May 17, 1947, strictly following the “ritual” formalities between brothers in faith: “To end on a note nicer than all this unpleasant gossip, you may have already heard (it is about a month ago) of the constitution, under the auspices of the G∴L∴D∴F∴, of the L∴ La Grande Triade (it is immediately clear where this title comes from), whose Ven∴ founder is F∴ Ivan Cerf, G∴ Or∴. It is an L∴ destined to remain very closed (one of the conditions of admission is a satisfactory knowledge of my work) and which aim is above all to apply, as far as possible, the points of view that I have expounded in particular in the “Aperçus [sur l’Initiation]”. […] You can imagine how happy I am with this result, which now gives me the certainty that the work I have done and to which I have devoted my whole life will not be lost!” The inspirer of this life-long dedication initiative was indeed easly satisfied! Unfortunately, also this, as other similar experiences attempted later in Italy, inevitably ended in a dead end. Actually R. Guénon breached his wise intention to abstain to indicate an initiatic solution also for the taṣawwuf, when he warmly advised those who were inclined to that choice, to receive the bay’at at the European “ṭuruq”, even though he was fully aware of the irregularity of the two self-proclaimed masters and knowing very well that no islamic organisation would ever have founded a branch out of the dār al-Islam. This set a dangerous precedent for the emergence in Europe of subsequent false and pretended sheikhs and even sheikhas![↩]
20. We cannot dwell on Guénon’s alleged infallibility, having already been splendidly dismantled by Carlo Rocchi in Alātaśānti. L’Advaita Vedānta e i suoi più consueti travisamenti, Milano, Ekatos Ed., 2021, pp. 407-411, n. 8.[↩]
21. R. Guénon himself stated in a letter of 1 November 1927: “I have also been informed that the ṭariqa ‘Alawiyyah] has a zawiya in Paris, in boulevard Saint-Germain, a few steps from here, which makes one fear that it will become too open and may therefore be diverted like many others.” In Rivista di Studi Tradizionali, no. 65.[↩]
22. Others, belonging to a somehow different Guenonian typology, have made a few rare trips to the land of Islam for a quick contact with a master and rapidly returned. This is totally insufficient. The disciples must spend long periods with the masters, receiving e their teachings and studying under their guidance. Luckily, there have been other more serious people who have spent long periods in contact with shuyūkh and learned ulamā, benefiting from their teaching. As it is natural, they conscientiously avoid showing off for the sake of publicity, they keep away from any controversy, preferring to lead a reserved life in order to dedicate themselves to the method that has been confided to them. For them, the goal is true spiritual realisation and not the urge to excel over followers with weaker minds.[↩]

65. Occultism in the Bourgeois Age

With the French Revolution the period of Renaissance and Enlightenment occultism came to an end. The Protestant Jacobin Fabre d’Olivet¹, the Catholic revolutionary Louis-Claude de Saint Martin² and the Catholic Bonapartist Willermoz³ all three had developed a Qabbalistic interpretation of the confessions they belonged to. The restoration of the status quo after the fall of Napoleon interrupted, for approximately fifteen years, the proliferation of those esotericisms that had arised hiding behind the Goddess Reason⁴. Occultism reappeared at the beginning of the nineteenth century in the wake of Romantic gothic literature⁵. This tendency would have remained a mere aesthetic morbidity if it had not been supported by the practice of spiritism⁶. A further ‘methodical’ component was inherited from the French libertine circles and the British Hellfire Clubs⁷ of the previous century, whose members tried to self induce paranormal experiences in secret meetings, through the use of sex and drugs⁸. From the confluence of these three currents emerged the occultism of the bourgeois age.

The most representative figure was Alphonse Louis Constant (1810-1875), better known by his nom de plume Éliphas Lévi, a pseudo-Hebrew translation of his baptismal name. Born into a poor family, he was sent to a seminary to complete his education, but the week before his ordination as a priest he left the cloth. He had a life of hardship, he worked as draughtsman and painter and also gave private lessons. During this period, while in Paris, he associated with socialist⁹ and proto-feminist circles, characterised by pretended mystical tendencies. It was during this period that he published La Bible de la liberté, a book considered blasphemous and subversive even by Louis-Philippe’s liberal regime, which cost him eleven months in prison. It was not until he was in his forties that Constant began to take an interest in Hermeticism and the Qabbalah. In 1854 he travelled to London where a medium urged him to summon the spirit of Apollonius of Tyana. He prepared complex rituals, evidently concocted from disparate books, and, on the agreed date, he performed a ceremony for twelve hours straight. At the end, a grey spectre appeared and touched his arm. Éliphas Lévi fainted from the pain and woke up with his arm frozen and swollen for several hours. From then on, he carefully avoided any practical experience, sticking to simply reading texts and writing. He also discouraged his followers from practising séances or necromancy¹⁰.

In 1855 he wrote his most famous book, Dogma and Ritual of High Magic. It is a text that puts together quotations from Plotinus, the Qabbalah, Renaissance hermeticists and alchemists such as Knorr von Rosenroth, Agrippa, Jakob Böhme, and Enlightenment occultists such as Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, Emanuel Swedenborg, Antoine Fabre d’Olivet, Chaho and Goeres, but ultimately appears to be a simple guide to ceremonial magic¹¹. On the other hand, he did not consider himself a master strictu sensu, nor did he claim to be an initiate. His admission into Freemasonry in 1861, in fact, was late and had little significance to him¹². However, that book and the other ones that followed, gave him enough fame and sufficient income to live on and to rent a decent flat. He met and frequented Jean-Marie Ragon, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the diabolical Abbot Vintras, Dr. Fernand Rozier¹³, Count Alexandre Branicki¹⁴, the “baron” Nicola Giuseppe Spedalieri¹⁵ and the spiritualist Victor Hugo. As it can be seen, Éliphas Lévi had become well established in the good bourgeois society, where he propagated his ceremonial magic disguised as Qabbalah, even charging for ‘lessons in High Magic’¹⁶.

Many pseudo-esoteric circles in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries drew on the magic of Éliphas Lévi. Among these were the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, the Golden Down, the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor¹⁷, the Cosmic Movement, the Abbey of Thelema and many others.

We find necessary to dwell on Alexandre Saint-Yves, another figure comparable to Constant, whose influence on occultist circles was, however, far more serious. Born into a middle-class family in 1842, Alexandre Saint-Yves quickly became a military doctor. He soon gave up a career in arms because of his physical condition and moved to the small Norman island of Jersey where he met Victor Hugo. The famous man of letters was in exile there due to his opposition to Napoleon III’s regime; he spent his evenings practicing “table dancing”, a passion he shared with Saint-Yves. The latter later found a clerical job at the Ministry of the Interior. In 1877, he met and married Marie Riznich who was divorced from Count Eduard von Keller¹⁸, a relative of Honoré de Balzac¹⁹ . She was a very wealthy woman due to her family’s business in Odessa and the bank it owned in Vienna. Thanks to his wife’s fortune, Saint-Yves was able to pay for publishing his books and to acquire the title of Marquis from the Republic of San Marino in 1880. Later, after buying an estate in Alveydre, he added the name of the estate to his surname as if it were his fiefdom²⁰.

Like Éliphas Lévi, also Saint-Yves d’Alveydre did not refer to a regular chain of masters, preferring to spread among his admirers the legend of an exceptional birth and a spontaneous self-initiation. Nor does he appear to have joined any of the pseudo-initiatic organisations that, at the time, were swarming throughout Europe. Nonetheless, his claims of innate wisdom were assumed as true by his many admirers. Like almost all the occultists of the second half of the 19th century, he had come close to the revolutionary theories of socialism²¹. In fact, his first important work was the Mission des Souverains, immediately followed in the same year, 1882, by a Mission des Ouvriers in which he supported the legalisation of workers’ unions. Partially distancing himself from contemporary socialism, in these two works he proposed as solution to all the political and social problems of the century, the freedom offered by a combined reinterpretation of Christianity²² and the French Revolution, all unoriginally viewed in the light of Science. In these two works the author laid the first foundations for his theory of Synarchy²³.

Another important book by Saint-Yves was the Mission des Juifs, an actual plagiarism of Fabre d’Olivet’s Histoire Philosophique du Genre Humain²⁴. In this work he described the process of degeneration of human history, which reached its lowest point with the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem by the Romans and the consequent diaspora of the Jewish people²⁵.

In the meantime, from 1885 onwards, he had come into contact with a bird seller from Le Havre, a certain Hardjji Sharipf (Hajji Sharif), obviously an Indian ‘prince’ in exile. Despite his clearly Islamic name, Hajji proclaimed himself “Brahma Guru Paṇḍita of the Great Agarthic School”. From him Saint-Yves took private lessons of Sanskrit, mixing data from the Indian sacred language with Arabic and Hebrew. Finally the ‘Guru Paṇḍita’ revealed to him the alphabet and the ‘Vattanian’ language in use in the underworld of Agarttha²⁶ which was, according to him, well known among the brāhmaṇas of India²⁷. In order to uphold his alleged self-initiation, Saint-Yves did not treat Hajji Sharif as a guru and, like the good rebel he was, he decided to visit Agarttha uninvited. He had, in fact, practised a discipline to separate the “astral body” from the gross one. As he himself explains in the introduction to his last book Mission de l’Inde en Europe, in doing so he had invisibly introduced himself into the underground kingdom, and admired its universities, the technology for light up the caves and the dense railway network of Agarttha. This daring intrusion would have brought him the reprobation and threats of the brāhmaṇas who guarded such precious spiritual secrets.

In imitation of humanists such as Llull and his prosecutors, Saint-Yves also invented a rotating mechanism based on numbers and various alphabets, including the Vattan, which answered any question on any subject. He called this mechanism the Archeometer²⁸. The book that he was preparing on this utopian instrument appeared posthumously and incompletely in 1913 edited by the Amis de Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, i.e. Papus and his circle²⁹.

The death of his wife in 1895 was a severe blow to Saint-Yves. He dedicated to her a room in his palace in Versailles, and transformed it into a spiritist temple, where he had long conversations with the ghost of his beloved Marie Riznich³⁰. He died in 1909 surrounded by the admiration and respect of his ‘disciples’. Among them there were Dr. Gérard Encausse (Papus), René Guénon, “Maître Philippe”, René Adolphe Schwaller de Lubicz³¹, Georges-Albert Puyou de Pouvourville (Matgioi)³², Josefin Péladan, Paul Sédir, Albert Faucheux (François-Charles Barlet), John Gustaf Agelii³³ and the Marquis Stanislas de Guaita, to name only the best known. This group of admirers was also ‘initiated’ into the use of opium by Matgioi³⁴. After the death of Saint-Yves, the irreconcilable separation between the different currents of European occultism and esotericism began. Thus ended the occultist adventure of the bourgeois age.

Gian Giuseppe Filippi

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1. André Tanner (éd.), “Fabre d’Olivet”, Gnostiques de la révolution, tome II, Egloff, Paris, 1946.[↩]
2. Nicole Chaquin, “Le citoyen Louis-Claude de Saint Martin, théosophe révolutionnaire”, Dix-huitième siècle, numéro thématique Lumières et Révolution, 1974, n° 6, pp. 209-222.[↩]
3. Alice Joly, Un mystique lyonnais et les secrets de la franc-maçonnerie: Jean-Baptiste Willermoz (1730-1824), Macon, Protat Frères. 1938, pp. 209–211.[↩]
4. One exception was the Carboneria, a branch of the Compagnonnage, which had spread rapidly from Franche-Comté to central and southern Italy. In the first third of the 19th century, the Carboneria was mainly a cover and the gathering place for a revolutionary political activity in liberal or socialist key, but it had no influence or claim over the esoteric thought.[↩]
5. We refer above all to the revival of the Ossianic literature of Byron, Polidori and Mary Shelley in their Swiss Hellfire cenacle.[↩]
6. We remind the reader that this practice of simplified necromancy began with the evocations of the Fox sisters at Hydesville in 1848. On this subject see L’Erreur Spirite, Paris, Rivière, 1923, a largely reliable book by René Guénon.[↩]
7. Evelyn Lord, The Hell-Fire Clubs: Sex, Satanism and Secret Societies. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.[↩]
8. Didier Foucault, Histoire du libertinage: Des goliards au marquis de Sade, Paris, Perrin, 2007; Beatriz Álvarez, El néctar divino de la “amapola”. El láudano y su relación con el “Círculo Diodati” y los prerrafaelitas, C2, Sciencia y Cultura, January 2017.[↩]
9. Especially groups inspired by the idealistic socialism of Saint-Simon and Fourier. After the revolution of 1848, which established the second republic, Constant directed the journal Le Tribun du Peuple, where he got closer to the Marxist ideas.[↩]
10. A. E. Waite, The Mysteries Of Magic. London, George Redway, 1886.[↩]
11. Ceremonials are those rituals learned and put into practice by reading books and they are not transmitted through the practical experience of a magician.[↩]
12. He attended his lodge only for a few months. Due to some disagreements, Constant left and never set foot in any lodge again.[↩]
13. The latter represented the trait-d’union between Lévi and Papus.[↩]
14. With him Constant also attempted the ‘Great Work’, the transmutation of base metals into gold. Through his close friendship with the Balzac family (he lived in the castle of Beauregard, owned by Honoré de Balzac’s widow), the count was also in close relations with Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre.[↩]
15. The ‘baron’ put also in contact Constant and Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.[↩]
16. Christopher McIntosh, Eliphas Lévi and the French Occult Revival, Albany, Suny Press, 2011.[↩]
17. This pseudo-initiatic group, which some had the audacity to consider as the only ‘serious’ milieu in the West, will soon be subject of analysis in our Narakam column.[↩]
18. Justus Perthes, Genealogisches Taschenbuch der deutschen Gräflichen Häuser, Gotha, Perthes-Verlag, 1871. Of illustrious Jewish origin, the family was ennobled and titled counts by the King of Prussia. Count Eduard von Keller became chamberlain, private councillor to the Czar and senator of the Russian Empire.[↩]
19. Honoré de Balzac’s father, of humble origins, had changed his surname Balssa to pretend to be a descendant of the extinct Marquis de Balzac d’Entragues. Whereas the Riznichs were a Jewish family of Dalmatian origin. See “In an interview with Kira Victorova”, archived at the Wayback Machine, 7 May 2013.[↩]
20. Saint-Yves, like most of the members of the occult milieu, was a snob in the technical sense of the term, being in fact by birth, despite the high opinion he had of himself, sine nobilitate (s.nob.): finally with a modest donation to an institution that took care of foundlings, he was able to appear as an aristocrat.[↩]
21. On the other hand, Saint-Yves was pathologically rebellious since his childhood, so much that his own parents (his father was a neurologist) had him locked up in the Mettray Correctional Home.[↩]
22. An unrecognisable interpretation of Christianity, similar, although specularly opposite, to that of his contemporary, Baron Alexis de Sarachaga. In fact, while Baron Alexis de Sarachaga fantasised about a Jewish conspiracy going back to antediluvian times, Saint-Yves (although fiercely opposed to the Rotschild family, seen as the cause of all political, economic and social imbalance on the planet) took a firm stand in favour of Judaism.[↩]
23. A political utopia promoting a supranational and interclass government, whose hierarchy is guaranteed by the degree of scientific and spiritual wisdom attained by the rulers. Public affairs are to be administered by a legislative, an economic and a religious council, all three coordinated by a ‘metaphysical’ council. The head of this government on the earth, as Saint-Yves would later reveal in his book Mission de l’Inde, must be approved and granted by the Pontiff of the underground kingdom of Agarttha.[↩]
24. It contains all of Fabre d’Olivet’s nonsenses, such as considering Rāma to be the leader of the Celts![↩]
25. In 1887 in the Mission des Français, Saint-Yves described the passing of the mandate to preserve the spiritual tradition from the Jews to the Catholic Church, which ruled the West until the Middle Ages. With the decline of the papacy, this mandate would then pass to France, specifically with the convocation in 1302 of the States General by Philip IV the Fair. Certainly, the choice of the latter as the champion of tradition shows how confused his ideas were.[↩]
26. This word, undoubtedly non-existent in Sanskrit, seems to be the deformation of Asgaard (Æsir-gard, enclosure of the Gods) mentioned by Ernest Renan (Dialogues et fragments philosophiques, Paris, Calmann-Levy, 1876), who took inspiration from Norwegian sagas that placed that kingdom in Asia (interpreted as the land of the Gods, Æsir). The same source was used by Louis Jacolliot (Les fils de Dieu, Paris, Lacrois, 1875), who deformed the name of that mysterious kingdom into Asgartha, adding some details (the Brahmātmā, the Himalayan underground location, the secret knowledge about Asgartha of the brāhmaṇas of India), that later was adopted and expanded by Saint-Yves.[↩]
27. Needless to add that such fantasies are completely unknown in India. And yet, there are those who still have the gullibility to claim that this information is highly confidential and that for this reason paṇḍitas, gurus, saṃnyāsin would not reveal it to their disciples even under torture. This is where the devout faith of fanatics leads to![↩]
28. “La Genèse de l’Archéomètre : Documents inédits de Saint-Yves d’Alveydre rassemblés et introduits par Joscelyn Godwin,” L’Initiation, 2 & 4, 1988, pp. 61-71; 153-166.[↩]
29. However, a series of laudatory articles published in the journal of the Gnostic Church, La Gnose, directed by René Guénon, and also entitled L’Archéomètre, already provided a foretaste of the text. It consisted of a long and fragmented review written by various pens alternating between imprecise considerations on the cosmic cycles of Hinduism, the theory of theosophistic races and sub-races, pseudo-Qabbalistic considerations, with a bit of judicial astrology, and the ever-present Vattanan alphabet. At the prelude, all of them paid tribute to the memory of Saint-Yves as ‘Notre Maître’. No “traditional” person then asked: “Maître of what?” (La Gnose. La Revue intégrale, Paris, Ethos, 2020)[↩]
30. Their marriage is said to have been very happy, but Marie suffered much from ill health in her last years, and died on June 7, 1895. Towards the end of 1895, Saint-Yves installed an oratory in his apartment on the ground floor of 9 Rue Colbert, just opposite the Palace of Versailles, and had it consecrated with the correct Catholic method. On June 6, 1896, on the eve of the anniversary of Marie’s death, he had a mass celebrated there, after which he had an ecstatic experience. He recorded it on a blank page of the Hermetic notebook which he had neglected for nine or ten years. This seems to have been the first reappearance of Marie, who appeared to him again on July 21, 1896 “in a blinding light,” as he told Alfred Erny on August 16. This initiated a new period of researches, which would fill out this notebook and several others. Saint-Yves writes: “My wife demonstrated to me a definition of life and inspired me to find it in this grouping of the sacred letters.” [It follows a series of letters from the Hebrew alphabet used by Saint-Yves to communicate with his wife’s spirit]. “La Genèse de l’Archéomètre”, cit.[↩]
31. He took this second surname in honour of the Lithuanian diplomat Oscar Vladislav de Lubicz Milosz. In this way, also Schwaller pretended to have been ennobled. Louis Charbonneau did the same, adding Lassay as his second surname after the village his family came from.[↩]
32. Although they were a noble family, the Pouvourvilles never held any comital title. (Jean-Pierre Laurant, Matgioi, un aventurier taoïste, Paris, Éd. Dervy, 1982). Matgioi was also recognised as “notre Maître”. Thus, from the very beginning the “traditional” occultist current was equipped with supposed western masters from the exotic esoteric world.[↩]
33. Better known as ʿAbd al-Hādī al-ʿAqīlī, an opium addicted painter, anarchist, feminist and proto-animalist, he worked in Egypt for the Ottoman and Italian secret services. He claimed to be muqaddam of the shaykh ʿAbd ar-Raḥman Elish al-Kebir. (Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 59-69).[↩]
34. Matgioi also wrote Le Livre de l’opium, signed under the pseudonym Nguyen Te Duc, reissued by Guy Tredaniel, Paris, 2002. Stanislas de Guaita died of a drug overdose. V. Noële Maurice Denis-Boulet, “L’ésotériste René Guenon”, La Pensée Catholique, 1962, n°. 78-79, p. 22.[↩]

Revolutions and ‘people power’

Until the 18th century, the word revolution meant the conclusion of a circular movement, a return to the point of origin, the restoration of a primordial order. The Latin term revolutio, in normal times, was applied both to space to especially describe the periodic orbital paths of celestial bodies, and to time to indicate the renewal of chronological situations, from the alternation of night and day to the precession of the equinoxes. The elimination of the traditional mentality has profoundly changed and even reversed its original meaning. In modern times, revolution is understood as the violent overthrow of the established order by the mercantile and servile components of society in order to establish a new political, social and economic system for the implementation of a given ideology¹. For instance, it became customary to define revolutions that of Cromwell, as well as, the American one, although the former was more properly a civil war and the latter a war of independence.

Also before that time, mutinies, insurrections, revolts and uprisings² had occurred, but almost all of them were eventually suppressed by the legitimate power. If they succeeded, they did not affect the mentality of an entire continent, remaining a temporary, limited and local phenomenon³. Therefore, without hesitation we can define as revolutions those episodes that overthrew the traditional legitimate power, and were historically imposed by consecrating their illegitimacy as a new self-proclaimed ‘rule of law’⁴.

