From Cosmos to Chaos

56. Rosacrucian Manifestos

In 1614, in Kassel, Wilhelm Wessel’s printing house published a booklet in German, whose long title is known in its shorter version: Fama Fraternitatis¹. It tells the story of a Friar C. R., an impoverished nobleman and German monk, who traveled to the Holy Land, heading first to Damascus with the intention of reaching Jerusalem. He fell ill in Damascus where he became known for his ability in the medical art. He got in contact with local doctors, and after a while he lost interest in Jerusalem and begged them to take him (against payment) to the town of Damcar². There he was generously welcomed by the wise men and doctors. In the story of the Fama, Damcar appears to have a total autonomy from the surrounding Ottoman dominion, as if it were a republic of sages, a sort of utopia. However, it is not clear its location: most certainly it was situated on the road from Damascus to Jerusalem³. C. R. stayed there for three years, learning the wonders of the Book of Nature taught by the philosophers of Damcar.

During his stay, he translated into German the mysterious Liber M. which later became the reference text for his followers. Once he was fully instructed, C. R. was sent to the city of Fez, in Morocco, to a circle of wise men closely connected with those of Damcar. About this second stage of instruction the Fama informs that in Fez C. R. refined his knowledge in “magic, qabbalah, medicine and philosophy”. C. R. confessed that his previous knowledge of the qabbalah was contaminated by his Christian religion. What he learned from the sages of Fez was “a superior qabbalah” which he adapted to the Christian religion in a form more appropriate to its origins. In this manner, he learned a science that allowed him to understand and harmonize all the fields of knowledge, and what did not fit within his view was considered the “Devil’s work”. After two years C. R. left for Spain. Here he exposed his knowledge to local scholars⁴, but they were irreparably “infected” by the Catholic prejudices still following the teachings of Porphyry, Aristotle and Galen. So, he left for Germany. There he found “true” intellectuals who enthusiastically embraced his teachings and the content of the mysterious Liber M. In the beginning three Fratres joined C. R., and they all travelled the streets of Germany bestowing the blessings of their knowledge. Their clothes did not distinguish them from the other Germans. They introduced themselves as doctors and they treated their patients free of charge.

The Fama also mentions an alliance with Theophrastus (Paracelsus), who, although not a member of the Invisible College, shared the same ideals. In addition, the Fama tells that those first four fratres developed a magical written and spoken language in which they compiled a Dictionary of all wisdom. They used to gather in a building called Sancti Spiritus. After a few years, they doubled their number and later on the organization counted thirty-six members. Their aim was to increase scientific knowledge in order to improve the living conditions of the time and, by performing prodigies, to change the antiquated mentality still prevailing in Europe. They claimed: “We firmly believe that if our brothers and parents had lived in the same clear light that now illuminates us, they would have followed neither the Pope nor Mohammed nor the scribes, artists and sophists”. The Brotherhood, however, would not have remained hidden forever because, their main purpose was to help building the “Germanic nation”, so in the future they would have revealed themselves publicly⁵. The first among the fratres to pass away was J. O. He was a very experienced doctor and very skilled in the qabbalah, he had also cured the Count of Norfolk from leprosy. After this first death, R. C.⁶ took care to build for himself a tomb, in a secret place, full of allegorical meanings and filled with books and wonderful objects. R. C. predicted that for a hundred and twenty years his tomb would remain concealed. But after that period of time his successors should have started to interfere in European events revealing their presence as Invisible College. The Fama goes on with the miraculous discovery of the tomb of R. C. in 1604.

The description of the tomb is a lengthy allegory in which mathematical and geometrical symbols are associated to the presence of the library of the late founder, of the Liber M, and of prodigious automata that were somewhere in between magic and mechanics. The conclusion of the libellus includes a utopian plan of magic-scientific universal improvement, under the insignia of an anodyne, holistic and “tolerant” Jesus Christ, freed from all the abstruse interpretations of the medieval theology⁷. In a few words, a religion devoid of dogmas, rites, hierarchies, which was inclusive of pagan, qabbalistic and alchemical wisdom; obviously the alchemy in question had to be strictly Protestant.

The following year, 1615, a second Manifesto, published by the same printing house, appeared this time written in Latin. This is known as Confessio Fraternitatis⁸, and it was obviously addressed to the educated classes. It does not start from a narrative, like the Fama, to which it explicitly refers.

It consists of a series of statements of faith and descriptions of a “universal” plan of Reformation. A Reformation generically Protestant and, therefore, rooted mostly in the Old Testament. In fact, from the very beginning Jehovah is invoked, as Lord of the imminent Sabbath. However, this God called by his Hebrew name is intended as the guarantor of the becoming of nature, and through its phenomena he would manifest Himself to the “wise men” and through calamities He would punish the “wicked”, meaning all those who did not accept the Word revealed in these Manifestos.

Since the appearance of the Fama Fraternitatis had been received with understandable hostility by the orthodox circles, the Confessio had a cautious outset “So that no one may accuse us of the slightest heresy, nor of following evil principles, nor of plotting against temporal power, we condemn the East and the West – the Pope and Mohammed – who are blasphemers of our Lord Jesus Christ and we offer with good faith our prayers, our secrets and our great golden treasures to the supreme Head of the Roman Empire”. What is the meaning of the ambiguous formula “supreme Head of the Roman Empire” is to be verified. In fact, the document insists on proposing a major change in the structure of the Holy Empire⁹. As it will be seen, the political action that these manifestos inspired will also be clearly subversive. The plan was not only to protestantize the Empire, but also to destroy Catholicism seen as the “religion of the Antichrist”.

But why the use of the formula “supreme Head of the Empire” instead of the more common title of Emperor? The answer to this question will be provided by examining the third and last Manifesto. The content of the Confessio also lists the ideals that the reform plan should have implemented: religious tolerance among the various Protestant sects, Judaism and the currents of free thought; “benign” use of magic, increase use of the sciences¹⁰, especially mathematics and mechanics, support for the arts, particularly the allegorical and utopian ones¹¹, economic and social development for the well-being of all. All these innovations and discoveries were intended above all to create a change of mentality in order to erase all memory of the medieval ecumenical Europe. But the ambitions of this occult movement, which was ahead of the globalisation of the 20th and 21st centuries¹², did not stop to Europe: “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to live in a place where the people living beyond the Ganges River in India would no longer hide anything, just as those living in Peru would stop keeping their knowledge a secret instead of not letting anyone know about it?”

Although referring to the Arabic adventure of frater C. R.¹³ in this second document it was also added: “It was necessary to publish the Fama in the mother tongue of all [in German!] so that those who – although they were not wise – were not excluded by God from the happiness of this Brotherhood, which somehow must be divided and separated in [hierarchical] degrees; exactly in the same manner of those who live in the city of Damcar in Arabia and who have a political and social order completely different from that of the other Arabs”. The document recommends the foundation of a free zone also in Europe, that should be governed only by wise men, namely by the very same brethren. In order to achieve this, it was necessary spreading the use of free individualistic examination of the Bible, and thus freeing its reading from any magisterium. Finally, the Confessio ends with a long appendix where Catholicism is furiously accused of all vileness, by using as leverage the German Protestant nationalism.  These first two Manifestos explicitly invited all those who were interested in the magic-scientific reform of Europe, presented here as a new “universal” religion, to make contact with the fratres.

The third document, The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz, appeared in Strasbourg in 1616, published anonymously like the two previous Manifestos. However, the author is certainly the Lutheran shepherd, magician and occultist Johannes Valentinus Andreæ (1586-1654), as already in 1604, he had published a first signed version entitled Chymische Hochzeit. In this manner the meaning of the different acronyms present in the previous Manifestos was for the first time revealed. The novel narrates of the marriage of two princes, which Christian Rosencreutz would be invited to, in their enchanted castle, a place full of magical wonders and animated mechanisms. The wedding ceremony lasted a week. Every day Rosencreutz had to go through various experiences lavishly described by mysterious allegories, obscure symbolisms, allusive theatrical performances¹⁴. The intent was to represent the seven steps of some not well defined hermetic-qabbalistic initiation. We omit to describe the details of the “prodigious” events of that week, which can only interest those affected by “symbol-mania”. The week-long ceremonies ended with the ordination of Rosencreutz and the other guests as knights of the Golden Stone Order¹⁵.

Before describing the environment that enthusiastically welcomed the publication of these three documents and the resulting historical effects, it is necessary to make some considerations about their contents. The arcane atmosphere of the Fama and the Confessio was immediately successful in the late Renaissance occult circles of Protestant Europe. Many personalities of the secularistic Protestant culture tried to get in touch with the mysterious members of the Fraternitas. Since the Manifestos did not indicate any contact details, the publishing houses were stormed; first and foremost, the Wilhelm Wessel house, which had published the Fama and the Confessio. Subsequently, other publishing houses, such as Lazarus Zetzner in Strasbourg, de Bry in Frankfurt-Oppenheim, Godfrey Basson in Leiden¹⁶, which had published the works of Andreæ and his fellows, such as Robert Fludd and Michael Maier, were also subject to urgent requests for contact. Since no one answered these demands, some of these seekers had the idea of publishing booklets by the very same printing houses with requests for admission to the Fraternitas or, at least, for an epistolary contact. But it was all in vain.

As often happens in pseudo-initiatic environments, the lack of answers was not considered a reason neither of disappointment nor of suspicion. Keepings their own origins mysterious, not revealing the name of the masters, concealing an overt doctrine behind abstruse symbolisms and allegories, invincibly attracts those who wish to be deceived. Everyone had referred to the enigmatic acronym C. R., until the book The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz appeared, and finally revealed the name of the founder and the title of the Fraternitas Rosicruciana. It is certainly true that the rose and the cross were two symbols universally known and previously used both in the external Catholic liturgy and in authentically initiatic symbolism. However, it is equally true that the unified symbol of rose and cross was a recent innovation. In fact, the first time that it appeared in Western history was in the glyph of Martin Luther’s ring¹⁷.

After having recognized Christian Rosencreutz as frater C. R., it will now be appropriate to give a more detached look at the Fama Fraternitatis. The main character went to the town of Damcar in Arabia, name that does not exist in that region, where he was expected as a predestined pupil. The wise men who lived there enjoyed a strong autonomy from the Ottoman administration. There he learned “magic, qabbalah, medicine and philosophy”. He then moved to Fez where another community of sages taught him “a superior qabbalah” which he later adapted to his Christian religion. The Confessio, for its part, confirms those data: “Those who live in the city of Damcar of Arabia, have a political and social order completely different from that of the other Arabs”, a kind of order that R. C. should have exported to Europe. The masters belonging to those communities in Islamic lands and their Rosicrucian Protestant disciples they both practiced the art of medicine. They wore the clothes of the countries they visited and not those that would have identified them as belonging to another community¹⁸.

In the Fama the qabbalah is mentioned four times and twice in the Confessio, and both Manifestos spoke ill of the Pope and Muhammad calling them heretics and blasphemers, therefore it is quite evident that the Rosicrucians did not go to the East to receive teachings from the Sufis. It is unknown the meaning of the name Damcar. What is certain is that between Damascus and Jerusalem there is the city of Safed. In the 16th century the city was the seat of the Qabbalistic-Messianic school of Rabbi Isaac Luria. This current relates to the mystical deviation of the ancient Jewish initiation created by Abulafia and it is from this school that in the XVII century came the false messiah Shabbeṯāy Ṣevī. The town of Safed obtained wide autonomy from the Ottoman Empire. Even today that city on the Lake Tiberias is considered the capital of the messianic-apocalyptic qabbalah.

Gian Giuseppe Filippi

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1. It seems probable, however, that it had already been circulating as manuscript since 1610, as in 1612 a certain Haselmayer, a Lutheran, had published a book of enthusiastic adherence to what was the content of the Fama.[↩]
2. In the English translation by the alchemist and natural magician Thomas Vaughan of 1652, Damcar always appears as Damascus. Many scholars of the events we are relating here, deliberately continue to keep this confusion between two different cities, as done for instance by Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1972, Appendix.[↩]
3. In the map of the Arabian Peninsula drawn by Abraham Ortelius in 1570, there is a place called Damcar in Yemen, in the interior not far from Aden. It is, however, a misspelling committed by the Jewish cartographer of the real name of the village of Dhamar. It is not excluded, however, that the author of the Fama may have borrowed this name to conceal the real name of the place where C. R. stayed for three years, ignoring the great distance between Dhamar and the place called Damcar, located between Damascus and Jerusalem.[↩]
4. It seems that the text alludes especially to the monks who taught at the University of Salamanca. During the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation that University graduated dialectically unbeatable theologians, for this reason it was the object of constant denigration and slander by Protestant circles.[↩]
5. As you will see, in the other Rosicrucian Manifestos this would have happened once the Church of Rome was erased and the Holy Empire was reformed in Protestant terms.[↩]
6. From this point on, in the Fama the acronym of the founder of the Order is inverted: instead of C. R. it is mentioned as R. C. Towards the end there is also the version “Friar C. R. C.”.[↩]
7. It is the “tolerant” Jesus Christ described by the reformist imagination, which excludes any Catholic intrusion, but which advocates a universal brotherhood only between Hussites, Lutherans, Calvinists and Anglicans.[↩]
8. The long title of this Manifesto informs also on its preface: the writing Brief consideration on the most secret Philosophy of a Philippus a Gabella. Most scholars agree to link the origin of this surname to the word qabbalah.[↩]
9. Later on, in fact, the Confessio states that many feathers of the imperial eagle “block our path and prevent us from achieving our goals”.[↩]
10. In the Confessio there is already the profane idea that science derives from the rationalisation of alchemy. This is true in the case of the alchemy of Renaissance souffleurs, the other alchemists being only occultists.[↩]
11. Urban planning, architecture, gardening, music and theatre, all expressing moral and philosophical allegories with utopian characteristics.[↩]
12. In the already mentioned book of F.A. Yates, the author often defines, perhaps unintentionally, the Rosicrucian occult movement as “liberal” and “progressive”, while she uses the terms “obscurantism” and “reactionary” for the Catholicism and the Empire. The failed attempt of coup d’état started with the “defenestration of Prague” is called “liberation of Bohemia”, and the imperial repression of the insurrection is treated as a “foreign occupation”. The rich data collected by the researcher of the Warburg Institute is interesting, even if she addresses her hopeful praise exclusively to the subversion of the remaining medieval order. For a correct reading of the Enlightenment of the Rosicrucians, it is sufficient to make a turn of 180° of the exposed point of view, always based on the same data.[↩]
13. Actually, the acronyms C. R., R. C. and C. R. C., repeatedly used in the Fama, are never used in this Manifesto. However only a passage mentions the founder of Fraternitas by the name of Christian.[↩]
14. We will not summarize the story of each single day of this uninteresting novel, with its wonders, visions and magic. It is only important to report that during the third day several Imperatores were weighed on a large scale. The heaviest and therefore the wisest among them was Christian Rosencreutz himself. It is worth of attention the presence in the tale of a multiplicity of Imperatores, when in reality the Catholic Emperor was always only one. At most, only his Orthodox counterpart, the Basileus of Constantinople, could be recognised with the same title, until the Eastern Empire managed to survive the Islamic invasions. Therefore, the title given to those characters will be interpreted in a transposed sense. Throughout the Middle Ages, Imperator indicated the function of the acknowledge head of initiatic organisations; therefore, these late Renaissance pseudo-initiatic secret societies misappropriated that title. Therefore Rosencreutz, in the Chemical Wedding, would be proclaimed head of all hermetic-qabbalistic Imperatores. Even later, several secret Rosicrucian societies used the title of Imperator to designate their leaders. Only the British secret societies preferred the title of Rex (King), as the imperial title in their opinion had too many “papist” connotations.[↩]
15. This is the first time that the Rosicrucian Brotherhood claimed to appear as a chivalric-alchemic order.[↩]
16. As it has already been pointed out, the publishers were exclusively Protestant or Jewish. In the Catholic Italy, the publishing houses were the disseminating centres of hermetic-christian qabbalistic fantasies since the origin of Humanism. This happened above all in the territories of the Republic of Venice, which in the 16th and 17th centuries felt territorially surrounded by two powerful allies, the Empire to the north and the Church State to the south. In those two centuries Venice supported from the outside any movement that opposed those two powers.[↩]
17. More precisely, the engraving puts together three symbols: the rose, the cross and the heart. It seems that this symbol was later split into two: on one side the Protestant rose-cross, on the other the cross with the Jesuit Sacred Heart. It would be an interesting study the research of the historical development of these two “cults” and their historical application.[↩]
18. Since the end of the Christian Middle Ages, the medical profession, because of its impurity due to contamination by blood, pus, necrosis and death, had been delegated to the Jews. In addition, special clothes were imposed on the members of the ghetto communities in order to be immediately recognised.[↩]

55. Imperialism against the Holy Empire

Emperor Charles V of Habsburg had inherited the immense territories of the Kingdom of Spain, as well as the not inconsiderable fiefdoms of the House of Austria and Burgundy. The territories of the Kingdom of Spain included the new Spanish conquests in the two Americas¹. In 1519 he was elected Emperor, crowned King of Germany and then King of Italy, thus becoming the legitimate ruler of the entire Catholic world². The Holy Roman Empire still nominally included France and England; for this reason also Francis I of France and Henry VIII Tudor, presented their candidature for the Imperial election³. Charles V, bred in Burgundy to the most rigorous principles of the Catholic religion, grew up following the example of justice and knightly loyalty. Elected Emperor, he decided to restore the Holy Roman Empire according to the ideals of his medieval predecessors⁴. This time the Papacy, in the midst of a moral crisis and in difficulty after the emergence of new heresies, no longer stood in the way of the project; on the contrary, it found in the Empire its natural protector, finally recognising its traditional function opportunistically⁵.

Times had changed, however. The feudal structure no longer responded to the principles of loyalty and chivalry and the most powerful feudal lords looked with envy at the Kings of France and England who had taken so much freedom from the Empire. Every prince of Germany dreamed of obtaining autonomy, if not real independence from the Empire. The unity of the Empire was guaranteed by the homogeneity of the Catholic religion and complementarity with the Church of Rome. This medieval ecumene, despite the papal conspiracy to take temporal power from the emperors, had always, at least formally, been maintained. In order to implement the project of a German nation state it was therefore necessary to break up the unity of the Empire and religion at the same time⁶. As has already been clearly demonstrated, the great German feudal lords unscrupulously used Luther’s subversive action; once they had achieved this, they set the rebel monk aside during his last years of life. Luther too, with great opportunism, betrayed the peasants’ revolt in order to side with the forces of repression. Lutheranism thus became the ideology of German nationalism, like Calvinism for the Dutch and Anglicanism for the English. In this way the barbarian peoples definitively separated from Rome.

* * *

The Tudor dynasty installed itself on the throne of England following the conclusion of the great slaughter of royal and aristocratic families during the War of the Two Roses. Henry VII (1457-1509), encamping rights to the throne for a certain maternal lineage and thanks to a marriage of convenience, declared that he had unified the Two Roses; he even claimed to be a direct descendant of King Arthur. He went down in history for his fight against the ancient aristocracy, which he began to replace by ennobling some bourgeois⁷ and for having institutionalised the Royal Navy⁸. His successor has already been discussed on these pages. Henry VIII, had carefully observed the Protestant phenomenon that was beginning to shatter the unity of Europe. He clearly understood that this secular religiosity was a cover for the new German nationalistic spirit. The secularisation produced by the Reformation promoted total independence from the papacy⁹ and the nationalistic spirit aimed at the disintegration of the Holy Roman Empire. It was a matter of separating itself from what remained of the ‘two Suns’ of the Christian Middle Ages.

Apart from his immediate lascivious intents, Henry VIII called Anglicanism his heresy to indissolubly unite the new pseudo religion with English nationalism: thus, those who were not Anglican automatically appeared to be anti-English. On the death of the sovereign he was succeeded by his legitimate daughter Maria I Tudor, whom the Protestant propaganda manoeuvred by Elizabeth I called and still calls Bloody Mary (1516-1558)¹⁰. On the premature death of Mary I, the throne of England, Wales and Ireland passed to Elizabeth I. The validity of this succession is weighed down by the fact that Elizabeth had been declared illegitimate daughter not only by the Pope, but also by the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer¹¹. It was the Anglican parliament that imposed Elisabeth as Queen, in omission of the laws of succession.

Elisabeth immediately demonstrated a despotic nature and an unscrupulous mind, capable of any cunning. She restored the Anglican “church”, giving herself new powers of control over her “religion”. Aware of the inferiority of the English navy in comparison with the powerful Spanish imperial fleet¹², she hired pirates to exhaust her continental enemies. She invented the institution of the rush war, with which the sea-thieves could freely strike the ships of rival countries, having the privilege of taking refuge in her ports in exchange for a large percentage of the loot. Obviously, when they succumbed in the clashes, the crown did not recognize the corsairs as English mercenaries. Some of them, at the end of their careers, were officially integrated into the English navy as admirals and ennobled, as happened to Francis Drake, Henry Morgan and to Walter Raleigh, the unfortunate imitator of the Spanish conquistadores¹³; the latter was also one of the many lovers of the “virgin” Queen.

