Rulers of Evil; Useful Knowledge
about Governing Bodies
By F.Tupper Saussy
Chapter 5
about Governing Bodies
By F.Tupper Saussy
Chapter 5
APPOINTMENT
AT CYPRUS
HIS NAME WAS Iñigo de Loyola. He was born in 1491 to a
rich family, youngest of eight boys, one of thirteen children. His older brother had sailed to the New World with
Christopher Columbus .
Iñigo served as a page in the court of King Ferdinand and
Queen Isabella of Spain. He became friends with Ferdinand’s Belgian grandson, Charles Habsburg, whose other grandfather was
Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian. (The Holy Roman Emperor
was a kind of secular pope who presided over the Christian kingdoms of the western world.) Charles was propelled to great authority before his twenty-first birthday by the deaths of his two
grandfathers within a space of two years. From Ferdinand, Charles
inherited Spain. From Maximilian, he inherited the Holy Roman
Empire. Charles Habsburg was King Charles I of Spain, Emperor
Charles V of Rome . He was the most powerful secular figure in Europe. And he was Iñigo’s friend.
In 1518, Iñigo was part of a legation negotiating for Charles
with Spain’s traditional rival, France, at the court of the Duke of
Najera in Valladolid. While the summit was in session, Catherina,
the Emperor’s sister, was presented to the Najera court. Iñigo fell
in love with her. He was twenty-seven and she was eleven. (The
Emperor was eighteen.) The match, however, was not to be.
On Monday, May 20, 1521, while commanding a garrison at
the Duke’s fortress in Pamplona, Iñigo was struck by a French cannonball. His right leg was shattered, and with it – since a well shaped leg was among a courtier’s most prized assets – the prospects
for a romantic life with Catherina, or any other woman. An honor
guard of French soldiers bore the wounded champion on a stretcher to his family’s castle in the Spanish Pyrenees. Surgeons
butchered his leg and reset the bones. He lost appetite and was
told he might die. He made confession and was given last rites. But
a few days after the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, he was pronounced
out of death’s immediate grasp. He credited this recovery to his
devotion to St. Peter.
Iñigo remained bedridden for nearly a year. Under the concerned if distant eye of the youthful Emperor, he spent his time
“searching for substitutes for the shattered ideals, ambitions, and
values that had been so central to his sense of himself.” 2
He gazed
obsessively at a small icon of Saint Catherine , a gift from Queen
Isabella to his sister-in-law. The icon sparked dreams of Catherina, which only throttled his heart with desolation. He turned to
books, Ludolph of Saxony’s Life of Christ and Voragine’s Lives of the
Saints – the only two volumes in the family library despite the fact
that a Spanish Bible had been available for forty years.
The icon and the books gave him visions. The visions, in turn,
led him to develop a process of “preparing and disposing the soul
to rid itself of all inordinate attachments, and, after their removal,
of seeking and finding the will of God.” 3
Iñigo called this process
“the Spiritual Exercises.”
In the Exercises, a Director leads a Retreatant through Four
Weeks of intense prayer, meditation, and dialogue with the Blessed
Virgin Mary, Jesus, and God the Father. Frequent repetition of “Anima Christi,” Loyola’s own habitual prayer for disorientation
and sensory deprivation (“Blood of Christ, inebriate me”), is
advised. The First Week is spent considering and contemplating
sins, creating vivid mental pictures of “hell in all its depth and
breadth, putting your five senses at the service of your imagination. ” The Second Week explores the life of Christ up to Palm
Sunday inclusively; the Third Week undertakes the Crucifixion,
in which the Retreatant is directed to “imagine Christ our Lord
present before you on the Cross , and begin to speak with him ...
and ask ‘What have I done for Christ? What am I doing for Christ?
What ought I to do for Christ?’” 4
The Fourth Week is occupied
with the Resurrection and Ascension, after which the Retreatant
prays “for a knowledge of the deceits of the rebel chief and help to
guard myself against them; and also to ask for a knowledge of the
true life exemplified in the sovereign and true Commander , and
the grace to imitate him.”