It must be added, however, that by the end of the Middle Ages the traditional feudal order had degenerated into absolutism, particularly in the Kingdom of France. The nobles were prompted to abandon their castles and move to Versailles, transformed into bumbling courtiers. Those who refused to live as parasites at the royal court were effectively excluded from the halls of power, their castles were turned into defenceless villas (the French chateaux) and the walls of their towns and villages were dismantled. These aristocrats, downgraded to ‘aristocratics’, began to harbour a muted hostility to absolute monarchy and this explains (but does not justify) the participation of some of them in the revolution.

The term ‘revolution’, therefore, is properly suited to the French revolution that decreed the end of the ancien régime⁵. In fact since the French revolution the term was used⁶ (also retrospectively) to define any epochal change that was antagonistic to the previous order: Christian revolution in an anti-Roman imperial sense, scientific revolution in an anti-Tolemaic sense, industrial revolution against artisan production, cultural revolution against all wisdom of the past, sexual revolution against the common sense of decency.

Applied in this translational sense, revolution simply means the overthrow of anything conforms to the natural order recognised by all men of sound mind. In the historical-political sense, however, it means the extermination of a dominant social class and its replacement by a subordinate one. From this perspective, the Puritan revolution led by Cromwell in England and the American revolution are not really revolutions, since the former, despite the beheading of the sovereign⁷, saw an alliance between a part of the nobility and the upper middle class united by Calvinism; the latter, on the other hand, represented the struggle of a petty-bourgeois colony against a power now considered as foreign, England. There was no real substitution of social classes in the government of public affairs, it was mainly a matter of nationality.

On the contrary, the French and the Bolshevik Revolutions can be considered as such for aiming to a partial or total extermination of the upper classes. The French revolution attempted the extermination of the aristocracy and the high clergy, and it almost achieved this by replacing them with the bourgeoisie at the head of the State. The Bolshevik revolution targeted the bourgeoisie in particular, effectively wiping it out of Russia, along with the clergy and nobility. Another notable difference is that the Anglo-Saxon revolutions were real wars⁸, whereas the French and Communist revolutions were coups perpetrated by demagogues skilled in fomenting discontent and social agitators. The Fascist revolution in Italy and the National Socialist revolution in Germany belonged to this same category.

Before going any further, however, it is necessary to point out that all revolutions, from the puritanical English one to the present day ones, have been inspired and led by bourgeoisie, skilful manipulators of the emotions of the people⁹, i.e. ‘useful idiots’¹⁰. This is the continuous common thread linking liberalism, democracy, socialism and totalitarian regimes, all inspired by the middle class¹¹. In reality, the common people are unable to elaborate or allow themselves to become involved in ideologies due to a lack of education and culture. The servile classes, too busy with daily survival, are alien to deformations and vicious cerebral lucubrations; they are, however, easily incited by ‘committed’ demagogues to envy and class hatred. Once wrath has died down, the common people return to submit to their new masters with servile obedience.

Like the American Revolution, the French one began as a protest against the excessive taxation used by the crowns of England and France to balance their public finances¹². Undoubtedly these rebellions gave rise to the delinquent democratic and popular political systems now predominant throughout the world, that, instead of the infamous medieval tithes, can take up to fifty per cent of a citizen’s income from direct taxation alone.

The French Revolution claimed more than six hundred thousand victims among its own citizens, slain for their loyalty to the monarchy or to the Catholic Church¹³. Thisis yet another ruthless legacy inherited by the bloody popular regimes of the 20th century, that it is always shamefully praised by liberal democrats and socialists. In fact, this aberration still goes on in the French republican regime, that even nowadays provides asylum and protection to guerrillas and terrorists of other nationalities¹⁴.

Many revolutionaries were Freemasons. In reality, the majority of Freemasons remained loyal to the monarchy, precisely because they were involved in high “knightly” ranks that harked back to a medieval type of loyalty. Certainly the agnostic and atheistic Enlightenment was a fundamental source of the French Revolution¹⁵: the cult of the “Goddess of Reason” with its farcical rituals was merely an insult to the Catholic and monarchical tradition of France.

In fact, the secular, anti-religious¹⁶ mentality came from the circles of so called Hermeticists, Rosicrucians, alchemists and Christian Qabbalists already described in the previous chapters. Their hidden influence made even French ecclesiastical circles sceptical, and from 1740 onwards these stopped prosecuting e the crimes of magicians and sorceresses. As a result of this laxity, there was a spread of magic at all levels: country witchcraft, collective possessions, and, at salon and lodge level, animal magnetism¹⁷ and somnambulism¹⁸. The Enlightenment in this manner confirmed its scepticism, atheism and anti-religionism, but it was at the same time imbued of experiments based on the most frightening psychism, the indisputable heir of Renaissance occultism. The climate of Terror, the unleashed madness of popular rituals addressed to the Goddess Reason and the Tree of Liberty, the spread of country witchcraft and ceremonial magic in the drawing rooms, could only end in a dictatorship with which Napoleon Buonaparte¹⁹ tried to institute some bourgeois order²⁰. In reality, his intervention in history completely unhinged the equilibrium in the rest of Europe. In fact, even after his fall, the continent was never able to return to normal and the restoration of the status quo ante was a complete failure.

Maria Chiara de’ Fenzi

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1. Ideology refers to a set of beliefs imposed in place of a traditional or religious structure. The absence of an established basic organic doctrine, in harmony with cosmic and divine laws, prompts the propagandists of the ideology to adopt an imposing, fanatical and persecutory attitude. Over time this has become more and more patent, as proved by the ideologies contrary to any natural evidence and rational argumention that States, international organisations, NGOs, multinational corporations, the media and other power-holding devilry are making compulsory in this beginning of the 21^st century.[↩]
2. In opposition to the contemporary historical criticism, flattened by a prejudice that falsely considers these phenomena of rebellion exclusively of popular origin, it is necessary to distinguish those insurgencies caused by feudal diatribes (uprisings of knights) from the truly subversive bourgeois or pauperistic uprisings.[↩]
3. An example is the case of the communes of the late Middle Ages which, however, forged the secular and hedonistic mentality that soon after gave birth to humanism.[↩]
4. In the 1776 document that founded the state entity of the United States, the delegates enacted the collective right to revolution and the individual’s particular right to self-defence. These two pseudo-principles were formalised in the Declaration of Independence from the Kingdom of England. Since the Constitution of 1787 did not clearly specify what those two rights consisted of, a Charter was added in 1791, setting out ten amendments to limit the powers of the US federal government in order to protect individuals. The Bill of Rights protects freedom of speech and religion, the right to keep and bear arms, and freedom of assembly and petition.[↩]
5. This led to the definitive abolition of feudalism. In the rest of Europe, with the transformation of constitutional monarchies into bourgeois regimes, feudalism slowly disappeared. But not immediately: for example the liberalisation of the last fief in the Austro-Hungarian Empire took place in 1900, as the writer of these lines well knows. Contemporary Constitutional monarchies, characterised by continuous marriages with people from the entertainment and business world, actively co-operated in the dismantling the last social functions of the noble class.[↩]
6. This happened with the enactment of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which proclaimed the equality of all citizens. Of course, the only inequality recognised was that of census, thus protecting the privileges of the new ruling class, the bourgeoisie. In addition, the separation of religion from the state was included among the rights (?): the State was thus overwhelmingly occupied by atheistic and anti-religious secularism. Today, revolutionary brainwashed Christians proudly proclaim themselves to be secular and religious at the same time: the devil and the holy water together.[↩]
7. In itself it was a very serious act that challenged the concept of the divine right of sovereigns. King Charles II Stuart had appealed to the Emperor as his superior or, in his behalf, to a college of three European kings as his peers. Instead, he was condemned to death by an assembly of his inferiors bourgeois, members of the Parliament.[↩]
8. We can add to these also the communist seizure of power in China in 1949, after a long and cruel civil war.[↩]
9. Revolutionary fanatics, who regard such historical events as commendable examples of civilisation, deny on grounds of ideological faith that fascisms were revolutionary movements, in fact these are their direct political rivals and as such to beirrevocably condemned, on principle only, as reactionary and retrogressive. In reality, whether right-wing or left-wing, the revolutions of the 20th century all had a socialist matrix. However, the French and Bolshevik revolutions were carried out in an underhand manner by means of coups d’état, without the heroic deeds so often boasted by the rhetoric of their admirers. Certainly there was violence, but this was unleashed post quem by the revolutionaries against their rivals as soon as they took power.[↩]
10. Formula used by Lenin to define pro-Soviet activists citizens of non-communist countries.[↩]
11. The dictators of right-wing and left-wing regimes, all of them bourgeois, are not so morally different from many ‘democratically’ elected presidents. The promoters of so-called ‘scientific’ exterminations are no worse than those who coldly ordered the use of the atomic bomb at the end of a already won war. These and many other examples have been before our eyes in the last few decades. On the other hand, the first example of genocide of an entire population is the one perpetrated against the Vendeans, a mass-crime rightfully imputed to the French Revolution. Gracchus Babeuf, La Guerre de la Vendée et le système de dépopulation, Paris, Éd. du Cerf, 2008.[↩]
12. Few people know that the French Revolution was carefully prepared by the British Intelligence Sevice to avenge the stinging naval defeat at Chesapeake. The ingenious British propaganda have always been able to erase British fleet’s defeats from memory. In May 1781, the French fleet, under the orders of Admiral François Joseph Paul, Count de Grasse, routed the British squadron, preventing the landing of reinforcements for the besieged contingent at Yorktown. As a result, Lord Cornwallis had to surrender to the insurgents and England was forced to recognise the independence of its American colonies. The British Prime Minister William Pitt wasted no time in avenging the bitter defeat by undermining the stability of the French kingdom. He identified the public debt and the system of exorbitant taxation as the weak point in France’s social system, which was already worn down by decades of continuous warfare. He recruited Swiss financiers and bankers to exasperate the situation and recruited political agitators and journalists to provoke tempers, among them Étienne Clavière, François Louis Jean-Joseph de Laborde, Jean-Paul Marat, Pierre Étienne Louis Dumont and the renegade Count Honoré Gabriel Riquetti de Mirabeau. Pierre Douat, Tout ce que vous auriez voulu savoir sur la France et qu’on vous a toujours caché, Rémire Montjoly. Éd. Marsan, 2016, pp. 11-20; Albert Mathiez, “Quelques affaires de commerce et d’intelligences avec l’ennemi sous la Terreur. Le banquier Boyd et ses amis”, Annales révolutionnaires, T. 12, No. 3 (Mai-Juin 1920), pp. 218-231. The fact that renegades join ranks with their natural enemies is a phenomenon that has continued and worsened over time. Nowadays, the opulent sons of the capitalist bourgeoisie display extreme left-wing ideas and sentiments, pledging the solidarity of the wretched scum in the attempt to save their economic empires from possible proletarian expropriation.[↩]
13. Adolph Thiers, Storia della Rivoluzione Francese, Brindisi, Edizioni Trabant, 2018-2021, 10 voll. Obviously, although the aristocrats and the high clergy were the preferred victims, such a high number of victims makes it clear that it was mainly a massacre of the bourgeoisie and the common people who had not bowed to the imposition of the new ‘freedoms’.[↩]
14. The Terror also inaugurated the political use of justice that is so widespread today. This brings with it an anomalous benevolence towards criminals and often inflexibility towards honest citizens. What characterises any democratic or popular government, however, is that it allows the rise of the worst elements of the petty-bourgeois and working-classes, who find in the political careers the easiest means of enrichment for themselves and their descendants.[↩]
15. René Le Forestier, Les Illuminés de Bavière et la franc-Maçonnerie allemande, Genève, Slatkine-Megariotis, 1974, pp. 557-566; 658-663.[↩]
16. Thomas de Cauzons, La Magie et la sorcellerie en France, Paris, Dorbon Ainé, s.d., III vol. pp. 360-547.[↩]
17. We are referring here to the parascientific experiments of Franz Anton Mesmer.[↩]
18. Namely, the use of sleepwalkers, ‘doves’ and mediums for clairvoyant purposes, in use by charlatans such as Cagliostro and Fabre d’Olivet.[↩]
19. Indeed, the Buonaparte was a family of ancient nobility. One such knight, Napoleon Buonaparte, took part in the First Crusade with the contingent sent to the Holy Land by the Marquis of Treviso. However, his omonimous descendant had fully embraced the ideas of the revolution.[↩]
20. Even if it was a caricaturesque image of the Empire, it was still a bourgeois dictatorship. However, the imperial-revolutionary regime was the design to replace what remained of the Holy Roman Empire. Indeed, it was the very Napoleon who imposed the end of that ancient and venerable institution when Francis II, the Holy Roman Emperor, was forced to become Francis I, Emperor of Austria.[↩]

62. Deviations of Qabbalah

In 1666, the Amsterdam Stock Exchange was in a state of great turmoil: the Jewish brokers and speculators were beside themselves with enthusiasm, the bull and bear players forgot their financial transactions and indulged in ecstatic dances of jubilation: commercial correspondence from the Levant announced that the Messiah had appeared to the Jews of Izmir. The cautious shopkeepers in Amsterdam wrote again to their correspondents for more reliable news, to convince themselves that there was no mistake, that the one who had appeared in Izmir was really the Messiah awaited for thousands of years by all the people of Israel. The answer was: “Hu velo acher”, “It is he and not others”. The happy message spread with lightning speed across seas and countries, in every place where the Torah was venerated. In Paris, in Livorno, in Vienna, the same scenes were repeated everywhere: men abandoned their business, women left their children and their homes, and everyone danced in the intoxication of an unrestrained enthusiasm.

With these vivid and historically unexceptionable words, an author describes the incredible adventure of a false Messiah¹. Šabbetay Ṣewi (1626-1676), son of a wealthy poultry merchant from Izmir, had experienced psychic breaks in the form of uncontrolled visions from an early age. In an attempt to bring some order to these experiences, he devoted himself to the study of Qabbalah from his adolescence. The Qabbalah he followed was not the traditional initiatic one, almost disappeared at that time, but the mystical and apocalyptic one that drew its source from the teachings of Abulafia, a deviation from the ancient tradition². At the age of 15, he received his first mystical revelations, which convinced him that he was the earthly manifestation of the saturnine aspect of God². Šabbetay indeed is the Hebrew term for the inauspicious planet of destruction. And, in fact, his behaviour was always characterized by that melancholy so typical also inall Christian Qabbalists and Renaissance Hermeticists of the time³.

At the age of twenty-two he proclaimed himself Messiah to his circle of admirers in Smyrna: his concept of the Messiah differed considerably from that of the previous false Messiahs. He claimed that there was an essential identity between him being a Messiah and God himself⁴ and that he had succeeded in pronouncing the tetragrammaton, the unpronounceable name of God, by rotating the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Punished of herem (rabbinical excommunication), Ṣewi began a wandering life between Byzantium, Thessaloniki, Jerusalem and Cairo. Through his preaching he attracted a small number of followers, who, however, wealthy and influential, protected him from the orthodox rabbinical and Talmudic circles and the Ottoman administration. In 1663 he met Nathan of Gaza, who quickly became his prophet and right-hand man. In 1666, year in which according to some ‘prophecies’ the Messianic era would have begun, started the great success of this false Messiah.

The illusion that the Messiah would quickly redeem the Jews from their marginalised status in Islamic and Christian countries raised a sudden enthusiasm in all the territories of the Diaspora⁵. He returned with full honours to his native Smyrna, overthrew the chief rabbi who was hostile to him and began to reign as a ruler. He married several women, but his main wife had to appear in Smyrna with great pomp. The prostitute Sarah from Livorno, had claimed since childhood that her destiny was to become wife of the Messiah. Financed by bankers and merchants from Amsterdam and Livorno, accompanied by a procession of learned rabbis and Talmudic sages, Sara presented herself to the divine bridegroom⁶. After the sumptuous ‘Tōrāh’ wedding, Izmir, a marginal and miserable town in the Ottoman Empire, flourished again. From Europe, Egypt and the Maghreb, ships laden with precious goods disembarked their treasures in its port, while Dutch, English, Genoese and Catalan banks, exchange offices and financial agencies opened new branches there. According to the general belief, the misery of the Jewish people was about to be redeemed by the mere presence of the Messiah and his Prophet⁷. The majority of rabbis, at the time, sided, or pretended to side, with Šabbetay, while only a small minority remained anchored to tradition. In particular, these latter looked with horror at the alterations of the rituals that were being adopted at the behest of the Messiah and Nathan of Gaza.

In the spring of that year, Šabbetay Ṣewi went to Istanbul in order to be recognised as the Messiah by the Ottoman Sultan and to be given the imperial crown. Reported by the Jewish community of the capital and immediately arrested, after two months of gilded imprisonment, the false Messiah asked to be admitted before Sultan Mehmet IV. There he publicly converted to Islam, taking the Islamic name of Aziz Mehmet Effendi as a new Muslim. All the Jewish communities in the diaspora were sorely disappointed⁸. There were two types of reaction: on the one side the traditional rabbinical circles unreservedly condemned Šabbetay as an impostor and a fraud.

From that moment on, the rabbis definitely turned away from the ecstatic-mystical Qabbalah, and this hardening of opinion also struck what remained of the authentic medieval Qabbalistic esotericism. On the other side, the most fanatical followers of the false Messiah tried to find a symbolic explanation for this shocking gesture, giving it the most disturbing and mysterious meanings. Nathan of Gaza himself circulated the rumour that the function of Messiah was to involve in the redemptive action also the qelippot⁹. This justification, which only apparently resembles a descent into hell, draws a disturbing picture of the entire mission of Šabbetay as actively linked to infernal powers. But those who are clouded by fanaticism have no critical ability and are incapable of seeing the facts as they are; blinded by exaltation these weak minds look for any way possible to find sublime symbolic meanings and examples to follow¹⁰.

In fact, the followers of the false Messiah emulated the example of their Lord and God, hypocritically converting to Islam in order to continue the work of redemption under cover. All in all, they revived the experience of their ancestors the Marranos of Spain; actually, the Thessalonian and Smyrna communities were mainly composed of Sephardim, Jews of Spanish origin¹¹. Those false followers of Islam are called dönmeh in Turkish, literally ‘converts’, a word which in time has come to mean ‘apostates’¹². Even after the death of their Messiah, the dönmeh continued to try to convince their sympathisers to leave their ghettos¹³. During the 17th and 18th centuries, also in Eastern Europe, this propaganda induced many to integrate into the Christian environment¹⁴, whether they converted or not¹⁵. Later, they enthusiastically assumed the anti-religious spirit that had spread during the Enlightenment¹⁶. This underground current adapted to the general situation, fitting in the new agnostic civilisation, and often taking the lead, while covertly maintaining a formal link with their religion and, above all, with their ethnic origin¹⁷. In contrast, the Orthodox Jews continued to profess their faith publicly, often incurring criticism, hostility and even denunciation by the crypto-followers of Šabbetay Ṣewi.

Jakub Lejbowicz (1726-1791) is better known as Jacob Franck¹⁸. His father, who belonged to the first generation of Ṣewi followers, was accused of heresy¹⁹ by the rabbis of the Orthodox Jewish tradition and forced to take refuge in Ottoman Bucharest, where Jacob was born. He was wild and rebellious, and throughout his life Jacob harboured a deep resentment against the rabbis and regular Judaism because of how his father was treated. He did not follow a regular upbringing or abide by the rules of social coexistence, extolling his ignorance and unrestraint as a sign of divine election. In 1753 he arrived in Thessaloniki, the centre of the dönmeh from which his father had been expelled.