The masterpiece of the Elizabethan reform was the foundation of the secret services, the Intelligence, to which Francis Bacon, one of the creators of the hermetic-qabbalistic legend about Elizabeth¹⁴, put all his cleverness. Until that moment the states were equipped with information services along the lines of those used by Rome since the Republican era¹⁵. Elizabeth structured her intelligence in such a way as to infiltrate internal¹⁶ and foreign centres of power on a permanent basis. The apparatus, vast and very expensive, operated through corruption, slander, political assassination, blackmail, incitement to rebellion, propaganda as an instrument for changing the common mentality. The organisation at home was lean and efficient and the Bacon brothers also founded a secret archive¹⁷.

The propagation environment chosen for this legalised criminal organisation was precisely the pseudo-initiatic convents of hermetic-qabbalistic magic matrix¹⁸ that were spreading throughout Europe, including Turkey. Aware of her military weakness, the Queen and her government needed peace to put in motion their plan to secretly corrode rival states from within. The peace plan was not entirely successful, both at home and abroad, but it was enough to prepare the imperialist ideology that became successful later in the 19th century. The Empire was a sacred concept, of Roman descent and identified with Christianity. All Christians identified the temporal and sacred authority in the Emperor, who, by successive delegations, guaranteed the freedom and security of all their subjects. Although the papacy had continually hindered the implementation of that ideal for earthly ambitions, the Empire had nevertheless guaranteed its continuity and the recognition of spiritual authority. Imperialism, on the contrary, is the ideology of a single nation that tends to subjugate the others through war, economy, trade, finance. The imperialist nation, in this case England or Great Britain, subjugates other nations by turning them into colonies and their citizens into second-class subjects. The Empire of Charles V, and later the Imperial Spain of Philip II, acknowledged the total autonomy of the newly conquered kingdoms, which were united under the same Crown. The subjects of each kingdom had guaranteed the same rights as the subjects in Europe under the laws of Burgos (1512), Valladolid (1513) and Valladolid (1551). Moreover, the administrators that Spain sent to the New World, at the end of their term of office, were obliged to undergo a trial, the Juicio de residencia, in which they had to justify their choices. Historically, there have been a number of convictions; however, although abuses were committed, it seems to us that the current corrupt democratic regime system, to which nowadays almost the whole world is subjected to, has no right to criticize the past. ¹⁹. Imperialism is therefore a doctrine of exploitation, and is only a caricature of an Empire.

As is known from the previous studies, Renaissance Christian hermeticism and qabbalah were completely devoid of any initiatory transmission. However, they provided the occultist with a complex and often contradictory apparatus of symbols, allegories and legends. To receive a proper education, the German, French, Spanish and Dutch humanists went to Italy, to the various hermetic Academies. This did not happen during the English Renaissance, because when this interest emerged the Renaissance fashion in Italy was in full decline. Therefore, the legend created by the propagandists of the Elizabethan regime scarcely referred to the memory of Greek-Roman classicism. It was therefore necessary to draw inspiration from Celtic sagas. The demons that the Elizabethan hermetists evoked were no longer the resurrected Olympic Gods, but goblins, ghosts, fairies, elves and witches, in a pre-Ossianic climate.

Elizabeth herself, although sometimes classically referred to as Astræa²⁰, was referred to the people as the Fairy Queen²¹, wrapped in a halo of mystery and magic²². The Queen, head of the Anglican church, appeared at the same time as a phantasmatic presence, symbol of a renewal of the whole world. Evil was therefore in the other ban, represented by the Pope, the Empire and the Kingdom of Spain²³. The English parody stood against the Western tradition, protecting and plotting together with the Lutheran and Calvinist principles of the continent. At the same time the Christian qabbalah²⁴ painted Elizabeth as a new Judith, ready to behead Holofernes, the Catholicism. The peoples of the British Isles themselves, although in constant struggle between each other, were identified with the ten lost tribes of Israel²⁵.

The ideologist of the magical esotericism of the Elizabethan regime was John Dee (1527-1608), preceptor of the first Earl of Leicester. A careful reader of Llull, Ficino, Pico, Reuchlin and Zorzi, he was particularly attracted by Agrippa’s De occulta Philosophia. He did not develop an original thought, but adapted Agrippa’s hermetic-qabbalistic magic to the environment that was forming around Elizabeth I, fueling the arcane legend that was being built on the Queen. Dee can really be defined as the inspirer of the new Anglican imperialist mysticism. Although his influence at court was truly enormous, some members of his secret circle began to distance themselves from him. Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) certainly managed to understand what John Dee’s true personality was: his Doctor Faustus is clearly a portrait of Dee, whose disturbing witchcraft and evocative tendencies he displayed. Similarly, his The Jew of Malta is a courageous denunciation of the magic that was hidden behind the facade of the Christian qabbalah²⁶. There is no doubt that Marlowe’s tragic death was piloted by the Elizabethan secret services to silence him for good.

From 1583 to 1589 John Dee went to the German territories of the Empire to carry out a secret mission with Edward Kelley, a blower and ghost-shooter medium. The occultist couple sowed the seeds of a Protestant alliance between hermetic-qabbalistic secret societies led by the British kingdom. They even managed to make contact with Emperor Rudolph II, an alchemy enthusiast. However, the Emperor always remained cautiously suspicious of them. The mission at the time seemed to have failed²⁷ and Dee, having returned to England, fell into disgrace. The Queen abandoned him and he died forgotten and in misery. However, the poisonous seed had been shed, as will be read in the next chapter.

Maria Chiara de’ Fenzi

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1. Overseas territories had been repeatedly declared metropolitan territory, with the guarantee of Spanish citizenship for all, including indigenous people. For this reason, it is totally incorrect to define these territories as colonies, as did England’s propaganda which was the first real European colonialist state. Right up to the present day, England has continued to refer the countries that it had enslaved to it Colonies or Dominions.[↩]
2. We remind the reader that at that date the Lutheran, Calvinist and Anglican heresies, which later shattered the Catholic world, had not yet appeared.[↩]
3. Henry VIII withdrew his candidature. Instead Francis I of France suffered electoral defeat, brooding until his death a morbid animosity towards the Emperor Charles and, as a consequence, for everything that was Imperial. It should be added, however, that, since the end of Middle Ages, the affiliation of France and England to Empire was purely formal. Whenever each sovereign saw the opportunity of some personal gain, they would declared themselves part of the Empire, as in the case just mentioned; otherwise they considered themselves completely autonomous and independent. In any case, the moral prestige of the Imperial title still remained unchanged and it was universally respected.[↩]
4. While the Holy Roman Empire still had an immense spiritual prestige, it is however necessary to point out that due the destruction of the Order of the Temple, it only remained only as an exoteric institution. If by chance, the post-medieval Emperors received some sporadic initiation, this was given to them in a completely personal capacity.[↩]
5. However, one must distinguish the treacherous behaviour of the elected popes of the Medici faction from all the others. In fact, the former were advocates of the change of mentality during the Renaissance, and, more or less secretly, they favoured the policy of the King of France. The other popes, on the other hand, expressed a real contiguity to the imperial ideals of Charles V. As will be seen, the latter became the object of ruthless anti-Catholic criticism which still today depicts them as corrupt (Claudio Rendina, The Popes. History and Secrets, Rome, Newton Compton, 1987, p. 602-603). The only source of this defamation, in particular against the Borgia family, was the Liber notarum of Canon Johannes Burckhardt (1450-1506), thief, moneylender and head of the German community in the city. He also made use of the gossip passed on to him by his companion, the pornographer Stefano Infessura.  The preposterous annotations of the Liber pleased enormously all the future Protestant sects who used it for their anti-Catholic propaganda. This malignant fabrication is stupidly accepted and still transmitted today by Catholic historians and even by parts of the Vatican high hierarchy.[↩]
6. To tell the truth, more than five hundred German princes succeeded in their project of detaching themselves from the Empire, but they had to wait until 1871 to have a united Germanic nation.[↩]
7. Among them there were the Buckinghams, the Burtleys and Crommwells and other rich merchants who, following the example of the Medici of Florence, leapt from nothing into the limelight of history.[↩]
8. At the end of his life, the English fleet consisted of about fifty ships. At that time, it was a completely insignificant number. Back then the Venetian, Turkish, Portuguese and Genoese fleets were composed of hundreds of ships. In Venice a galley was built, equipped and armed in twenty-four hours. Only at the end of 1500 the Spanish fleet surpassed the Venetian one; the English fleet, in the same period, although much stronger than before, still remained well below the size of those two fleets of the Catholicity.[↩]
9. Two centuries earlier Philip the Fair, moved by insatiable greed, spinned out an elaborate web of lies in order to seize the treasures of the Templars. In the same manner the separation from Rome allowed also the Tudors to become rich by seizing the centuries-old movable and immovable property of all the churches, monasteries and convents that were present in their lands. This colossal sacrilegious thievery served later as an example to the supporters of the French Revolution, of all the secular and liberal regimes of the 19th century, such as the Italian ‘Risorgimento’, the Germany of Bismarck, as well as the Communarde France, up to the Russian Bolshevik Revolution and all the countries that were, and still are, devastated by Communist regimes.[↩]
10. According to the Book of the Martyrs by the fanatic Protestant John Foxe (1516-1587), the Catholic restoration attempt, undertaken by Queen Mary, caused the death of 274 Anglicans. On the other hand, the Anglican counter-restoration of Elizabeth I alone killed more than eight hundred lay people and 160 priests among the Catholics. As William Corbett demonstrates, during her reign Elizabeth alone caused more deaths than the whole Inquisition in all its history (History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland, London, Charles Clement, 1824). But the Protestants call Bloody only Mary I![↩]
11. Elizabeth was in fact a natural daughter. After the repudiation of Queen Catherine of Aragon by the King, that was never accepted by the Catholic Church, and after the annulment of marriage between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn performed by the newly born Anglican “church”, the legitimacy of Elizabeth’s succession seems untenable.[↩]
12. Everyone knows the unfortunate expedition of the Felicissima Armada (it was renamed “Invincible” for mockery by the English propaganda). The Spanish defeat, caused by the sudden death of the invict Admiral Don Álvaro de Bazán Marquis de Viso, resulted in the loss of twenty-nine ships due to a storm, two captured by the English and ninety-nine returned to Spain. Nobody knows, however, that the following year, in 1589, Elisabeth sent a “Counter Armada” of 180 ships to invade Spain. The battle took place off the coast of Lisbon. It ended with a bitter English defeat: almost fifty ships were either destroyed or captured. The power of English propaganda![↩]
13. The conquest of the territory that he baptized Virginia in honour of his mistress lasted less than a year.[↩]
14. It was also important the contribution of the Queen’s private adviser, William Cecil, who took care of the financial administration as Lord High Treasurer. Stevan Dedijer, The Rainbow Scheme. British Secret Service and Pax Britannica, 3.10.2020.[↩]
15. The Roman information services were first called frumentarii, speculatores and, under the Empire, agentes in rebus. Throughout the Middle Ages, the activities of the information services followed the rules of chivalry. This behaviour was also maintained in Europe during the French Revolution: it can be said that the first sensational criminal activity of the Napoleonic secret services was the case of the Duke of Enghien.[↩]
16. The Elizabethan secret service hired Giordano Bruno with the cover name of Henry Fagot. The defrocked Dominican, occultist and sorcerer, infiltrated those circles where English Catholics were hiding in order to avoid the death sentence. The spy, first in Paris among English exiles, and then in England, easily posed as a Catholic cleric. In this way, he delated and sent dozens of Catholics to death. The charge he was sentenced to death for in Rome in 1600 was that of anti-Catholic espionage. And, recently, there have even been some obtuse popes who have apologized for that dutiful condemnation! John Bossy, Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair, Yale, Yale University Press, 2002.[↩]
17. This explains Great Britain’s long lasting prominence on the world scene, even now that it is reduced to a power of second or third order.[↩]
18. This peculiarity remained and strengthened over the last three centuries.[↩]
19. (Maria José Collantes de Teràn de la Hera, “El juicio de residencia en Castilla a través de la Doctrina Juridica de la Edad Moderna”, Histora, instituciones, documentos, n. 25, 1998, pp. 151-184).[↩]
20. The Greek Goddess who guaranteed justice during the reign of Cronos in the Golden Age.[↩]
21. Edmund Spenser, the author of the poem The Fairy Queen was a member of the mysterious “School of Night”, an “esoteric” circle led by Walter Raleigh and among its members there were Christopher Marlowe, George Chapman, Matthew Roydon, John Dee, William Shakespeare and Thomas Harriot.[↩]
22. Actually, this legend remained only on paper and confined to the court. Only in the Victorian era with the Romanticism and, more recently, with the scholars of the Warburg Institute, the legend of the Elizabethan Golden Age was propagandized. The aim was to magnify nineteenth-century British Protestant imperialism.[↩]
23. The Habsburgs of Austria and Spain guaranteed for a century the identity between the Holy Roman Empire and the kingdoms of the Spanish crown.[↩]
24. Elizabethan propaganda greatly denounced the inhuman expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. It constantly accused the Spanish monarchy of forcing the Jews into conversion or exile. However, the Jews who escaped from Spain and passed through England they all moved on to Amsterdam. Almost none remained in England. The only one who officially remained was Roderigo Lopez, who became the queen’s doctor and who later was put to death on suspicion of witchcraft and of having tried to poison Elizabeth. In fact, even in England since 1292 the practice of the Jewish religion was forbidden. (Frances A. Yates, Cabbala e Occultismo nell’età elisabettiana, Turin, Einaudi, 1982, pp. 138-145). But in the books, it’s only mentioned the expulsion from Spain. How many Jews left Spain and went into exile? About fifty-thousand out of two hundred thousand. One hundred and fifty thousand Jews preferred to apostate rather than sell their properties in Spain (Julio Cao Baroja, Los judios en la España moderna y contemporanea, 3 vols. Madrid, Isthmus, 1986).[↩]
25. It should not be forgotten that the Christian Qabbalist Friar Francesco Zorzi had fraudulently found support in the Old Testament for the divorce of Henry VIII Tudor.[↩]
26. The Catholic Shakespeare, on the other hand, tried to get away with it: in his Merchant of Venice you can recognize a criticism of the Christian qabbalah of the Venetian Zorzi; instead in the Tempest he characterize with benevolence the hermetic magician Prospero.[↩]
27. In the same manner Elizabeth’s myth and her imperialistic project failed. If the Spanish Empire lasted three centuries, British imperialism in America was a real failure. As soon as England had established with an iron fist its first colonies in North America the revolution broke out and ended with the founding of the United States. Great Britain was left with only Canada, which in any case only became British possession in 1763.[↩]

54. The Reformed Pseudo-Religion and its Pseudo-Esoterism

Before addressing the theme proposed in the title, we will have to mention the problem of the relationship between the new humanistic science and religion. Already in Llull and Nicholas of Cusa we had found that knowledge had split into two opposing domains. Or rather, secular science had declared itself superior to faith. One was prerogative of a small intellectual elite, while faith was given to the people to satisfy its elementary needs in order to maintain both public and private peace¹. This science, as demonstrated in previous chapters, appeared increasingly mixed with magic to the point that is was not possible to distinguish their respective boundaries. On the other hand, magic, like profane science itself, is nothing more than an experimental knowledge addressed to the gross and subtle phenomena here considered as ‘objective reality’, and hence ‘real’². On the contrary, according to this point of view, religious faith would concern only hypotheses that cannot be demonstrated, beliefs, imaginations³. The scientific mentality spread by Humanism generated a new curiosity to search the skies with an unhealthy mixture of astrology and astronomy; to explore the emerged lands looking for both real and fantasy people and places⁴; to intervene in the composition of matter in order to analyze and modify it through physics, chemistry and alchemy.

However misunderstood, the presence of an initiatic esoterism above and beyond the exterior religion was still in the memory of the Renaissance scholars. Esoterism, which had represented the true wisdom of the Middle Ages, had maintained order into the Church and the Empire and had provided the means for an inner realization to those who had the right qualifications. The tragic end of the Templars had marked the rapid decline of the initiatic schools of Western Europe, as each of them somehow referred back to the Templars’ Order, leaving the Papacy and the Empire like two empty shells. Renaissance thinkers were aware of the decadence and corruption of the Church, and hence they turned towards the Empire, and especially to the national kingdoms, hoping for a renewal. Indeed, they mainly felt the lack of chivalric initiation and the cosmological knowledge that it entailed. However, their ideas about it were totally distorted.

The renewal of exotericism tended towards a return to a presumed evangelical purity, which meant the total abrogation of tradition. It was an evangelical purity filtered through the humanistic lens that had already lost all traditional transmission. Two were the main aspects of this religious reform. The first tendency was a reform from within, represented by Erasmus of Rotterdam, that aimed to maintain the external form of the ecclesiastical structure. This modification had to occur according to moralistic parameters and without taking into account the stratification of traditional teaching accumulated over the centuries. The second trend was the reform from the outside against the Church, represented by Luther and his imitators, with the catastrophic consequences that we have previously described.

The renewal of esotericism, or rather its re-founding ex novo, lead to a series of confused and very suspicious projects. Firstly, it was required the abrogation of the theology based on Aristotelianism. This already shows the distorted ideas of the scholars and magicians of the Renaissance, in fact theological knowledge belongs in its entirety to the exoteric domain. Having lost all esoteric wisdom, they replaced it with the magic of Hermeticism and the Qabbalah, variously mixed among them, but always in a syncretic way. The fundamental problem of these Renaissance scholars was that although sensing the lack of initiation⁵, they no longer knew what it consisted of and what was its purpose. By opening to magic and witchcraft, they freed dangerous psychic influences that contributed to devastate Europeans minds further more.

The best example of this project to reform tradition without any spiritual transmission is represented by Enrico Cornelio Agrippa (1486-1535). He had been disciple of the very cautious Abbot Trithemius⁶ and fellow disciple of Paracelsus⁷, and in the wake of Reuchlin he carried on a Qabbalah no longer Christian but solely Protestant. In an attempt to restore some order in Catholicism, in Italy began an anti-protestant sentiment. This tendency forced those humanists who drift towards paganism, to return into the Catholic ranks or, at least, to conceal their heretical ideas. As a sign of contempt Agrippa avoided as much as possible quoting Pico della Mirandola or Francesco Zorzi, referring preferably to his German Lutheran compatriots: Reuchlin, Dürer, Cranac, Johannes Frobenius and others. Together with his friend Albrecht Dürer, Agrippa put pressure on Erasmus to abjure Catholicism, but remained disgusted with the diplomatic responses of the Dutch philosopher. He was therefore a fundamentalist Protestant, who actually only reproduced without any originality the themes of Florentine Neo-Platonism of the previous generation.

Yates, in her studies of re-evaluation of Protestant occultism, describes him as a fine thinker of great culture, but she fails to bring any evidence in favour of this depiction of Agrippa⁸. What is unmistakable and what distinguishes him from Ficino, Pico and Zorzi is his evident aggressiveness and his faith in the magic, so openly declared in his writings. Despite his conversion to Protestantism, he was soon suspected of black magic and witchcraft⁹. Rumours spread that the black dog that accompanied him in his relentless travels was the devil¹⁰. However, Agrippa found hospitality and protection everywhere within the occult circles. This fact has been correctly interpreted as proof of the existence of a network of hermetic-qabbalist secret societies that in the Renaissance had spread throughout Western Europe¹¹. He visited Trithemius, who he considered as one of his main masters. Then he went to England where he joined with the first humanistic circle on the island, founded by Thomas More¹². He fraternized with John Colet, a Herasmian who had already foretold Lutheran ideas. When he went to Italy in 1511, he had already made his ideological choices: he came in contact with Francesco Zorzi, with the judaizing Cardinal Aegidius from Viterbo and with rabbi Agostino Ricci¹³, a convert to Catholicism, but he was disappointed by the cautiousness and balance of the choices of the Italian humanists.

In Germany, later on, Agrippa became an ardent supporter of Luther and Calvin. He then went to France where, in 1526, he published his book De Vanitate Scientiarum (On the vanity of Sciences). The other book he was famous for among the humanists was De Occulta Philosophia (On the Occult Philosophy), published in the Flanders in 1533. Yates, through her exclusively historical approach, fails to comprehend the difference in perspective of the two texts¹⁴, even though, in line with the Warburg Institute, she is fundamentally partisan of both positions. In De Vanitate Scientiarum Agrippa criticizes all sciences and arts; not only the medieval trivium, quadrivium and scholastic theology, but also those new experimental sciences that had emerged during the fifteenth century. The critique is therefore extended to magic, qabbalah, alchemy, all together considered as ‘monastic superstitions’. Therefore, according to Agrippa every science is futile wisdom, except for the message of the Gospel. Consequently, all cosmological and theological knowledge must be erased from the mind in order to rely only on the original message of Jesus Christ¹⁵. Obviously, the Gospel was subject to free personal interpretation as per protestant custom.