By the time the Exercises have run their course, the Retreatant’s purified imagination is totally dominated by mental pictures of Jesus resurrected, Jesus the King Militant. One can now
answer the King’s call to conquer Protestantism and its rebel chief
(“the enemy of human nature” ) with the selfless fidelity of a
chivalrous knight. One’ s consciousness has been altered. One’s
soul and brain have been washed. One’s liberty has been sacrificed
to authority. One’s individuality has been surrendered to the
Christ of Rome . One no longer has a will of one’s own. One volunteers for any assigned task no matter how adverse.
Martin Luther spent Loyola’s year of recovery imprisoned at Wartburg Castle for insulting the papacy with his Ninety-Five Theses. Remarkably, while one prisoner experienced mystical visions that urged him to defend the Church’s honor in the romantically chivalrous manner of the Knights Templar, the other was translating (with the miraculous permission of his keepers) the New Testament into German so that ordinary people might learn the will of God directly. These parallel, simultaneous quests for holiness would define modern life’s underlying conflict: Which Master Do I Serve, Rome or the Word of God?
PURIFIED by the Spiritual Exercises, Iñigo’s sensual attachment to Princess Catherina was transformed through Saint Catherine into a higher, spiritual attachment to a higher femininity – to Mary, the Queen of Heaven. An apparition of the Virgin appeared to him one night and validated that he was free of fleshly lusts and was now worthy of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In Martin Luther’s opinion, “as far as God is concerned, Jerusalem and all the Holy Land are not one whit more, or less, interesting than the cows in Switzerland.” 5 But to a spiritual warrior preparing to lead the Church to war against Scripture, a touchdown in Jerusalem was absolutely necessary. Jerusalem was the domain of King Solomon’s Temple , the geo-spiritual center of the Knights Templar. If Iñigo was to revive the Templars, as the Emperor desired, it was liturgically imperative that his newly-washed spirit present itself in the Sacred City for initiation into the mysteries of holy warfare.
All pilgrims to the Holy Land were required by law to apply to the pope at Easter for permission to proceed. In early March 1522, more than a year in advance, Iñigo set out for Rome in all his aristocratic finery, riding on the back of a mule. The corrupt Leo X had died suddenly of malaria in December 1521 , and on January 9, 1522, Charles Habsburg (King and Emperor ) had engineered the nearly unanimous election of his former tutor, Adrian Dedal, to succeed Leo as Adrian VI. Iñigo headed for Rome coincidentally with Adrian’ s journey across Spain to Barcelona, the point of embarkation for voyages to Italy. The new pope stopped in Navarre, in northern Spain, for an official reception by the Duke of Najera’s successor. Iñigo, too, stopped at Navarre to do some undescribed business at the Duke’s residence at Navarette. Perhaps Adrian gave him a discreet audience.
Further on, the pilgrim kept an all-night vigil at a chapel of the Virgin of Aranzazu, Protectress of the Basques, vowing his chastity to her small, dark statue. He continued on to Montserrat, where he lodged in a Benedictine abbey. There , he rededicated himself to God’ s service before another statue of the Virgin, the Black Madonna of Montserrat, Protectress of Catalonia , Patroness of Christian Conquest. The spiritual exercise here must have been intense, for in the late afternoon of the third day, Iñigo traded clothes with a beggar, hung his sword and dagger on the Madonna’s shrine, and gave his mule to the abbey.
While Adrian VI proceeded on to Barcelona, Iñigo detoured on foot to the village of Manresa for ten months of penances, spiritual preparation, and note-taking. Stripped of everything but sackcloth, a gourd for drinking, and a pilgrim’s staff, he adopted the lifestyle of the early Knight s Templar, begging food and alms. He was initiated into the Illuminati, the “Enlightened Ones,” a secret society of gnostic fundamentalists who preached that all matter is absolutely and eternally evil.