He immediately assumed the way of thinking and acting of the dönmeh and, feeling intimately related to Šabbetay Ṣewi, first he proclaimed himself to be his reincarnation and thento be the Messiah. Ṣewi had been the Messiah of tribulation, whereas he would be the Messiah of power, the Messiah-King. He revealed that the age of the law was definitely over and with his reign his followers were freed from any requirements except total obedience to the Messiah’s wishes. The community that gathered around him lived simulating him and indulged in all its appetites, especially, of course, in the sexual ones. Franck took libertinism, that had already appeared with Ṣewi, to its extreme limits. He was excommunicated and denounced by the followers of the rabbinical tradition, and after various events, he decided to emigrate with the crowd of his debauched followers to Poland. At that time, the Kingdom of Poland, worrying about the refractoriness of Jews to convert to Catholicism, promised those who got baptised the status of nobles and estates. Franck began negotiations with King Augustus III. Together with about thirty thousand of his disciples, he would embrace Catholicism. In addition to land and mass ennoblement, he demanded all properties to be gathered into a single fief, still vassal to the King of Poland, but where the only owners were to be Franckists. The King was flattered to make such a good impression before the papal throne; however, it remained the geopolitical problem of granting an entire region to people from the Ottoman Empire, with relatives and friends on the other side of the border. Understanding the Crown’s hesitation on this last topic, the Polish rabbis denounced Frankism as heretical before the Holy Office. The confrontation between the rabbis and the Franckists took place in Lemberg Cathedral under the arbitration of Canon Mikulski. With great shamelessness, the Franckist speakers took up religious positions clearly based on the Christian faith²⁰ and thus easily got the better of the more educated and trained regular rabbis. Franck’s true thinking, however, was as follows:

Our Lord and King Sabbataï Zevi had convert to the faith of the Ismaelites [Muslims], but I, Jacob, more perfect, must convert to the faith of the Nazarenes because Jesus of Nazareth was the skin or peel of the fruit and that his coming was permitted only to open the way for the true Messiah. We must therefore accept this Nazarene religion pro forma, observe it meticulously so as to appear as good Christians as they are. However, we must not marry any of their whores or have fun with them or mix with other nations. Even if we profess Christianity and regularly follow their commandments, we must never forget in our hearts the three pillars of our faith, the Lords and King Sabbataï Zevi, Berakhya [his successor] and Jacob Frank, the most perfect of the three.²¹

The rituals taught by Franck, which had replaced the traditional ones now abrogated, are described as follows:

“The religious rites of the Frankists consisted of ecstatic songs accompanied by wild applause, with female participation ending in an orgiastic ritual. The ritual usually began as follows: Frank knelt, staring at two lit candles on a wooden bench, drove a nail into the wood and, brandishing a cross in all directions, exclaimed ‘Forsa damus para verti, seibul grandi asserventi! “(in Ladino, the Spanish dialect of the Jews sephardim: “Give us the strength to see you, the privilege to serve you”). Then the lights were switched off and pandemonium ensued. Men and women would undress completely “to get at the naked truth” and copulate in the hodgepodge and only the leader would refrain in the midst of it all.”²²

After his baptism, and once become lord of a large fiefdom vassal to the King of Poland, Franck decided to organise his own army. It was so well organised that many of the Franckists served a few decades later as officers in Napoleon’s army²³.

Generously financed by Mayer Amschel, founder of the Rothschild Bank, Jacob Franck and his wives lived in the splendour of a royal court. But It was short-lived. His followers, now convinced that they were above the law, began to reveal the secret that he was, in fact, the Messiah. Franck was imprisoned and put on trial by the Inquisition. He tried, in vain, to promise the Czar that he and his people would collectively convert to the Orthodox Church, but all to no avail. In the meantime, while waiting for the papal verdict, the prisoner in the fortress of Czenstokhova lived a princely life: he had dropped the act and no longer performed Catholic rites. He lived cursing Poland and prophesying that it would be wiped off the map. And so it happened. Russia invaded Poland, which was divided among the other powers, and Franck found himself free again. He settled in Moravia, which hadbecome a province of the Austrian Empire. Jacob Franck had a cousin in Brünn, Salomon Dobruška, a wealthy tobacco merchant and financial speculator. His son Moses²⁴ played a mysterious destabilising role during the French Revolution; but that pertains to another historical moment.

Gian Giuseppe Filippi

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1. René Fülöp–Miller, Capitani fanatici e ribelli, Milano, Mondadori, 1936, p. 69.[↩]
2. Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, the Mystical Messiah, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1973.[↩][↩]
3. Cf. From Order to Chaos, no. 54. The reformed pseudo religion and its pseudo esotericism.[↩]
4. The concept of the divinity of the Messiah, elaborated by Šabbetay, strangely resembles the Christian concept of the God-Man. Idel raises the question of how a returning influence of Christian Qabbalah could have been exerted on Ṣewi. M. Idel, Messianic Mystics, cit. pp. 265-267.[↩]
5. John Freely, The Lost Messiah, New York, Overlook TP, 2004, pp. 49-58.[↩]
6. Fülöp-Miller, cit. pp. 70-72. It is well known that in traditional Qabbalah the relationship between God and the world, between Creator and creature, was strongly characterised by erotic symbols. In the heterodox current of Šabbetay Ṣewi, symbolism was transformed into praxis, with ‘orgiastic freedom’ permitted by the imminence of the end of times. Moshe Idel, Eros and Qabbalah, Milan, Adelphi,2007, pp.265-267; 304-309.[↩]
7. All this took place before the fascinated and intrigued eyes of Protestants, who were always morbidly attracted towards Jewish or Hebrew prophecy about the last days, and who somehow participated emotionally in such jubilation. J.S. Mebane, Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1989.[↩]
8. “The Jews of Europe, even those far away in Amsterdam and Hamburg, were seized by a wild frenzy; many sold their homes, packed up their possessions and set out to join the Messiah, only to learn the dreadful news of his conversion to Islam!”. Arthur Mandel, Le Messie Militant ou La Fuite du Ghetto, Milan, Archè, 1989, p. 17.[↩]
9. The ‘shells’ or larval remnants of evil powers that infest the lower worlds.[↩]
10. “The initial disappointment, far from marking the end of Sabbataï Zevi’s adventure, quickly changed into a renewed and stubborn faith. Hadn’t they spoken a thousand times about the sufferings of the Messiah, the afflictions of his birth? Of the strange things he would have to do to bring salvation? Of the necessity of descending into the abyss of sin and passing through the 49 gates of abomination? As scandal had become the symbol of salvation in the eyes of the disciples of Christ, the disciples of Sabbataï Zevi accepted the apostasy of their master as an additional proof of his truthfulness; and even his death, far from shaking their belief, turned their eyes with faith towards his second coming.” A. Mandel, cit. pp. 17-18. Scholem specifies the origins of the phrase “redemption through sin” by asserting that he deduced it from the testimonies of former Sabbatarians, particularly from the community of Satanov [sic!], collected and published by the great Sabbatarian hunter Ya’aqov Emden in several of his works. “Da Giacobbe ai Giacobini”, addendum a G. Scholem, Le tre vite, cit., p. 189.[↩]
11. A. Mandel, cit. p. 43. This author adds: “The rites of the Doemne ended in orgiastic dances, singing the Song of Songs.” Ibid.[↩]
12. Indeed, this closed community acted towards the Ottoman Empire like a caterpillar in an apple. It was on their initiative that the Young Turk movement was founded, which took power at the end of the 19th century, undermining the sultan’s authority. It was them who pushed for participation in the First World War, from which the Turkish Empire emerged broken. It was the government of the Young Turks that unleashed the genocide of the Armenians, causing an incurable wound between Muslims and Christians. It was also them who decreed the end of the Islamic Caliphate, and later supported the dictatorship of Kemal Atatürk. And even today they inspire Turkey’s dangerous Pan-Turanic policy. Despite the alternation of contingent political events, it is a fact that Turkey is the country with an Islamic majority that maintains the best diplomatic and geopolitical relations with Israel.[↩]
13. Marc David Baer, The Dönmeö: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2010.[↩]
14. This was facilitated by Cromwellian England, Holland and the Protestant countries in general. The path to integration, as seen in the previous chapter, was the great routes of trade, the expansion of the stock exchanges and the birth of national banks, often under the cover of hermetic-qabbalistic secret societies of Rosicrucian origin.[↩]
15. Gershom. Scholem, “Die krypto-jüdischeü Sekte der Dönmeö (Sabbatianer) in der Türkei”, Numen 7. II, Leiden, Brill Ed., 1960, pp. 93-122.[↩]
16. “Allow me to return once again to the path to the abyss’ as Frank understood it. For him and his followers, this path has two aspects: a historical and a moral one. The historical aspect is expressed in the hope of a general overthrow of all human relations and, characteristically, in the vision of the collapse of the Catholic Church and its hierarchy to which, as we have seen, Frank had outwardly submitted. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Frankists, both those who remained faithful [formally] to Judaism and those who were baptised, developed a psychology very close to that of the enlightened revolutionaries in Germany and France. …] What gave the Frankist dream its peculiar dynamism was not its positive content, which has never been precisely defined, but the visionary charge present in its idea of destruction and subversion. “Gershom Scholem, “La metamorfosi del messianismo eretico sabbatiano in nichilismo religioso nel XVIII secolo,” in Le tre vite di Moses Dobrushka, Milano, Adelphi, 2014, p. 152.[↩]
17. It is from this apparently agnostic or even atheistic environment that modern and contemporary Zionism originates. John Rose The Myths of Zionism, London, Pluto Press, 2004, pp. 54-55; Vicente Risco, Historia de los Judíos desde la destrucción del Templo, Valladolid, ed. Maxtor, 2005, pp. 384-397.[↩]
18. The ‘frank’, i.e. the European, as he was from a Jewish family of Polish origin. “In numerous studies I have analysed the metamorphosis of the heretical messianism professed by the followers of the cabbalistic messiah Shabbatay Zevi into a form of religious nihilism, developed within an underground movement, Frankism, named after its ‘prophet’ Jacob Frank, active mainly in Poland and Austria in the second half of the 18th century, on the eve of the French Revolution. From the very beginning of my research into the history of the Frankist movement, I was struck by the particular combination of the two elements that determined its nature, just before and just after the French Revolution; the inclination towards esoteric and cabbalistic doctrines on the one hand, and the appeal of the spirit of Enlightenment philosophy on the other. “G. Scholem, Le tre vite, cit., p. 13. Scholem’s astonishment is due to the fact that he does not realise the unique purpose of those two elements: the will to spread chaos.[↩]
19. Two Jewish heresies arose during the 18th century: “Hassidism and Frankism, the two movements that deeply troubled the Jews of Europe during the 18th century and beyond, which go back to the early Christians and Gnostics” “Be that as it may, whether it was the Russian Khlysti, the German “Hüpfer”, the English ‘Jumpers’ or the American ‘Shakers’, all show astonishing similarities to these wretched Jews from the godforsaken villages of eastern Galicia, in both the spiritual and formal senses. “(A. Mandel, cit. p. 21; p. 23). This last observation of Mandel’s is of great interest: it seems that during the first half of that century a new form of “possession” by subtle forces, evidently beyond any ritual control, had spread all over the West. The ignorance of the general modern culture about all things related to the domain of the sacred led to the belief that Hassidim should be considered ‘ultra-Orthodox’ Jews, rather than the heretics that they are. Even the wearing of antiquated and obsolete clothes, as it is also the case among the Protestant sects mentioned above, brings modern people to misunderstand ‘orthodox’ with those who are ‘out of fashion’.[↩]
20. They had the shrewdness to refer to the Messiah as the second person of the Trinity, to his death and resurrection, to his mission as Redeemer, without ever mentioning the name of Jesus Christ. With this ambiguity they made the Catholic clergy believe that they were dealing with the Messiah of the Christians, when in fact they intended to speak of Jackob Franck. In reality, the “Kabbalistic heresy of the Sabbatarians had developed a theosophical trinity, undoubtedly very different from the Christian one. This trinity consisted of the “Hidden Old Man” (i.e. the deus absconditus), his emanation, called the “Holy King”, identified with the God of revelation, and his female companion, the Shekhinah”. G. Scholem, The Three Lives, cit., p. 146. This clearly explains the origin of certain recent Catholic heresies about a Trinity formed by a female Holy Spirit (often identified with the Virgin).[↩]
21. A. Mandel, cit. pp. 92-93.[↩]
22. A. Mandel, cit. pp. 60-61. The lubricity of such practices had no limits. The false Messiah himself performed incestuous sexual rites with his own daughter! In those years Eva Franck was appointed by her father as the female Messiah and his heir to the mission. It would be interesting if someone investigated the origin of the psychoanalytical theory of the libido of Sigmund Freud, who was from a Frankish family.[↩]
23. A. Mandel, cit. pp. 105-107. “Frank is the first Jewish militarist known to us, and he is so without reservation. It is not possible for me here to go further into the relationship between this militarist ideology and Frank’s specifically Jewish hopes, which he maintained at the very heart of his dream of escape from the old borders. Frank’s thought is in no way marked by cosmopolitan categories. Even in his most virulent anti-rabbinic outbursts, he always remained an ambassador for the Jews and thought only of their destiny. “G. Scholem, Le tre vite, cit., p. 154.[↩]
24. “Moses Dobrushka received a Jewish and rabbinic education in his father’s home; at the same time, he was initiated into what the sectarians called the Sabbatarian “secret of faith”, and into the literature of the “faithful”. This double education was customary in many families which, while continuing to practice a facade of orthodox Judaism, had secretly joined the sect. “(G. Scholem, The Three Lives, cit., p. 19). In the course of his eventful life, Dobrushka also took the names Franz Thomas Baron von Schönfeld, when he attended the Habsburg court, and Sigmund Gottlob Junius Frey when he participated in Jacobin activities in Paris. Diederichsen, his lawyer, right-hand man and lover of his younger brother, wrote that he saw in him ‘an authentic image of Satan “father of lies”’. G. Scholem, Le tre vite, cit. p. 80.[↩]

61. Revolutionaries, heretics, magicians, scientists and loan sharks

Gothein, in his positivist book, takes several pages to demonstrate that the Jesuit experiment of the Paraguayan reducciones was based on Thomas Campanella’s City of the Sun¹. There is no doubt that generally the reducciones were not based on a very Christian or religious concept; on the contrary, it is quite evident the Renaissance utopian vision to creating an ‘ideal’ society. In particular, the influence of Campanella, rather than Thomas More², is proven by the fact that the constitutions of those social experiments were designed by two Italian Jesuits, the fathers Maceta and Cataldino.

Campanella (1568-1639), who was twenty years younger than Giordano Bruno, maintained the same magical-hermetic approach based on Marsilio Ficino’s theories³. For this reason, he can be seen as the last representative of the declining Humanism⁴. He joined the Dominican order, but was soon put on trial by the Holy Office⁵ because several of his public statements had been condemned as heretical. After a short stay in prison, he left the order and in 1599 he went back to his native Calabria. There he devoted himself to plotting a revolt against the Spaniards who ruled over the Kingdom of Naples. This must not be mistaken for a movement of redemption against a foreign power, since at that time the sense of nationhood was still completely absent not only in Italy, but also in most of non-Protestant Europe.

In reality, his opposition towards Spain was due to the Kingdom’s role as protector of Catholicism and the still recognized supremacy of the Holy Roman Empire that it represented. Campanella basically wanted to establish an ‘ideal society’ in southern Italy, which he later described in his book The City of the Sun. Pretending to be still a monk, he became the agitator of the Dominicans of Calabria who rushed to his call to arms⁶. The attempted insurrection was obviously a total failure⁷. Arrested and condemned by the civil court for rebellion and by the Holy Office for heresy, he spent 27 years in prison. He avoided torture by pretending to be insane. But was it really fiction?

The Neapolitan prison in which he was imprisoned was probably not very strict; in fact, he was constantly receiving visits from occultist admirers⁸. Among these there were Adami and Wense, two of Andreæ’s friends. Campanella entrusted them with the manuscript of The City of the Sun, which was published in Frankfurt in 1623. With great ease, while in prison, he offered Spain his providential work of transforming the entire Empire into an ideal City of the Sun. The authorities more convinced of his insanity than of the sincerity of his new pro-Hispanicism, eventually released him. He ended his life at the court of Henry IV of Navarre, a Huguenot who later became King of France. To Campanella’s great dismay, Henry converted to Catholicism in order to obtain the French throne.

Another fine example of moral rectitude was Galileo (1564-1642). He was born into an opulent family of the old Florentine aristocracy who had changed its original surname Bonaiuti into the patronymic Galilei a couple of generations earlier⁹. Although the family bank had suffered some setbacks, Galileo inherited a considerable amount of land and villas, including the fortified villa of Arcetri. He enrolled at the University of Pisa, and at the age of 25, mainly thanks to the patronage of Cardinal Del Monte and Ferdinando I de’ Medici, Duke of Tuscany, he was able to teach mathematics without having graduated yet¹⁰. Then, thanks to the same Medici’s recommendations, he was appointed to the chair of mathematics at Padua.

During this period, he became friends with Paolo Sarpi, and he was also able to get into the good graces of some of his powerful allies such as Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga, Cardinal Cornaro and Prince John Frederick of Alsace. He took advantage of the appearance of a supernova to draw up horoscopes based on his astrological knowledge, which he then sold at a high price to the Venetian patricians and the feudal lords on the mainland who were his supporters. In Padua, Galileo began his anti-Aristotelian battle that made him a leading figure of the new science¹¹. Galileo did not particularly distinguish himself in terms of discoveries. He supported the Copernican heliocentrism to which he contributed with a few more observations¹². His celebrity is therefore linked to the fact that he is considered, from a philosophical point of view, the father of the so-called scientific method.

It essentially consists of three stages: careful observation of the natural phenomenon, experimental reproduction of the phenomenon in a controlled environment and the required demonstration through mathematical analysis from which, eventually, a universal physical law can be draw. The first two stages of the Galilean method, however, are by no means something original. Even the magic still used by his contemporaries, was, since the dawn of time, an empirical science based on the observation of nature and the artificial reproduction of its phenomena. As for the third phase, it appears to be a theoretical abstraction. In fact, converting physical space into geometric space represents the farfetched attempt to match a continuous quantity to a discontinuous one¹³. However, demonstrating thus his modern mentality, he disguised his criticism to the Catholic doctrine by claiming to provide the biblical exegesis with a scientifically unassailable new interpretation¹⁴.

Based on the experiments of the alchemists he frequented, Galileo recovered Anaxagoras’ theory of atomism to explain the composition of matter. In this way he demonstrated that if the attributes of an object did not change, this meant that the atomic composition of the substance remained unchanged. This argument, expounded with cautious and convoluted arguments, refuted the scholastic doctrine of Eucharistic transubstantiation. As a consequence, the Eucharist was not really a sacrament, but it became the simple celebration of an event narrated in the Gospels; it was exactly the Lutheran interpretation of the Protestant non-ritual communion¹⁵. The falsification of history for centuries concealed the fact that this was the main charge in the Holy Office’s trial of Galileo; even the most serious academic texts spread the lie that he was condemned because he supported the Copernican theory¹⁶. The trial ended with a conviction. Galileo, consistent with his behaviour, recanted all his theses, pledging as follows:

With a sincere heart and unfeigned faith, I abjure, curse and detest the aforementioned errors and heresies, and in general any and all other errors, heresies and sects contrary to the Holy Church; and I swear that for the future I will never again say or assert in voice or in writing such things as may be suspected of me.¹⁷

However, the Roman church, despite the Counter-Reformation, had already been strongly influenced by the anti-religious thinking supported by the Medici party during the Renaissance. The defendant was a guest at the Villa Medici in Rome throughout the trial. Cardinals, Italian princes and the same Academy of the Lincei, they all moved their pieces and monitored the proceedings’ progress. Evidently, the secret societies of the Italian occultism helped their favourite in every possible way. In fact, the sentence was suspiciously mild: Galileo was sentenced to house arrest for life. He spent a few years n Siena as a guest in the princely Villa Piccolomini, hosted by Archbishop Ascanio himself, before moving to his fortified villa in Arcetri, near Florence, at the centre of his estates¹⁸. The ‘prisoner’ was completely free to receive and host anyone and it was thanks to certain Protestant visitors that he was able to publish his Speeches and Mathematical Demonstrations in Leiden in 1638.

Let us leave for now these shining examples of the righteous conduct and philosophical elevation of shown by the descendants of the Romans and see what was happening at the same time in the barbarian lands of northern Europe.

In England, the Stuart dynasty implemented a religious policy that aimed to bring the Anglican sect, of which the King was the leader, back into the bosom of Catholicism. As it had happened in Bohemia, the English Parliament was de facto occupied by Protestants; and as the Anglican leadership softened towards Rome, the hardcore Anglicans moved increasingly close to the Calvinist extremists, the Puritans. During the reign of the Stuart dynasty, therefore, the rivalry between Crown and Parliament became more and more acute. The Parliament, composed of Puritan bourgeoisie, presumed to take over certain royal prerogatives, limiting the king’s power. An armed revolution broke out when the monarch refused to submit to the demands of the Calvinist merchant class. The leader of the rebels became Oliver Cromwell, a country gentleman¹⁹ with undeniable military skills and who was driven by furious Puritan fanaticism.

During the civil war, his victories over the royal army eventually led to the arrest of King Charles I and, after various events, to the monarch’s beheading. Cromwell then established a parliamentary republic, which was the first attempt to establish a modern democratic state run by the bourgeoisie. But parliamentary democracy also fatally carries the risk of the appearance of its dictatorial variant²⁰. Cromwell closed down the Parliament and assumed all powers. His dictatorship is remembered as one of the most heinous examples of democratic ruthlessness, targeting in particular Catholics and the Irish²¹, who had to suffer bloody repression even in peacetime. Finally, his brutal cruelty was also directed against the Scots, who were Presbyterian Protestants, but who rebelled against the English yoke. At his death, with great relief of the three kingdoms of England, Ireland and Scotland, Charles II Stuart, son of the King beheaded by Cromwell, ascended to the throne in 1660. Actually, the English Parliament remained under the control of Protestant fanatics, leading to a constant friction between Throne and Parliament until the change of dynasty²². It is symptomatic that the current United Kingdom, which claims to be ‘the oldest democracy’ and at the same time the ‘most formal monarchy’, has such subversive origins.