On the other hand, in De Occulta philosophia, Agrippa asserted that the occult philosophy, meaning the practice of magic, was based on the tripartition of the universe. The world composed of the four elements was the domain of natural magic; the celestial world was the domain of the astral hermetic magic based on a pseudo-Pythagorean numerology; lastly, the superior or angelic world was the domain of ceremonial magic of Qabbalistic origin. In the first, through sympathetic magic there is interaction with the elemental spirits, in the second with stellar demons, in the third with angelic hierarchies. From this synthesis it is clear that the message of De Occulta philosophia has nothing new to add to what had already been said by Ficino, Pico and others; but in Agrippa the magical and witchcraft substratum is finally uncovered. Agrippa, therefore, had a main role in the divulgation and propaganda of those themes that until then had been kept strictly confidential or hidden with care.

Let us now try to explain what Yates did not find clear in the apparent inconsistency between the contents of the two writings of the German magician. The truth appears very simple to those who know the exterior exoteric structure of the monotheistic religions, in particularly of Catholicism. With the Protestant Reformation this structure was reintroduced in a completely reformed way. By consulting the Bible without any authoritative indication or certain critical guidance, the exoteric component turned into a faint religiosity devoided of any rites and doctrines: everyone had to imagine what God suggested in the sacred text, drawing from its dull rules of behaviour. Every science was considered superfluous, except for any practice that through competitiveness aimed towards the pursuit of wealth and social position. This is the “religious” or exoteric Protestantism valid for all the reformed faithful. Within the community and, somehow hidden from the eyes of outsiders, the new “esoterism” is established, an occult philosophy, as it is called, consisting in practical, astral or ceremonial magic. The pseudo religion was in this manner provided with a pseudo esoterism.

A similar structure was described in Thomas More’s Utopia and, a generation later, in the New Atlantis by Francis Bacon, Civitas Solis by Tommaso Campanella and others. Later on, this fanciful societal project was insanely implemented through the “ideal communities”, among the thousand Protestant sects especially in North America. The philosophical-magic elite, dedicated within its own circle to the arcane practices of invocations of elementals, spirits and “angels”, appears to the outsiders as a trustworthy group of wise men, elders, philosophers. All the other members of these communities have the duty to work and pray God in order to obtain worldly success and social security and wealth, obviously in line with anyone’s predestination. In short, a sort of ora et labora adapted to the worker ants.

We chose Agrippa as illustrative character to describe the sad decline of the West and also for his many connections throughout Europe; but studying any other Renaissance magician of the first half of the 16th century would have given similar results.

France, also heavily contaminated by the Renaissance occultism, was also scene of a particularly intelligent reaction. Jean Bodin (1530-1596) in his book De la démonomanie des sorciers (On the diabolical possession of sorcerers)¹⁶ demonstrated the contiguity between the magical infiltration into cultured circles and the spread of witchcraft at a popular level. With great lucidity he denounced the Christian Qabbalah of the Marquis of Mirandola and Fra’ Francesco de Zorzi, as well as the Protestant one of Reuchlin and Agrippa, to be a falsification of the true Jewish qabbalistic esoterism, and to represent a disturbing deviation in a magical-evocatory and witchcraft sense. Bodin with full awareness describes the plan to demolish the medieval tradition, indicating in Agrippa the most nefarious agent¹⁷. The times were changing and the Counter-Reformation was containing the heavy damage caused by the frantic anti-traditional protestant action of the Germanic and Anglo-Saxon countries.

Maria Chiara de’ Fenzi

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1. Religion was thus reduced to a tolerated superstition for unrefined minds. This imposed on the new science scholars a methodical denigration of medieval theology and metaphysics (however partial the latter may have been) that coordinated the sciences of trivium and quadrivium and providing universal doctrinal bases. The science of the ancients was contemptuously defined as ‘monastic’, while the new science was characterized by secularism. It should be noted that even today this obtuse mentality lives on.[↩]
2. Of course, this approach remains exclusively limited to the waking world (sskrt. jāgrat prapañca) and does not include the knower-subject at all (sskrt. pramātṛ).[↩]
3. Obviously even secular science is based on hypotheses, imaginations, postulates and unprovable dogmas, meaning faith, like any other worldly knowledge (sskrt. vyāvhārika pramātṛtva). But this arrogant attitude of superiority was enough to intimidate the representatives of the Church. Many of them, like the Cusano, supported this position against tradition. From that moment on, they have manifested two opposing tendencies: the first one supports the superiority of faith over knowledge. In this way, Patristic and Scholasticism were foolishly abandoned as subordinate to the truth affirmed by faith; in doing so, the superiority of secular science over faith was implicitly recognized and it paved the path to the attempt to find ‘scientific’ justifications for religious precepts as we had experienced in the last couple of centuries. The second tendency is to assume a blind hostility towards everything that is doctrinal, cognitive and intelligent, accusing wisdom of arrogance and ‘Gnosticism’. These two tendencies though incompatible with each other, coexist in the callousness of the ecclesiastics.[↩]
4. We will not address the topic of geographical discoveries, especially that of the Americas. However, since colonialism and missionary practice started during the Renaissance period, together with the fanciful historical falsification connected to it, we will return often on these controversial issues.[↩]
5. These self-satisfied intellectuals despised the craft initiations because they considered the mas vulgar and suitable for ignorant workers. However, in the European desolate initiatic desert, Agrippa was the first to launch a first and timid bait to the Free Masons, sometimes defining God as the Architect of the Universe.[↩]
6. The Benedictine Johann Heidenberg Trithemius was the author of a confusing Steganography that allegedly allowed distant communication, even with angels, by using an abstruse alphabetical and numerical method. Because of his ambiguous religious positions, he was deposed by his own monks and had to withdraw in an isolated monastery.[↩]
7. Doctor, alchemist and astrologer, Theophrastus Bombast from Hohenheim chose the pseudonym Paracelsus due to his admiration towards the Roman doctor Aulius Cornelius Celsus. The question erases whether the real Celsus he took inspiration from was in fact the homonymous Gnostic heretic philosopher, historically known for the terrible reprimands that Origen addressed against him in his Contra Celsum.[↩]
8. Frances A. Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1979, 5th ch. Yates’ work is indeed very useful for the material and data it discloses. However, with regard to a critical point of view, it is easy to rotate her judgment 180° in order to get the correct answers to any possible doubts, since this scholar is an expert in the so-called spirituality of Renaissance occultism.[↩]
9. It is well known that Protestants, because of their moralistic vision of human behaviour, were really obsessed with witchcraft much more than Catholics.[↩]
10. Daniel Pickering Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic: From Ficino to Campanella, London, Warburg Institute, 1958, pp. 90-99.[↩]
11. Paola Zambelli, Umanesimo magico-astrologico e raggruppamenti segreti neoplatonici della preriforma, Padova, Centro internazionale di studi umanistici, 1960; Charles G. Nauert, Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1965.[↩]
12. Thomas More was also sanctified four centuries after his execution, in 1935: These canonizations (see Joan of Arc) must be considered from a political point of view  and were motivated by suspicious contingent  interests: after the bolshevik revolution, in fact, the newly born Soviet Union declared that Thomas More’s Utopia had been one of the inspiring texts of communism. It was perhaps in this way that the Vatican tried to reclaim More, even though his Utopia has nothing Catholic about it. It is certain, however, that the Herasmian Thomas More was the first to found an English foothold for hermetic-qabbalist magicians coming from the continent. This centre for gathering and mutual aid was to become a few decades later the beating heart of the Elizabethan occultism and the source of the subversive English expansion throughout the world.[↩]
13. Nauert, cit., pp.42-46.[↩]
14. Yates, cit., pp. 54-62.[↩]
15. Protestantism in this sense defines itself as ‘evangelical’; in other words, its ‘religiosity’ is based only on the free individualistic examination of the Bible (in particular of the Old Testament, because it is more Jewish and Qabbalistic), while it abrogates any ritual that is not an just an empty ceremony and rejects all the sapiential heritage of tradition accumulated over fifteen centuries.[↩]
16. Paris, Librairie Le Livre Penseur, 2004.[↩]
17. Walker, cit., pp. 173-191.[↩]

53. Renaissance magic and witchcraft

Dmitrij Sergejevič Mereškovski¹ began his novel The Resurrection of the Gods with an episode of great interest. A party of peasants, engaged by some humanists, are requested to excavate the countryside around Rome and for vestiges of pagan antiquity. Eventually, a diaphanous sculpture of a Roman deity emerges from the ground like a ghostly apparition. «The Gods rise again», the exultant humanists think, and with them they plan to resurrect the pre-Christian civilization. In reality, what they unearthed is an idol that indeed was a divinity in the classical age, but that at the time of the dig is nothing but a receptacle of inferior influences that hence are set to free to spread everywhere, changing the general mentality.

In the Hindū tradition the icons of the Gods must be consecrated and animated with the prāṇapratiṣṭhā ritual. The vital force that the celebrating brāhmaṇas instil in inert matter must be constantly nourished by offerings of the devotees and rituals constantly repeated by the pūjārīs. The image (mūrti) of a God abandoned by devotees and celebrants, gradually loses effectiveness, returning to be a simple mass of stone or metal. If the image is broken, mutilated or even simply scratched², it cannot longer represent the divinity and, through the rift, harmful influences can creep in, those same influences haunting ruined shrines or abandoned temples. If an unearthed mūrti appears intact, after appropriate reconsacration, can be reused; but if it were damaged in some part, it would be dealt with as a fearsome subtle entity such as piśāca, bhūta, bīr (vīra) or rākṣasa and thus confined to a safer place³.

This is what really happened at the end of the Middle Ages. Previously, the situation had remained for long centuries under the control of initiatic organizations and of ecclesiastical and imperial structures. In some peripheral areas, only later converted to Christianity, legends and superstitions of the ancient Latin, Celtic and, mostly, Germanic religiosity remained. As often happens, among the lower strata of the society survived the obsession of the most morbid aspects of ancient beliefs. In particular, the memory of the Roman Goddess Trivia⁴ lived on; a nocturnal deity who procures abortion and leads to the underworld of the dead, but who also nurtures necromancy and the return of the larvae to the world of the living when duly invoked in the crossroads on moonless nights. On the equinox nights, when the gates of hell are believed to remain open, the Goddess is said to lead the dead to a wild hunt. On those nights, the inhabitants⁵ of the countryside used to lock themselves in their homes waiting for dawn and, with it, the return to the normal order⁶. In the early Middle Ages this figure already overlapped that of Frau Hölle, the Lady of Hell of Germanic folklore⁷.

What is certain is that in the medieval period the beliefs of the plebs and the very subtle influences of these remnants of bygone religions were carefully avoided and kept under control. In fact, when in 1231 Pope Gregory IX established the Inquisition, this new institution for a long time only committed itself to repressing cases of abnormal religious cults. Its main function was, therefore, to pursue heresies such as, for example, the Albigensian, Waldensian or Dulcinian ones, or doctrinal distortions of the spiritual Franciscan or Joachimite Franciscan sort. The very Hermetic magic was thwarted more for its ability to induce its followers to assume heterodox positions, rather than to prohibit the production of paranormal phenomena. Only in 1326 Pope John XXII, with the bull Super illius specula, extended the application of the laws against heretics also to magic practices, without however defining them doctrinally and dogmatically heretical. It is a fact that up until about 1420 or so there were not many magic trials. The imputations of diabolical sorcery only increased after 1450⁸.

By sorcery is meant the confluence of two different phenomena; the first is that of possession, the second consists in magic as an empirical science. Possession is generally connected with a psychic imbalance from which the individual is disturbed from birth. This pathology can worsen in the adolescent period, giving rise to a complex and differentiated phenomenology case by case. The person has the sensation of hosting an alien presence that tends to control the will of the possessed person. In some cases, when he is at the mercy of such a subtle suggestion, he experiences certain paranormal powers. Among these are often the sensation of flying in the air and penetrating the bowels of the earth, the ability to assume animal forms⁹, and the ability to hear voices spoken by invisible beings¹⁰. All things considered, the phenomenon of possession in other non-monotheistic religious contexts would have led to the practice of shamanism. Beside possession, we find the practice of magic in ceremonial form for the purposes of incantation, curse, clairvoyance, medicine and pharmacopoeia, the latter particularly aimed at the preparation of love filters.

The end of the Middle Ages represented the end of the control of tradition over society, with the spread of an anti-religious mentality even among the lowest strata of society. If in the past everything that was forbidden or reprehensible was kept at a distance, with the beginning of humanism also the people turned their attention to the acquisition of miraculous powers that religion seemed no longer able to guarantee. Instead of locking themselves in their homes fearful of the wanderings of purgatorial souls in Lady Hölle’s wake, a profusion of witches and sorcerers¹¹ committed themselves to take part in the Wild Hunt. In the absence of a flight favoured by air spirits, witches and sorcerers relied on certain magic ointments. This magical expedient, unknown in the Middle Ages, is clearly taken from Lucian of Samosata’s Metamorphosis, which demonstrates how widespread was the humanistic cultural influence also at a popular level. Soon, the frightening air procession of souls on their way out of the hells of the medieval hunt turned into a grotesque swarm of witches converging on the orgiastic Sabbath to meet Satan in person¹².

As has been said, from the end of the 14th century the Inquisition began to investigate this new phenomenon¹³ with growing concern due to its spread. In 1398, the University of Paris affirmed that the magical powers were real and not purely illusory, contradicting Gratian’s Decretum, which in the 12th century, on the basis of St. Augustine and the Canon Episcopi, had supported the illusory nature of phenomena such as night flight, denying any effectiveness to the various evil warped by witches.

A well-known case concerns the trial of Joan of Arc for witchcraft, although subsequent falsifications of documents have made it difficult to display historical evidence¹⁴. The sentence was decreed mainly on account of the mysterious voices that, since adolescence, the maiden of Orleans claimed to have heard at the “fairy tree”, voices that she attributed to St. Michael the Archangel and Saints Margaret and Catherine¹⁵. Various circumstances attest to the correctness of the verdict; moreover, the divine mandate for Joan’s mission appears completely untenable, since it is difficult to understand why God had to be against Burgundians and English and partisan of the King of France. Furthermore, from the point of view of the legitimacy of succession, the true King of France was certainly not the infamous Charles VII.  What seems more disturbing, however, was the collaboration and friendship of Joan with the Marshal of France Gilles de Rais.

Since the beginning of the Renaissance there was a sudden increase in witchcraft. The historical turning point was marked by two ecclesiastical stances: the bull Summis desiderantes affectibus by Pope Innocent VIII in 1484 and the publication in 1487 of the Malleus Maleficarum by the Dominicans Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger¹⁶. These two documents testify to a sudden intensification of the witchcraft phenomenon throughout Europe. The bull gave orders to the Inquisition to intensify the repression of the new phenomenon, while the Malleus Maleficarum¹⁷ was an instruction manual for inquisitors on the different forms of witchcraft. In both cases the paranormal phenomena were described in real terms, demonstrating the poor discernment of Catholic theologians during the Renaissance period. On the other hand, what is beyond doubt is the uncontrolled spread of pseudo-religious, heathenish or openly diabolical practices at the popular level, parallel to the emergence of the pseudo-esoteric magic of Hermeticism among the educated classes. The ecclesiastical reaction, therefore, was justified in practice, although not supported by as much doctrinal clarity.

It is estimated that from the middle of the 15th century to the end of the 18th century about fifty thousand people were condemned for witchcraft. It is not clear what percentage of death sentences were carried out in these trials. What is certain is that the brazen Protestant propaganda unleashed all its fury against Catholicism and, in particular, against the Spanish Inquisition¹⁸. However, the reality is quite different: while in Catalonia alone from 1450 to 1630 little more than one hundred death sentences were carried out, in the rest of Spain they were just forty-nine¹⁹. Moreover, abundant documentation proves the constant ecclesiastical exhortation to the courts of the Kingdom²⁰ not to resort to torture.

On the contrary, in the countries controlled by the Protestant Reformation, burning and torture were the order of the day, under the banner of the same cruelty described in the previous article “The Protestant Reformation.  Luther’s emulators”. The inflexible and moralistic mentality of the various Protestant sects also spread overseas, where the ruthless repression of witchcraft took on forms of collective alienation²¹.

Gian Giuseppe Filippi

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1. Poet and novelist (Saint Petersburg 1865- Paris 1941), one of the founders of the Russian Symbolist Movement. This movement should not be confused with that of the same name which arose in France, which spread throughout Europe bearing all the worst neo-spiritualist tendencies, imbued with all morbidness and vice of romantic Decadentism. For this movement, the symbol represented an alternative degenerate, hallucinated, occult and individualistic reality, an infrahuman escape from positivist obtuseness. Russian Symbolism, on the contrary, represented the search for the meaning of sacred symbols present in the different religions and traditions of the past and present, interpreted mainly in the light of Orthodox Hesychasm. These symbolists, through the search for ‘Divine Sophia’, aimed at opposing the antichristic corruption of modern civilization. Among the main exponents were Vladimir Soloviev, the monk Pavel Aleksandrovič Florenskij (executed by order of Stalin), Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Nikolái Berdiáyev and Zinaida Gippius, who became Mereškovski’s wife. This author, admittedly anti-communist, was certainly not “politically correct”, at least according to today’s view. This is the reason why the so-called democratic regimes and their servants have organized a conspiracy of silence around him.[↩]
2. This is well known to relentless propagandists of religions who invaded India on the wave of various military conquests. It has been the malignant attention of those invaders to destroy or, at the very least, to scar the mūrtis of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism in order to prevent their ritual use. And this insanity has not yet subsided, as evidenced also by recent episodes.[↩]
3. It is significant that even today the intact images exhibited in the archaeological museums are object of worship with flowers and garlands.[↩]
4. This deity called Hecate by the Greeks, was the dark hypostasis of the Goddess Diana-Artemis. Now, just as the latter was the huntress deity accompanied by a pack of hounds, so too was Trivia associated with dogs. But in this case, it was the jackal-dog, carrion-eater. These two aspects later merged together.[↩]
5. In the Anglo-Saxon world the dark Halloween holiday has been preserved and, like all the aberrations that come from there, it is spreading everywhere as an unreasonable fashion. Although the homologated culture maintains it to be a Celtic term to indicate the evening before the All Saints’ Day (All Hallow’s Eve) of Christianity, it is clear that Halloween refers to a previous period. It is much more likely that the term indicates the opening of the doors of the Germanic hell (hall, hölle).[↩]
6. Julio Caro Baroja, Las brujas y su mundo, Madrid, Revista de Occidente, 1961, cap. IV.[↩]
7. Nordic hell is connected to the idea of ice and snow. For this reason, Frau Hölle, as well as her counterpart Frau Perchta or Lady Bertha, is the snowy queen of the winter that leads to ‘white death’ by frostbite. It is known for her large feet or goose feet. Even her helpers suffer from the same deformity.[↩]
8. Andrea Del Col, L’Inquisizione in Italia. Dal XII al XXI secolo, Milano, Oscar Mondadori, 2006, parte I, cap. V. The trials that took place in Toulouse between 1335 and 1350, whose details on the Sabbath seemed to anticipate those contained in the records of the following centuries, are actually hoaxes fabricated in the first half of the 19th century (Norman Cohn, I demoni dentro. Le origini del sabba e la grande caccia alle streghe, Milano, Unicopli, 1994, capp. I-II).[↩]
9. These phenomena were later separated, giving rise to the belief of lycanthropy and vampirism.[↩]
10. The Canon Episcopi of the 10th century considered these prodigious events as simple fantasies, dreams or hallucinations.[↩]
11. In the present atmosphere of total imbecility, it is widely accepted the wrong belief that witches were exclusively women because of the misogyny of patriarchal society at the time. In fact, in witchcraft trials in Scotland, Iceland and Estonia, the majority of the convicted were men. (Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch-Hunts: A Global History, Wiley Editing Services, 2004, pp. 147-164).[↩]
12. The relationship between witchcraft, diabolical evocations and Renaissance culture is very well demonstrated by the episodes described by Cellini in his autobiography (Benvenuto Cellini, La vita, Novara, Istituto Geografico De Agostini, 1983, pp. 170-174). The reader will have the opportunity to learn more about this subject in the next chapters.[↩]
13. Matteo Duni e Dinora Corsi (ed. by) Non lasciar vivere la malefica: le streghe nei trattati e nei processi (secoli XIV-XVII), Firenze, Firenze University Press, 2009.[↩]
14. Jeanne des Armoises (1412-1431?) was certainly not a peasant girl, as the pious legend in the service of French nationalism says, but a well-known person at the court of the Dauphin and probably related to the royal house of the Valois. Not only was her story severely manipulated, but her religious mission was nothing more than a cover for a political plot. It is truly suspicious that she was beatified only in 1910 and canonized in 1920, five centuries after the events! André Bourrier, Grillot de Givry and Han Ryner, La vérité sur le supplice de Jeanne d’Arc, victime de l’Église: la Pucelle a-t-elle été brûlée? S’est-elle échappée et mariée?, Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, L’Idée libre, 1925. Another unclear subject is linked to the environment of the Romanian esotericists stationed in Paris, already militants of the Iron Guard and disciples of the disquieting seer Petrache Lupu. Vasile Lovinescu linked the figure of Joan of Arc to an alleged initiation centre located in the “Hyperborean Dacia”. Although in much more prudent terms, Vâlsan also attributed to the Maid of Orleans a supposedly important “initiatic function”, completely indemonstrable.[↩]
15. St. Margaret of Antioch and St. Catherine of Alexandria, as they were identified a posteriori; they are two virgins and martyrs of whom very little is known and who, in any case, had nothing in common with the alleged “patriotic mission” of Joan.[↩]
16. No wonder the two friars were recently converted from Judaism. Overzealousness and fanaticism are a psychological result typical of conversions from one monotheistic religion to another, as was the case with the famous inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada OP.[↩]
17. Until the 17th century, the term maleficae was used to define witches. The term “witchcraft” came into use from the Enlightenment in order to stigmatize religious behaviour and positions.[↩]
18. “In the period in which torture was most prevalent in Spain, in Valencia, out of two thousand trials of the Inquisition in the period from 1480 to 1530, twelve cases of torture were found” (Jean Dumont, L’Église au risque de l’histoire, Paris, Critérion, 1981, pp. 378-379). We have already pointed out on other occasions the artificial construction of the leyenda negra against Catholic Spain carried out mainly by Elizabethan England and its Dutch and German Protestant vassals. We will have to return to the leyenda negra in more detail, considering that only a few courageous historians have expressed themselves on this historical falsification which continues to be promoted and divulged by the Anglo-Saxon Protestant peoples of Europe and North America.[↩]
19. In Italy there were thirty-six and in Portugal four. In Catholic Ireland there was not even one conviction. P. Portone, “The zealous judge and the tolerant inquisitor”, in AAVV, La causa delle streghe di Triora, Arma di Taggia, Pro Triora Ed., 2014, p. 33.[↩]
20. It is well known that canon law was entrusted to Dominican inquisitors, while the civil, criminal and police aspect were directly managed by the ‘secular arm’, that is, the court of His Catholic Majesty. Marina Montesano, Caccia alle streghe, Rome, Salerno Ed., 2012; Jean-Baptiste Guiraud, Elogio dell’inquisizione, Rino Cammilleri (edited by), Milan, Diffusione Libraria, 1994; Adriano Prosperi, Tribunali della coscienza. Inquisitori, confessori, missionari, Turin, Einaudi, 1996; Rino Cammilleri, La vera storia dell’Inquisizione, Casale Monferrato, Piemme, 2006.[↩]
21. Paul Boyer e Stephen Nissenbaum, La città indemoniata, Salem e le origini sociali di una caccia alle streghe, Torino, Einaudi, 1986; Mary Beth Norton, In the devil’s snare, the Salem crisis of 1692, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, La città indemoniata, Salem e le origini sociali di una caccia alle streghe, Turin, Einaudi, 1986; Mary Beth Norton, In the devil’s snare, the Salem crisis of 1692, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.[↩]