The gnostics taught that humanity itself is of Satanic origin. Adam and Eve were the offspring of devils. Humanity can achieve salvation from death and eternal punishment, however , by freeing soul from body for absorption into the pure light of Godliness . This is done by withdrawing from sensual pleasure and intuitively discovering hidden truths as conveyed by the cabalah. (The gnostics’ contempt for anything having to do with the physical side of existence translated into wildly ironic behavior . Some practiced radical celibacy because they believed the result of sexual intercourse, conception, would only imprison more souls in physical bodies. Others practiced unbridled sexual libertinism in order to prove they were completely free from all physical inhibition. Still others combined the two, pursuing hypocritical lives of celibate fornication, of which “safe sex” is the modern institution. Loyola’s particular cult apparently chose the asceticism of self-flagellation, for Iñigo wandered many nights about the Manresa countryside whipping himself with a scourge studded with iron barbs. Later in life, he would decide that the whips and barbs “sapped one’s strength,” that the Godhead could as adequately be sought by the more humane self-mortification of the Spiritual Exercises.)
While Iñigo was outlining the Exercises in Manresa, Luther’s translation of the New Testament was introducing readers and listeners in Germany, Switzerland, France, Bohemia, and England to a different form of spiritual exercise, one in which God’s will, ancient and immutable, was expressed not within the private imagination but publicly, in the printed Word, for all to see. People devoured the New Testament even before it reached the bindery. In one contemporary’s words, “The sheet, yet wet, was brought from the press under someone’ s cloak, and passed from shop to shop.” 6
THE pilgrim sailed from Barcelona to the Italian port city of Gaeta , and walked the remaining distance to Rome , arriving there on Palm Sunday, March 29, 1523. Two days later, according to Vatican archives, “Iñigo de Loyola, cleric of the diocese of Pamplona” received permission from Pope Adrian VI to visit Jerusalem.
From Rome , Iñigo proceeded to Venice , where one of Charles Habsburg’s agents received him graciously and introduced him to the Doge, Andre a Gritti, the highest official in Venetian civil government. A famed diplomat and linguist, Gritti arranged free passage for Iñigo aboard a small ship whose name – the “Negrona” – was appropriate for an evangelist dedicated to the Black Virgin of Christian Conquest.
On July 14, 1523, the Negrona left Venice , arriving a month later at the island of Cyprus. At Cyprus, one Diego Manes and his servant, along with several Cypriot officials, boarded ship for the rest of the voyage to Haifa. Diego Manes was a Commander of the Knights Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem. 7 Since 1312 , the Hospitallers had held title to the vast wealth of the Knights Templar. They had been drawing upon these assets to defend the Roman economy against Islamic marauders in the east. But when the Turks attacked the Hospitallers’ headquarters on the Island of Rhodes, the assets were frozen by the pope and his former pupil, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles. No assistance in any form was forthcoming from either party. Consequently, in December 1522, the Hospitallers had no choice but to surrender Rhodes and retreat to what would become their final domicile, Malta. The message was clear. Now that Luther’s German-language New Testament was in print, Protestantism loomed a greater menace to Rome than Islam ever did.
It is possible that in a Jerusalem-bound ship named Negrona, Commander Diego Manes turned over the litanies, lists, secret codes, formulae, cabalah, and other portable assets comprising the Knights Templar resources to Iñigo. If this indeed happened, the western world’s secret infrastructure was now Loyola’s to populate and manipulate in the cause of learning against learning. That is my hypothesis . What is not hypothesis is that as soon as the pilgrim returned from Jerusalem he began vesting himself with Medici learning.
The idea of uniting the Templars with the Hospitallers was first argued publicly in a book published in 1305 by Raimon Llull, a renowned illuminatus from Majorca. Llull’s book, Libre de Fine, (“Free At Last” ) appeared in the midst of a raging controversy between the French monarchy and the Roman papacy over who held jurisdiction over the Templars. That is the subject of our next chapter.
Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux, the leading propagandist of the day, extolled the Templars as “the epitome and apotheosis of Christian values.” Bolstered by such unprecedented promotion, the Poor Knights attracted the best and the brightest young men of Europe to become Crusaders , to vow celibacy and leave their families in defense of Christ’s tomb against Muslim terrorists.
The mission failed within nine years. Even so, Bernard’s propaganda caused the Templars to be received as conquering heroes when they returned to France. They set up their permanent lodge at Troyes under the patronage of the court of Champagne . (For nearly a century, Troyes had been Europe’s leading school for the study of the kabbalah, which may explain why the city is laid out in the shape of a champagne cork.)