During the Civil War, in 1645, the hermetists, who were returning from the Count Palatine’s Bohemian adventure, began to converge on Oxford. The Elector Palatine’s chaplain John Wilkins and the Heidelberg Israelite Theodor Haak were the organizers of these secret meetings. The group was soon joined by Robert Boyle, who was Galileo’s disciple and a frequent visitor at the villa in Arcetri, and the real organizer of the group of Protestant hermetic scientists and alchemists²³. It was he who started to use the term “Invisible College” for this secret society, with obvious Rosicrucian derivation²⁴. In 1660, once the Cromwellian terror period ended, the “Invisible College” moved to London where it took official form under the name of The Royal Society²⁵. The Hussite pastor Iohannes Amos Comenius also enthusiastically hailed the birth of the new magical-scientific institution, of which he considered himself an inspirer²⁶.

The Society gained fame when Isaac Newton became its president in 1703. He was in that moment at the height of his fame as a scientist. Of course, his occult interests and believes in alchemy were later concealed²⁷.

William of Orange-Nassau had wound up in heavy debts with Dutch moneylenders and bankers to organize the military expedition to take the English throne. Once he became King of the Triple Crown, he unloaded his past debts onto the finances of his new kingdom. Unable to meet this commitment, in return for the debt repayment, he assigned the monopoly of issuing money to a private institution created out of nothing. “A coterie of power headed by William Paterson, lent to the government of King William III, the sum of 1,200,000 pounds-gold at eight per cent interest and, ‘in return’ for the ‘favour’, it was authorized to print notes for the same amount.”²⁸ In 1694, with the foundation of the Bank of England, William of Orange-Nassau was able to finally pay off his debts by discharging them onto public and private borrowing. This system, nowadays predominant all over the world, causes that the money the citizen thinks he is earning and owning is actually his debt to the private bank issuing.

It is certainly no innocent coincidence that Isaac Newton was appointed to the presidency of the English State Mint!

Gian Giuseppe Filippi

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1. Eberhard Gothein, Lo Stato cristiano-sociale dei Gesuiti nel Paraguay, Firenze, La Nuova Italia, 1987, pp. 4-15.[↩]
2. It is probable that later the Jesuits overlapped on the Campanellian model the Protestant Rosicrucian utopias of Bacon in the scientistic context, and of Andreæ on the moralistic-universalist perspective. This occult influence was made possible by the diverse, well provided and numerous libraries that the Society of Jesus gathered in South America. In the middle of the seventeenth century the one In Candelaria alone contained about five thousand volumes, a remarkable amount considering that in North America, in the same period, no library existed.[↩]
3. Tommaso Campanella, Del senso delle cose e della magia, Germana Ernst (ed. by), Torino, Feltrinelli, 2019.[↩]
4. As already pointed out, there was no real transmission among these characters that could resemble a paramparā in the Hindū sense. For example, Campanella never met Bruno, having known him only by reading his books. This confirms the initiatic nothingness of what esotericists call ‘Christian Hermeticism’. Besides Campanella was still attached to outdated conceptions as it is demonstrated by his impermeability to the Rosicrucian innovations and the new scientistic mentality.[↩]
5. One of these trials was held in Padua, with some aggravating charges of crimes against nature. It was during this period that he met and associated with Galileo Galilei, who taught at the University there.[↩]
6. The modern active support of Catholic friars to left-wing subversive and terrorist movements has therefore deep roots. The IRA in Ireland, ETA in Spain, the R.B. in Italy, Sendero Luminoso in Peru, the MIR in Chile, the PLO in Palestine, the Tutsi’s genocide and RFU’s child soldiers in Africa, and the Naxalites in India and many others groups around the world had always some supporter and guerrilla in cassock.[↩]
7. Fra Tommaso Campanella. La sua congiura, i suoi processi e la sua pazzia, Luigi Amabile (ed. by), Locri, Franco Pancallo Editore, 2009, 2 voll.[↩]
8. Also, from prison he corresponded with Paolo Sarpi. With the support of England, this Venetian friar was plotting to help all sorts of Protestants to infiltrate into the Venetian Republic. However, the English soon realized that the Most Serene Republic was not at all interested in converting to Anglicanism: it was simply pursuing a policy of surviving the increasing pressure of the Empire from the north and the Church State from the south. When the danger was over, especially after the failure of Count Palatine’s Bohemian adventure, Venice turned its back on England.[↩]
9. Because of the proletarian myth of Galileo seen as the intended victim, historical falsification records the ‘humble origins’ of Galileo, with a life always on the verge of poverty. In this way, it was created a character that could attract the sympathy of the contemporary ‘intelligentsia’. Actually, his hypothetical indigence, that he repeatedly complained about in his biographies, hided an insatiable thirst for money, a greedy sentiment that he felt throughout his life. On the contrary, but this time with a shameless disparaging purpose, Dante, because he represents the highest example of the traditional medieval man, for some time now, has been described in the school textbooks as a petty bourgeois, a social climber and the son of an usurer! In reality he belonged to the most illustrious patriciate of Roman origin both on his father’s and mother’s lines, and he was very respected by Emperors and Imperial Vicars, and was indeed the finest symbol of western Tradition.[↩]
10. Ludovico Geymonat, Galileo Galilei, Torino, Einaudi, 1965, p. 111.[↩]
11. At that time, the opposition towards Aristotle was in reality an attack onto St Thomas and the Catholic doctrine.[↩]
12. As a matter of fact, nowadays the geocentric and heliocentric theories are both devoid of any real meaning. In the galaxy, where all bodies are in constant motion, determining which is fixed at the centre is an arbitrary choice. However, in order to establish the distances between the planetary bodies, the speed of movement and the corresponding time calculations, one can choose between the systems; in fact, the results will be exactly the same. Prof. Umberto Bartocci, Professor of Algebra and of History of Mathematics at the University of Perugia, has demonstrated abundantly this with mathematical calculations in his Una rotta templare alle origini del mondo moderno, Rome, ed. Andromeda, 2015, pp. 341-363. It is therefore clear that Galileo’s support of the Copernican thesis, only manifested his inner desire to contradict the Bible and Aristotle in an anti-religious key.[↩]
13. It is well known that if a rocket is launched from the earth to a given point on the lunar surface based on a pure mathematical calculation, that rocket, without continuous human manual assistance and correction, will never reach its destination.[↩]
14. This expedient used for four centuries, instead of leading to an impossible combination between theology and science, has made faith completely ancillary to the atheistic rationalism.[↩]
15. All this has been analyzed and demonstrated with irrefutable evidence by Pietro Redondi in his Galileo eretico (Turin, Einaudi, 1983), pp. 173-287.[↩]
16. The “And yet it moves!” episode never happened, but it was a useful tool to inoculate people’s imagination with the idea of his conviction for heliocentrism.[↩]
17. U. Bartocci, cit., p. 335. Those who claim that Galileo’s declaration was extorted under threat of torture are also lying. There is no trace of such threats in the trial, which was conducted in an entirely accommodating manner.[↩]
18. Ludovico Geymonat, cit., pp. 194-197; Mario Biagioli, Galileo Courtier, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1993.[↩]
19. In other words, he was not a nobleman, despite the fact that his followers at the time and present-day admirers have invented a royal ancestry for the Cromwell family. In fact, the forefather, in the early 16th century, was a simple blacksmith and brew master of whom Oliver was descended only by maternal line. John Schofield, The Rise & Fall of Thomas Cromwell: Henry VIII’s Most Faithful Servant, Cheltenham (UK), The History Press, 2011.[↩]
20. In this context, obviously, Dictatorship does not refer to the original Latin meaning of the term, but in the specific to that regime in which a single commoner rules, instead of a parliament of popular extraction that takes the burden of decision for all social components. Dictatorship and democracy are therefore just two different forms of government of the people.[↩]
21. Cromwell, with the sole exception of the Scottish Presbyterians, who were resistant to his dictatorship, united all the various Protestant sects with an anti-Catholic purpose. Without revoking their expulsion, he also invited back to England Jews from Holland in order to form an anti-Testamentary alliance in hatred of the Latin Church. Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews in England, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1985, pp. 300-311; C. Roth, A life of Menasseh ben Israel, Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society, 1945, pp. 207-260.[↩]
22. In 1688 seven members of Parliament offered the crown of England to William of Orange-Nassau. The coup was reinforced by the landing of a Dutch invasion force. James II, abandoned by the army, fled to France. With the new Protestant dynasty, it began a period of close agreement between the Parliament and the Crown.[↩]
23. There is no need to emphasize that, in this context, alchemy does not mean anything truly initiatic or generically traditional, but a real counterfeit. On the other hand, it is well known that alchemists from the 15th century to the 18th century were often individuals who sought to deceive rulers with the fable of the transmutation of base metals into gold.[↩]
24. On the other hand, John Wilkins, in his Mathematicall Magic, quotes Rosicrucian manifestos extensively. During the time when the “Invisible College” used to meet, the Fama and the Confessio by the alchemist Thomas Vaughan were translated and published in English. The success of this translations led the Puritan theologians to call for the universities to replace Aristotelian scholasticism with Hermetic natural philosophy.[↩]
25. Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society, London, Pr. By T.R. for J. Martyn,1667.[↩]
26. Frances A. Yates, L’illuminismo dei Rosacroce, Torino, Einaudi, 1976, pp. 202-227.[↩]
27. William R. Newman, Newton the Alchemist. Science, Enigma, and the Quest for Nature’s “Secret Fire”, Princeton & Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2019.[↩]
28. Pietro Ferrari, La questione monetaria, Cermenate (CO), Ed. Radio Spada, 2018, p. 39.[↩]

60. Missionaryism – II

Luther advocated that salvation¹ could not be achieved through religious duties nor through the individual’ intention or free will. The consequence of this assertion was the abandonment of rituals as instruments of salvation. In fact, Protestant ceremonies are merely secular commemorations of the Gospel events. Nevertheless, he recognised to faith a certain efficacy as an individual’s emotional transport towards God. And so, if God was pleased and he would reward the believer with unexpected blessings. Calvin, on the other hand, denied even this possibility. Salvation for the human being was, therefore, arbitrarily bestowed by the Deity. In one way or another, the salvation of the soul was regulated according to the theory of predestination. This led to specific behavioural consequences and prejudices among those who embraced the various sects of Protestantism. It is worth to mention, for instance, their conviction that the individual’s worldly success, fortune and well-being are the outward sign of divine benevolence; and, equally, the belief that birth into a given status, race, nation and religious confession indicates a clear heavenly choice². This demonstrates the close relationship between capitalist ideologies and Protestantism.

From this perspective, the theory of predestination is based on the fact that God is omniscient and, as such, knows in advance anything that will happen. Every happening is therefore written in destiny ab æterno and develops in time according to His will since the moment He creates the world³. On the contrary, both in Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, predestination is balanced by the recognition of human free will. God knows everything in principle and determines the course of human and universal destinies, but human beings are free to choose one path rather than another, precisely because they benefit from their ignorance⁴. Until the end of the Middle Ages, Christian theology witnessed the struggle of different currents of thought that, while accepting both divine foreknowledge and free will⁵, leaned more towards one or the other of the two visions concerning human destiny. It was, indeed, extremely difficult for any theologian to maintain the right balance between such opposing points of view⁶.

The Protestant theory of predestination had the effect of easing the burden of individual responsibility from any action that was made. Even sin was reduced to a moralistic and behavioural infraction with a social dimension, which was nevertheless foreseen and willed by God. So even the sinner, provided he had faith, participated in the mysterious divine plans of salvation⁷.

The Catholic Counter-Reformation rejected the Protestant thesis as heterodox, emphasising on the fundamental importance of free will in the choice between good and evil. Jesuitism was the religious movement that gave most prominence to free will over predestination, to the point of risking limiting the very concept of divine omniscience. Paradoxically, these two trends, the Protestant and the Jesuit, although opposed to each other, represented the two sides of the same Renaissance individualism.

Jesuitism

Ignatius (Iñigo) López de Oñaz y Loyola (1491-1556) was born into a fallen noble family. After an adolescence spent as a page at the court of Germana de Foix, second wife of Ferdinand the Catholic, he sought military glory as an officer in the war against France (1521) with disappointing results and where he suffered a wound that forced him to limp. During his convalescence Ignatius occupied his time reading the few religious books in his father’s library. It was thus that he decided to abandon worldly honours and devote himself to the pursuit of holiness. After taking a vow of total poverty, he travelled to the Holy Land (1523) with the intention of converting Muslims with his oratory. It was the Franciscans of Jerusalem themselves who sent him back to Spain, fearing the predictable reaction of the Ottoman governor. This failure did not end Ignatius’ missionary aspiration but it rather intensified it. In the meantime, he was creating and experimenting on himself the Spiritual Exercises that would later become the core of Jesuit practice.

In order to give himself a thorough theologically education, he attended the Universities of Salamanca and Paris, where he studied under the Dominicans. In Paris, he began to have followers thanks to his eloquence and example. In this period, he decided to found a new religious order. In 1537 he travelled to Venice in order to once again leave and liberate the tomb of Christ from Islamic occupation. This was no longer a knightly crusade, but a missionary campaign. He never managed to leave for the Holy Land, but during that stay in Venice, Iñigo and his six acolytes were ordained priests by papal order. In 1540 the Rule of the new order, called in military style, the Society (originally ‘Company’) of Jesus, was accepted by Pope Paul III. Ignatius was appointed General of the Society. The Catholic Church, that in the meanwhile was preparing its counter-reformist resurgence, welcomed this new religious order⁸, that was rigorously organized as an army. The Society of Jesus was a sudden success and, in a few years, spread throughout Europe, the Americas and Asia.

The Jesuits periodically performed, under the guidance of a more experienced brother, spiritual exercises that were supererogatory to the classical liturgy of the Latin Church. It is necessary to understand what these new practices consisted of. In order to emphasise the importance of free will for the Counter-Reformation church, for St Ignatius of Loyola the mind of the religious man took a newfound importance. It was exercised in solitude on a daily basis to strengthen the individual will and imagination. The will forced the imagination to mentally reproduce the various episodes narrated in the Gospels. The Jesuit had to concentrate on each episode of Jesus’ life, reconstructing with his fantasy⁹ every detail of the imagined scene. In this way, the individual’s mind, together with the five senses were involved in the episode, as if he were living in the event in person. This mental experience was meant to provoke emotions and feelings that made the sacramental experience more vivid. For example, the climax of this psychological tension was reached by mentally reliving the episode of the Last Supper¹⁰. This provoked such an intensity of emotional feelings in the Jesuit’s soul that the Eucharist received immediately afterwards became a vivid mystical experience.

As one can easily recognise, this technique of voluntary imagination was not at all an initiatic method (sskrt. prakriyā), but a mere psychological discipline (sskrt. vinaya) that in the long run could lead to a permanent mindset modification. In any case, it was a psychological palliative that attempted to replace the absence of initiation and its corresponding method (dīkṣita sādhanā). It is evident that this practice marked a strengthening of individualism and, at the same time, a diffusion of self-inducted mystical experiences based on the five perceptions at the subtle level.

Soon the practice of the spiritual exercises was extended to lay admirers and followers and became an instrument of moral and behavioural correction used by the Counter-Reformation church. This trend pushed the Church of Rome even further away from the medieval contemplative spirit and contributed to the spread of a modern mentality of voluntaristic activism¹¹. The Society of Jesus became the militant arm of the papacy, turning itself in a strict and perfectly efficient organization, based on the absolute obedience to the Superior General.

Loyola, who was already an elderly man, wanted especially to orientate the Jesuits to the function of confessors. Until then, the sacrament of confession consisted in the declaration of the sins committed by the faithful, followed by penance and absolution by the priest. St Ignatius added a new practice: after hearing the sins, the priest devoted some time to the moral upbuilding of the penitent, insisting on personal responsibility and free will, according to the parameters of the spiritual exercises. The religious were advised to offer themselves as confessors to the powerful, Emperors, princes, popes, cardinals, ministers and bankers. In this way the Jesuits could engage in an elitist proselytism, which had an immediate political effect and contributed to a change of mentality guided from above.

This radical modification of the ancient proselytism was enormously successful, making the new religious order a great cross-state power, that went beyond the extension of the Catholic countries. The scientific practical application of free will and the prevalence of voluntaristic initiative in human actions diminished, in theological terms, the importance of God’s omnipotence by reducing the intervention of the divine will. It is therefore understandable how the Jesuit hegemony and the autonomy of its choices soon gave rise to an increasingly secular vision of human freedom. Already a century after the foundation of the Society, the first suspicions circulated in the West that the Jesuits were pursuing power and wealth in a purely worldly sense, far from any spiritual purpose.

With great lucidity, St Ignatius had drawn a plan to control the powerful of the earth through a network of Jesuit confessors, a plan exclusively addressed to the ‘Christian’ West. Instead, he quite differently had established a missionary plan to conquer power ‘from below’ in the other continents.

Jesuitical Missionaryism

The Jesuits behaved in a markedly different way when directing their work of conversion depending on whether they were addressing poorly civilized or highly civilized populations. For this reason, their behaviour in the Americas should be differentiated from that in Asia.

They did not become involved in the missions in South America until 1609. The great empires of Mexico and Peru had already been Christianized by the Dominicans and mostly by the Franciscans. In the great Meshika, Maya and Inca cities there were already splendid cathedrals and convents in Plateresque, Renaissance and Baroque styles. Even the first cases of miracles and visions, such as that of the Virgin of Guadalupe (1531), had already been recorded. The Jesuits, therefore, focused on the Christianization of the Guaraní of Paraguay¹². These were poorly civilized peoples living in tangled rainforests. Spain guaranteed all natives the same rights to those of all the other subjects of the Crown. However, in these wild areas, those who had been entrusted a frontier territory (encomienda) by the Crown, taunted the law and often kept the Guaraní in a state of semi-slavery as a labour force.

In order to limit the power of the encomenderos (commendators), the Crown allowed the Jesuits to establish religious encomiendas, known as reducciones. In the reducciones, the Guaraní cachiques (tribal chiefs) were allowed to administer their property and justice; they retained their ancestral communal system¹³ along with the barter system, and the Guaraní remained the official language. The Jesuits stayed as educators and controllers¹⁴ of these local thirty-three republics that effectively belonged to the Kingdom of Spain. Certainly, the efficient Jesuit organization that overlapped with the tribal one guaranteed a period of peace and prosperity. Many Indios fled from the encomiendas to seek refuge within the reducciones, which were equipped with an indigenous defence system and firearms.

While the Jesuit leadership from a civic point of view brought peace and prosperity¹⁵, their mission of conversion was highly questionable. Generally, they required nothing from the Guaraní but to be baptised. Religious instruction was based on an attempted syncretism between some aspects of Christianity and the ancestral religion. For example, the indio God Pay Zumé was identified with St Thomas Aquinas (called Father Tomé). In addition to these bizarre mixtures made in order to convince the Guaraní that their tribal beliefs and Catholicism were similar forms of a single religion, the Jesuits promoted syncretistic fiestas and processions, displaying rich and creative costumes typical of the indios sacredness¹⁶. They also invented an architectural style for churches that reproduced on a large scale the Guaraní people’s huts with their traditional decorations. What is most surprising is that if on one hand there was disregard towards the sincerity of the conversion of the natives, on the other there was a steady diffusion of Renaissance science technologies. For instance, in each reducción there was a printing press; in many of them there was a production of clocks and, later, of telescopes. All of the above was indeed an obvious interest towards secularism and the Renaissance scientism.

King John III of Portugal wanted to use his colonies in Asia as bases for Jesuit missionary activity. In 1542 Francis Xavier landed in the Portuguese colony of Goa. Francis (Francisco de Jasso Azpilicueta Atondo y Aznares, lord of Javier) was a close friend and the oldest pupil of St Ignatius. Although based in Goa, Francis Xavier wanted to explore South India in order to understand how to make a breach into the Hindū society and convert its people. When he arrived in Kanyā Kumārī, he found fertile ground for missionary work among the pearl fishermen (paravar)¹⁷. The Jesuits in India started their missionary efforts among the low castes and tribals, especially in Tamilnadu and on the Malabar coast. At a certain moment they had the illusion of possibly converting the ruling class: in 1579 Emperor Akbar invited a Jesuit delegation at his court in Fatehpūr Sikrī. In order to ease the conversion of the Muslim ruler, the Society sent to that court, among the delegates, a Persian who had converted to Christianity. But the Great Mughal had a syncretistic vision of religion and, in his utopian conception, he wanted to govern his country with the help of a council of representatives of all religions. For more than thirty years, several Jesuits alternated at Akbar’s court, without succeeding in converting anyone.

In Malabar there was a community of the autocephalous Syriac Church that had taken refuge in India when Syria had been invaded by the Muslims. The Jesuits helped to circulate the legend that this community was founded by the Apostle Thomas¹⁸, and used this rumour as bridgehead for the conversion of India. However, the Syriac Church had adapted to many Hindu caste customs and rituals, and the Jesuits never intervened to stop them. This led to a controversy over the ‘Malabar rites’ and the Society of Jesus was accused of religious syncretism by Franciscans, Dominicans and even by the pontifical see¹⁹.