52. The Protestant Reformation. Luther’s emulators.

All the above resulted in an irrational hatred towards all that was Latin or Roman. The Germanic and Anglo-Saxon peoples, by following Protestantism and thus rejecting Latinization and Rome which had partially brought them into civilization, returned to their barbaric origins. This terrible crisis of the Western world caused a decreasing power of the Empire and the Church. The latter, responsible during the Middle Ages of casting the Latin civilization into chaos by plotting against the Empire for temporal hegemony, realized too late that it had mainly damaged itself. As soon as the Lutheran heresy was born what was left of the Church came under the protection of the Emperor, who although cut back was still powerful and respected by all the kingdoms of the fragmented Christianity.

The Germans, as already mentioned, were divided into a large number of kingdoms, duchies, marquisates, ecclesiastical or noble fiefdoms and free communes, all directly dependent on the Holy Roman Empire. The great feudal lords envied the kings of the national states, namely France and England who, although nominally still part of the Empire, managed to detach themselves from it thanks to their military power and vastness of their territories. At the same time France and England had also achieved to be almost entirely autonomous from the papal authority. The German princes saw in Luther’s rebellious preaching the opportunity to emancipate themselves from the two powers of the medieval tradition, and thus acquire national independence¹.

In the early 16th century, the outrageous enrichment of the “fat people”² had ruined not only the city plebs and the peasants, but also the small and medium nobility. The great feudal lords, on the other hand, formed an alliance with the new rich, distancing themselves furthermore from the impoverished nobility and the urban patriciate. This important part of German society also sympathised with the vulgar and poor religiosity preached by Martin Luther. From 1524 to 1526, under the leadership of indebted and ruined knights, a mass uprising of thousands of hungry commoners broke out against the princes. Martin Luther had to choose whom to side with: and he decided for those who could most support his work of international subversion to Catholicism. He chose the princes. “[…] Anyone who can, must tear them to pieces, strangle them, pierced them secretly or publicly, as a stray dog must be beaten to death”³, he declared lovingly about the rebels. The revolt was forcefully suppressed with more than one hundred thousand dead.

Sheltered by his illustrious protectors, who took advantage of the fairness and chivalry of Emperor Charles V⁴, this champion of virtue believed that Jesus Christ himself had acquitted him of his various oaths and vows that he had took as a monk. And so, Luther not only married a nun, but he also chose as residence for him and his family the entire deconsecrated monastery of Wittemberg, where he had occupied a cell as a monk. He spent his last years to consolidated the heresy he created. But by that time his protectors had already fully exploited his work for their own gains. Feeling isolated, he dedicated himself to composing repetitive but increasingly harsh writings, and to consoling himself by taking refuge in binge and lust. He died in 1546.

Other reformers rose in the wake of the Lutheran protest. The Swiss German Huldreich Zwingli (1484-1531) leveraged on the nationalism of the German cantons to start a reform very similar to Luther’s one, but definitely more bourgeois and more aggressive. He endorsed the idea of predestination, but stressed the importance of the divine grace in favour of those cultured people blessed by luck, thereby revealing his attachment to the humanistic mentality. He started a bitter conflict with the Protestant sect of the Anabaptists of Zurich who in 1526 were all sentenced to death by drowning. He fell in battle against the Swiss German troops still loyal to Catholicism.

John Calvin (1509-1564) at the beginning followed the footsteps of Zwingli who was just few years older than him. From his native France he fled to Switzerland to escape the Inquisition. In Basel and Geneva, he tried to create a utopian society, but his new ideas clashed equally with Catholicism and Protestant sects. He preached that faith reveals itself solely through absolute certainty (Institutio Christianae Religionis, III.2.6) and that this absolute certainty was the only proof that the faith was established by the Holy Spirit (Ibid. III.2.7). This entailed the belief that God assigned salvation to some and eternal damnation to others, forging thus the idea of an inevitable predestination⁵; good luck in life was then seen as a sign of divine predilection⁶ (Ibid. III, 21, 5).

His fanaticism finally prevailed in the city of Geneva and took the most violent forms. Massacres, killings, torture, burning of witches and heretics did not decreased with the Protestant reform, on the contrary they increased tremendously. In Calvin’s Geneva, strict rules, spiritual police, denunciation, spying and bloody penalties were imposed. Those who disagree with the reformer were sent to the torture chamber or burnt at the stake⁷ even without having committed any action against the new laws. He introduced the “stake of vanities” (Bildersturm, “statue-storm” or the outbreak of iconoclastic fury) where everything beautiful, sacred or considered superfluous was burned⁸.

But the worst forms of ugliness and depravation were performed by the reformed Anabaptist sect⁹. This sect, born in Switzerland in 1525, showed little difference from Lutheranism. The main distinctive trait, however, consisted in trying to be possessed (sskrt. aveśana) by God and thus to prophesy. In 1534 two Anabaptist “prophets” from the Netherlands¹⁰ arrived in the city of Münster. In a short time, they roused to fanaticism the population of the city and they established a lawless regime of terror. Family was destroyed, the moral proscribed and the gratuitous violence was considered God’s will.

Also, the new Anabaptist converts began to be possessed, mainly women, with scandalous and shocking results. The city, besieged by both Catholic and Lutheran feudal troops, resisted for eighteen months during which acts of collective madness were committed¹¹. When the city was finally liberated, the population was more than halved not as a result of the armed clashes, but because of the summary executions carried out among the besieged Anabaptists. The surviving prophet, who had ludicrously declared himself King and adorned himself with gold crown and ornaments, retracted in vain in order to save his life¹².

Following the example of the Protestant reformation, in 1533 Henry VIII of England proclaimed himself head of the Anglican church. The reason for this rift with Rome was really trivial: the King wanted to divorce his Queen in order to marry another woman, but that was not possible for the Catholic Church which considered marriage as indissoluble¹³. With this latter heresy the Catholic church returned to be essentially Latin¹⁴.

In conclusion, Protestantism in its numerous sects is characterized by the absence of rituals, replaced by social or commemorative ceremonies, and the real theology substituted by moral theories. As such it cannot be properly considered in a religious nor in a dhārmika context. And neither it can in any way be considered as an exotericism on which any initiatic school survived in the West could legitimately rely on.

Lastly, Protestantism finds its only base on the words expressed orally or in writing, and it was extremely important the use of the press for its great diffusion¹⁵. This technological innovation, closely connected to the legend of Mephistopheles, for the first time in the history of humanity acted as tool of propaganda and popularization¹⁶.

From the German-Anglo-Saxon peoples developed and spread the so-called modern civilization, a true cancer that has brought the entire planet to agony. Nowadays their postcolonial weapons are represented by savage capitalism and the usury by banks that stem from the Protestant morality and the constant inspiration from Judaism¹⁷. With ignoble shamelessness, even in official documents, they continue to define P.I.G.S.¹⁸ non-Protestant peoples, those Latin and Southern peoples who were the only representative of the tradition in the West.

Only a dunce can call them “separate brothers”!

Maria Chiara de’ Fenzi

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1. These princes miscalculated the outcome: Charles V (1500-1558), the young Emperor and King of Spain, demonstrated skills of great leader and politician. Without ever breaking the chivalric code, he overcame all the intrigues of his vassals and maintained the prestige of the Holy Roman Empire. We must stress the greatness of this Catholic sovereign, since only the external form of the ancient Empire was surviving by then. In fact, the Empire of Charles V was completely devoided of its initiatic substratum after the destruction of the Order of the Temple and he had to witness the conversion to Protestantism of half of his German vassals. On the other hand, Germany had to wait until 1871 to achieve its unification as a national state. Moreover, the plots of the German princes, who used Luther for their own interests, irreversibly destabilized Central Europe, spreading wars, revenge, chauvinisms and hegemonic claims that are still virulent today.[↩]
2. These emerging classes mostly used usury to enrich themselves. The Council of Vienna (1311) had decisively condemned usury even at minimum interest. This prompted the new rich to turn their attention towards the Old Testament more than to the Gospel: “Thou shalt lend to many nations, and thou shalt not borrow from any man. You will rule over many nations and no one will rule over you” (Deuteronomy, xv.6). And thus, a new “ethic” was born, what today is believed to be the ‘Judaeo-Christian origin’ of European civilization.[↩]
3. “[…] Man soll sie zerschmeißen, würgen, stechen, heimlich und öffentlich, wer da kann, wie man einen tollen Hund erschlagen muss.” Martin Lutherus, Wider die Mordischen und Reubischen Rotten der Bawren (Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants).[↩]
4. Although the Diet of Worms condemned the rebel monk, the Emperor respected the safe-conduct he had issued to him, allowing him to leave and hide.[↩]
5. Luther’s denial of free will led to the theory of predestination. Calvin radicalized this idea: the “elects” could sin without compromising their predestination to salvation, on the contrary the “reprobates”, although leading a virtuous life, could not hope for salvation. Hence the dreadful question: how can you know if you are an elect or a reprobate? Having doubts about not being predestined to salvation would be already seen as a sign of little faith and of being already close to the state of reprobation. At this point fully engaging in a professional occupation becomes a self-motivation exercise that would bring “self-confidence”, by removing religious anxieties and inspiring a sense of presumption of being already saved. The ‘self-made-man’ which succeeds in ‘do it’, to “made it” in his profession or in his business is kissed by God and his wealth becomes a sign of divine predestination” (Pietro Ferrari. La questione monetaria, Cermenate, Ed. Radio Spada, 2018, p. 38). This Calvinist mentality spread nowadays on the wave of the Americanization of the world, and it takes the form of the most ruthless competitiveness and unprincipled self-affirmation. Because of the multimedia reality this frenzy approach to work persecutes each and every one even in private life and free time.[↩]
6. It is easy to understand where the greedy business mentality of the Swiss bankers comes from.[↩]
7. In a few years more than ninety people were burned alive for having expressed ideas not aligned to the insane Calvinist republic.[↩]
8. This information is largely and comprehensively presented in detail by Stefan Zweig, Die Discipline, Frankfurt am Main, Fischer Verlag, 1987, pp. 54-65. In the present “ecumenical” climate an attempt was made in vain to pass these cruelties as legend, when the true leyanda negra was created exclusively in a Protestant context with anti-traditional purpose.[↩]
9. This name implies the need to re-baptize the new believers.[↩]
10. The Netherlands, since the Middle Ages, always had an anti-traditional role, representing the merging point of the worst tendencies of the German and English peoples. Even today, the ill European habits find breeding ground in this area of northern Europe.[↩]
11. We can easily see this event as a macroscopic example of collective possession, that can be found more or less extensively only in modern revolutions, from Cromwell’s up to the more recent insane examples of the Khmer Rouge or the neo-khilafah.[↩]
12. Friedrich Reck Malleczewen, Il re degli anabattisti. Storia di una rivoluzione moderna, Milano, Rusconi, 1971.[↩]
13. The Franciscan Francesco Zorzi was commissioned by Henry VIII to find a theological loophole to justify his divorce. Zorzi, an alchemist and Christian qabbalist, belonged to an illustrious Venetian patrician family, and was related to the ruling Doge Andrea Gritti. At the beginning of the sixteenth century Venice, under the influence of the profane Renaissance mentality, carried out an anti-imperial and anti-papal political action. Francis A. Yates, Cabbala e Occultismo nell’età elisabettiana, Torino, Einaudi, 1982, pp. 37-47.[↩]
14. The only exceptions were some southern German princedoms, such as Bavaria and Austria, which remained loyal to the ancient religion. The Calvinists represented about ten percent of the population in France, known there as Huguenots, and the reformed Waldensians could be found in Piedmont and Savoy. A particular intellectually rigid mentality can still be found nowadays in the areas where these Protestant enclaves flourished.[↩]
15. Protestant or neo-Qabbalist printers often offered shelter and financial support to Protestants in those areas still under Catholic control. The printer Aldus Manucius, friend and disciple of Pico della Mirandola, and his descendants, had a central role in the change of mentality in Venice.[↩]
16. The name of the devil who holds a grimoire, Mephistopheles, is probably composed by the words of the Hebrew מֵפִיץ (mepis), propagator, diffuser, and the German teufel, devil, liar; name that is well suited to the patron spirit of the printing art. His name appears already in 1527 in the pseudo-Jewish and pseudo-Greek book entitled Praxis Magia Faustiana, printed in Passau in Bavaria. It is no fortuitous that this demon happens to live in the woods surrounding Wittemberg. On the black magic origins of printing see Sarah Wall-Rendell, “Doctor Faustus and Printer’s devil”, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Vol. 48, No. 2, Tudor and Stuart Drama (Spring, 2008) Rice University Pbl., Pp. 259-281.[↩]
17. The ethical revolution of Calvinism, by erasing the sin of usury, relegated man to a servant and an instrument of money by reversing the natural order and thus opposing the Aristotelian conception of money as “nomisma” that considered it merely an econometric tool created by law; Calvinism paved the way to ruthless competition and to a financial and anarchist capitalism which, with Adam Smith, determined that currency was indispensably a commodity. The Calvinist Netherlands attacked England, which since the Norman conquest of the 12th century had only known an ‘Aristotelian’ monetary system based on silver […] In 1692 the Catholic King James II of England was overthrown by William of Orange, who had to pay his debts to his war financiers. Cromwell’s dictatorship erased all of this wealth and patrimony, paving the way for private bankers (Goldsmith) who wanted an indebted State. With William of Orange in 1689 and then with the foundation in 1694 of the Bank of England, it was established a Dutch-style system with a private institution issuing money, a monopoly created from nothing with the only aim of indebt the State” (Ferrari, cit., pp.38-39).[↩]
18. Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain.[↩]

51. The Protestant Reformation: Martin Luther

In 1482, Johan Reuchlin, one of the first German humanists, travelled to Italy, specifically to Florence and Rome, to receive a more thorough education on the new ideas of the time. There he had contact with the Neoplatonic Academy which influenced greatly his studies, in particular with the Marquis of Mirandola. From that moment he became fascinated with the Christian Qabbalistic view, rather than the Hermetic one. It was also in Italy that Reuchlin studied Hebrew with Obadiah Sforno, a Talmudist rabbi from Cesena. His first work to stand out was the De verbo mirifico (1494): a dialogue between a Greek philosopher¹, a Qabbalist and a Christian. In order to assure the “initiatic” orthodoxy of the text, Reuchlin makes the Jewish rabbi the main character, thus placing both the Platonic philosophy and the Christian religion under the protection of the Qabbalistic magic². In fact, although effective, the Platonic and Neoplatonic magic did not provide sufficient spiritual guarantees due to the unclear standing of the pagan powers. The Qabbalah, on the other hand, based on the evocation in Hebrew of angels and of the names of Yehovah, assured the positive nature of the forces called into action. Therefore, Christians were able to find in it the proof of the divinity of Christ and the confirmation of the Christian revelation. As a matter of fact, with the addition of a shin in its centre, the tetragrammaton became Yehshuah, Jesus³. However, the dialogue between the three sages eventually comes down to a mere description of a ceremonial magic to summon “angels”. In 1517⁴, Reuchlin published his major work: De arte cabalistica. In this treatise he demonstrates a better knowledge of the Jewish Qabbalah, as evidenced by the numerous sources cited. This was probably due to the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492⁵. On that occasion, many Qabbalists moved to Italy bringing their libraries with them. Also De arte cabalistica is structured around a dialogue between three wise men: a Qabbalist, a Pythagorean (de facto, an Hermeticist) and a Muslim. The Catholic is clearly no longer among the sages. The Pythagorean replaces the Platonist of his previous work, thus showing Reuchlin’s intent to have the Qabbalistic numerology coinciding with the Pythagorean one⁶. There is no doubt that Reuchlin had influence on Martin Luther through his nephew Melanchthon, who was the closest collaborator of the Protestant reformer. However, this influence did not properly concern the intellectualist approach of the humanist to the Qabbalah. Luther was a rustic commoner, not very inclined to cultural abstractions. Nevertheless, he was also well aware that his desire to eliminate the Catholic priestly tradition led inevitably to a return to the Jewish origins of Christianity. Initially, in fact, Luther preached a reunification of the two Semitic religions, convinced as he was that, in this perspective, the Jews would have easily accepted Jesus as their Messiah. In fact, this also explains the renewed importance of the Old Testament for the Protestant reform which, in the long run, overshadowed the Gospel itself. However, within fifteen years, this Lutheran pro-Jewish feeling led to unexpected results. The Jews maintained their refusal to recognize the Christ as their Messiah and, more importantly, many of Luther’s followers began to get circumcised and to convert to Judaism. This prompted Luther, a man of uncontrollable outbursts of anger, to adopt increasingly severe positions against the Jewish, so much that in 1543 he published the book About the Jews and their lies (Von den Juden und ihren Lügen), which sparked a real anti-Semitic persecution⁷.

Martin Luther was born in 1483 to a peasant family. The father, who became a miner, took advantage of the climate of social confusion typical of the time of communes and quickly managed to climb up to the lowest ranks of the new bourgeoisie. This allowed Martin to access Law studies, thus carrying on his father’s plan of social climbing. Nonetheless, Luther’s cultural education remained rather superficial. Because he was a follower of Ockham’s nominalism⁸, he excelled in dialectics rather than in doctrine. Tormented by an inconstant nature, he fluctuated between visionary exaltations and dark depressions, fearful of God and tempted by the devil. And as a result of a sign from heaven⁹, Luther became an Augustinian monk in search of a little cloistered peace. For a brief time, he was able to repress his lustful temperament and his intolerance for authority¹⁰. However, he found the theme of divine justice, which he hated and feared, unbearable. He eventually found a solution to his annoyance: the divine justice implies that God justifies everyone indiscriminately¹¹. A sense of hatred for tradition began to arise in him. Tradition requires obedience and, hence, he was under the obligation to continuously repress the centrifugal forces of his own individualism. Thus, between 1517 and 1518¹² Luther began conceiving the idea of a “return” to early Christianity¹³. Early Christianity could only be imagined by reading the Gospel; consequently, he rejected any transmission of ritual and doctrinal order¹⁴. By amputating fifteen centuries of completely autonomous tradition, Luther placed his “true” Christianity back in the bosom of Judaism. This is the origin of the fictitious Judeo-Christianity that from that moment on has greatly gained ground up to today’s culture. At the same time, the Old Testament became predominant thanks to the “Protestant Bible”. Undoubtedly, Luther was not fully aware of this pro-Jewish turn, that was instead controlled by more sharp and dangerous minds, namely Reuchlin and his nephew Philip Melanchthon. The consequences of this “return to origins” were as follows:

1. Protestantism abolished any reading, prayer, invocation or praise instituted by the Church since its foundation, validating instead only passages taken from the Bible. Due to its hatred towards tradition¹⁵, it fiercely opposed the Latin language in favour of the vernacular, in this case German.