For making the Templars a world power, Bernard shares credit with Cardinal Aimeric of Santa Maria Nuova . Aimeric was the Church’ s highest judicial officer. It was his unlawful connivance 1 that created Honorius II, the pope who ordained the Templars as the Church’s most highly-esteemed religious order. It was Aimeric, too, who devised a radical “inner renewal of the Church,” which inspired noblemen throughout England, Scotland, Flanders, Spain, and Portugal to shower the Templars with donations of land and money, over and above the properties required of all initiates upon joining the Order.
When Honorius died in 1130, Aimeric led a minority of cardinals in another connivance resulting in the election of Innocent II, who was consecrated pope in Aimeric’ s titular church of Santa Maria Nuova . In 1139, Innocent issued a bull placing the Templars under an exclusive vow of papal obedience – a measure by which Aimeric effectively put all Templar resources at the disposal of the papacy. Within another decade, the Knights were given exclusive rights by Pope Eugenius III to wear the rose croix, the rosy cross, on their white tunics. As their list of properties lengthened with donations from Italy, Austria, Germany , Hungary, and the Holy Land, the Templars built hundreds of great stone castles. Wealthy travelers lodged in these castles because of their unmatched security. Convinced they were building a new world, the Templars called each other frère maçon (“brother mason”). Later, this term would be anglicized into “Freemason.”
The Templars invented modern banking by applying an oriental invention to their commerce. Agents of the Chinese emperor Kao-tsung, inventor of paper currency called fei-chi’en, “flying money,” sought trade with the middle east during the period of Templar occupation.2 Kao-tsung’s was the first government on earth to enforce circulation of drafts as legal tender for debts. Evidently, Kao-tsung’s agents introduced the Knights to this new medium of exchange created out of merchant drafts. The Templars enhanced their already booming business of (1) accepting current accounts, deposit accounts, deposits of jewels, valuables and title deeds, (2) making loans and advances (charging “fees” because the Church forbade interest), and (3) acting as agents for the secure transmission of such things by (4) adding circulating letters of credit – flying money – to serve as paper currency. To supply the Templars’ currency needs may explain why paper in France was first manufactured in the Poor Knights’ hometown of Troyes.
By 1300, presiding over the world economy from their Paris office, 3 the Templars had become an international power unto themselves. Engaged in diplomacy at the highest levels of state from the Holy Land westward, they set the tastes, the goals, the morality, the rules of the civilized world. Kings did their bidding – when Henry III of England threatened to confiscate certain of the Order’s properties, he was upbraided by the Master Templar in the city of London:
“What sayest thou, O King? So long as thou dost exercise justice, thou wilt reign. But if thou infringe it, thou wilt cease to be King.” 4
But suddenly, at their very zenith, the Poor Knights suffered a strange reversal of fortunes. In 1302, King Philip IV of France dared to challenge their sovereignty on his own soil. He asserted that in France everyone, Knights Templars included, was subject to the King. Pope Boniface VIII jumped in and declared that France, the King, the Templars, all of them, and everybody else as well, belonged to Pontifex Maximus – “It is absolutely necessary for the salvation of every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff.” Philip then accused the pope of illegitimacy, sexual misconduct, and heresy. Boniface prepared a bull excommunicating Philip, but before it could be published, a band of the Philip’s mercenaries stormed the Vatican and demanded the pope’s resignation. Although the intruders were driven off, the shock to body and soul was too much for Boniface, and he died a month later.
Two successor popes held firm against Philip, until Bertrand de Got, Archbishop of Bordeaux, was elected in 1305. Crowned in Lyons with the papal name Clement V, de Got moved the papacy to Avignon, and began a long train of concessions to Philip’s royal prerogative. Finally, on Friday, October 13, 1307, Philip arrested all but thirteen of the Templars in France, tried them and, upon evidence of their practice of the kabbalah, found them guilty of blasphemy and magic. At least fifty knights were burned at the stake.