The situation became more complicated when, in 1606, Roberto de Nobili (1557-1656) arrived in Madurai full of missionary zeal. Being from a noble family, he introduced himself to the Hindūs as a rājā. He soon realised that the saṃnyāsin were the most respected category in India. He therefore decided to disguise himself as a Hindū renunciant, he wore the ochre-coloured garment and carried the cane with a tiny axe, the daṇḍa, and he became a vegetarian²⁰. The false daṇḍi saṃnyāsin quickly learned the Tamiḷ and Sanskrit so well that he soon wrote a false Veda with the sole purpose of diverting the Hindūs from their dharma and making them converge towards Christianity²¹. However, this was not the only example of fraud.

During the same time, a companion of Robert de Nobili, Friar Thomas Stephens, had also written and circulated a Krīsta Purāṇa²² to convince the Indians that their own sacred texts had predicted the birth of Christ. These Jesuits disguised as saṃnyāsin attended rituals in the villages they visited, abstaining, it seems, only from worshipping the idols (mūrtis). For them, the rites of the sanātana dharma were not effective and were only social ceremonies; for this reason, they felt authorized to intervene. From Rome, Cardinal Bellarmino thundered against their participation in ‘pagan’ rites and the consequent syncretism of different faiths. And yet, in view of a few hundred converts from untouchable castes or tribes, Pope Gregory XV ended up blessing such a blatant fraud²³.

Since then, these two strategies of bribing with money and force the conversion of the poorer, uncultured and fragile sections of the population and the use of fraudulently assuming the customs and traditions of the Hindū dharma to be accepted without suspicion in the communities, have become the usual tools of missionaryism even in non-Jesuit settings. Even today, camouflage, lies and blackmailing money-traps are still widely used among the “scheduled” tribes and castes. Moreover, the missionaries circulate the lies that they are the gurus of Christians, that baptism is dīkṣā and that salvation or redemption is mokṣa²⁴. Aided by the former pro-Soviet governments in order to eradicate Hinduism from their own land, the missionaries have today the monopoly of private education and their prestigious colleges, financed by the state, shamefully occupy the most luxurious palaces in the city centres²⁵.

We will add just a few more observations on missionaryism in the Far East. In fact, Francis Xavier went also to Japan, where he was received with oriental hospitality. Conversions to Catholicism did not really happened: the few Japanese who accepted baptism were merchants who saw it as a shortcut to facilitate the trade with the Portuguese in Macao. The Jesuits who went to Japan later disguised themselves as Zen monks, following their experience in India. Within a generation, however, the attitude of the authorities in Japan turned hostile.

In China, Francis Xavier’s attempt to convert failed. It was only at the end of the 16th century that the Society of Jesus resumed its missionary activity with Brother Matteo Ricci. In this case, Ricci chose to fascinate the Chinese with European scientific discoveries, even going so far as teaching the theories of Galileo Galilei, which were condemned by Rome right in that time. In this way, missionaryism also became a way for transmitting the secular scientific mentality to Asia, the outpost of atheistic positivist science. Ricci quickly learned Mandarin language and participated in the Imperial examinations, becoming a Confucian scholar. In this capacity his Jesuits were allowed to participate in Confucian rituals. This sparked a controversy with the papal seat, similar to the one that was going on over the Malabar rituals. The Jesuits argued that the Confucian rituals were simply civil and secular ceremonies, so participating was compatible with the Catholic rituals. However, as in the case of the Malabar rites, the Jesuits’ position was clearly in bad faith, since they were well aware that those rites were used by the Hindus and Chinese for reaching the blessed heavens in the afterlife.

In conclusion, Counter-Reformation missionaryism gave way to a great imposture, comply not only by the Jesuits, but also by the Franciscans and the more recent missionary orders. These were and still are committed to spreading the idea of civil, technological and economic superiority of the West, hiding behind the loving image of Jesus Christ.

With great delay, but with greater political, economic and military support, the countless Protestant sects also entered in competition with Catholic missionaryism²⁶. They played an essential role in the thorough penetration of colonialism, especially British colonialism in India. Nowadays the North American Protestant sects, even more aberrant in their beliefs, more fanatical and irrational, but loaded with dollars, are invading the entire planet, replacing even the Catholic missions, by now meaningless and feeble due to the demise of this religious form.

Maria Chiara de’ Fenzi

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1. Let us recall that in the exotericism of monotheistic religions, salvation consists simply in the posthumous preservation of one’s individuality in the heavens (svarga) and in avoiding the fall into hell (naraka). The means to achieve these destinies are compulsory religious ritual duties, identical for all believers. As far as the Renaissance period is concerned, the posthumous destinies conceived by the Catholic initiatic organisations cannot be taken into account, since they either disappeared or were in a larval state and, therefore, completely absent as protagonists in religious life. Moreover, salvation cannot be confused with the mokṣa of sanātana dharma, as some Indian authors, admirers of Christianity superficially do.[↩]
2. This is what is implied today by the acronym WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestants) that some culturally depressed masses in the northern hemisphere are proud of. There is no understandable pride in being born into a heretical, barbaric environment and, on top of everything, they are not even really white. In fact, they legally define themselves ‘Caucasians’ in order to welcome their friends from the Near East under that denomination.[↩]
3. This is further proof of the closeness of Protestant sects to Judaism. Islam too, in perfect harmony with the Semitic mentality, participates in the same beliefs.[↩]
4. Of course, reconciliation between the two opposing views is impossible because the question is simply ill-posed. Only the doctrine of karma, although considered from an advitīya point of view, is able to give a perfect solution. First, Brahman is neither before nor after time, for he is perfectly eternal and outside that condition. Secondly, the concept of a personal God endowed with anthropomorphic qualities, such as will and knowledge of contingent events, and the fact of being a creator, is all considered a projection of ignorance. Thirdly, the individual is the sole doer (kartṛ) of his destiny as long as he remains involved in the illusion of saṃsāra. In this way, only through the realization of one’s non-dual Self, all the struggles of Christian theology aporias would be nullified.[↩]
5. With the exception of Pelagianism, the Christian current that had completely denied the concepts of divine foreknowledge and predestination. Pelagius (360-421 A.D.) had consequently abolished the dogma of original sin: the individual determined his destiny thanks to his own free will. He was declared heretical by the Council of Carthage (411 A.D.) because by removing the original sin all motivation for the incarnation and redemptive mission of Jesus had no reason to be.[↩]
6. Even St. Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle’s confused thinking on this subject, sometimes seems to give more weight to divine foreknowledge and sometimes to the individual’s free will. The only perfectly balanced position was expounded by Dante Alighieri in Purgatorio (XVI.52-81); however, it is still an initiatic perspective in a theological context.[↩]
7. Fredrik Brosché, Luther on Predestination: The Antinomy and the Unity Between Love and Wrath in Luther’s Concept of God, Charlottesville, University of Virginia, 1978.[↩]
8. The strict ascetic and pauperistic rules that Ignatius had imposed on himself for decades were set aside in order to make the new order powerful and influential. In fact, in a short time his religious order became the richest and most powerful in Christendom. The Jesuits and the Theatines (an order founded by Paul III himself) thus became ‘religious orders’, to differentiate themselves not only from the ancient ‘monastic orders’, but also from the ‘mendicant orders’ of the late Middle Ages, such as the Franciscans and the Dominicans.[↩]
9. As the meditator did not really experienced the Gospel episodes, his scenographic reconstruction depended more on the personal inclinations of his fantasy (sskrt. vikalpa) than on the imagination (sskrt. kalpita). For example, anyone can imagine today what will happen tomorrow in his or her house, a place that he knows in detail: although he cannot foresee the contingencies of future events, the imagined setting will be entirely plausible. On the other hand, even if they knew the events narrated in the Gospels, their setting will be the result not only of their imagination, but of a creative fantasy lacking any link to reality.[↩]
10. René Fülöp-Miller, Il segreto della potenza dei Gesuiti, Milano, A.Mondadori ed., 1931, pp. 21-23; 95-144.[↩]
11. This trait also led to a series of socially useful activities. Also, the mendicant orders had developed a series of initiatives in favour of the poor. The Jesuits, and the other religious orders founded later, specialized the different parts of their organization in the rehabilitation of prostitutes, the vocational education of foundlings, the nursing in hospitals, and the service to prisoners. All this has little to do with religion, as these are areas concerning the social organization of the States: at most, each private individual can support these activities as part of what is called charity. However, in post-Counter-reform Catholicism took place a real mental distortion that considers the organization of socially useful activities as spearhead religiosity.[↩]
12. At the time, this area was much larger than the current state of Paraguay, and included part of Bolivia, the southern part of Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay and the north of Argentina.[↩]
13. Lutheran authors such as Eberhard Gothein (Lo Stato cristiano-sociale dei Gesuiti nel Paraguay, Firenze, la Nuova Italia, 1987) interpreted the typical economic structure of tribal societies in a Marxian collectivist sense.[↩]
14. Generally, there were no more than two or three religious per encomienda, each of which numbered between five and fifteen thousand Indios. In total, the number of Guarani in the encomiendas was slightly more than one hundred and fifty thousand.[↩]
15. In Spain, with the change of dynasty and the arrival of the Bourbons, an anti-religious sentiment, distinctive of the Enlightenment period, began to emerge. In fact, Charles III expelled the Society from his domains. In just a few years the work of the Jesuits vanished. In Paraguay, the reducciones were invaded and annexed to the encomiendas run by the new South American bourgeoisie who was beyond the control of Madrid. The Guaraní people took refuge in the forests where they quickly went back to a primitive state that still persists today. Thanks to the Enlightenment and the bourgeois mentality, South America entered into the state of chaos in which it still is today. Following the echoes of the French Revolution, the Hispanics of South America discovered nationalism and gradually broke away from the mother country, with the results that are before everyone’s eyes nowadays.[↩]
16. Leopoldo Lugones, El Imperio Jesuitico, Buenos Aires, Hyspamérica Ed. Argentina, 1985, pp. 135-138.[↩]
17. The conversions were helped by money donations that the Jesuits used to ingratiate themselves with the most economically depressed castes. Giuseppe Massei, Vita di S. Francesco Saverio della compagnia di Gesù apostolo dell’Indie, Venice, ed. Francesco Andreola, 1818, p. 131.[↩]
18. Actually, all the oldest sources assigned the evangelisation of the Parthians to St Thomas. The first to mention him and alleged mission to India were Rufinus and St Jerome, but this mission clearly took place in Abyssinia. This confusion between India and Abyssinia continued until the Renaissance. Rosa Conte, “L’evangelizzazione dell’India: quale India?”, Napoli, Orientalia Parthenopea III, 2006, pp. 27-51.[↩]
19. As a matter of fact, the successive popes had different opinions depending if the information received was for or against the ‘Malabar rites’. The final condemnation was declared in 1744, on the eve of the suppression of the Jesuit order. William V. Bangert, Storia della Compagnia di Gesù, Marietti, Genova, 1990.[↩]
20. Not being fully aware of the caste rules, he also wore the sacred thread (yajñopavīta) of the kṣatriya caste, and on the knot he hung a crucifix![↩]
21. Pierre Dahmen, Robert de Nobili S.J.: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Missionsmethode und der Indologie, Münster, Aschendorff, 1924. Later, in order to remove any trace of this blatant mystification, the Jesuits in India made disappear every copy of the false Veda; they thus declared that instead it was a slander by the Hindūs to hinder their missionary work. In Appendix A, titled “Robert de Nobili, The Jesuit Missionary”, of Brahm Datt Bharti’s book, Max Muller: A Lifelong Masquerade, New Delhi, Erabooks, 1992, pp. 222-244, it can be found the entire documentation that proves the dishonest misrepresentation made by the Jesuits to cover up Nobili’s shameful fraud.[↩]
22. Joseph L. Saldanh (ed. by), The Christian Puranna, of Father Thomas Stephens, Mangalore, Bolar, 1907.[↩]
23. William V. Bangert, cit.[↩]
24. Since neither Catholicism nor Protestantism have any dīkṣā, they can have neither guru nor mokṣa![↩]
25. Like Christian schools, Islamic madāris also benefit from abundant state funding, which is therefore mainly paid for by the taxes of the Hindū majority. On the contrary, the government considers the secular state school, which even in India certainly does not represent excellence, to be the educational institution for Hindū students. Therefore, schools for Hindūs not only do not receive subsidies, they simply do not exist.[↩]
26. Richard D. N. Dickinson, The Christian College in Developing India, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1971.[↩]

59. Missionaryism – I

Before tackling this third-rail subject, it is necessary to give an explanation on the correct use of some terms. Nowadays, in all Western languages, the word ‘proselytism’, of Greek origin, has a strong negative meaning: an effort of propagandistic zeal that aims to acquire new followers by subtle persuasion, cunning and deception. The purpose of ‘proselytism’, according to this interpretation of the term, is to increase the number of ‘proselytes’, in order to put together large number of people which, with its numerical weight, can disrupt or overturn not only a religious situation, but also a political, a social, an economic and an ethnic one. Proselytism is therefore subtly linked to the idea of sedition or even subversion¹. In reality, at least originally, the genuine meaning of the term ‘proselytism’ corresponded to something perfectly legitimate and even beneficial. The word derives from ‘proselyte’ (Gr.: προσήλυτος, read prosélütos), which means ‘newcomer’, completely similar to the meaning of ‘neophyte’ (new sprout). Proselytism, therefore, means to divulge a thought in a way that allows others to assess its rightness and, eventually, approve and share it. Since it is usually applied to the sphere of Christianity, let us see how proselytism is described in the Gospels and in what sense it was indicated as an apostolic activity:

Do not go the way of the Gentiles, nor enter any city of the Samaritans: but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel². And as you go, preach, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons: freely you have received, freely give. Do not put in your purses either gold or silver, or copper, or money for the journey, or two garments or two coats or shoes or sticks; for he who works deserves to earn his food³. And in whatsoever city or town you shall enter, ask who is worthy in it, and stay there until ye depart. And when ye enter a house, salute it. And if the house is worthy, let your peace be upon it; but if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you. And whoever does not greet you and listen to your words, when you leave his house or town, shake off the dust of your feet⁴. (Gospel of St. Matthew, X.5-14)

As can be seen, proselytism was then not only licit, but beneficial⁵. In fact, the proselyte had to be able to comply to the new message in complete freedom⁶. This has happened in all traditions. In India, for example, through its paṇḍitas, gurus and ācāryas, the different doctrines were publicly expounded on the occasion of pilgrimages (yatra), in public confrontations between exponents of different currents (ānsīkṣikīm), or at royal courts (rājādhiṣṭhānam). This is how sanātana dharma and the various currents of Buddhism spread in Southeast Asia and the Far East respectively.

The word ‘proselytism’ gradually took a negative connotation; it finally degenerated into missionaryism following the Protestant invention of propaganda. This was later intensified by the mass conviction typical of Marxism, which divides humanity into oppressors and oppressed by appealing to the most basic feelings of envy and revenge. Finally, with the birth of psychiatry we witness the rise of new techniques of collective suggestion and brainwashing practices by the means of technological tools.

Another term has been used to refer to the same practice of proselytism when it is regarded as its virtuous aspect, its good side, its positive reflection: missionaryism. The word derives from the Latin mittere, to send, and was originally related to the idea of an ambassadorship. However, in the praxis, ‘missionary’ has taken a very different meaning. The missionary is sent by a Christian religious organisation⁷ not with the purpose of expounding the truth, but of convincing people to convert, using both legal and illicit means. The aim is to push people to abandon with shame their tradition of origin, defined as superstitious and primitive, leading to inferiority complexes. ‘Mission’, far from meaning a temporary representative assignment, indicates a form of permanent and destabilizing infiltration in the core of the civilizations they targeted. Yet, in the popular imagination, the missionary is commonly believed to be a person who generously sacrifices himself for the spiritual, moral, economic and social well-being of the less fortunate populations. These latter are unable to enjoy such welfare and prosperity because of their ‘primitive religion’ or ‘pagan superstition’⁸. Of course, the individual missionary can be an altruistic person; but ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’, says popular wisdom. In fact, he is a cog in the wheel of a perverse mechanism created for the planetary expansion of Christianity. Or, more precisely, of the atheist civilization, the cancer that has metastasized the entire globe, which uses Christianity as a Trojan horse.

Proselytism towards the ‘worthy’ people was the traditional form of Christian preaching from the origins upto the Middle Ages⁹. It consisted in exposing to sovereigns and ruling classes the novelty of the Christian thought persuading them with the elevation of thought, the nobility of feeling and the example of an irreproachable, just and mild conduct. The conversion of the sovereign or the oligarchy meant the acceptance of the new religion also by the subjects¹⁰, over a more or less long period of time.

Alongside this proselytising of the elites¹¹, early Christianity also devoted itself to convincing the plebs. By Preaching humility, demanding ‘social justice’ and the rejection of the ancient pagan religion, this devious form of proselytism insinuated itself into the Roman civil society, thus vilifying the ancient religion and undermining the authority of the state. This form of proselytism from below, subversive towards the Imperial order, can be acknowledge as origin of missionaryism as it appeared from the Renaissance onwards, that then spread everywhere through colonialism. This revolutionary activity de facto, which denied the divine right of Roman institutions and, first and foremost, of the Emperor, was the main cause of the persecutions that the Roman state unleashed against Christians¹².

Proselytism through ‘worthy persons’ was successful: by decision of the monarchs, it in fact occurred the Christianisation of the Kingdom of Edessa (201 AD), Kingdom of Armenia (301), Kingdom of Georgia (326) and the Ethiopian Empire (330). On the contrary, the imposition of Christianity¹³ as the official religion of the Roman Empire cannot be counted among those free conversions of a sovereign. In reality it was the result of an exhausting infiltration into the ganglia of the state by disloyal converts who, indeed, acted to destroy it from within. This weakened the Empire and left it defenceless against the threat of barbarian invasions.

On the contrary, before the fall of the Empire for the barbarian peoples, such as the Germans and Celts of the islands (Irish and Scottish), and later in the Middle Ages among the Angles and Saxons, Hungarians and Slavs, conversion to Christianity was always determined by the sovereign or the oligarchy own choices. The last well-known episode of this form of ‘proselytism from above’ was the vain attempt of St. Francis of Assisi, in 1219, to convert Sultan Malik al-Kamil and with him the whole of Egypt¹⁴.

At the end of the Middle Ages, Catholic proselytism was in fact exercised by the mendicant orders, the Franciscans and Dominicans. Therefore in 1245 Pope Innocent IV sent the Franciscan Giovanni da Pian del Carpine to Karakoram, the capital of the Mongols, to invite Güyük Khan, successor of Genghis Khan, to convert together with his people¹⁵. The Khan declined the request, but treated the friar with respect and allowed him to leave with gifts for the pope. In 1294 another Franciscan, John of Montecorvino, established himself as the first archbishop in Peking, at the Court of Emperor Timur, with permission to preach. Again, the Mongol Emperor of China refused to convert with his subjects. However, one of his vassals, the Prince of Tenduk, was baptised with the name George and all his people followed his example¹⁶.

It will be useful to dwell a little on the preaching of Catholicism in the Americas, especially for the benefit of our Indian readers. In fact, all they know on this subject comes exclusively from the colossal falsification of history carried out by the Protestants. This historical falsification is still disingenuously active and through the means of colonization, and the imposed British educational system, it has conditioned the ideas that the Indian people have about Catholicism in the Americas. The fact that the American “Indians” were colonized by Spain and Portugal, as India was by Britain, triggers in our Indian readers a misguided sense of ‘third-world’ solidarity. Finally, forty years of political and cultural subordination to the Soviet Union by Congress India, has instilled, sometimes even in traditional Hindū circles, the miserable ideology that sees all humanity divided into oppressors and oppressed. Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Communist International is globally imposing its new dictatorship through ecologism, globalism and the preaching of ‘cross-breeding’ and it continues to spread the poisons of the ‘liberation theology’¹⁷, of the ‘ransom’ of minorities, with the purpose of destroying all religious or dharmic traditions. The well-intentioned Indian reader should indeed ponder carefully on what follows.

In 1492, after concluding the reconquest of the territories occupied by the Moslems, the Kingdom of Spain had to face a new domestic danger. For several decades a large number of the Jew population took advantage of the option to simulating permitted by the Talmud, and pretended to convert to Catholicism. Since the Jews had been entrusted with the management of usury and banking, they were usually quite wealthy. By converting, they suddenly had access to the highest offices to both kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, to the Church hierarchy and to the most prestigious families of the aristocracy. They de facto secretly continued to practise their religion, lobbying on behalf of their community, benefiting from their twofold condition. This situation led to numerous popular uprisings against these new privileged people.

For this reason, the Catholic Monarchs issued an ultimatum to the Jews of Spain. Either they sincerely converted, and voluntarily submitted themselves to checks by the authorities, or they would be expelled from the crown territories. Of the approximately 180,000 Jews, three quarters decided to leave and they sold their property and took their movable goods with them. About 50,000 of them preferred to convert and accept to be checked on, avoiding in this way to sell off their property to the unfailing looters who were taking advantage of situation¹⁸. It is certain that very few of them actually converted and the others continued to rely on the art of simulation¹⁹. There is a whole literature on the various tricks and expedients they used to deceive the controls.