2. The repealed traditional liturgical (ritual) and theological (doctrinal) teaching was replaced by the free examination of sacred texts. Since no authority was recognized, everyone had the right to interpret the texts at his own discretion, leaving no room for rebuttal or correction.

3. Actions (ritual or not) do not lead to salvation, only faith does. Faith is now seen as an emotional and mental transportation towards one’s individual beliefs, as it appears clear from point 4. Faith is a free gift of the divine grace; therefore, salvation is somehow predestined.

4. The arbitrary interpretation could become a sort of “spontaneous prayer”, and in the ceremonies it replaced the ancient consecrated formulas of the Catholic tradition. This allowed the use of free anathemas against anyone and anything that opposed Protestantism.

5. Thus, the rite was altogether replaced by the “liturgy of the word”, with readings of biblical passages in vernacular translation, by “spontaneous prayers” that became sentimental outbursts of anyone who belonged to the community, and by sappy songs that reinterpreted in a moralistic sense the Old Testament passages. The liturgy of the gesture was completely replaced by signs of community aggregation, “greetings of peace” etc.

6. The seven sacraments of Catholicism were first reduced to three, then to two. In fact, the confession without penance was soon abolished, favouring instead some sort of public admission of sin. Only the Baptism and the Eucharist survived. The Baptism with water became a symbol of aggregation to the community of believers. The Eucharist lost any sacrificial meaning: it was no longer the ritual repetition of the sacrifice of the cross, but simply the commemoration of the last supper. However, Luther kept claiming that the body and blood of Jesus Christ were still present in the bread and wine of the communion. But how was it possible to justify the presence of the Christ in the substances offered in sacrifice if there was no consecration? Could possibly the mere presence of laymen consecrate the bread and wine in any way?

7. The abolition of the sacrament of priestly ordination precluded all sort of consecration. Without priesthood there is no sacrificial rite nor the consecration of the oblation or the victim¹⁶. The dissolution of priesthood was indeed the eradication from tradition, thus reducing the Protestant or Evangelical community, as they prefer to be called, to a lay community. One becomes “pastor” after a mere school course, or simply by election of the community, without obtaining any priestly charism.

8. Likewise, the place of prayer cannot be consecrated and it is no longer the permanent home of the Lord where His presence is real. It is open only during the congregation assemblies. For the rest of the time, it remains an unused profane space.

9. Similarly, the tombs of the saints and the relics are not held as holy. The very concept of sacred is just a conventional title given to the Bible, considered to be “the word of the Lord”. God, therefore, after the prophets of Judaism and after the historical life of Christ, became silent. Or rather, He speaks through the individual fantasies of each Protestant believer.

10. Due to the hatred and rejection towards any medieval tradition, the veneration of the saints and of the Virgin was also abolished. All iconic representations were, therefore, prohibited and the ancient images destroyed because they were seen as residues of superstition.

11. Due to the disappearance of the centrality of sacredness and mystery, and by pushing to the extreme limit the individualism, characteristic of that period of mercantile class affirmation, Protestantism inevitably fragmented  into hundreds of sects and subsects fiercely in competition with each other: “And if a kingdom be divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand; And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand; And if Satan rise up against himself and be divided, he cannot stand, but hath an end.” (Gospel of Saint Mark, III. 24-26). Notwithstanding their feuding, these sects are always ready to overcome their differences and join forces in order to fight Tradition¹⁷.

Maria Chiara de’ Fenzi

1. The Greek philosopher is used here to exalt Plato and devalue Aristotle. However, this is only a façade. In reality, behind the figure of Plato we find the celebration of Hermetic magic opposed to the medieval Scholasticism represented by Aristotle.[↩]
2. We want to remind the reader, in case the content of previous articles has been forgotten, that neither the Christian Qabbalah nor the Renaissance Hermetism cannot claim any initiatic derivation of any nature. In fact, they were only profane reconstructions based on books. In both cases the definition of pseudo-initiation is entirely adequate.[↩]
3. Both Reuchlin and Giovanni Pico referred to the authority of Saint Jerome, who allegedly would have endorsed, with his excellent knowledge of Hebrew, the existence of the version of the tetragrammaton with the shin in the centre, thus forming the name of Jesus. Frances A. Yates, sympathizer of the Judaizing Christians, confirmed that the tetragrammaton with the inner shin was indeed attested in the works of both Saint Jerome and Nicholas of Cusa. The latter does not come as surprise, although we have not been able to verify the existence of such a pronouncement in his writings. Such notion, however, does not appear in any of Saint Jerome’s writings that deal with the tetragrammaton (Breviarium in Psalmos. Psalm. VIII). As proof of the deception orchestrated by these Renaissance occultists, it suffices to say that the name of Jesus in Hebrew and Aramaic ends with an ‘ayn, which makes all their attempts a simple mental construction. The educated Renaissance men, albeit keen to dismantle with philological rigour the medieval falsifications such as the donation of Constantine, shamelessly falsified the texts whenever they needed to support their ideas. This was done not for the sake of truth, but simply to undermine the Church.[↩]
4. It is certainly not a coincidence that this is also the starting date of Luther’s anti-Catholic activity.[↩]
5. This edict is regarded as a turning point by western historiography, especially by the sensitive Protestant souls who still have their finger pointed at the Catholic Kings. It is curious, however, that hey are conveniently oblivious to the fact that the Jews had already been expelled from England in 1290. In 1657, Oliver Cromwell allowed the Jews to return. However, the expulsion decree was never officially withdrawn. The Jews were also expelled from the kingdom of France in 1394, by order of Charles VI. His successor, Charles VII and the pucelle d’Orléans, were careful not to revoke the decree, which was abolished only in 1789 by the Revolution. In non-national states, such as Italy and Germany, it was the single fiefdoms or communes that, in different times and manners, expelled the Jews. In Italy the states that took such measures were the Papal State, the Kingdom of Naples, the Republic of Genoa, the Duchy of Milan. At the beginning of the 16th century, out of 2500 German cities, only Frankfurt, Worms and Prague had not forced the Jews out of their walls (Claudio Pozzoli, Vita di Lutero, Milan, Rusconi, 1983, p. 35). In large part, the expulsion of the Jews was not motivated by religious reasons. Asa matter of fact, it was a convenient way to extinguish the debts by exiling the usurers. The expulsion of the Jews by the Catholic Kings is still one of the main arguments of the leyenda negra exploited to humiliate Spain and, by reflection, the entire catholicity. On the contrary the Jews were welcomed in the Netherlands, where they became the most fervent supporters of the Orange. They were also accepted in the Ottoman territories, especially in the city of Thessaloniki. In Italy they found refuge in Venice and Livorno. In short, the Jews were welcomed anywhere there was hostility against the papacy.[↩]
6. Johannes Reuchlin, L’Arte Cabbalistica, by Giulio Busi e Saverio Campanini, Firenze, Opus Libri, 1995, pp. 84-136. In this book Reuchlin maintains that “he who willingly believes in the word shall easily become a Pythagorean” … the word of a Qabbalist! (Ibid. P. 10).[↩]
7. The book was also extensively used by the National Socialists for their anti-Jewish propaganda (Martin Lutero, Degli ebrei e delle loro menzogne, by Adelisa Malena, Torino, Einaudi, 2008).[↩]
8. However, it is emblematic of those dark times that at the University of Erfurt were taught Ockham’s heretical doctrines instead of Scholasticism.[↩]
9. Throughout his life, Martin gave credence to a large number of superstitions. The event leading him to monastic life, of which he made only mysterious allusions, seems to have been the striking of a lightning bolt while he was walking in the countryside.[↩]
10. Even so, he was able to conclude his studies and eventually taught theology at the new, but not very prestigious, university of Wittenberg, which became the centre of the Protestant revolt.[↩]
11. The dogmatic basis of Protestantism was that not actions, but only faith leads to salvation. We shall soon see what Luther meant by faith. Also the latest Catholic popes seem to have converted to this theological aberration by declaring that everyone is already saved.  Such an affirmation renders religion fundamentally meaningless and purposeless and, therefore, it devoid of any reason to exist anymore.[↩]
12. The “sale” of indulgences was only the pretext for severing relations with Rome. This practice was the standard dakṣinā given to priests in exchange for prayers to release the souls of the deceased from their purgatorial sufferings. This custom was not mandatory, and it contributed only to the maintenance of priests, monks, friars and nuns of all orders and ranks. At that time, the other source of livelihood for ecclesiastics and civil authorities was the obligation of the tithes, or the tenth part of the net income of a family, to be delivered annually to the parish priest or to the tax collector. The Protestants, who first invented the modern secular society, are still outraged by such “despicable” practice but they forget the suffocating direct and indirect taxes that currently suffocate the citizens, defrauding them of more than half of their gross profit.[↩]
13. All ideas regarding an alleged “return to origins” actually hide a subversive intention. In fact, the “origins”, due to the lack of regular teaching through direct transmission, are merely conceived on the basis of the inclinations and mental impressions of the “reformer”. Similarly, the reformed pauperistic medieval orders like Franciscans, Dominicans and Augustinians (reformed by Alexander IV) and all the heretical and “communistic” movements to them related, such as the Waldensians, Dolcinians, Wycliffians, Lollards, Hussite etc., they all preached a miserable and wretched life as indicated by Gospel, or so they believed. This is absolutely false. In fact, the Gospel teaches to have mercy and help the poor, not to live a wretched beggar’s life (Giorgio Tourn, I valdesi, Torino, Claudiana ed., 1977; Mariateresa Beonio-Brocchieri Fumagalli, Wycliff, il comunismo dei predestinati, Firenze, Sansoni, 1975).[↩]
14. In similar fashion, due to Protestant influence, has developed the neo-Hinduism current of the nāstika, known as ārya samāj. This current refuses any written text or oral transmission that does not appear in the Vedas. By preaching the return to the origins, it divulges a monotheistic, evolutionary and anti-caste religiosity, in full contradiction with the very Vedic texts. Thus, according to its followers, the Vedas must be reinterpreted to grasp their true meaning![↩]
15. Translation always involves an interpretative filter. Therefore, the biblical passages central to the religious practice appear strongly distorted by Protestantism.[↩]
16. Due to the absence of priesthood, the killing of an animal is not a real sacrifice, but only a pious slaughter. True sacrifice is performed only accordingly to the rules and by following a complete priestly doctrine of sacrifice.[↩]
17. These princes miscalculated the outcome: Charles V (1500-1558), the young Emperor and King of Spain, demonstrated skills of great leadership and political savviness. Without ever breaking the chivalric code, he overcame all the intrigues of his vassals and maintained the prestige of the Holy Roman Empire. We must stress the greatness of this Catholic sovereign, since at that time only the external form of the ancient Empire had survived. In fact, without the backbone embodied by Order of the Temple, the Empire of Charles V was by that time completely devoid of its initiatic substratum and, thus, he could only be an impotent spectator of the conversion to Protestantism of half of his German vassals. On the other hand, Germany had to wait until 1871 to achieve its unification as a national state. Moreover, the plots of the German princes, who used Luther for their own interests, irreversibly destabilized Central Europe, waging wars, wreaking vengeance and making chauvinistic and hegemonic claims that are still virulent today.[↩]

50. The return of Hermetism

Until the 11th century, the only Hermetic text preserved in western Christianity since the Hellenistic era was the Asclepius, a Latin version of the Greek original attributed to Apuleius of Madaurus¹. The text deals mainly with the rituals that the ancient Egyptian priests carried out to charge the images of their gods with the powers of the corresponding stars. As long as the tradition of ancient Egypt had survived, there is nothing to complain about the validity of those rites, which resemble the ones used for the animation of icons (sskrt. prāṇa pratiṣṭhā) still used in India today. One can legitimately wonder what the hermeticists of the early Middle Ages intended to animate, since the Egyptian tradition had already disappeared with all its Gods, overwhelmed by Christian monotheism. If the Alexandrian Gnostics had Greco-Roman simulacra on which to exercise their theurgy, certainly in the Middle Ages such superstitions of antiquity were exercised solely to charge some non-religious objects with subtle energies.

Therefore, the main activity of the hermeticists of western Christianity was limited to the preparation of amulets and fetishes, with the use of sympathetic (or homeopathic) and antipathetic (or allopathic) magic. They collected, therefore, metals, stones, herbs and animals corresponding for certain analogies to planets, celestial asterisms and zodiac signs, drawing the elements from which the talismans were modelled. The malicious or benign use of these objects was then left to the discretion of those who were to use them. It is, therefore, understandable that hermetic magicians were frowned upon by ecclesiastical and imperial authorities and treated in the same way as healers, sorcerers and country wizards. However, the transformation in gold of base metals always moved the greed of the mighty who were often in debt. Therefore, it is no surprise that figures like Michael Scotus² attended the court of Emperor Frederick II and Roger Bacon lived under the protection of Pope Clement IV.

From the end of the 12th century, following the translations made in the first Universities of the works of al-Kindi, Avicenna and Averroes, a number of texts of Arab alchemy began to be known in Spain, France and Italy³. It is certainly no coincidence that those texts which, by means of magic preceded modern chemistry and the rationalistic mentality, arrived in Europe through the study of profane Arab philosophers. Those works were considered the product of the fertile pen of the alchemist Geber.

At the beginning of the 14th century, other Arab works⁴ of Geber began to spread in Latin Christianity. Not without a certain degree of superficiality, the hermeticists later identified him with Jābir ibn Hayyān (721~815)⁵. It is, however, probable that one or more Spanish moros versed in laboratory alchemy were hidden behind that name. Curiously enough, the Arabic texts attributed to the Persian alchemist that mention the chain of masters who transmitted that cosmological knowledge (silsilah, sskrt. paramparā) trace its origin to Hermes Trismegistus⁶, continuing through Orpheus, Pythagoras and Plato to the Neo-Platonists. Therefore, no mention is made of a more recent continuity through the taṣawwuf! What is certain is that in Islam, Alexandrian Hermetism did not come into conflict with religion. It was considered as a philosophy, the residue of a previous revelation abrogated by Islam and, as such, considered as isra’iliyat⁷.

However, the use of a peculiar form of expression and the conspicuous display of cosmological symbols and notions could have been deemed suitable for the purpose of expressing certain truths revealed by the Koran and of relaying deductions drawn from nature, both at the esoteric and exoteric levels. In this way, ‘Ali Ibn Abī Tālib, Ja’far aṣ-Ṣādiq, Dhul Nūn al-Miṣrī, the same Muhiddin Ibn’ Arabi and other well-known Sufis, sometimes assumed a hermetic form of expression. Nevertheless, their initiatic transmission remained the regular Muḥammadic one. And, on that account, Islamic philosophers and alchemists without Sufi ba’yat (sskrt. dīkṣā) continued to be profane: the former theoretical hermeticists, and the latter souffleurs in search of gold making⁷. At this point, Western esotericists should ask themselves the following questions: could Christian hermeticists have received Sufi initiation with the relative transmission of hermetic symbolism and language without converting to Islam? Or could they have received the hermetic doctrine and the corresponding alchemical method from theoretical hermeticists and Muslim souffleurs? Or finally, is it possible that they received an improbable Sufi-hermetic transmission simply by reading texts of Arab alchemy? The three questions can only receive a negative answer. Because an autonomous hermetic initiation was evidently non-existent.

*
*      *

In 1438, Georgius Gemistus Pletho (1355 ~ 1450)⁸, along with his follower Cardinal Bessarion (1403-1472), accompanied the basileus John VIII Palaiologos to participate in the Council of Ferrara and Florence in an attempt to unify the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. In Florence, Plethon captivated the attention of Cosimo “the Elder” de’ Medici with his idea of restoring the Hellenistic thought. It was this suggestion that prompted Cosimo to later found the Medici’s Neo-Platonic Academy⁹, the first nucleus of Humanism. Humanism refers to a cultural movement which, inspired by Classical and Hellenistic writings and works of art, imitated their styles with the aim of restoring this civilization and setting it as a model for a new world view. This endeavour, devoid of any traditional continuity from the original, consisted in the reproduction and reinterpretation of the exterior forms of antiquity, in a purely aesthetic sense. On the contrary, the content of the recovery of ancient forms could only be the reflection of an unreservedly anti-traditional mentality. The centrality of the Divinity and of man as His image, characteristic of the medieval tradition, was replaced with the world considered from a naturalistic and, before long, mechanistic point of view. This plan manifested itself clearly during the Renaissance with the development of Humanism, which entailed the replacement of religion with science and magic, and the imperial order with rampant armed merchants and loan sharks. Thus originated the modern world¹⁰.

With the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Orthodox monks fleeing the fallen Byzantine Empire introduced parts of the rich archives of their monasteries and imperial libraries to the Balkan peninsula. Western Christians, instead of worrying about the tragic fate of the Greeks, devoted to the recovery of those treasures of ancient wisdom. Cosimo “the Elder” sent messengers to the Balkans with orders to acquire ancient manuscripts from Byzantine refugees at low prices. Some of Plato’s works that first arrived in Florence were translated into Latin by Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499). In 1460 the Franciscan friar Leonardo da Pistoia returned from his mission to Macedonia, and handed over to Cosimo de’ Medici the manuscript of the Corpus Hermeticum¹¹, hitherto unknown in the West. The Florentine magnate, always attracted to the occult sciences¹², interrupted Ficino’s translations by ordering him to give priority to the translation of the hermetic texts. Ficino translated the collection in one breath and published it under the name of Pimander¹³. From that moment on, he was an enthusiastic supporter of hermetic philosophy, influencing the entire circle of the Academy with his passion. Ficino worked also on the translation of the Asclepius. However, this text attributed to Hermes resembled more to a grimoire, filled with magic bordering on necromancy and the evocation of demons.

Until then, magic, whether it was hermetic or otherwise, was kept outside the domain of religion, if not actually fought as a diabolical art. Thus, it became Ficino’s commitment to make hermetic magic accepted as Catholic¹⁴. He carefully avoided facing the clear condemnation uttered by Saint Augustine against Hermetism, hence preferring to quote Lactantius and Clement of Alexandria instead¹⁵. The reader should be reminded that Lactantius interpreted the expression ‘son of God’, announced by Pimander, as a prophecy of the coming of Christ. In reality, on closer inspection, it is clear that with ‘son of God’ the Corpus Hermeticum meant the Demiurge of gnostic conception. Ficino always professed his loyalty to the prevailing Catholicism, fearing that the magic he was propagating was condemned by the Church as witchcraft. He earnestly endeavoured to argue a distinction between ‘white’ and ‘black’ magic; namely, that activated by the intervention of angels from that inspired by devils. In this way, Hermes Trismegistus and his immediate successors, while being prisci magi (ancient magicians) were also prisci theologi (ancient knowers of God). From another point of view, he also claimed that hermetic magic should be considered as natural. In other words, he wanted to disguise magic as another natural science, therefore, not contrary to religion, but somehow neutral.

Note that the same approach was adopted by other exponents of the Renaissance to make empirical science accepted and appear compatible with faith. Once accepted in these terms, it was rather easy to accept science as true knowledge and faith as personal belief¹⁶. Furthermore, from a practical point of view, Ficino produced amulets on which he evoked the descent of celestial influences, with magical procedures not very dissimilar from what humanist intellectuals condemned as country witchcraft¹⁷. However, despite his precautions, his magical operations went far beyond:

“This human tree must be watered with young human liquid, in order for it to regain strength. So choose a healthy, shapely and pleasant young woman of fair complexion, and greedily suck her milk when the moon is crescent […]. It is a common and ancient opinion that certain old “saghe”, which are commonly called witches, suck the blood of infants to rejuvenate in strength. Why can’t even our old men, deprived of any other remedy, suck the blood of a young man? Of a consenting young man, I say, healthy, pleasant, of fair complexion, who has excellent and perhaps too abundant blood. Hence, like leeches, suck one or two ounces from a vein in the left arm that has just been opened […]”¹⁸.

To this practice of vampirism, Ficino adds love magic:

“But why is love called magician? Because all the power of magic consists in love; the work of magic is a certain adhesion of one thing to another by similitude of nature. The parts of this world, like the limbs of an animal, all depend on one Author and connect together by communion of nature. Therefore, as in us the brain, lung, heart, liver and other body parts adhere to one the other for something, and mutually help each other, and when one is sick the other is also sick, so the limbs of this great animal, that is, all the bodies of the world linked together, adhere to each other and share their nature. Thanks to this common relationship, common love is born; from this love mutual attraction is born, and this is true magic.”¹⁹

For this reason, “spiritual alchemy” is nothing but a euphemism used in the hermetic jargon to indicate the practice of magia sexualis still in vogue today among the alleged heirs of Renaissance Hermetism²⁰.

Magic and science, mysteriosophical occultism and naturalism, the admiration for paganism and the rejection of the medieval Christian tradition, the attraction for Gnostic arcana and the repulsion for Aristotelian-scholastic intellectual rigor, the fascination for complicated impenetrable symbolisms and the rejection of any inner aspiration, the preference for an enjoyable life and easy welfare and the intolerance for monastic asceticism and feudal austerity, the predilection for allegory and the aversion to the logic corpus, the exoticism of other religions and the neglect of faith, the interest in form rather than in content, the anxiety for a modernization of the Church and the repudiation of ancient doctrines and rituals, all this led to an urge for a radical change also in the arts. Sandro Botticelli, Antonio and Piero del Pollaiolo, Leonardo da Vinci, Pietro Perugino and Luca Signorelli attended the Academy and became the founders of the Renaissance new style. In only a few decades, the novel mentality that originated in Italy spread all over continent, embraced above all by the new emerging classes of wealthy bourgeois. These now considered themselves as peers of those who had been the dominant classes since time immemorial, refusing to continue being divided into guilds and arts²¹. This new wealthy middleclass disdained the traditional craft organizations²² in the same way a farmer’s son, once he becomes an industrialist, despises and is ashamed of his father’s humble condition. Under the cloak of aesthetic perfection²³, of charming illusory effects and of a beauty never seen before, the poison that still afflicts the West today spread in all directions. And thanks to the great geographical discoveries of that time, with the explorations and conquests, it has contaminated the whole world. Italy bears serious responsibility for generating this cosmic imbalance. And yet we still glory in it!

Gian Giuseppe Filippi

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1. Inspired by this late Roman version, the 12th century saw the production of several apocrypha attributed to Mercurius Triplex, such as the Liber XXIV Philosophorum and the Liber de VI rerum principiis, on judicial astrology, alchemy of souffleurs, on the manufacture of amulets and filters and other lesser magic. Moreover, love filters concerned the sphere of magia sexualis, that is sexual magic, which we will present later.[↩]
2. Dante puts the alchemists in Hell, in the bolgia of falsifiers. Here we find Michael Scotus “That other there, his flanks extremely spare, was Michael Scot, a man who certainly knew how the game of magic fraud was played.” (Inferno, XX.115-117). Roger Bacon, in addition to being an alchemist, was also a precursor of the profane science, which has been triumphant since the Renaissance.[↩]
3. Among those texts, the most important was Picatrix, the Latin translation of an Arabic treatise. Its original title was Gāyat al-hakīm (The aim of the essay), written by Abū Maslama Muhammad ibn Ibrahim ibn ‘Abd al-Da’im al-Majrītī of Cordoba (? ~ 1007). According to the Latin manuscripts, the work was translated from Arabic into Castilian in 1256 under the reign of Alfonso X “the Wise”. This text, whose content includes sympathetic magic, judicial astronomy and practical alchemy, was immediately recognized as a grimoire and condemned as such by Saint Albert the Great in his Speculum astronomiæ.[↩]
4. Only four texts by this pseudo-Geber are known: Summa perfectionis magisterii; Liber fornacum; De investigatione perfectionis; De inventione veritatis. Given the great difference in perspective between them, it is highly unlikely that they can all be attributed to the same hand.[↩]
5. Little is known even on this figure, mostly through stories of unreliable historical foundation. It appears inplausible that more than three hundred treatises can be attributed to a single author. The legend wants him in connection with the famous Sufi Ja’far aṣ-Ṣādiq and for this reason, was one-sidedly considered a Shi’ite. Particularly, this is the opinion of Henry Corbin who identified Islamic esotericism with Shi’a; or rather, he argued that the initiatic sciences were of pre-Islamic origin, thus emptying the Sunni Sufism of any content of original wisdom (L’Alchimie comme art hiératique, Paris, Cahiers de l’Herne, 1986). This work, received with satisfaction in every academic environment, did not explain the reason why Shi’ite turuq should exist. However, this was in line with both the heretical tendencies of the Shaykhiyya school to which Corbin referred and his anti-traditional and rigidly Calvinist mentality. It is curious to note that Corbin affirmed – similarly to what Schuon had claimed for Catholicism – that Shi’a is an ‘initiatic’ religious form, and that all its faithful are, therefore, ‘initiates’.[↩]
6. According to the Arabs, there have been three Hermeses: Enoch (Idrīs), Noah (sometimes replaced by a Babylonian Hermes) and Hermes the Egyptian (Hirmis al-Miṣrī). Herein lies his triplicity. Each of them represents a function: the prophet-magician, the priest-philosopher and the king-legislator. Therefore, the functional triad in modern occultism appears to be of Hermetic origin. Every human being is potentially a Hermes thanks to his triple composition of spiritus, anima et corpus. On this basis, the hermeticists of Humanism believed that even the magician can be a creator, hence bringing the divine creation to demiurgic fulfilment. Thus, if the Qabbalist magician aimed at creating the golem, the Renaissance alchemist-magician aimed at creating the homunculus.[↩]
7. This term indicates the survival (lat. superstitiones) of dead traditions preceding the advent of Islam, which, even if ineffective, can be used to express some doctrinal aspects of the new religion. By the same token, one should not forget how Aristotelianism was used by the Scholastics.[↩][↩]
8. Considered a Neoplatonic philosopher, Plethon was a syncretistic thinker inspired by the most disparate currents of Alexandrian Gnosticism. He conceived the utopian vision of a universal religion, promoting what today would be called “dialogue among religions”. According to him, Hermes Trismegistus came after Zoroaster, who he arbitrarily considered as the first prophet of this universal religion, a sort of parody of the primordial Tradition. Plethon attributed the Chaldean Oracles to Zoroaster, which in fact are apocryphal works spread by the Alexandrian Jewish circles to discredit the rival newly born Christian Church. In this spirit, he participated in the Council. This demonstrates that it is precisely ecumenism and relativism that reflect a Gnostic mentality. Due to his equidistance between religions, or rather due to his indifference towards Christianity, he was recognized as an atheist by the Patriarch of Constantinople and his work destroyed. His hostility towards Aristotelianism started the rebellion against Scholasticism, anticipating the urge for reform, so emblematic of the Renaissance.[↩]
9. Other members of the Academy were Pico della Mirandola, Poliziano, Nicholas of Cusa, Leon Battista Alberti, Cristoforo Landino, Gentile de’ Becchi and Giuliano and Lorenzo de ‘Medici, that is, the first founders of the humanistic movement.[↩]
10. Contemporary diabolical preachers of a ‘new Humanism’ actually encourage the completion of the same plan in the direction of ‘transhumanism’.[↩]
11. However, this manuscript was missing the last chapter, the fifteenth.[↩]
12. It is quite wrong to use the terms occultism and occultists only to define the circle of Papus (Dr. Gérard Encausse) and of his successors. Already in the 15th century, Italian humanists rejoiced in defining in such way their ideas and the circles they frequented. This term, however, officially appeared for the first time in the title of the volume De occulta philosophia by Agrippa (1486-1535).[↩]
13. In truth, Ficino named his Latin translation of the entire Corpus Hermeticum after the title of the first book dedicated to Pimander, the ‘Shepherd of men’, where the active Intellect, the Divine Mind was defined.[↩]
14. The popes of the Medici circle and those belonging to that family kept the Inquisition from investigating the magicians of Humanism. Only too late was there a reaction, as in the case of Giordano Bruno, when the objectives of the reform of Christianity had already been achieved. It would be very interesting to study in depth the reasons why the Medici popes have always been considered enlightened, while the Borgias were and still are object of every slander and contempt by the general public.[↩]
15. See our previous article no. 49. The origin of Hermetism. In truth, Clement of Alexandria had only indicated the existence of Hermes Trismegistus as a pagan prophet without ascribing him any praise or infamy.[↩]
16. Galileo was the shady figure who consciously endeavoured to achieve the public acceptance of scientism as an indisputable truth, a mission that moderns, still to date, champion with satisfaction. Naturally, this was possible thanks to the connivance of the Medici and a Catholic Church already in a state of confusion. We will consider these aspects of the modern world later.[↩]
17. Giovanni Pico, who almost became subject to scrutiny by the Inquisition for his Christian interpretation of Qabbalah, displayed prudence, asserting that his magic could not be accused of being diabolically inspired because based on the Jewish tradition of the Old Testament. While fully in agreement with his associate Ficino, he maintained that the qabbalistic magic had to be superimposed on the hermetic one due to its evident spiritual superiority. In his opinion, the Egyptian origin of Hermetism could in fact suggest a latent presence of Sethian influences, as if this presence were non-existent in the Semitic religions! However, he could not be entirely unaware of an underground sexual magic in the messianic and apocalyptic Qabbalah, which will publicly emerge in all its shamelessness and perversion with Šabbetay Ṣewi and Jacob Frank (Moshe Idel, Eros and Qabbalah, Milan, Adelphi, 2007, pp. 305-307).[↩]
18. Marsilio Ficino, Sulla vita (De vita cœlitus comparanda), Alessandra Tarabochia Canavero (a cura di), Milano, Rusconi, 1995, II.11, pp. 156-157.[↩]
19. Marsilio Ficino, El Libro dell’Amore, Sandra Niccoli (edited by), Firenze, Olschki, 1987, pp. 144-145. It is certainly no coincidence that Ficino always translated the sins of incontinentia with incostantia and concupiscentia with luxuria. F. A. Yates, Giordano Bruno y la Tradición Hermética, Barcelona, Ariel, 1983, pp. 48-49.[↩]
20. In the West, the discovery of Indian left-hand Tantrism has been used as an opportunity to dignify the pseudo-hermetic sexual magic (see Hargrave Jennings, Indian Religions, or Results of the Mysterious Buddhism (1858); The Rosicrucians, Their Rites and Mysteries (1870); Phallism: A Description of the Worship of Lingam-Yoni (1889). In turn, the main source about India was the book by the pornographer Edward Sellon, Annotations upon the Secret Writings of the Hindus, (1865)). However, the difference is truly remarkable. First of all, Tantrism vāmācāra is an initiatic path, whereas, as is evident from what we have described here, Renaissance Hermetism is an artificial reconstruction from the texts, devoid of any real transmission. Secondly, the practices used in India are not aimed at pleasure, as demonstrated by the semen retention technique. On the contrary, in the West, it is the very uncontrolled release of pleasure, even in the forms most contrary to nature, that guarantees the magical result. Finally, the inner sublimation, which occurs with the ascent of the cakra along the suṣumṇā produces an inner rebirth, is very different from the obnoxious manipulation of body fluids that the alleged alchemists operate in order to give birth to the homunculus. Needless to say, the results of these operations appear only by way of suggestion, since even in this case there has been no transmission by a real magician. It is, therefore, only ceremonial magic, devoid of any real effect.[↩]
21. It was precisely by the will of the popes bound up with the Medicean party that the construction of churches was no longer entrusted to the stone-cutter guilds. It was preferred instead the project of an architect who not necessarily belonged to a traditional art. In short, the guilds were neglected and branded as relics of a past that they wanted to forget. This is historically proved by the abandonment of the orientation of Renaissance churches. The guilds suffered the competition of workshops of ‘great artists’ and ‘universal geniuses’. Long before Michelangelo, Brunelleschi too had refused to join the guilds. In this way, the Renaissance style supplanted the Gothic. In 1539, with a decree, Francis I, king of France, abrogated guilds as social categories. Nevertheless, the guilds survived, thanks also to their ancient initiatic structure. But from a practical point of view they had to settle for the construction of minor works, like houses, bridges and mills; that is, on buildings considered not ‘artistic’, thus starting a secular decline.[↩]
22. To be precise, the guilds did not fully coincide with the corresponding initiatic organizations, even if the latter always flourished within the former. In the case of the builders, the corporation also included hard workers, often not free men (rough masons), for whom it served as a ‘trade union’, performing administrative functions. The initiatic lodge or hütte was inside the guild and was reserved for free masons, keepers and transmitters of the secrets of the craft.[↩]
23. However, this aesthetic of beauty, based on such degenerate theories, fatally carried the seeds of contemporary art, the ugliest, most vulgar, blasphemous and corrupt form of expression never conceived and produced by human thought.[↩]

49. The origin of Hermetism

Certainly, it is not easy to define exactly what was meant by Hermetism over the centuries. In fact, depending on the periods and traditional areas, this term has taken on different meanings. As it has already been pointed out, all the traditions that flourished in the West have had a predominantly cosmological imprint. Prisoners of the unsurpassed conditions of time and space, they have been marked profoundly by continuous changes. Therefore, even in the case of Hermetism, we cannot ignore the historical perspective in order to appreciate its consecutive adaptations¹. We will therefore proceed to tackle this elusive topic by following its developments throughout history. What is certain is that Hermetism undoubtedly originated from the ancient Egyptian tradition. This was still alive during the reign of the Macedonian Ptolemaic dynasty (323-30 BC), established in the land of Egypt after the death of Alexander the Great. As we have already illustrated before², a nucleus of Pythagorean-Platonic Greek philosophers had formed in Alexandria, where they became acquainted with Egyptian doctrines, on which they commented in numerous texts after operating a Hellenization of their original symbolic forms.

When Egypt fell under Roman rule, Alexandria became a cosmopolitan centre, a meeting point between different cultures and traditions. Alongside the Hermetic, Neoplatonic and Christian theurgic gnosis, the most diverse forms of syncretism developed, such as the various sects of Christian, Jewish and Chaldean Gnosticism, among others. This does not mean that the authentically Egyptian tradition did not continued to exist, distinguished from the other currents by its exclusive linguistic constituent³. Although Hellenized, the traces of the Egyptian tradition remained evident in Hermetism⁴. It represented a traditional science of health, whose practical aspect was expressed by the arts of alchemy⁵ and astrology⁶. The most immediate aim consisted in the search for medicine⁷ that would allow to achieve longevity or “eternal youth”. Having obtained a healthy and more long-lived body, the initiate could devote himself to more specifically spiritual practices.

To prepare the Elixir of Long Life, it was first necessary to find the Philosopher’s Stone in the inner “cave” of the body or in the underground tunnels and mines of the earth. The stone had the triple power; to lead to longevity and bodily health, to the transmutation of base metals into gold and to the achievement of initiatic wisdom⁸. Originally, this was only a representation of the inner path to be taken in life. In fact, at the moment of death, “[the initiate leaves his] material body to the natural forces of alteration, in the same way that the substance of his bodily senses and the lower faculties return to their respective cosmic sources. Then, the “man” darts himself heavenwards through the planetary spheres, stripping himself of the energies, passions and impulses that derived from them; from the lust of Venus to the craving for wealth of Jupiter, from the wrath of Mars to the insidious lies of Saturn. And so – finally “devoid of the effects of the ensemble of the spheres” and of the fatality determined by the configurations of the celestial zodiac – he can reach the Eighth Heaven and continue even further. He can surrender himself to the divine “powers” and become himself a dúnamis, a specific “power” of the upper world, being definitively reborn in God.”⁹

It is evident that Hermetism originally represented a path of knowledge of the non-Supreme (sskrt. Aparabrahma vidyā), with strong characteristics comparable to the Indian śākta Tantrism. In fact, the initiatic power evoked in the quotation was personified by the goddess Isis, the divine maiden (Kóre). Kóre in Greek also indicates the eye pupil, the window through which the soul perceives external objects¹⁰; while in the heavens, Isis corresponds to the Moon¹¹. From the reading of the hermetic texts elaborated in the 2^nd and 3^rd century AD¹² it is clear, however, that the doctrinal expression was not matched by any alchemical methodical technique of similar loftiness. In fact, the attainment of knowledge (or gnosis) of reality beyond its illusory appearances – that is to say true immortality – remained a mere chimera, since no reference was ever made to any method other than the ritual one. Therefore, true gnosis is lowered to the degree of relative immortality (sskrt. āpekṣika amṛtatva), in a state of permanent association with the divine light¹³.

The Great Work, or Magnus Opus, the process of realization offered by the alchemical method, begins with the blackening, or nigredo¹⁴, the initiatic death under the guidance of Anubis, the jackal God of death; follows the whitening, or albedo, a ritual purification based on a complex symbolism, whose guiding divinity is Isis. Finally, the reddening, or rubedo, in which the rituals are internalized following the lead of Osiris¹⁵. The three phases are represented by the celestial bodies Saturn, Moon and Sun and by the metals lead, silver and gold. However, all attention is focused on Isis and her redundant cosmological symbolism. It should also be considered that even rubedo, which allegedly represents the transmission of the entire Egyptian priestly knowledge, is called “work” (sskrt. karma). Therefore, the transition from Egyptian tradition to Hermetism has led to the loss of the ars sacerdotalis (sskrt. brahma jñāna). This explains in which sense the alchemical ars regia must be understood.

There is another further consideration to be made to answer the question of how an initiatic path of the non-Supreme could have been transplanted from one tradition to another; namely, from the Egyptian tradition to the Greco-Roman, the Hebrew, the Christian, and the Islamic ones. The fact is that although the Corpus Hermeticum alludes to direct meditation (aliṅga upāsanā), the alchemical method never goes beyond the symbolic level. The meaning of symbols is never explained, giving to the hermetic texts their characteristic involute, impenetrable and artificially mysterious aspect: hermetic, indeed.

After the first Alexandrian flowering, Hermetism migrated, then, to other traditions, no longer as a complete way of the non-Supreme, but resizing itself to become a particular science¹⁶ and art. Only by taking the form of a craft way can a particular science be transferred and integrated into a complete tradition. Medicine, pharmacopoeia, architecture, painting, sculpture, music, metalworking, carpentry, weaving, pottery, tailoring, etc., do not need the connotation of a defined traditional form. Arts and crafts are integrated into a tradition by the simple fact that they operate on objects composed of the five elements¹⁷ and therefore are shared by everyone regardless of the faiths professed. In this process of adaptation and self-limitation, Thoth, the Egyptian Deity who oversaw the intermediate sciences and whom the Greeks recognized as equivalent to their God Hermes, was transformed into a human figure.

It was called Hermes Trismegistus (lat. Mercurius Termaximus), the ‘thrice-greatest Hermes’; while the Gods Isis and Osiris, in this perspective, changed into his first two human disciples. According to this new version, Hermes Trismegistus would have been an Egyptian prophet contemporary of Moses, or somewhat more ancient. Thanks to his self-realization, he had succeeded in transcending any contingency, meeting the God ‘shepherd of men’, Poimandres, and in receiving His knowledge¹⁸. In this way, starting from the 3rd century, Hermetism gradually changed its appearance incorporating itself into monotheisms. The very texts, the Corpus Hermeticum and the Asclepius attributed to Hermes Trismegistus¹⁹, took on a form that imitated the prophetic literature of the Bible, thus masking its Egyptian priestly origin²⁰.

In the aftermath of the Theodosian decrees (380 AD), which declared the illegality of pagan cults throughout the Roman Empire, Hermetism further adapted to the new circumstances. However, this adaptation did not only imply the limitation of the doctrinal scope described above, but leaned more on the Theurgy, which the previous hermetic gnosis had used as a support to its method. Christianized Hermetism gradually lost its initiatic content to decline towards magic, with the drafting of horoscopes, the manufacture of amulets and talismans, and the search for the creation of gold to acquire wealth. The decline worsened due to the hostility of Christian Churches towards magic of pagan origin²¹. It is in this larval form that Hermetism was transmitted to the early Middle Ages.