The same problem affected the assimilation of the Spanish subjects of Islamic faith²⁰. The Muslims who remained under the new rulers were mostly of Iberian-Latin and Visigoth origin, Christians who had been forced to convert to Islam, the so-called mulades. They were forced to reconvert to Catholicism by a decree issued at the same time as the expulsion of the Jews. With a behaviour similar to that of the Jews, they simulated reconversion by accepting to be baptised. However, they remained faithful to Islam in private by following the principle of taqiyyah, i.e., the simulation of their inner beliefs. These crypto-Muslims, known as moriscos, adopted the opposite behaviour of the marranos: they preferred to isolate in rural communities to avoid royal control, but they were always ready to sabotage, to banditry, to rebel²¹ and to act as a bridgehead for North African and Turkish pirates and slave hunters. Soon the monarchy, the church and the Christian subjects learned to distrust both the crypto-Jewish and crypto-Muslim false converts²².

All the above must be well understood in order to have a balanced idea of the ways in which Catholicism expanded in Ibero-America, especially in the conquest of the two great empires: the Meshika-Azteco of Mexico and the Inca in South America. In both cases the tendency of the conquistadors was to convert the respective emperors to the Christian religion. If later there was violence against them, it was due to the initially inclined attitude of the rulers towards conversion. Both Moctezuma II for the Meshika and Atahualpa Inca, after an initial acceptance, wanted to backtrack. This convinced the Spaniards that the Indios emperors were behaving hypocritically, as previously done by the marranos and moriscos in Spain. Hernán Cortés had Moctezuma arrested, who was later killed by an Aztec arrow.

Also, Francisco Pizarro in Peru arrested Atahualpa and sentenced him to death for some gestures considered sacrilegious by the Catholic religion. However, even the defenders of the oppressed American Indians, easily manipulated by Protestant propaganda, cannot understand how a few hundred Spaniards were able to overcome the hundreds of thousands of soldiers of the Meshika or Inca armies. As for Mexico, the Aztec Empire had subjugated many kingdoms of other ancient civilizations and established a regime of absolute terror throughout Central America. Annually, in Mexico City alone, more than twenty thousand human victims, chosen from the enslaved peoples²³, were sacrificed. Their flesh was then distributed to the Meshika and eaten²⁴. Many are surprised by the easy victory over the Aztecs of only seven hundred Spaniards, including 13 arquebusiers and 16 horsemen²⁵. But they deliberately forget that more than a hundred thousand warriors of the subjected and victimized local populations had joined them in a real war of liberation from the nightmare of human sacrifice and cannibalism²⁶.

The same applies to Francisco Pizarro’s adventure in Peru, where he conquered the newly formed Inca Empire with only two hundred and fifty infantrymen and twenty cavalrymen. He also found peoples, newly subjugated by the Incas, who welcomed the Spaniards as liberators. These populations provided tens of thousands of warriors to Pizarro’s weak army. Besides Emperor Atahualpa was already engaged in a civil war against his brother Huáscar, fact that greatly contributed to the collapse of the Andean empire²⁷. These events were not followed by any mass genocide as the ‘Leyenda negra’ claims, on the contrary: just as Cortés had married a daughter of the Meshika emperor, Isabel de Moctezuma, thus starting the Cortés Moctezuma dynasty, so Francisco Pizarro wedded the Inca princess Inés Huaylas, Atahualpa’s sister. In this way began the family of the Marquises Pizarro Yupanqui²⁸. The Inca Garcilaso Count de la Vega, a famous Spanish historian and aristocrat, was also a grandson of the second-last Inca Emperor Huayna Cápac. Viscount Juan Cano Moctezuma, was the son of Juan Cano de Saavedra and Isabel of Moctezuma. He married the Duchess Elvira of Toledo, who belonged to the second noblest family of the Spanish Grandes. Thus, began the lineage of the Dukes of Toledo Moctezuma²⁹.

If the historian is in good faith and has the courage to contradict the lies of the Anglo-Saxon historiography, he will discover that this was not the exception, but the rule at every social level throughout the Kingdom of Spain³⁰. If we analyze the current situation of the ethnic composition of Mexico as an example, 60% are Mestizos, 25% Indios, 10% descendants of Spaniards and 5% descendants of other European populations. In Peru the percentages are as follows: 45% Indios, 35% Mestizos, 8% descendants of Spaniards, 7% descendants of other European populations, 3% Chinese, Mulattos, Zambos, Africans, etc.

In the United States, the percentages are as follows: Whites are 80%, Blacks 12.3%, population from Asia 3.9%, from Hawaiian colony 3% and Amerindians 0.8%³¹. Our friends from India who are reading this article should reflect on these figures and correct the false information they have received from their ancient colonizers.

Franciscans and Dominicans had a decisive role throughout the era of the Spanish conquest of Central and South America and the beginning of Catholic proselytism. In particular, there were generous figures, such as Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas³², who devoted himself to prevent the sadly inevitable abuses of power and injustices that were often perpetrated due to the distance of the colonies from the Court of Madrid. In fact, the Spanish Court usually promptly punished whoever committed abuses³³. It is important to stress that the native inhabitants had full Spanish citizenship with all the rights thereto and were guaranteed to retain the private property they owned before the conquest.

Instead, with the Counter-Reformation appeared a new kind of missionaryism, a more degenerate form of conversion of the popular masses that had already been used to undermine the Roman Empire from within³⁴.

Maria Chiara de’ Fenzi

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1. For this reason, after the Counter-Reformation, Catholics preferred to call their preaching ‘apostolate’, assigning to Protestants the now derogatory term of ‘proselytism’. Giovanni Perrone, L’apostolato cattolico e il proselitismo protestante, Genova, D.G. Roddi ed., 1862.[↩]
2. Jesus’ instruction to the apostles indicated that the preaching was intended exclusively for the Jews of the diaspora, and among them the worthy persons, i.e., the qualified religious leaders and the heads of the communities. It was with the reformation of St Paul that preaching was also extended to the Gentiles. In this case, ‘worthy’ meant a person of some dignity. It was not for nothing that St Paul, a Roman citizen, addressed the court and senatorial families in Rome. However, the method of preaching remained unchanged: those who did not recognise the truth of the Gospel message were no longer to be considered ‘worthy’.[↩]
3. That is, those who accepted the Gospel would provide for the apostles.[↩]
4. The Jews considered that only their homeland was consecrated land. Therefore, on returning from a journey to the land of the Gentiles, they would shake the dust of the profane land from their shoes. This custom was inherited by the Christians, but they did not interpret it in the limited sense of religious legalism. They considered impure the dust of the soil of those who, having heard the truth, rejected it.[↩]
5. It must be remembered that in the 1st-2nd centuries AD the preaching of Christianity also included the divine mysteries of initiation and not merely the exposition of general doctrine within the reach of all. It was thanks to this proselytising work that the German, Scandinavian, Anglo-Saxon and Celtic peoples of the islands (Irish and Scottish) became Latinised and emerged from their original barbarism for some centuries.[↩]
6. This excluded any proselytism leading to forced conversion at sword point, as in other Semitic religious forms. It should not be forgotten, however, that early Christianity was an initiatic doctrine and practice; not even in the initiatic paths of other monotheisms forced adherence is conceivable.[↩]
7. In this, Catholicism can claim a sad primacy over the Protestant ‘confessions’. These arrived later, and were weakened by the fragmentation among their different sects and the mutual ‘liberal’ competition, although since then they have made up for the lost ground. It should be pointed out, however, that the countless Protestant factions are not religions at all, since they lack any kind of priestly, let alone initiatic, transmission; consequently, they are devoid of rituals that allow the faithful to gain the heavens, and everything is reduced to a worldly moral behaviour. The same can be said of Catholicism, which resoundingly committed suicide in the course of the twentieth century, in such a manner that it no longer retains even the semblance of a religion. It is interesting to stress that the Eastern autocephalous, Orthodox, Coptic, Oriental Assyrian churches, etc., which have maintained a traditional Christian structure and which still preserve an initiatic legacy, are, not by chance, devoid of the missionary anomaly.[↩]
8. The term ‘religion’ is used here to align all the traditional forms with the parameters of the Christian religion, in order to have at least some common ground. On the other hand, ‘culture’ means the set of arts, sciences, social structures, rules of behaviour etc., typical of non-advanced ethnic groupings. In fact, from this perspective, only Christianity is endowed with civilization. It is no coincidence that the word ‘civilization’ acquired a modern sense during the Enlightenment to define and make a distinction between what it is ‘civil’ and it is not ‘religious’. The truth is exactly the opposite. In fact, Christianity, as well as its Semitic congeners Judaism and Islam, is a religion, and as such is quite different from the concepts of dharma or the Far Eastern tsung chiao (宗教). In these two different Eastern forms, the ritualistic intention is directed towards the well-being of the entire cosmic order, including insentient objects (jaḍa) and sentient beings, plants, animals, subtle beings and Gods. As for Christianity, it has developed a civilization that is only partially religious, whereas there is no distinction between dharma, cosmic order and civilization. Let us leave the term ‘culture’ out of this discussion, whether it is meant in the derogatory ideological sense used in cultural anthropology or in the sense of secular scholastic and self-taught erudition.[↩]
9. In the early Middle Ages, this proselytising mission was carried out by Culdean monks also on the initiatic level. Nuccio D’Anna, Il cristianesimo celtico. I pellegrini della luce, Alessandria, Ed. dell’Orso, 2010.[↩]
10. In the same way, the sanātana dharma, not at all inclined to proselytism, spread peacefully in South Asia, Indochina and Malay Archipelago, already in the centuries before the Vulgar Era. This is demonstrated by the great number of rājās and mahārājās present in that vast area before the Islamic invasion, that were then dethroned for good by British and Dutch colonialism. In Laos, on the other hand, the monarchy was suppressed by the armed communist revolution at the service of the Soviet colonialism. Only the Hindu-Buddhist monarchies of Cambodia and Thailand remain. For its part, the Bauddha Dharma, which has a strong proselytising component, converted the rulers of Tibet and the great empires of the Far East. Of these, only the Japanese Empire survives, the other empires having been subverted by Soviet and Chinese-Communist colonialism.[↩]
11. See in this respect St Paul’s preaching at the Areopagus. Originally, this assembly represented the senate of the eupatrids, the ancient nobles. Despite the encroachment of the merchant classes and the abrogation of the monarchy due to the progressive democratization, it always remained the high court controlled by the aristocrats.[↩]
12. The same insubordination to Imperial authority was also adopted by the Mosaic Jews, whom the Romans did not distinguish from the Christians during the persecutions. Exclusivism is congenital in Semitic religions: it is a known fact that after the recognition of Christianity as the State official religion by Emperor Theodosius (380), the Christians, having come to power, sought revenge. From then on, the followers of the ancient tradition, contemptuously defined as ‘pagan’ (rustic, uncouth, peasant) were subject to continuous persecution. In fact, from the beginning of the Middle Ages, paganism disappeared completely as religion together with its rituals and mythology, leaving behind only the remnants of magical or superstitious practices. However, many initiatic components survived within the Christian initiations to knighthood or trade.[↩]
13. In ancient times the conversion to Roman Christianity, Greek Christianity, or the less orthodox forms of Arianism, Monophysism or Nestorianism made little difference. The distinctions began and became more dogmatic only after the Councils of Nicaea (325), Ephesus (431), Chalcedon (451) and the Second Council of Constantinople (553).[↩]
14. Certainly, the sultan welcomed the poor man as a faqīr, a Christian Sufi. The friar’s arguments did not convince Malik al-Kamil, who was a learned initiate into Sufism and well versed in Ibn ‘Arabi writings. The fact that the sultan let St. Francis go freely, despite the fact that the fifth crusade was in progress, was only a demonstration of magnanimity. The situation was instead quite different ten years later when Malik al-Kamil and Frederick II met as equals and, apart from the political contingency, the two sovereigns discussed spiritual matters with mutual satisfaction. On the contrary such convergence was not repeated in the epistolary dialogue with the Almohad king ‘Abd al-Wahid ar-Rashid. Troubled by the exposition of Frederick’s doctrine on the eternity of the world, the sultan consulted the controversial Andalusian Sufi Ibn Sa’bin al-Mursi, who responded with an irritatingly arrogant haughtiness on the superiority of the creationist conception. The Emperor was not at all satisfied with this exchange of letters. Karla Mallette, the Kingdom of Sicily, 1100-1250; A Literary History, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005, pp. 58-63.[↩]
15. Secondly, the Pope also invited the Grand Khan to form an alliance against the Islamic threat.[↩]
16. AA.VV., I francescani e la Cina. 800 anni di storia, Assisi, Ed. Porziuncola, 2001.[↩]
17. We should remember that this repulsive ideology has not only instigated terrorism against the “masters” in almost all the republics of Central and South America, but also in Africa and Asia. Even the Naxalite problem in India is the natural fruit of this process of putrefaction of Catholicism, that spreads with the support of Maoism.[↩]
18. Actually, before the end of the 15th century, more than a third of those who left returned to the Spanish dominions, since, with the exception of Holland, Venice and the Ottoman Empire, Jews were allow to settle down anywhere else in Europe.[↩]
19. The few sincere converts were called conversos, while those who tried to deceitfully blend in among the Catholics were called marranos.[↩]
20. When Granada surrendered to the Catholic Monarchs, there were no Jews left in the territory, while the Christian Mozarabes, i.e., subjects of the Muslim kingdom, were reduced to a negligible number, demonstrating the mystification of the myth of a supposedly Edenic coexistence of the three religions in el-Andalus. The moros, of Arab and Berber origin, who preferred to follow their King Boabdil into African exile, left the kingdom of Granada almost uninhabited, which had to be repopulated by migrations of Spaniards from Galicia and Castile. Serafin Fanjul, Al-Andalus. L’invention d’un mythe, Paris, Éd. L’Artilleur, 2017.[↩]
21. The bloody rebellion of the crypto-Muslims of Alpujarra in 1568 also resulted in the expulsion of the moriscos from Spain in 1609. These poor people, who then emigrated to the Maghreb and Algeria, instead of being welcomed, were exterminated by their Arab, Cabile and Berber brethren, who from centuries were engaged in piracy and banditry. Serafin Fanjul, cit.[↩]
22. The concealment of one’s religion was seen as repugnant by Catholics who on the contrary considered virtuous the refusal to reject their own faith, even to the point of martyrdom. This reprehensible sin of cowardice is personified in the Gospels by St. Peter who denied Christ three times in the same night. Devin J. Stewart, Baber Johansen, Amy Singer, Law and Society in Islam, Princeton, Markus Wiener Publishers, 1996.[↩]
23. Pietro Scarduelli, Gli Aztechi e il sacrificio umano, Torino, Loesher, 1980. Actually, the Incas rarely sacrificed human victims compared to the Aztecs. They sacrificed slaves to honour the funerals of the imperial house princes or, in case of natural disasters, to the goddess of the earth, Pachamama. Alfred Métraux, Gli Inca, Torino, Einaudi ed., 1998.[↩]
24. Obviously, the stupidity of the defenders of the “oppressed” has no moral scruples. To justify the practice of cannibalism, the American anthropologist Michael Harner went so far as to claim that the Indians had a diet poor in proteins and largely based on maize, and consequently rich in carbohydrates, and for this reason they had to resort to human sacrifice (‘The Ecological Basis for Aztec Sacrifice’, American Ethnologist, Vol. 4, No. 1, Human Ecology (Feb., 1977), pp. 117-135). Numerous ecological scientists have enthusiastically embraced this explanation in order to fatally condemn Spanish colonialism. But then again, what can one expect from those who support Malthusian abortion and euthanasia to contain the ‘alarming’ population growth in emerging countries? In the end, Bolshevism and National-socialism have indeed succeeded![↩]
25. Mario Lopez Martinez, Conquistadores Extremeños, Leon, Ed. Lancia, 2007.[↩]
26. It is therefore easy to understand why these populations quickly abandoned those brutal cults to embrace Catholicism.[↩]
27. John Hemming, La fine degli Incas, Milano, B.U. Rizzoli, 1992.[↩]
28. José Maria Ochoa, Francisco Pizarro, Montijo, Barrantes Cervantes Ed.s, 2009; Manuel Ballestreros, Francisco Pizarro, Madrid, Ed. Quorum, 1987.[↩]
29. How many British aristocrats, bourgeois and proletarians, and how many North-American proletarians have mixed with the native Americans since the landing of the ‘Pilgrim Fathers’?[↩]
30. Even Baron Alexander von Humboldt, a Protestant and fanatical advocate of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority, who visited South America at the service of the US intelligence from 1799 to 1804, reluctantly declared: ‘Because of a prejudice widely common in Europe, there is the belief that very few copper-coloured natives have survived in America. In New Spain, the number of natives amounts to two million, counting only those who have no intermingling with European blood. And what is still more consoling, that far from being extinct, the native population has increased considerably during the last fifty years, as is shown by the records of capitation and tribute.” Laura Dassow Walls, The passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the shaping of America, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2009, p. 60.[↩]
31. In Anglo-Saxon America the main holiday is ‘Thanksgiving’. It is celebrated on the last Thursday in November and it commemorates a precise event. The Calvinist-Puritan ‘Pilgrim Fathers’, fled from England in the spring of 1621, and they brought with them seeds to be planted in their new homeland across the Atlantic. However, the harvest was disastrous and they risked starvation during the approaching winter. A large delegation of local natives arrived at the desperate immigrants’ camp and brought them enough corn, turkeys, fruit and game to survive through the winter. Tables were set and natives and Puritans celebrated together this new brotherhood of the New World. ‘Thanksgiving’ was established as a token of gratitude for the help received. ‘Thanksgiving’ was instead historically carried out with the scientific extermination of the original inhabitants of North America. Arcangelo Mafrici, Genocidio degli Indiani d’America, Roma,Gangemi ed. 2017; Gianfranco Peroncini, Al Dio degli inglesi non credere mai. Storia del genocidio degl’Indiani d’America 1492-1972, Sesto S. Giovanni, Oaks ed., 2017.[↩]
32. Obviously, the reports of abuse by Las Casas, became the favorite source of the English and Dutch Protestant Anti-Catholic propaganda. It is also true that this Franciscan accepted slavery for those deported from Africa. But it must be understood that the mentality of the time allowed for these contradictions. Julián Juderías, La leyenda negra: estudios del concepto de España en el extranjero, Valladolid, Madrid, Ed. La Esfera de los Libros, 2014; William S. Maltby, La leyenda negra en Inglaterra. Desarollo del sentimiento antihispánico 1558-1660, Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1982.It should be added though that the majority of slave traders from the 16th to the 19th century were English and Portuguese, who went to the coasts of the Gulf of Guinea to buy black slaves from Arab merchants and took them to America.[↩]
33. Christopher Columbus himself went to prison for enslaving some indigenous people. –Instead, later, the first president of the new-born United States (based on human principles: equality, freedom and the pursuit of happiness), George Washington, lived peacefully on his farm on the Potomac river surrounded by his black slaves.- Moreover, Don Pedro de Heredia, Governor of New Andalusia, was condemned and imprisoned together with his brother. The Viceroy of New Granada, Don José Manuel Soliais Folch de Cardona, who had become a cloistered monk at the end of his term of office, was condemned, pulled out of convent and sent to prison. (Maria Elvira Roca Barea, Imperiofobia y leyenda negra, Madrid, Siruela, 2016, pp. 306-307).[↩]
34. Considered without prejudice, the Spanish conquest was a true epic. Its protagonists were the last examples in the West of kṣatriya’s behaviour, comparable to that of medieval chivalric sagas. Lewis Hanke, La lucha española por la justicia de America, Madrid, Grech, 1987. It is fatal that, in the effeminate, coward and pacifist atmosphere of the contemporary world, the conquistadores are object of hatred and condemnation. Philip Wayne Powell, El árbol del odio, Madrid, Porrua, 1972.[↩]

58. The Catholic Reaction. The Counter-reformation

In contemporary history books the events we have described in the previous chapters are narrated with shameless factiousness. In fact, the Protestant Reformation is shown as an initiative for the palingenesis of a freer and fairer Europe, that soon after had been attacked by the ruthless obscurantist reaction of the inquisitorial Catholic church backed, of course, by the expansionist ambitions of the house of Habsburg. But all this is exactly the opposite of the truth. It was actually the heresy that shook Christendom and the Holy Roman Empire by hunting down Catholics and by the use of violence of the soldiers under the orders of the rebellious German princes. The subversives pretended to be the victims and those who maintained the order were portrayed as repressors¹.