Gian Giuseppe Filippi

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1. From Cosmos to Chaos,“5. The Historical Approach”.[↩]
2. From Cosmos to Chaos, “27. The esoterism-exoterism separation in the primitive Church”.[↩]
3. The use of Egyptian and hieroglyphics instead of Greek language. Thanks to the ecumenical spirit of the Roman rule, the Egyptian initiation was present in all the main cities of the Roman Empire, starting from its very capital. Apparently, it took the mysteric forms known by the name of Mysteries of Isis and Osiris. However, although non-Egyptian subjects were admitted, these initiations cannot be defined as hermetic yet, being genuinely administered by priests from Egypt. Apuleius in his Metamorphoses (XI) testifies to the presence of an Egyptian priestly college had been established in Rome since the time of Sulla.[↩]
4. Academic scholars of Hermetism, affected by classical prejudice, tend to downsize its Egyptian origin, unable as they are to conceive other civilizations, other than the Hellenic one, worthy of being considered such. However, it would be sufficient to consider the three phases of the hermetic initiation, the ‘work’ in ‘black’, ‘white’ and ‘red’, to recognize its authentic source. Let’s take another important component of the hermetic doctrine as an example, namely the distinction between the ‘dry way’ and the ‘wet way’. Far from representing the initiatic and mystical way, they refer to what in Hinduism are called devayāna and pitṛyāṇa. In the Book of the Two Ways, one of the many texts on the post mortem of Egyptian antiquity, a category of souls immediately after passing away, goes through the heat of the desert to reach the immortal kingdom of Horus, from which ‘will no longer return’. Another category of souls, however, rises in the air in the form of water vapour. These vapours are pushed by the winds towards the south, going up the Nile towards its sources, until reaching the mythical mountains of the Moon (the Castle of the Moon). After having settled there in the kingdom of Osiris, the dead god or dead’s King, the souls of the dead, condensed in the form of clouds, with the change of the wind return to the land of Egypt, precipitating with torrential rains and causing the flood of the Nile. With the flood, the souls of the dead return to the earth where they are reborn (Eadweard Khimsc (Ed. By) The Egyptian Book of the Two Ways, Tricase (LE), Youcanprint, 2014). This doctrine, very similar to what King Pravahaṇa taught to Āruṇi (BU VI.2.2 et seq.; CHU V.3.4 et seq.), Also explains why Hermetism is considered a Royal Art.[↩]
5. By science one must understand a doctrine (sskrt. vāda) and with art its method (sskrt. prakriyā). Thus, even the Indian health science of Āyurveda, among its various practices features that called rasa vidyā, or Indian alchemy, which is often assisted by the vedāṅga jyotiṣa, that is astrology.[↩]
6. It is a method based on the powers of the different celestial bodies, of which the judicial astrology of horoscopes is a secondary and exterior application altogether.[↩]
7. This medicine, starting from the Middle Ages, was defined elixir, word taken from al-´athir, Arabic corruption of the Byzantine ‘ether’ (αἰθήρ, read aithīr). Some argue that it derives from the other Arabic term al-iksīr, ‘essence’, of uncertain etymology.[↩]
8. Julius Evola, La Tradizione Ermetica, Roma, Ed. Mediterranee, 2006, pp. 61-62. Besides the imaginary symbolic descriptions, even the Philosopher’s Stone actually had to be forged in the cavity of the alchemical furnace, the athanor (arab. at-tannūr). Titus Burckhardt, Alchemie, Sinn und Weltbild. Olten, Walter Verlag, 1960, ch. XIII. If we include the Forgerons et Alchimistes by Mircea Eliade (Paris, Flammarion, 1950) to the works of Evola and Burckhardt, one will soon realize how exceedingly easy it is to get lost in the mazes of symbology. While dealing with the same subject, the three authors only manage to express their individual inclinations. For Evola, Hermetism is heroic magic; for Burckhardt, it is a borrowing from Sufism, defined in a suspect way as “spiritual alchemy” (an occultic expression indicating sexual magic); for Eliade, it is the experience of the blacksmiths’ shamanic trance![↩]
9. Davide Susanetti, La via degli dei, Roma, Carocci, 2017, p. 222.[↩]
10. La via degli dei, cit., p. 227.[↩]
11. This concept corresponds exactly to the puruṣa (or viśva) in the eye, identified in the heavens in the Sun (Virāṭ) of the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad Śaṃkara Bhāṣya (I.III). However, the hermetic point of view differs from the Vedāntic one in one important detail: it replaces the God with the Goddess, the sun with the moon. As already mentioned, this closely resembles the Hindū Śaktism, in whose perspective the active entity is the Śakti, while the God Śiva appears inert; idea that is expressed iconographically by the Goddess dancing on the God’s lifeless body. Also in the ancient Egyptian tradition Isis was the dynamic divinity, while his consort, Osiris, was a dead God. This is another detail that reinforces the hypothesis of an archaic Indian origin for a current of the Egyptian tradition, which has already been mentioned on this Site (From the Order to the Chaos, “8. Atlantis: other sources (II)”).[↩]
12. André-Jean Festugière O.P., La Révélation d’Hermès Trismégiste, 4 voll., Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1950-1954, I vol. pp.85-88.[↩]
13. La via degli dei, cit., P. 223. “… to attain this second kind of knowledge, which is the result of certain upāsanās [meditations] aiming at achieving identification (abhimāna) with a particular divinity, it is necessary that the zealous disciple strives continually to contemplate that devatā [divinity] as an object of meditation (upāṣya viṣaya), preventing the interference of any idea, thought, feeling and emotion.” Svāmī Satcidānandendra Sarasvatī, La Via della Conoscenza e le altre Vie, Milan, Ekatos Ed. Pr., 2019, p. 51. This is the description of meditation beyond the symbol (aliṇga upāsanā).[↩]
14. In Coptic (late Egyptian), black was called kem-it. From this term comes the Arabic al-kīmyā´. Kem-it, the ‘black earth’, was also the name of Pharaonic Egypt.[↩]
15. Note the inversion of the white and red colours with respect to the order of the Sāṃkhya’s guṇas. The latter appears doctrinally more correct, being black the absence of colour, white the concentration of all colours, and red a median one.[↩]
16. In this case, the term ‘science’ meant the doctrine that had taken the form of a ‘natural philosophy’, so as not to conflict with revelation-based theology. As will be seen later, the split of science from art, that is to say from method, will really give birth to a theoretical philosophy or speculation. Hermetic philosophy substituted the absence of the method with ceremonial magic, prudently redefined Theurgy and Angelology. We are, therefore, witnessing here the first signs of the faith-science fracture that has undermined western intellectuality.[↩]
17. It would more accurate to say four, as for hermetists the fifth element had changed into a mysterious elixir that one aspires to obtain artificially.[↩]
18. La via degli dei, cit., pp. 219-221.[↩]
19. These texts are a collection of works from different sources and eras, harmonized and certainly reworked by the alchemist Zosimos (3rd-4th century AD), the most learned representative of the Alexandrian hermetic gnosis.[↩]
20. In fact, Lactantius repeatedly affirmed that Hermes Trismegistus was a pagan prophet who had foretold the coming of Jesus, son of God (Divinæ Institutiones, I.6; IV.6; VIII.18). On the contrary, Saint Augustine severely condemns Hermes as a magician and summoner of pagan Gods (De Civitate Dei, VIII.23-26).[↩]
21. A serious blow was inflicted with the closure of the Academy of Athens decided by Emperor Justinian in 529. This measure was motivated precisely to hit certain pre-Christian and magical resurgences that posed a threat to Christianity.[↩]

The “Christian Qabbalah”

Since the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem (70 AD) and the consequent anti-Roman revolt of Bar Kokhba (132-135 AD), Jewish esotericism had remained alive in the communities of the Diaspora. Gnosticism and Neoplatonism¹ had exerted an influence only on the community of Alexandria in Egypt which, after the Arab invasion of the mid-seventh century, moved largely to Byzantium. On the other hand, the destruction of the centre of the Israelite religion and the passage of ritual duties from the priesthood to the doctors of the law or rabbis had reduced the scope of esotericism, all the more inclined to assimilate Theurgy, as well as, the science of production of amulets and talismans. Moreover, despite the bitter controversy with the newly born Christianity, which had been suffered as a schism with heretical tendencies, Judaism could not exempt itself from assuming certain messianic doctrines. In fact, in the Talmudic period (4^th-6^th century AD) the ancient conception concerning the Messiah (Heb. Mašīaḥ) had changed with respect to the Old Testament view. Particularly, from the Babylonian captivity to the destruction of the Temple, the term Messiah designated the figure of an anointed King² who by divine will had redeemed and set the people of Israel free from servitude, defeating and subjugating all other nations. In the vulgar era, however, the term Messiah took on a new apocalyptic and eschatological meaning. The Messiah would thus descend from the heights of heaven to destroy the enemies of Judaism and to end the history of man by establishing the kingdom of Yehovah in a new cycle of peace and justice³. These beliefs spread within rabbinic Judaism until the early Middle Ages, without being sensitively received by esotericism.

Differently, in the medieval theurgic Qabbalah, the term ‘Messiah’ indicated the attainment of a high spiritual degree corresponding to the knowledge of the angel of the face, Meṭaṭron, the Demiurge who conveyed the dictates of God on the creation. However, the achievement of such level of initiatic wisdom did not extend beyond the sphere of the inner and personal experience. Those who achieved the degree of Messiah were therefore released from any exterior royal, priestly or prophetic functions awaited in the exoteric environment in order to affirm the sovereignty of Judaism over the world.

At the end of the Middle Ages, a new current, apparently antithetical to the initiatic-theurgic one, separated from the Qabbalah⁴. Avraham ben Šemu’el Abulafia (Zaragoza 1240- Comino 1291) was the first to break the barrier that distinguished the initiatic concept of the Messiah from the popular one. He was a savant with a remarkable personality who changed and upset the traditional initiatic parameters of Qabbalah. In his youth, he had gone to Palestine to make contact with the ten lost tribes of Israel who were said to have founded a mighty Empire in Asia. His purpose was to request their armed intervention to free the Jews of Europe, avenge them for their marginalization, severely punish Christians, and subject them to the Jewish world empire. Abulafia had to withdraw from his “mission” in the face of the spread of Mongol hordes across the Near East⁵. This episode testifies to the secular or even political interest behind the application of his messianic idea. He, for the first time in history, argued that anyone who had attained the spiritual level of Messiah by initiatic practice should also publicly declare himself as such and take the lead of the Jewish communities for their liberation. Of course, he declared himself a Messiah⁶ and embarked on a mysterious and thoughtless mission to Rome to seek the recognition from the pope⁷.

Interest in the assimilation of Christians was a constant in the worldly action of Abulafia. He did not wish to convert them, but to assimilate them to Judaism like the ancient ger tošab⁸, making himself recognized as the Messiah of the second coming. This is the first late medieval expression of a Jewish grafting project on Christianity. A fervent admirer of the anti-Qabbalistic philosophy of Maimonides, Abulafia tried in every way to bring together the philosopher’s thinking with the traditional teachings. To achieve, he inserted a hitherto unknown mystical and visionary component⁹ into the Qabbalah. He also altered the method (sskrt. prakriyā), adopting a new practice of visualization of the Hebrew letters that allegedly was received by direct revelation¹⁰. From the doctrinal point of view, he adopted Maimonides’ perspective, according to which the possible intellect (sskrt. buddhi) is of a superindividual nature and, as such, has the possibility to identify itself with the active Intellect (sskrt. mahan ātman), being of the same nature¹¹. Abulafia did not give great importance to the use of Theurgy and magic, as previous Qabbalists had done. However, he maintained that, through the experience of ecstatic mysticism, the human being could enjoy divine qualities, including that of creator¹².

The characteristics of this mystical reform of Qabbalah will give birth to the visionary Jewish Messianism whose developments will prove increasingly disturbing. Referring to a knowledge of ancient origin, apocalyptic Messianism produced two figures: that of the prophet announcing the coming of the Messiah and the Messiah himself. Prophets include Avraham Eli’ezer ha-Lewi (1460-1529), Dawid Re’uveni (1490 ~ 1541) and Nathan of Gaza. Among the self-proclaimed Messiahs we find Šelomoh Molko, Šabbetay Ṣewi (1626-1676) and Jacob Frank (1726-1791).

* * *

        At the same time of Abulafia we also find Ramón Llull (1232-1315), a figure who stood out for the originality of his writings. Majorcan baron and squire to King James II of the Balearics¹³, at the age of forty he had various visions of Christ that inspired his commitment to converting Jews and Moors. To this end, he embarked on numerous journeys between both shores of the Mediterranean. Although he had the opportunity to frequent the Knights of the Temple in Rhodes, thanks to his highborn birth, he ended up becoming an admirer of Philip the Fair of France and actively participated in the Council of Vienne in 1311¹⁴. Close to the spirit of chivalry, but eager to fight it in favour of absolute sovereigns, he always pledged his loyalty to the Franciscans and their missionary propaganda, without however taking on even the Third Order.

Llull studied theology in Paris and assembled an impressive library of religious and classical manuscripts. He also wanted to learn more about Islam and Judaism. He, therefore, studied Arabic and attended Qabbalist circles, numerous at that time in Palma de Mallorca¹⁵. In addition to sharing monotheism, he noted that the three Semitic religions recognized that the gross world was composed of four elements and that these determined four conditions of the bodily existence: cold, hot, moist and dry¹⁶. The four elements extended their domain in an ascending direction to the planetary spheres and fixed stars, also affecting with their influences life on earth¹⁷. Therefore, for missionary purposes, he decided to put aside the theological discussions that were fuelling the disagreement and start over from the physical grounds shared by Christians, Jews and Muslims¹⁸. On that basis he founded a system that today would be called ‘interreligious’, which he called ‘art’, capable of interpreting the fate of an individual and intervening to modify it. To this end – evidently influenced by Abulafia’s ‘way of names’ – using the letters of the Latin alphabet instead of the Hebrew ones, Llull conceived a mental mechanism capable of explaining all reality, theology, logic, science and art¹⁹.

The four-element based communion found among the three exterior religions – different and usually hostile to each other – represents the first emergence of the scientistic mentality that will proliferate in the Renaissance period, ultimately to become dominant²⁰. In fact, the scientific method does not really differ from the empiricism of practical magic²¹. The fact that at least until the early 19^th century scientists were also occultists testifies to this concomitance²². At the same time, finding a common ground for overcoming the doctrinal differences between religions began to undermine the concept according to which civilization and tradition were identified. Llull’s theories brought science and faith, profanity and sacredness, analysis²³ and synthesis into conflict for the first time, evidently siding in favour of the former at the expense of the latter. Even his fervent religiosity, akin to that of the paupers’ orders, actually harboured anti-ecclesiastical feelings²⁴.

Lullism had a great success throughout Latin Christianity and was accepted as an alternative philosophy to Scholastic theology. During the 14^th century, the practitioners of alchemy and magic often made reference to his writings, and works allegedly attributed to him began to circulate. In the following century, Cardinal Nicolas of Cusa (1401-1464), one of the first humanists²⁵, transmitted the magic-scientistic tendency of Lullian theories from the very heart of the Catholic Church to the Renaissance²⁶. In line with Llull’s plan, he hoped to unite Christianity, Judaism and Islam by demonstrating the logical truth of the Trinity²⁷.

However, it was necessary to wait for the Medici family²⁸ to take power in Florence in order to inaugurate the Renaissance. Following the fall of Constantinople (1453) to the Ottoman Turks and the loss of that centre of wisdom, in 1462 Cosimo the Elder entrusted Marsilio Ficino and Gemistus Pletho with the foundation of the Neoplatonic Academy for the recovery of any cultural documents saved from the collapse of the Eastern Empire. We will deal with Marsilio Ficino soon. What interests us in this context is the figure and work of his closest collaborator, Giovanni Pico marquis della Mirandola (1463-1494)²⁹. In the Academy, he represented the current that was directly related to the thought of Ramón Llull. Unlike the Majorcan thinker, Pico studied Hebrew and eventually mastered that language³⁰. According to him the name of Jesus, in Hebrew Yehošu‘a, interpreted according to the values and meanings of the Hebrew letters, meant ‘Messiah’. Furthermore, he interpreted this name as the tetragrammaton, the unpronounceable name of God, in whose centre was inserted the letter šin, which added the idea of action to that of being.

With this interpretation Pico hoped to convert the Jews to Catholicism and, at the same time, to convince the Church of the sacredness of the Hebrew language, as well as, of the mysticism of Qabbalistic origin. This initiative failed to achieve the aim of converting the Jewish people, but it yielded two results: the birth of a syncretism called Christian Qabbalah, and the plan for a reform of Catholicism based on the Old Testament³¹. The Pichian philosophy refers to the interpretative method of the rotating alphabetic letters founded by Abulafia and handed down by Llull. Pico applied this method to the astrology of neo-Platonic origin, to which he added the cosmography of the ten sefirot. From an operational point of view, everything was translated into the evocation of angels and Qabbalistic magic, which he distinguished from practical magic. In his opinion, the practice of the latter was dangerous because it entailed the manipulation of demoniac influences³².

“And one aspect of this story that does not seem to have been sufficiently highlighted is the fact that through Pico’s introduction of the Christian Qabbalah, a modern and contemporary Jewish movement flooded and permeated the evolving of European mentality and spirituality. This certainly represented a novelty, a significant emergence from the Middle Ages.”³³

It, therefore, appears evident that between the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance, its reparation work had been undertaken to fill the void left behind the disappearance of an authentic Christian esotericism, which consisted in its replacement with magic or with spontaneous mysticism. The only esoteric legacy that survived was unquestionably that of the craft initiations, which, however, remained excluded from the mystical and magical-scientific circles of the new bourgeoisie. It was precisely the Renaissance that deconsecrated art and removed it from the guilds, only to entrust it to the genius of “brilliant” individuals deemed to be superior³⁴. Even the Church, having absorbed the Renaissance mentality, renounced to entrust the construction of places of worship and the production of sacral sculptures and paintings to the guilds, resulting in a fracture that would later become irreparable.

Gian Giuseppe Filippi

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1. This tendency remained somewhat indelible over the centuries both in the Jewish esotericism of the Iberian Peninsula (Ibn Gabirol, 1020 ~ 1070) and in that of the Aškenazi German speaking area (Efrayyim ben Šimšon, 13^th century).[↩]
2. Notwithstanding this term referred also to the anointed High Priest of the Temple.[↩]
3. Not only do we recognize in this interpretation the apocalyptic influence of the “millennial reign of the second coming of Christ”, which must be established at the end of time, but also of oriental cyclical conceptions, especially of Persian origin, which circulated in the Gnostic circles of the Hellenistic era.[↩]
4. Qabbalah simply means tradition and, in the specific case, initiatic transmission. It is an academic convention to bring this denomination back to the period in which this split occurred, almost as if earlier Jewish esotericism was not Qabbalistic.[↩]
5. Marco Giardini, Figure del regno nascosto, Firenze, S. Olschki, 2016. The author suggests a symbolic and all-spiritual interpretation of Abulafia’s journey to the mythical Sambatyon river, beyond which the spiritual Empire of the ten lost tribes of Israel would have extended, as well as of his conversation with the pope. In such a case, however, both attempts should be admitted to fail. Following a widespread inclination currently in vogue, this book, although of great interest and rich in information, is unbalanced in constantly denouncing Christian anti-Judaism and always justifying Jewish anti-Christianity.[↩]
6. Šelomoh Avraham ibn Adret, the highest Jewish authority in Spain and traditional Qabbalist, bitterly refuted Abulafia’s self-proclamation as Messiah. Moshe Idel, Mistici Messianici, Milano, Adelphi, 2004, pp. 89-90.[↩]
7. The audience eventually never took place. On his arrived in Rome, Abulafia was immediately imprisoned. He was released after a few weeks, following the passing of pope Nicholas III. He himself spread the rumour that the pope had died thanks to his magical operations. He took refuge in Sicily and then in Comino (Malta) where his tracks are lost. Further on, also the false Messiah Šelomoh Molko (1500-1532) and Natan of Gaza (1643-1680), prophet of the false Messiah Šabbetay Ṣewi, performed magical ceremonies in Rome to curse the papal see. Moshe Idel, cit., P. 195; p. 267.[↩]
8. Cfr. Auctores Varii, From Cosmos to Chaos, Milano, Ekatos Ed. Pr., 2019, ch. 22; https://vedavyasamandala.com/en/22-the-origins-of-christianity/.[↩]
9. Mysticism is a phenomenon that manifests itself in the context of monotheistic religions following the decline and disappearance of initiation. This tendency arose in Catholicism with the pauperistic orders and preceded the mystical deviation imprinted on Qabbalah by Abulafia. In Islam mysticism was manifested above all in the Shi’ite sphere.[↩]
10. Traditional Qabbalah used the method of the ‘way of the ten sefirot’, which consisted of invoking ten divine names to replace the supreme name of God, whose pronunciation had been lost. The sefirot corresponded to the virtues of the ten cosmic spheres and to those of the human being. Abulafia invented a new ‘way of names’ with the use of a rotating mechanism to create indefinite combinations of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Each combination indicated one of the innumerable divine names, corresponding to an angel who could thus be evoked. Gershom Scholem, Major trends in Jewish mysticism, New York, Knopf Doubleday Publ. Gr., 2011 (I Ed. Jerusalem, 1941), pp. 202-203; 122-124.[↩]
11. This theory, which we will return to in later articles, found many followers during the Renaissance.[↩]
12. It is known that this possibility in Hinduism is explicitly denied even for the “liberated souls” (GG Filippi, The post-mortem of the sādhaka according to the doctrine of Śaṃkarācārya, Milan, Ekatos Ed. Pr., 2019, p. 109; 131 -132). From this one can easily deduce that vulgar magic always lies concealed under the name ‘Theurgy’ in deviated or degenerate initiatic ways. In fact, in the deviated Qabbalah the achievement of this “divine quality”found a worldly application with the magical practice of “creating” the golem, an artificially animated human being. Abulafia never used the term golem. However, he described a ceremony to “create a creature” (livro‘ beri‘ ah; M. Idel, Il golem, Torino, Einaudi, 2006, pp. 116-126). In light of these considerations, the current obsessive search for “artificial consciousness” in order to activate the “intelligence” of computing machines to make them autonomous is truly suspicious.[↩]
13. It is lamentable to note that, on the wave of micro-nationalisms now in fashion, even academic historians tend to consider Llull a Catalan.[↩]
14. It was following this council that Clement V dissolved the Order of Templars. Removere, cassare, tollere, i.e. to suppress, are the Latin verbs used in papal bulls. The verb ‘to suspend’ never appears in these official documents, disproving Barbara Frale’s claims in her unsuccessful attempt to absolve pope Clement of his crimes. See Umberto Bartocci, A Templar route to the origins of the modern world, Roma, Andromeda, 2006, pp. 200-214. This last book, flawless for what the sources are concerned, is highly questionable in terms of her interpretations, often prejudicial.[↩]
15. However, it does not appear that he acquired any knowledge of the Hebrew language.[↩]
16. As a matter of fact, this belief, widespread in the Middle Ages and used for magical purposes, involved only two of the four elements: cold and wet are, indeed, effects of water; whereas, heat and dry are of fire. The attribution of hot-moist to the air and cold-dry to the earth is completely arbitrary; in the Hindū tradition, their respective characteristics are mobility and immobility. Note, however, the absence of the fifth element in this Lullian conception.[↩]
17. Once can recognize here the principle of sympathetic magic, which Llull defined astronomy to distinguish it from the judicial astrology used earlier to prepare horoscopes.[↩]
18. In his complicated system of mechanically combined alphabetic letters, Llull also inserted their corresponding numerical and geometric elements. Thus, he associated the idea of the One and Three God to the triangle. He thought that in this way he could convince Jews and Muslims to accept the Christian trinity, which represented the main obstacle for a common understanding.[↩]
19. He was the first to manifest the occult tendency to translate the universe and the supernatural world into a mechanistic system, whose secret keys of interpretation could be revealed through the imagination of a device or artifice (the ‘Lullian art’). It was a mechanism based on concentric circles featuring alphabetic characters and their meanings that by rotating composed unlimited combinations, similar to safe locks. Last but not least, in the circles of modern occultists, we remember the utopian and unusable device called ‘archaeometer’, designed by Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveidre. See A. Saint-Yves d’Alveidre, L’Archéomètre. Clef de toutes les Religions & de toutes les sciences de l’antiquité, Paris, La Tour du Dragon, 1910.[↩]
20. Frances A. Yates, L’arte della memoria, Torino, Einaudi (I ed. London 1966), 1972, pp. 160-182.[↩]
21. Lynn Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science, New York and London, Columbia University Press, 1923-1958, (8 vols) II vol., p. 865.[↩]
22. For example, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, Isaac Newton, Carl Linnaeus and Franz Mesmer.[↩]
23. To understand the meaning of abstract concepts, the ars lulliana used the breakdown of the alphabetic letters of the words that expressed them, then converted the letters into numbers to be interpreted by means of the method of rotating combinations. Although in an imaginative form, becomes evident here the analytical and purely quantitative tendency that characterizes modern and contemporary science.[↩]
24. Some academic scholars and even certain esotericists have seen in Llull an influence of the doctrines of Joachim of Fiore, the Cistercian monk ‘with a gifted prophetic spirit’ (Divine Comedy, Paradise, XII. 141). In reality Joachim described the advent of the kingdom of the Holy Spirit in full agreement with the Gospels. It was his Franciscan admirers, the so-called “spiritual” ones, who transformed these doctrines into a heretical millennial Messianism. Joachim wanted to name “Flower” the coenobium he had founded, in line with his troubadouric inspiration.[↩]
25. In his De docta ignorantia, Nicholas of Cusa propounded the idea of a universe without a centre, thus surpassing in modernity even the proponents of the heliocentric system. For the first time, the description of creation contradicted the sensory and deductive experience, entrusting it to calculations of the abstract numerical quantity. In the same book he advocated a “monotheistic” world government led by the pope.[↩]
26. Also the chameleonic Enea Silvio Piccolomini (1405-1464) belonged to this proto-humanistic environment. Initially contrary to papal primacy and being pro-imperial – just until he himself was made pope under the name of Pius II – he embraced Lullism, the teachings of the Nicholas of Cusa and the advice of Jewish scholars, giving thus impetus to astronomy and cartography. Undoubtedly these studies paved the way for the great geographical discoveries of the following period. As a further proof of the heavy presence of this neo-Platonic and Judaizing occultist current within the same ecclesiastical hierarchy, we will quote the Christian Qabbalist cardinal Egidio of Viterbo, second in importance only to the Marquis of Mirandola. Egidio da Viterbo (1469-1532), Scechina and Libellus de Litteris Hebraicis, (edited by François Secret), Rome, International Center for Humanistic Studies, 1959, pp. 9-20.[↩]
27. From the 13^th to the 16^th century the legend of the “Three impostors”, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad, circulated in pre-humanistic and Renaissance circles, which greatly influenced the characters we have mentioned here. It is, therefore, evident that overcoming the divisions between the three monotheisms, the advocacy of a scientific-mechanistic mentality and of magic is the most evident proof that these occult circles had nothing to do with authentic esotericism.[↩]
28. Family of bankers whose origins have been carefully concealed. Since interest-based moneylending was prohibited by the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages, society had delegated this “sinful” exercise to the Jewish community. Similarly, at that time the medical profession was considered unclean because of its contiguity with blood and death. Therefore, also this unpopular profession was left to the Jews. Furthermore, non-aristocratic families often derived their surnames from the profession exercised by the householders. Is that perhaps the reason why this family of bankers that carried this surname tried to conceal their ancestry? It should also be considered that starting from the beginning of the 14^th century, this very rich family had begun to weave marriage alliances with the main crowned families of Europe. Umberto (Moshe David) Cassuto, Gli Ebrei a Firenze nell’età del Rinascimento, Firenze, Olschki, 1965 (I ed. 1918).[↩]
29. Francis A. Yates, Giordano Bruno y la tradición hermética, Barcelona, Ed. Ariel, 1983 (I ed. London 1964),pp. 104-141.[↩]
30. His Hebrew language teacher was Yōḥānān ben Yitshaq Alemanno, friend and confidant of Lorenzo de’ Medici. Alemanno argued that the ancient Jewish initiatic wisdom had merged into the Neoplatonic philosophy. Therefore, it had to be revived by reading the Bible in the light of the Greek-Latin classics, especially from an astrological-theurgic perspective. Clearly, he was not a traditional Qabbalist. Pico also befriended two Jewish scholars who attended the Academy, the Averroist Elia del Medigo and the convert Flavius Mithridates. Both of them provided him with several Jewish esoteric texts.[↩]
31. The reform of Catholicism from within found its main representative in Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536). The design of this reform had the main purpose of erasing Scholasticism, and in particular Thomism, considered as an outdated or, as we would say today, an obscurantist form of thought. As we will see later, this reform did not take place from within, but with the appearance of Protestantism which, in fact, halved the extension of medieval Christianity, putting the Catholic Church in serious danger. We will write on Johan Reuchlin, Judaizing disciple of Pico della Mirandola, when we examine the origin of Protestantism.[↩]
32. He supported this notion to avoid attracting the attention of the Inquisition. However, the mystic’s appearances and the magician’s evocations are both of a doubtful and dangerous nature.[↩]
33. Frances A. Yates, Cabbala e occultismo nell’età elisabettiana, Torino, Einaudi, 1982 (I ed. London 1979), p. 29. (Unfortunately, we could not consult this book in the original version.)[↩]
34. Michelangelo always disdained the idea of becoming part of a craft guild. Thus originated the modern dichotomy between craftsman and artist.[↩]

The collapse of tradition in Western Europe

Dante predicted that two popes, who that time were still alive, were destined to hell. They were Boniface VIII¹ and Clement V². The former was the most fanatical supporter of the temporal supremacy of the Church over the Emperor, the kings and princes of western Christianity; the grey eminence behind the papacy of his predecessor, Celestine V. Boniface played an important role in inducing that mild and shy pope to abdicate. In this way, with a rigged conclave, he took over the power from Celestine, who had returned to hermit life. However, dubious of Celestine’s sincere renunciation and fearful of a possible reaction from his supporters, he threw him in imprison where he eventually died. Meanwhile, the Empire was going through a period of crisis because the candidate Emperor, Adolf of Nassau, King of Germany, had been deposed by the same princes who had him elected, thus triggering a tragic civil war. Therefore, Boniface VIII was well aware that the Empire did not pose any threat to his politics. Instead, he feared the growing power of the King Philip IV of France. For this reason, he approached the King of England, who was then also Duke of Aquitaine, and thus more than a simple nuisance to France. Despite this alliance and the violence with which he exercised power over the State of the Church³, the pope had no choice but to come to terms with Philip IV. He agreed to crown the king’s cousin, Charles of Anjou, as king of Naples and to sanctify his grandfather, Louis IX. Therefore, he unscrupulously used excommunication, inquisition and canonization⁴ as political instruments. However, his claims of temporal power were frustrated precisely by those national sovereigns that the papacy, for two and a half centuries, had instigated to become autonomous from the Empire. Death caught him at a time when all the major powers, the senate and the people of Rome were openly averse to him.

The second pope placed in hell by Dante, Clement V, was the protagonist, together with the King of France, of the infamous persecution against the Knights Templar. After the fall the city of Acre (1291), the last three hundred monks-knights stationed in the East withdrew from the Holy Land to Cyprus under the guidance of Grand Master Jean de Montfort⁵. On that island, these survivors dedicated themselves to ascetic life. Once dissipated their warrior zeal, the Knights Templar had turned to contemplative life. Even the knights who had remained in Europe to administer fiefdoms, commanderies and castles, gradually lost the ancient ascetic-military inclination and retired to religious life. This drift contributed to the weakening of the Order’s function, that of presiding over and coordinating the initiatory organizations of the West. While living their daily lives in frugality, the Templars had accumulated an immense fortune from donations and offerings from the princes and lords of the time. Their function of controlling the coinage of the Christian States⁶ also made them powerful; and thus numerous rulers increasingly turned to them for loans and financial support. King Philip IV of France, known as ‘the Fair’, got heavily into debt with the Order in order to strengthen the royal power⁷.

Aware of not being able to repay the loans and fuelled by the greed for the immense wealth of the Order of the Temple, he decided to take possession of it⁸. On October 13^th, 1307, he had all the Templars of the Kingdom of France arrested in a single night⁹. They were incriminated with unfounded charges of heresy¹⁰, idolatry¹¹ and sodomy. Clement V, the French pope elected in 1305 thanks to the pressure exercised by Philip the Fair¹², although aware of the one-sidedness of this farce trial, suspended the Order and disposed that all its patrimony were to be donated to the rival Hospitaller Order. Unsurprisingly, in France it was the King who took over everything, including what had been assigned to the Hospitaller Knights¹³. The trial against the Templars lasted until 1314. By means of the most ruthless tortures, false confessions were extorted from about sixty knights, often retracting at the end of torture¹⁴. The tragedy ended with the condemnation of the Grand Master Jacques de Molay, who was burned at the stake. Molay is said to have serenely faced the torture and predicted the imminent death of those responsible for that horror. In fact, within a year both the pope and Philip IV died¹⁵. The fleeing knights took refuge in England, Scotland¹⁶, in the kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula and in the principalities of Germany and Italy, where they were welcomed into local chivalric orders and craft guilds (sskrt. śreṇi)¹⁷.

In the other States of Europe, the dissolution of the Order of the Temple was carried out according to papal dictates; without, however, the same iron fist that marked the arrests and trials ordered in the kingdom of France. Yet, the Templars’ main centre had always been in France, therefore the anti-traditional action of Philip the Fair had successfully beheaded the entire magisterial hierarchy. The general situation of the initiatic organizations connected or subordinated to the Temple was of maximum alarm and widespread confusion. It is no coincidence that Dante himself happened to be present in Paris during the Templar trial; the secret head of the Christian initiatic ways and member to the Third Order of the Temple could not help rushing to pick up some legacy. This is, indeed, the most mysterious episode of his life; so much so that many academics are inclined towards the unlikeliness of his stay in Paris¹⁸.

In the meantime, other events had occurred. In 1308, after the death of Albert of Habsburg, the Templar Henry VII of Luxembourg became king of Germany and of Arles. After re-establishing order in Germany, he descended in Italy to be crowned Emperor. The military expedition of the monarch, although opposed by Philip the Fair, by Robert of Anjou, King of Naples, and by the many Communes that, at the papal instigation, had rebelled against the Imperial authority, was largely a success. Henry was crowned King of Italy, King of the Romans and, in 1312, Emperor. While the dreadful events of Paris described above were unfolding, the Faithfuls of Love and the Italian Templars saw in Henry’s crowning the possibility of a restoration of the traditional order. Dante himself appeared almost as the sapiential inspirer of that thrilling adventure. However, the dream came to an abrupt end. In 1313 the Emperor suddenly died, poisoned with arsenic, probably at the hands of his Franciscan confessor. It was the collapse of all hope. Templars and Troubadours dispersed. Many of them fell into the hands of the Inquisition. Dante himself, although under the protection of knights of the highest rank who hosted him as a guest, became aware of the unfavourable signs of the times and transformed his work, the Divine Comedy, into the Testament to all Western initiatic wisdom for future times. Tradition wants that he predicted that the meaning of his message would only be understood six hundred years after his death. And so it happened.

After Dante’s passing, no one evidently succeeded him in the role of guru, although there was a new generation of Faithful of Love of great importance that include Petrarch and Boccaccio. The latter made a special effort to confuse the ideas of the uninitiated with regard to the Holy Faith. While the Black Death, the plague of 1348, was ravaging the population of all Europe, one last attempt to restore the tradition was made. Cola di Rienzo, who is said to have been the natural son of Henry VII, took over the city of Rome, which was in a state of absolute decline after being abandoned by the popes and prey to the depredations of powerful rival families. His attempt was to re-establish the res publica of ancient Rome, while maintaining Rome as the capital of both the Empire and papacy. But times had changed. After the first successes, despite both Imperial and papal support, he was killed by the wrath of the Roman populace¹⁹.

The tradition in the West had now interrupted. From that moment on, a mercantile civilization prevailed, dedicated to the worst follies of individualism, magic and naturalism²⁰. The modern world was born.

Petrus Simonet de Maisonneuve

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1. Divine Comedy, Inferno, XIX.53-72.[↩]
2. Divine Comedy, Inferno, XIX.79-117; Paradiso, XVII.82; Paradiso,XXX.142-148.[↩]
3. The destruction of the city of Palestrina is an example. Also Dante became victim of Boniface’s hatred. It was this very pope who asked the Commune of Florence to condemn him to death, to expropriate him of all his possessions, thus forcing the Poet to exile from his homeland.[↩]
4. With the canonization, the sanctity of a person is officially recognized and his public veneration is permitted. It will be seen later how canonization has been used as a political tool until the contemporary era.[↩]
5. Throughout the second half of the 13th century, the military incompetence of Louis IX of France, Edward I of England and Charles I of Anjou, king of Sicily, led to irreparable disasters, at the cost of many human lives. The Templars did their best to repair the delirious strategic decisions of these greedy sovereigns, paying a high price in the number of fallen knights.[↩]
6. Philip the Fair was also responsible for tampering with the minting of gold and silver coins of his kingdom, contravening the control of the Order of the Temple. Paradiso, XXXIII. 118-120.[↩]
7. Indeed, the transformation of the feudal kingdom of France into a centralized and absolute national monarchy had already been largely accomplished by Louis IX. He had placed the administration of public affairs in the hands of plebeian jurists, reducing and limiting feudal privileges and centralizing the power of the State in his hands. Devoted to an entirely Gallican religiosity, insubordinate to the pretensions of the papal political hegemony, he supported mendicant orders (especially the Franciscans) in opposition to ecclesiastical hierarchies. Philip the Fair inherited and aggravated this friction with Rome.[↩]
8. The verses of Dante (Purgatorio, XX.85-96) testify to Philip’s greed for the riches of the Temple. On the illicit love affair between Philip IV (the giant) and the Church (the whore), see Purgatory XXXII.148-160.[↩]
9. This shows the efficiency achieved by the “police regime” of the absolute sovereign. There was no resistance from the Templars, deceived by the “fiscal” motivations of the summons. This however also denotes unpreparedness, naivety and weakness on their part. The anti-Templar operation was prepared as early as 1305, when the French ruler had gathered the vindictive slanders of some knights expelled from the Order for unworthiness. Some royal emissaries were then infiltrated into the Order as spies. These were the architects of the first confessions during the arrests. Nevertheless, these traitors were not spared from being convicted. Jules Michelet, Procès des Templiers, Paris, Imprimerie Nationale, 1851, vol. I, p. 458.[↩]
10. No doctrinal heresy was ever proved. The only anomaly found was the following: every Holy Thursday the knights received the Eucharist only with wine. The absence of bread was considered heretical. In reality such a rite confirmed that the Templars continued the initiatic ritual tradition of drinking the blood of Christ from the Grail vessel.[↩]
11. During the trial, attempts were made to accuse the Templars of worshiping an idol called Baphomet, represented by a head. The inquisitors argued that it was a cult addressed to Muhammad (in French Mahomet). Now, it is known that Saladin had beheaded all the Templars he had occasion to capture because it was impossible to convert them to Islam. Probably, under the name of Baphomet – altogether made up by the inquisitors – the Templars venerated the “The Veronica” or the folded Shroud, holy relics that had been in the possession of the Order.[↩]
12. That pope was a real puppet in the hands of the French ruler, who induced him to abandon the traditional Roman See and to move it to France. There the popes remained from 1313 to 1377 at the mercy of the political will of the kings. The cowardice of Clement V was such that he allowed the mass executions of knights who had been acquitted religiously for not having committed any fault. The various studies by Barbara Frale, who would like to absolve Clement V of his responsibilities, underline instead the cowardice and complicity of the pope in the massacre. In a circular letter dated March 18^th, 1311, the pope asked all the princes and inquisitors of Europe to arrest and subject the Templars to torture. Robert L. John, Dante Templare, Milan, Hoepli, 1991 (1st ed. Dante, Wien, Springer-Verlag, 1946), p. 132.[↩]
13. This could happen because in 1307 chaos reigned in the imperial territories of Germany and Italy. In fact, the feudal lords, now almost completely secularized, and the Communes that declared themselves free, fought one another for the control of Imperial territories, markets and assets. Albert I of Habsburg, after winning and killing Adolf of Nassau in battle, rekindled the civil war in Germany. In an attempt to be crowned Emperor, he allied himself to the king of France and abandoned the “Garden of the Empire”, Italy, to his fate. For such misdeeds, Dante cursed him in Purgatorio (VI.100-102).[↩]
14. Between those who did not survive the torture and those who were sent to the stake, around one hundred knights died. However, the approximately two thousand survivors were sentenced to life isolation. This prevented the continuation of the paramparā. Georges Lizerand (Éd.), Le dossier de l’Affaire des Templiers, Paris, Soc. d’Édition «Les Belles Lettres», 1964, pp. III-XII.[↩]
15. Guillaume Nogaret, Philip’s plebeian minister, inspirer of such a massacre, died mysteriously before the final sentence.[↩]
16. They were welcomed with open arms by King Robert Bruce.[↩]
17. For instance, some knights were “accepted” into the Kilwinning stone-cutter guild. “Acceptance”, in the language of the guilds, consisted of recognizing an initiate of a different way, chivalrous, corporative or, in ancient times, monastic (in later times, hermetists and qabbalists were also “accepted” and considered, rightly or wrongly, as initiates and were even allowed to participate in rituals. In times of decadence, also simple profanes who did not exercise any corporative craft were considered as “accepted”). Those who were “accepted” could attend the art rituals without actively participating because they were foreign to the profession. Contrary to what Ramsey claimed, the “acceptance” of Templars in the aforementioned lodge did not made all the guild workers “knights” (René Le Forestier, La Franc-Maçonnerie Templière et Occultiste, Paris, La Table d’Émeraude, 1987, vol. I, pp. 53-56; ibid. vol. II. p. 781, n. 54). This shows that “Templarism” is a sort of ideal link that lacks, however, a real transmission (Gastone Ventura, Templari and Templarismo, Rome, “Atanòr”, 1980). Dante too had to be accepted into the guild of physicians and apothecaries in Florence; or else, as an aristocrat, he could have no longer participated in the political life of the bourgeois communal regime.[↩]
18. R. L. John presents well his argumentation on the Parisian stay of the Poet in 1311 (cit. pp. 47-51). However, it is indicative that Dante had been a student of theology at the Sorbonne in the year 1294; in the same year and in the same university where Meister Eckhart was lector of theology. Eckhart returned to the Sorbonne as master (magister) where he taught from 1311 to 1313. Therefore, is it possible to consider the simultaneous presence in Paris of the two greatest representatives of Western initiatic wisdom a mere coincidence? An article on Meister Eckhart is underway and will be published on this Site soon.[↩]
19. Carmela Crescenti, Cola di Rienzo. Simboli e allegorie, Parma, Ed. Insegna del Veltro, 2003. The author of this excellent essay does justice to the character, clearly explaining that Cola di Rienzo did not intend to found a bourgeois Commune nor a personal tyranny, let alone an Italian republic, as it has been described in the past three centuries. However, the book overbalances when comparing the attempt at the traditional restoration by a Faithfuls of Love, however unrealistic, with the utterly suspicious adventure of Joan of Arc.[↩]
20. It is indicative that nowadays novels, films and videogames have resumed the defamation of the Templars of the Middle Ages portraying them as the worst acolytes of evil and corrupt criminals in history. The persecution, therefore, continues with the only purpose of sowing hatred against tradition and in defence of the last two dreadful centuries of western history.[↩]