The Church of Rome tried to talk in any possible way to the fanatics, and in the same manner the Empire showed patience and forbearance towards the rebels. This tolerant behaviour was a mistake and allowed heresy and nationalism to stabilize. The excommunication of Luther came only in 1521, four years after the publication of his theses². As already described, Emperor Charles V, in order not to dishonour the safe-conduct he had granted him, allowed Martin Luther to slip away and seek the protection of the rebellious princes. Immediately afterwards began the aggression of the princes’ armies towards convents, monasteries, cathedrals, and the city of Trier, feud of the Electoral Bishop. The revolt of the knights and peasants was directed against the Empire and the Church, until the insurgents became useless and were abandoned and betrayed by Luther and the feudal lords who supported him.

The Counter-Reformation began after twenty years of bargaining, diplomatic efforts, proffers of conciliation, and timid stances that caused a serious delay in reacting to the theological provocation and the devastation of central Europe. The Counter-Reformation movement officially began in 1542, with a first hesitant convocation of the Council of Trent, and ended in 1563. However, these twenty-one years were characterized by strong accelerations and sudden stops: it all depended on the political positions of the five popes who alternated during those years³. The Emperor had to slow down the internal repression against his vassals’ felony because of the constant external attacks from the “most Christian” France, always ready in supporting the protestants, and of the threat of the expanding Ottoman Empire in the Balkans.

Finally, in the Council of Trent was decided what follows:

1. The source of religion could not be reduced to the sole reading of the Bible, and it was indispensable the uninterrupted transmission of rites and doctrine that forms the only base of tradition. In order for the tradition to be kept intact, the transmission had to happen through ritually consecrated persons, in other words through bishops and their delegates, priests and deacons. In this way, the Counter-Reformation denounced the anti-traditional character of the various Protestant sects, which lacked of regularly consecrated clergy and therefore lacked of ritual and doctrinal transmission.

2. The reading of the sacred text had to follow the unbroken interpretation of the Church’s teachings guaranteed by the transmission of the pontiffs and taught by the clergy. Therefore, personal interpretations of the Bible, based on each individual’s own inclinations, were arbitrary and of no value.

3. The sacraments were seven, they were based on the New Testament and the conditions conveyed by the apostles. The sacraments were effective rituals that produced real effects in this life and in the life after death; they were not, therefore, merely empty commemorative ceremonies, like the only two sacraments recognized by the heretics.

4. The Eucharist was confirmed as central sacrament. Christ was born to sacrifice himself for the fallen humanity. The rite of consecration of the bread and wine was the actual renewal of the Good Friday sacrifice and the sacrifice of the cross and not simply a ceremony in memory of the Last Supper, as used by Protestantism.

5. Since the rites were operative, they allowed the accumulation of merits in order to reach heaven after death. Faith, therefore, was not sufficient to obtain salvation, as the Protestants claimed. As already noted, the Protestant denial of the efficacy of the rites is closely linked to their belief in predestination. In fact, in Protestantism the individual, without the grace of faith given by God, cannot act to improve his posthumous destiny.

6. The rite, therefore, in order to be effective, must be preserved from any voluntary or involuntary modification. The celebrating priest, had to scrupulously follow the Roman canon, with the exception of the few ritual variations consecrated by tradition⁴.

7. The ritual language had to be Latin⁵, and St. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate was declared the canonical text for the Bible. The use of the vernacular was interdicted⁶.

These points concern the Catholic doctrine and liturgy. Actually, the Council of Trent did not change anything in this area; it merely reaffirmed the tradition in strong opposition to the Reformation. The following points, on the other hand, are innovations that consisted in organizational and behavioural changes in order to repair the defects of the church and the corruption that had been the cause of the moralistic accusations of the heretics⁷. The Clergy had to be instructed in doctrine, ritual practice, and morality. The doctrine had to be explained with clarity, simplicity and beyond all uncertainty. In this regard, the ponderous medieval theology was synthesized and unified in articles of faith taught by the catechism. The centralization of the Roman rite put an end to the diversity of practice among the various dioceses and nations. More importance was given to the moral theology in order to define without any doubt the behaviour of all consecrated people. Bishops were responsible for overseeing the education of the clergy, by keeping under their supervision and control the new centres of study for the aspiring priests, the seminaries.

9. Bishops were to keep a constant attention onto seminaries, monasteries, and convents, by removing and punishing unworthy individuals.

10. Parishes and dioceses had to commit themselves to nurture and instruct the faithful, working for the recovery of the weaker or morally stray fringes of society. To this end, numerous ‘religious orders’⁸ were created and dedicated to an action of social relief.

11. The Roman Pontiff was proclaimed the sole guarantor and absolute sovereign of all Catholics, in complete continuity with the secularization begun five centuries earlier by Gregory VII; with the aggravating circumstance that at that time the prestige of the Holy Roman Empire was threatened by the national kingdoms born during those centuries. The imperial prestige was now of a symbolic and moral order, but in practice it was not followed. The pope, realizing this, decided to align the Emperor alongside the various reigning kings and princes, all strictly subordinate to him. Unfortunately, he did not realize that even the papal authority was now perceived in the same way and that, politically, the State of the Church had no longer real power, but only a moral one. By denying the imperial primacy, the pope also demolished his own authority.

The decisions made by the Council of Trent resulted in an entrenchment of Catholicism in a new crystallized form. The clarity of doctrine simplified in the catechism brought to the proliferation of dogmas, i.e., indemonstrable postulates of faith. Catholic society, by assuming more austere rules, seemed to purify itself. However, without realizing it, the conduct of the Counter-Reformation towards a more moralistic behaviour became similar to the Protestant one. The education of the ignorant masses through catechism indeed benefited the common people and the lower clergy; however, it led to a considerable intellectual impoverishment in comparison with the scholasticism of the Middle Ages as pursued by the Dominicans and Franciscans.

The absence of a Catholic sapiential esotericism for several centuries resulted in to two opposing phenomena. To the first one we have dedicated our previous writings of this Series starting from chapter 48: the lack of cognitive or, at least, devotional initiation, pushed the humanists to create from book-based sources an anti-Catholic magical occultism founded on the hermetic-qabbalistic syncretism. The second was the birth of mysticism, sometimes spontaneous, sometimes induced by certain practices. The religious orders reacted correctly against Protestant or agnostic pseudo-initiations. However, in doing so they built a wall around the Catholic Church that would also prevent any interchange with a regular initiation. In fact, from that moment on, the post-Tridentine Church confused any form of authentic initiation, that was still surviving in the West, with occultism and Satanism, all branded indiscriminately as ‘Gnosticism’. From then on, this constituted a true incompatibility between Catholicism and initiation.

Mysticism⁹: we assume that the reader is aware that mystica and mystes¹⁰ correspond to an initiatic condition, while mysticism and mystic describe a spontaneous phenomenon of a psychological order. The mystic manifests from birth certain characteristics and mental inclinations that provoke in him involuntary subtle experiences and that, as such, are considered bestowed on him by the divine grace. Generally, these experiences intensify during the adolescence, determining in the youth choices regarding their future adult life. These experiences, although multiple and specific to each individual, can be divided into two categories: sensory experiences while remaining in a waking state, such as the perception of visions, voices and sounds, smells, touches¹¹, etc. Or experiences that are defined contemplative and that are experienced during the ecstasy¹².

In specific initiatic terms, the use of the definition ‘contemplative experiences’ is erroneous, since in the initiatic path contemplation is a desire for knowledge¹³ and not a passive reception of the divine grace. Scholasticism defines the ecstasy as the separation of the soul from the body, which is equally an inaccurate concept, since such separation would lead to immediate death. Nevertheless, the theological description, however limited and fallacious, is useful for understanding the meaning of mysticism in Catholicism. To use a cultural anthropological language now widespread in contemporary pseudo-theology, ecstasy is an altered state of consciousness¹⁴. This correctly places mysticism together with similar spontaneous phenomena, such as the shamanic transe, the mediumistic transe and other types of passive possession. Consequently, the religious upbringing of the mystic would determine whether his or her sensory or ecstatic experiences should be considered orthodox¹⁵ or heterodox¹⁶. However, even among orthodox mystics, it remains uncertain how to differentiate which of their subtle experiences should be considered of divine origin and which of a demonic one¹⁷.

Spontaneous mystic phenomena were already present in Catholicism towards the end of the Middle Ages when sapiential initiation had receded, and they became quite common in the Renaissance period, as if to counterbalance the spread of witchcraft among common people and the Renaissance occultism among scholars.

In this same period another kind of Catholic mysticism appeared, not spontaneous but induced by prayers and ascetic practices that can be traced back to the Jewish environment. Examples are the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola¹⁸ and the practices to promote the ecstasy¹⁹ of St. Teresa of Avila²⁰. However, this mysticism must not be mistaken with the Christian Qabbalah founded by the Marquis of Mirandola. In fact, Spanish mystics borrowed the Jewish techniques to aid Catholic religious and completely exoteric practices, while the Christian Qabbalah represented a Judaization of the hermetic magic thus showing its esoteric pretensions. Jesuits and Carmelites, rapidly spread these preparatory techniques to mysticism throughout the Latin world in order to contain the Protestant expansion.

Gian Giuseppe Filippi

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1. They also want to blame the Empire for the sack of Rome, when in reality Charles V and Pope Clement VII were still allies. The responsibility of the event must be put on the Constable of Bourbon who was in command of the mercenary lansquenets. He was killed during the assault on the Roman walls, so his troops, mostly Protestants, lacking all control went on a terrifying barbaric plundering spree (André Chastel, Il sacco di Roma 1527, Torino, Einaudi, 2010).[↩]
2. Incidentally, the scenic posting of theses on the door of the cathedral of Wittenberg in 1517 historically never happened, even though it is an unfailing episode in school history texts. The episode, indeed, was narrated only thirty years later by Melanchthon, the unique source who, moreover, at that date was not even present in Wittenberg. “Præfatio Melanthonis in ‘Tomum secundum omnium operum R. D. Martini Lutheri’”, in Corpus Reformatorum 6, Halis Saxonum, C. A. Schwetschke, 1839, p. 161 and following pages.[↩]
3. The popes of the ‘Medici party’, profoundly influenced by the secular culture of the Renaissance and sympathetic towards France, hindered the natural alliance with the Holy Empire showing a mild reaction towards the Protestant heresy, and thus favouring its consolidation. On the contrary, the popes of the ‘Spanish party’, more rigorous on religious matters, pushed decisively with the Imperial help for the eradication of the heresy.[↩]
4. For example, the ancient Ambrosian ritual used in the Milan area, the Greek ritual of the Ravenna area, the Braga ritual in Portugal, and the medieval ritual of the Carthusian Order, were all maintained.[↩]
5. The whole of Christian rituals that the consecrated priest celebrates on behalf of the faithful is called ‘liturgy’. Literally it means “action on behalf of the people” (Gr. λαίτος-oὐργία). Since Latin was also used for individual rites both spoken and mental, it is reductive to consider it only as a liturgical language. During the Middle Ages, when the initiatic practice still existed, Latin formulas, or alternately the Greek ones, were used. Latin, therefore, must be considered to all effects the sacred language of Roman Christianity. The appearance of Hebrew in pseudo-initiatic inscriptions or in Renaissance magical evocationscame later and can be attributed to the syncretism of Christian Qabbalah.[↩]
6. The episode, indeed, was narrated only thirty years later by Melanchthon, the unique source who, moreover, at that date was not even present in Wittenberg. “Præfatio Melanthonis in ‘Tomum secundum omnium operum R. D. Martini Lutheri’”, in Corpus Reformatorum 6, Halis Saxonum, C. A. Schwetschke, 1839, p. 161 and following pages.[↩]
7. It will be recalled that the Lutheran subversive movement began with the specious criticism of the sale of indulgences. The specific case was the collection of funds for the construction of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Without those indulgences, the basilica would have never been built to marvel the following centuries. Protestant moralists, on the other hand, took over Catholic churches and transformed them into reformed ‘temples’, destroying ancient paintings and sculptures, as result of their iconoclasm and hatred for the cult of saints. This explains the distressful hangar or garage-like squalor of their ‘temples’. On the other hand, the moralist-in-chief, Martin Luther, preferred to convert the monastery in which he lived as an Augustinian monk into a luxurious residence for his family.[↩]
8. With the Middle Ages decline, the ‘contemplative monastic orders’ lost their sacerdotal science, the patristic doctrine and the corresponding initiation. In order to overcome this loss, the ‘pauperistic mendicant orders’ such as the Franciscan and the Dominican, appeared; certainly, some of these friars had obtained an initiation, but a knightly or a trade one that were completely foreigner to the orders they belonged to. The Franciscans devoted themselves to the guidance of souls in the cities by indicating a righteous and simple life; the Dominicans, on the other hand, specialized in the teaching of theology and philosophical speculation. Both concurred in founding universities and in professing scholasticism. The new ‘religious orders’ of sixteenth-century on the other hand, devoted themselves to social activities such as, for example, the basic teaching of catechism to children, canteens to feed the indigent, asylums for the recovery of prostitutes, assistance to prisoners, institutes for the reception of foundlings, etc. Over the centuries, this tendency towards social work has become the sole purpose of Catholicism, to the detriment of all other truly religious activities.[↩]
9. Subject partly already covered in the third article of this series “Initiation and Mysticism”.[↩]
10. It is therefore correct to regard Eckhart’s doctrine as mystica and him as mystes, although his followers, Tauler, Suso, the ‘Friends of God’, as well as Beguinage, are more correctly to be counted among the currents of mysticism.[↩]
11. Some of them manifested the Christic stigmata or other wounds as suffered by holy martyrs of the past. Like all those who passively receive these experiences, also the mystic, in the event that the phenomenon does not occur, is driven to fraud and simulation of the ‘divine signs’.[↩]
12. St. Thomas Aquinas (Le questioni disputate. IV: De anima, Bologna, Edizioni Studio Domenicano, 2001, II.II, q. 175 a. 3) distinguishes three degrees of ecstasy: suspension of the external senses, suspension of both external and internal senses, direct contemplation of the divine essence.[↩]
13. Note that jijñāsā is still a mental activity (mānasa kriyā) despite the fact that it is considered non-action (akarma) because it does not produce other action (karma phala).[↩]
14. The extent of the corruption of thinking, due to scientism, of contemporary Catholic pseudo-theologians is proven by the following exposition: “This necessity is so decisive that for Aquinas: It is clear that the sensitive faculties are necessary for us in order to be able to think, not only in the phase of acquiring knowledge but also in using the knowledge already acquired. Here Thomas has an insight that only the modern medical sciences, particularly neurophysiopathology, have acquired. […] Today we know how and why a lesion of parts of the brain leads to serious difficulties in its overall functioning…” (Don Sergio Simonetti, “Mystical Knowledge in St. Thomas Aquinas,” Rome, Teresianum 57, 2006/2, pp. 599-612).[↩]
15. These considerations are valid for monotheistic religions, with the exception of Eastern Orthodox Christianity and the Islamic Sunnah, where the phenomenon did not happen. Therefore, it is fair to assume that the post-Qabbalistic tendencies of Judaism were mystical experiences as well as were those of the Islamic Shi῾a after the decline of Sufism in the Imamite environment.[↩]
16. Meaning reformed: among the latter are known the cases of Jakob Böhme, George Fox, Emanuel Swedenborg and others.[↩]
17. From a metaphysical point of view, we cannot accept at all as origin of certain psychic phenomena neither God nor the devil, as it is assumed in theological circles. We prefer to interpret them as projections of the sāttvika, rājasa or tāmasa tendencies of the individual’s own nature (svabhava).[↩]
18. Ignatius was a hidalgo descended from a Jewish family converted to Christianity and his secretary, Diego Laínez, was Jewish by birth. (C. Carrete y C. Fraile, Los judeoconversos de Almazán. 1501-1505. Origen familiar de los Laínez, Salamanca, Universidad Pontificia, 1987). The meditative isolation required for the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius is the Christian transposition of the Qabbalistic hitbonenuth.[↩]
19. The evident sensual characteristics of these ecstatic states has always casted doubt on whether these were influences of the lubricious heretical current of the alumbrados of Toledo; although St. Teresa was kept under control by the Holy Office for this reason, the ecclesiastical tribunal was never able to prove the truth of this suspicion.[↩]
20. “In the course of the investigation, it emerged that the Jew Juan Sánchez, a wealthy silk merchant living in Toledo and a convert to Christianity, i.e., converso, was accused of having secretly returned to the practice of Judaism and therefore considered a marrano [crypto-Jews]. After a raid by the Suprema, the Inquisition Tribunal, Juan Sánchez had chosen to make a confession and therefore, having been judged guilty, had atoned for his guilt on July 20, 1485: he was flogged in public, forced to put on the black ‘sambenito’ (blessed sackcloth) and paid a considerable fine. After this bitter matter, Juan Sánchez and his family moved to Ávila, changed their surnames, and his sons lived as nobles and married women from the most important social circles in Ávila. The marrano was none other than the father of don Alonso de Cepeda, therefore grandfather of doña Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada. […] Teresa was aware of this family background, but never mentioned it in her writings, although some signs revealed a connection with the religious tradition of her family. In fact, similarities are appreciable between Judaism and Theresa’s mysticism, for example between the Jewish prayer and Theresa’s oration; the “we will do and listen” of the Torah and Teresa’s “works”; halacha, the path through existence of the Jew and Teresa’s Path of Perfection; kavannáh and deveqúth as participation to the divine Presence, the shekinah, and the concentration as taught and practiced by Teresa; berachà, the blessing that gives rhythm to the day of the pious Jew and that is similarly present in  all the works of the Carmelite; tzimtzum, the contraction of God in the individual own profound essence leaving space and autonomy to creation corresponds to the contraction of Teresa’s life in a delimited space, accepting the tzimtzum of one’s own body and spirit in celibacy. All experienced within history in order to restore the world, in tikkun ‘olam, in communion with the Most High. (Vito Luigi Valente, “Nonno marrano,” L’Osservatore Romano, 2.10.2014)[↩]

57. The Ludibria rosicruciana

What was John Dee doing in Bohemia from 1583 to 1589 during his secret mission? It is generally said that, together with his companion, the necromancer and magician Edward Kelley, he visited Rudolf II of Habsburg (1552-1612) in Prague. At court, the two allegedly involved the Emperor in evocations of angels and in rituals of possession, during which Kelley played the role of medium¹. There were also rumours, which were never confirmed, that on the same trip Dee also met Rabbi Judah Loew, a Qabbalist known for his messianic mysticism and magic practices². In reality, John Dee spent most of his stay in Trebon as a guest of the powerful Prince Villem von Rosenberg (1535-1592)³. There he founded a “circle” of friends, although it would be preferable to call it secret society due to its secretive nature. The younger brother of his host, Peter Vok von Rosemberg (1539-1611), who abandoned Catholicism in favour of Calvinism, his friend Christian von Anhalt (1568-1630) and the hermetic Paracelsian Qabbalist Oswald Croll (1563-1609) were certainly members of that circle.

The underground political action carried out by John Dee in Bohemia in 1588, temporally coincides with the suspect presence of Giordano Bruno at the court of Rudolf II. Also in this case, the Emperor quickly got rid of the spy at the service of England, by dismissing him with a simple donation of money. Bruno, as well, during his stops along his trip in Germany and Bohemia, founded secret ‘Jordanist’ societies which used magical rituals of “Egyptian” inspiration⁴.

At the time, those two secret missions failed. However, as we will see below, they sowed the seeds of a broad scale subversion that would ultimately lead to the disasters of the Thirty Years’ War. But what were the goals of these spies of the fledgling British “Intelligence”? The aim was to obstruct the Catholic Counter-Reformation which was slowly regaining large areas of Germany. But above all they were trying to undermine the true Catholic power represented by the Holy Roman Empire. Elizabethan England, despite its excessive imperialist ambitions, was still a third-rate power⁵. During the mission in continental Europe, John Dee, an ultranationalist Anglican, softened the tones of his faith in the “Church of England” and preached among the different Protestant sects in order to overcome their rivalries in the name of a fictitious universalist esotericism rooted in the humus of the hermetic-qabbalistic occultism⁶. The aim was to secretly infiltrate the Protestant sects and the continental powers in order to make the English crown the great invisible maneuverer of the destinies of the West. Also Giordano Bruno, namely the English spy Henry Fagot, conspired in this sense. Totally agnostic, he considered the various Protestant currents useful tools for the destruction of Catholicism and the Holy Empire⁷. His interest was focused on the explicit preaching of “Egyptian” magic as an instrument for reforming the mentality.

Apparently, the purpose of these magicians at the service of the English “Intelligence” was to deceive the Emperor Rudolf, who was also king of Bohemia, in order to gain control of the Holy Roman Empire⁸. Prague, where Rudolph had moved the capital of the Empire, was an important strategic hub, as the king of Bohemia was one of the seven imperial electors. Basically, attempts were made in order to gain control of Christianity after the setback of 1519, when neither Francis of France nor Henry VIII Tudor had managed to be elected Emperor.

Rudolph II, as it often happens to those fascinated by the occult, was not a very balanced person. In a period of serious tensions caused on one hand by the Protestant division of Christianity and, on the other by the wars unleashed by the different princes, particularly German and Dutch, who took advantage of this unrest to carve out an independent state, Rudolph II was a real problem. Instead of taking charge of the situation, he preferred to lock himself up in his Prague castle, devoting himself to ceremonial magic and to collecting grimoires and automata, the occultists’ toys. Sincerely Catholic and an advocate of the Counter-Reformation, he gave little thought to the threat to peace of the Protestant aggression. He was not even concerned about the propaganda of Hussite heretics in the same Prague⁹. At the end in 1608 a family council dismissed him from all his duties¹⁰.

Once back in England, because of the failure of his European mission, John Dee lost the good grace of the Crown,and he was forced into a life of hardship and oblivion¹¹.

At the death of Elizabeth I, James VI Stuart, king of Scotland, succeeded to the throne. James I of England was a very peculiar sovereign who represented a discontinuity from the imperialist dreams of the Tudors. He was a fervent Catholic¹², but he claimed wide autonomy from the Roman Pontiff, in line with the absolute monarchy idea that was prevailing everywhere in Europe. He was against the theories and practices of magic¹³ and hostile to Protestantism, particularly to Puritanism¹⁴. However, his power was partially hindered by the Elizabethan Parliament from which Catholics were excluded¹⁵. The Parliament actually heavily influenced the Protestant choices of the King’s offspring.

Meanwhile, the poisonous seeds scattered by Dee and Bruno in the Protestant circles in Germany had begun to germinate. In 1604 a curious book appeared the Naometria by Simon Studion, who was a late Paracelsian humanist. The book is a classic example of “prophetic” literature, and it was written with the sole purpose of influencing the course of events towards a precise direction. It predicted an alliance between James I of England, Henry IV, King of Navarre and later of France, and the Duke Frederick of Württemberg¹⁶. According to the book these three princes would swiftly succeed in overthrowing the power of the Antichrist, i.e. the Catholic Church, and also in defeating Islam, and these events would lead to the return of the Christ and to the beginning of the millennium of Protestant peace. Obviously, this did not happen at all. Naometria could therefore be forgotten but for one single detail: on one page is reproduced the seal of Luther, in a context that is clearly rosicrucian¹⁷.

In 1613 it was celebrated the marriage between Elizabeth, daughter of King James and, the Palatine Count Frederick V, an Imperial Elector. Frances A. Yates enthusiastically described in detail the festivities, the scenography, the farces and theatrical comedies¹⁸ and the pompous processions that were prepared for the occasion. Her enthusiasm partakes the same hopes of all the anti-Catholic heretics sects of the time. It is quite clear that all the artificially allegorical surrounding of the princely wedding is the historical fact that inspired Andreæ for his Chemical Wedding by Christian Rosencreutz. In fact, Heidelberg Castle, the seat of the Palatine Elector, with its “symbolic” gardens, its collections of books on magic, witchcraft and alchemy, its museum of wonders and automata, was also the model for the romantic castle in which Rosencreutz was “initiated” to the seven degrees of the Order of the Golden Stone¹⁹.

The princely couple, object of true worship by all the Protestant sects, was actually young and with a weak personality and entirely at the mercy of those manoeuvring it. The puppeteer behind them was Christian von Anhalt, whom wealready know to belong to Dee’s circle in Trebon Castle. He was the mastermind of the entire pantomime of the Palatine wedding and its final ruin. In 1617 the Bohemian Diet recognised the Catholic Ferdinand of Habsburg as King of Bohemia. This succession was not appreciated by the Hussites, and the following year they defenestrated the royal legates²⁰ and rose up against the crown. The Hussites, under pressure of the Prince of Anhalt and his Calvinist acolytes, elected the Palatine Elector Frederick V as anti-King.

The political manoeuvre was shamelessly evident: the Emperor’s Electors were seven, three clergymen and four laymen²¹. Three of the lay electors were Protestants, whereas the King of Bohemia, a Habsburg, was Catholic. With the coup d’état in favour of the Palatine Elector, Frederick would have disposed of two votes, thus reversing the majority in favour of the heretics. In this way, the Holy Empire could be disrupted into a confederation of Protestant and anti-Catholic states. The adventure lasted less than a year: the commander-in-chief of the rebels, Prince Christian von Anhalt proved to be a bad strategist and the Lutheran-Calvinist-Hussite army was massacred in the Battle of White Mountain on the 8th of November 1620²². The news of the reversal reached the two young usurpers of the crown of Bohemia while they were having lunch in the Castle of Prague. They disorderly fled, abandoning in place all their belongings. In this manner Frederick V and Elizabeth not only lost the crown of Bohemia, but also the electoral county of the Palatinate, strengthening thus the catholicity of the Empire. They lived in exile at the expense of some Dutch and German feudal lords, who were still bound to their unfortunate cause, and with some help from the English Parliament²³.

That was the first of a number of imperial victories; if the King of Sweden had not intervened later in support of the Protestants, the reform would have been wiped out completely. But let’s leave the field of simple politics and go back to examining the pseudo-initiatic implications of those events. It is clear that the three rosicrucian documents, on the wake of Bruno’s and Dee’s subversive missions, wanted to inspire an occult reform of Europe; they were the prophetic continuation of Studion’s Naometria, that aimed to secretly influence the mentality of the time in order to accept as providential the socio-political changes that they were pursuing. However, something went wrong.

It is curious that even Andreæ himself, author of the Chemical Wedding, even before the White Mountain²⁴ disaster, stood back from the rosicrucian movement. In his later works he defined the Fama, the Confessio and the Chymische Hochzeit with the Latin word ludibria; the immediate meaning of ludibrium is that of mockery,joke, teasing but in the language of drama it defines the farce, which stresses a lack of seriousness of the play. In his Mythologiæ Christianæ Libri Tres of 1619, still using the theatrical language, Andreæ stated: “I have absolutely nothing to do with it [the R+C fraternity]. Not long ago, it happened that some writers were preparing a performance of certain intellectual circles, I approached them to observe them, since the current fashion is to eagerly seek out the latest news. As a spectator, not without a certain pleasure, I witnessed a diatribe between writings, but immediately afterwards I witnessed a complete change in the protagonists. Since the theatre is now full of quarrels, with violent clashes of opinions, even if expressed through ambiguous allusions and malicious conjectures, I decided to completely get out of it, so as not to have any role in such a suspicious and risky story”. In this way he shamelessly denied his participation to the rosicrucian farce as author of the Chemical Wedding, adding all his disapproval for the change of course made by the inspiring characters and their ends, that in fact took place in the brotherhood.

In this regard, Yates has every reason to say that the initial idea of an imaginary fraternity had been diverted on the ground of political, religious and military confrontation. In fact, it was created a real secret society which, instead of promoting a pseudo-esoteric Protestant mentality, actively intervened to alter the balance of the West in favour of some new and obscure masters. The researcher of the Warburg Institute states that this unorganized and nebulous group of occultists, who had fantasized about rosicrucian “adepts” and Rosicrucian Fraternity, had been infiltrated by ‘unknown superiors’, as we would say, and transformed into a real and inaccessible organization. These infiltrators, presumably not Christian, induced Andreæ to hastily return to his steps and to create, in opposition, a Societas Christiana, of which he wrote the foundation manifesto entitled Reipublicæ Christianopolitanæ Descriptio²⁵. The hypothesis of infiltration from the outside is reinforced by the conduct of Michael Maier²⁶ (1568-1622), consider by some as the author of the Fame and the Confession. Maier repeatedly claimed that the Rosicrucians formed a real brotherhood, although he strongly stated not to be affiliated to it. In 1622, after the disaster of the rosicrucian adventure in Bohemia, he published the book Cantilenæ intellectuales de Phœnice redivivo. In this work he reduced the rosicrucian conspiracy to a joke, affirming that the ideals of universal reform had been betrayed by foreign infiltration and he foresaw an imminent resurrection of the movement, but this time victorious.

The last Rosicrucian of the period we are investigating, was the Englishman Robert Fludd. He was a Paracelsian doctor and an Anglican hermetic and had travelled in Europe as a young man. In particular he stopped in Germany where he got in contact with Michael Maier and the De Bry publishers. There is no doubt that Fludd in this manner wanted to continue the work of covert persuasion that John Dee, who he greatly admired, had earlier begun. He later claimed that he unsuccessfully had tried to get in touch with the authors of the Fama and the Confessio Fraternitatis. Especially after the failure of the “rosicrucian Reform” movement in Europe, but he insisted that he had never been able to have contact with the true Rosicrucians. In this way he distanced himself from that venture, while at the same time he discretely renewed his sympathy for the original ideas of the movement. Like Andreæ and Maier, he also testified, to some degree, about an extraneous intrusion that had led to a deviation from the ideals of the origins, which was the main cause of the failure of the Bohemian adventure.

Despite the confusion, often willingly created, about the Rose Croix and the Rosicrucians, it is necessary to draw the right conclusions from the data we have presented in our investigation of the period that goes from the end of the Middle Ages to the beginning of the Modern Age.

1. In the Catholic tradition, i.e. in the European area coinciding with the Western Empire (Holy Roman Empire), after the withdrawal of the monastic-sacerdotal initiation, the destruction of the Order of the Temple marked the end of the knightly initiatic paths²⁷. Only The initiatic organisations such as the trade guilds remained alive.

2. The void left by the disappearance of priestly knowledge was filled up by a surfacing mysticism, a phenomenon that was not initiatic and, in some way, ‘spontaneous’.

3. The ‘Christian’ hermeticism was a libresque reconstruction carried out by some Renaissance occultist intellectuals, without any real transmission from Alexandrian or Arab hermeticism.

4. Those who could not overlook the problem of a lack of initiatic transmission turned to the Jewish qabbalah. But also in this case no transmission took place. First of all, because the Renaissance hermetists turned to the mystical, magical and apocalyptic deviation of the qabbalah; secondly, because they did not convert to Judaism, but instead they invented a Christian qabbalah which would have the opposite purpose, that of converting the Jews. The intellectuals of the Renaissance, lacking of any notion about the initiatic transmission, superimposed the qabbalistic magic on the hermetic “Christian” magic in such a dubious way that its irregularity was blatant even in their eyes.

5. The new thinking was created to destroy all that remained of the medieval tradition: the still existing initiatic organizations of the guilds, the ecclesial structure with its theology and the Holy Empire ideal.

6. The simultaneously spreading of “Christian”, Hussite, Lutheran, Calvinist and Anglican heresies, prompted to consider a starting point for a new era and a new ‘secular religion’ that could better adapt to the new times. The magicians of the Renaissance, convinced to represent an intellectual elite, carefully persevered to implant their Qabbalist-hermetic occultism as a new pseudo-esotericism within and above the new pseudo religion. But it remained the problem of how to compact the various heretical sects into a ‘universal religion’

7. In front of the effective anti-protestant and anti-Renaissance reaction of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, the different sects began to overcome their differences. This situation benefited the Elizabethan England.

8. Similarly, the different occult currents found common ground in the rosicrucian legend.

Unquestionably until the appearance of the rosicrucian manifestos it was completely unheard of such a fraternity: apart from the Fama, the Confessio and the Chemical Wedding, there is no other document attributable to the Rosicrucians attesting their existence. The other writings that were published in the same period and that mention the Rosicrucians are, at least officially, just supporting literature. Their authors, in fact, declare themselves admirers of the “Invisible Collegium”, but confessed that they were not part of it²⁸. Therefore, research and study this subject, there are only those three sources. The fact that the word ‘rosicrucian’ defines a degree of achievement corresponding to the perfection of the human state, and not to a specific organisation, it is a pure inference in complete contradiction with the three above-mentioned documents. In fact, in those writings the Rosicrucians appear to be those who are associated with the same Fraternitas or ‘Invisible Collegium’²⁹.

Nor can it be argued that the Rosicrucians were Catholic initiates who survived the destruction of the Order of the Temple and who reorganised themselves together with some initiates of Islamic esotericism to sustain a sort of initiatic continuity with the past. Firstly, because from 1314 to 1616 the name Rosicrucians³⁰ was never mentioned and, secondly, because the three documents exude hatred for both Catholicism and Islam. On the contrary, for the Rosicrucians the only source of knowledge mentioned was the qabbalah.

Neither is it acceptable that the Rosicrucians were initiates of such a high level of realization that they escaped any historical investigation: would they have been so far above Lao Tze, Chuang Tze, Lie Tze, Gauḍapāda, Śaṃkara, Sūreśvara, Abd al-Qādir Jīlānī, Ibn ‘Arabi, Abd al-Karīm al-Jīlī, Origen, Eckhart, Dante, who left clear traces of their earthly existence along with their famous works? The assertion that it is impossible to find traces of such important figures for human destiny, brings back to mind the similarly unreachable theosophist mahātmās or Himalayan bābājīs of the Indian new age. In other words, these are naïve believes of those who blindly have faith in people exposing theses devoid of any basis and foundation. This occultist legacy is demonstrated by the fact that it is assumed as certain that the “true Rosicrucians” would have left Europe and went to Asia³¹ around 1648, the date of the Peace of Westphalia. In fact, the occultist Saint-Yves d’Alveydre is mentioned as one of the sources. Clearly occultists have access to secret historical information that is denied even to initiates³²!

Gian Giuseppe Filippi

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1. A contemporary witness, quoted by Evans, states that the Emperor welcomed the two magicians with interest; the sovereign, although attracted by all that was occult, remained sincerely Catholic; therefore, he soon became suspicious of the ends pursued by Dee and Kelley, and drew them away from the court (Robert John Weston Evans, Rudolf II and His World: A Study in Intellectual History, 1576-1612, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1973, pp. 218-228).[↩]
2. The practice of magic by this rabbi seems, instead, to be a legend invented in romantic times. Moshe Idel, while validating Loew the mystical-ecstatic deviance of the qabbalah and his millenarianism, convincingly rejects any of his inclinations towards magic and, in particular, denies that he had ever built a golem (Golem. Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions On the Artificial Antropoid, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1990, pp. 251-258).[↩]
3. Peter French, cit. pp. 224-228. Benjamin Woolley, The Queen’s Conjurer: The Science and Magic of Dr. John Dee, Advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, New York, Henry Holt and Co., 2001.[↩]
4. Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1964, pp. 312-313.[↩]
5. At the end of the 16th century the Holy Empire, the Kingdom of Spain and the Kingdom of France were the only first-rate European powers. After them came the Republic of Venice, the Kingdoms of Poland, of Sweden and of Hungary.[↩]
6. Universalistic, butyet it excluded the church of Rome. In the same period, it was fabricated a caricatural magical-hermetic-qabbalistic initiatic chain, that started with Llull, Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and continued with Reuchlin, Zorzi, Agrippa, Paracelsus, Bruno and Dee, although many of these actually had never met in person.[↩]
7. Giordano Bruno managed to be declared a heretic not only by the Catholic Church, which gave him a well-deserved end, but also by Calvinists and Lutherans.[↩]
8. It is remarkable the modernity of all these ignoble political manoeuvres cloaked in “universalism”, “liberation from the obscurantist past” and “love of neighbour”.[↩]
9. The Prague Diet was in fact monopolised by the Hussites. In fact, in 1419 the Catholic representatives had been defenestrated (i.e. thrown out of the window) by Hussite parliamentarians and massacred in the square by an angry crowd of heretics. This started the Hussite revolt. Since then, and for a couple of centuries, Catholics were no longer accepted in the Diet.[↩]
10. His reaction was weak: he tried with a Charter of Majesty to attract the support of the Protestants by granting them freedom of worship. But by then he had been ousted from all power, except from the imperial title alone, and this last manoeuvre had no consequence.[↩]
11. It would be interesting to know more about the estrangement of the brothers Francis and Antony Bacon (both ennobled by Elizabeth) from John Dee and his spreading of the hermetic-qabbalistic occultism. The Bacons were both founders of the English Secret Service, and after the failure of the Dee-Kelley mission, turned their backs on occultism, now suspected to be related to black magic, to preach instead the advancements of science and mechanics in its place. This new trend culminated in 1605 with the publication of Francis Bacon’s Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Human, the first document of what in the following century would take the form of a ‘secular religion’ based on faith in unlimited progress; a faith that is still unshakable today among the masses.[↩]
12. He had the Bible translated under his constant supervision. The Bible of King James today still appears to be the best in a vulgar language.[↩]
13. He was the author of the interesting study entitled Dæmonologie in which he sharply stresses the subtle relations between witchcraft and Protestant Reformation.[↩]
14. The name of the extreme form of Calvinism in England. Obviously F. A. Yates describes this cultured and refined sovereign as a bigoted fool with mental problems; the preference of the Warburg Institute researcher was instinctively in favour of the bestial Henry VIII (The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, London, Routledge & Kegan, 1972, ch.II).[↩]
15. This exclusion continued until the Emancipation Act of 1829.[↩]
16. Of the three, the Duke of Württemberg was the only truly Lutheran. Henry IV of Navarre had abjured Calvinism in order to become King of France (Paris vaut bien une messe). However, the Protestants rightly doubted the sincerity of his conversion; moreover, the French court was strongly influenced by the party of ‘politiques’ Catholics, ambiguously friendly towards the Huguenots. The third member of the alliance, James Stuart, was sincerely Catholic, even though his foreign policy was often conditioned by a parliament composed exclusively of Anglicans and Puritans. Studion’s prophecy was therefore more based on the Protestants’ hopes than on real data.[↩]
17. A.E. Waite, Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, London, William Rider & Son Ltd., 1924, pp. 36, 639 ff. Waite rightly points out that the publication of Naometria was concomitant with the first edition of J.V. Andreæ’s Chemical Wedding. The concomitance, in these circumstances, is by no means random, but precisely calculated to launch sectarian messages.[↩]
18. All rosicrucian activities were accompanied by shows of propaganda staged by companies of English comedians. Even Inigo Jones, according to Yates (The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, cit., I ch.), reached Heidelberg as set and costume designer for the great carnival wedding. The love for scenography, processions, parades and any other empty ceremonial formalities are still today characteristic of the British mentality.[↩]
19. A fictional Order that clearly alludes to the philosopher’s stone. It is no coincidence that in the pamphlets of the Protestant propaganda the wedding of Elisabeth and Frederick of the Palatinate were full of insignia of the orders of the Golden Fleece and of the Garter, bourgeois substitutes of the ancient and authentic monastic-knightly orders.[↩]
20. That time there were only wounded. It seems that defenestration is an inveterate habit of the Bohemian subversives: the last one was that of Minister Masaryk who, in 1948, started the communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia. Also in 1483 the Prague burgomaster and his advisors were defenestrated by Hussite rebels.[↩]
21. Respectively, the Bishops of Cologne, Trier and Mainz and the King of Bohemia, the Duke of Saxony, the Margrave of Brandenburg and the Count of the Rhine Palatinate.[↩]
22. Between 1619 and 1620 Jacob Böhme visited Prague several times. It is doubtful that the hermetic Protestant and Qabbalist mystic chose that period for the sole purpose of selling shoes to the rebels.[↩]
23. James of England took the blame for not having helped his daughter in that wretched enterprise. In reality the Stuart was openly opposed to the manoeuvres of the Protestants. In fact, he had tried to counterbalance as much as possible his daughter’s marriage to a Calvinist prince of little importance by marrying his son to a Spanish Infanta.[↩]
24. Although Descartes had previously tried in vain to get in touch with the Rosicrucians, in the end he chose the Catholic field and took part in the battle of the White Mountain among the ranks of the Imperials.[↩]
25. F.A. Yates dedicates the entire chapter XI of his The Rosicrucian Enlightenment to this subject.[↩]
26. Lutheran Jordanist, Paracelsian alchemist, hermetic magician and friend of Christian von Anhalt, he was for a short period doctor to Rudolf II, James I Stuart, to the traitor to the Empire and uncle of Frederick V of the Rhine Palatinate the Prince of Nassau, and, finally, to the Landgrave Maurice of Hesse-Kassel. It is curious that biographers have never suspected any spy activity from him.[↩]
27. Just as it happened for the monastic initiation that declined and disappeared in a few generations after the reform of monasticism that begun at the end of the 10th century, in the same way the destruction of the Order of the Temple marked the beginning of the disappearance of knightly initiations. However, for about a century there were still some survivors. The last sign of continuity emerged in the middle of the 15th century with Sir Thomas Malory’s Mort d’Arthur, although we do not know whothis author really was. It is certainly one of the most beautiful examples of Templar initiatic novels, scarcely contaminated by Hermeticism.[↩]
28. As we have already seen, not even the rosicrucian symbol had ever been known or used before, at least not until its first graphic appearance in Simon Studion’s Naometria, modelled on Martin Luther’s seal.[↩]
29. The Collegium was initially composed of four members and only later of eight: never of twelve.[↩]
30. And, indeed, this name was completely unknown even before the destruction of the Templar Order.[↩]
31. One wonders whether the Asian rosicrucian haven should not be identified with the mysterious Damcar. The “true Rosicrucians”, in this way, would have retreated to that place to lick their wounds after the of Bohemian failure and then try again to infiltrate Europe a few decades later.[↩]
32. A quick reading of the special issue of Le Voile d’Isis (August-September 1927) dedicated to the Rosicrucians is enough to realise these aberrant fantasies.[↩]