From captured documents it was learned that the Templars, from the very beginning, had renounced what Roman theologians called “the religion of St. Peter.” They had been initiated into a secret gnostic branch of the Eastern Church known as “the Primitive Christian Church. ” Because the Primitive Christians ’ apostolic succession claimed to flow from John the Baptist and the apostle John they were called “Johannites.” 5 [huh,the dude with the massive head wound,imagine that DC]
The Johannites believed that although Jesus was “imbued with a spirit wholly divine and endowed with the most astounding qualities,” he was not the true God. Consistent with gnostic logic, the true Johannite God would never lower Himself to become vile human matter. Jesus was in fact a false Messiah sent by the powers of darkness. He was justly crucified – although when his side was pierced he did repent of his pretensions and receive divine forgiveness. Thanks to his repentance , Jesus now enjoys everlasting life in the celestial company of the saints.
Regarding miracles, the Johannites believed that Jesus “did or may have done extraordinary or miraculous things,” and that “since God can do things incomprehensible to human intelligence , all the acts of Christ as they are described in the Gospel, whether acts of human science or whether acts of divine power ” can be accepted as true – except for the Resurrection, which is omitted from the Templars’ copy of the Gospel of St. John. 6 Therefore, for all his wonderful attributes, Christ “was nothing , a false prophet and of no value.” Only the Higher God of Heaven had power to save mankind. 7
But the Higher God avoided human matter, and so lordship over the material world belonged to Satanael, the evil brother of Jesus. Satanael alone could enrich mankind. Templar kabbalah represented Satanael as the head of a goat emblazoned with, sometimes contained within, a pentagram. 8 This symbol is deeply rooted in Old Testament kabbalah, in which the goat is identified with power in the world and separation from God. On the greatest Israelite feast day, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, one goat was spared the sacrificial knife, and was sprinkled with the blood of another goat killed for the sins of Israel. The spared goat, the scapegoat, was then banished from the congregation to bear Israel’s sins into the wilderness, which typified the world. 9 The scapegoat escaped with his life, his freedom.
King Solomon conferred with evil spirits, 10 but Scripture describes the spirits only generally. However, the Zohar, or “Book of Splendor, ” one of the main works of ancient kabbalistic literature, tells us evil spirits appeared to the Israelites “under the form of he-goats and made known to them all that they wished to learn.” 11 The Templars called this goat-idol “Baphomet,” from baphe- and –metis, Greek words combined to mean “absorption into wisdom.” Baphomet encapsulates the career of Solomon, who Scripture says was absorbed into the wisdom of God more than any other human being, 12 yet finished out his life in communion with he-goatish evil spirits. 13 By the Templars’ Johannite standard, communing with the evil spirits was the secret to controlling the world. By the biblical standard, however, Solomon represents the impossibility of human perfectibility. Perfectibility is indeed attainable, according to Scripture, but only through the redemptive process shown in the Ne w Testament which Rome kept the Templars from reading.
ON March 22, 1312, Clement V dissolved the Knights Templar with his decree Vox clamantis (“War Cry”). But the dissolution proved a mere formality to further appease Philip. More importantly, it permitted the Templars, in other manifestations, to continue enriching the papacy. For Grand Master Jacques de Molay, just prior to his execution in 1313 , sent the surviving thirteen French Templars to establish four new Metropolitan lodges: one at Stockholm for the north, one at Naples for the east, one at Paris for the south, and one at Edinburgh for the west. Thus , the Knights remained the militant arm of the papacy. Except that their wealth, their secrecy, their gnostic cabalism, and their oath of papal obedience were obscurely dispersed under a variety of corporate names.
A subtle provision in Vox clamantis transferred most Templar estates to the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, who took possession after King Philip’s death. In Germany and Austria, the Templars became “Rosicrucians” and “Teutonic Knights.” The Teutonic Knights grew strong in Mainz, birthplace of Gutenberg’s press. Six centuries later, as the “Teutonic Order,” the Knights would provide the nucleus of Adolf Hitler’s political support in Munich and Vienna.
The Edinburgh lodge would become the headquarters of Scottish Rite Freemasonry, which Masonic historians call “American Freemasonry” because all but five of the signers of the Declaration of Independence are said to have practiced its craft. In Spain and Portugal the Templars became the “llluminati” in whom Iñigo had taken membership at Manresa, and “Knights of Christ. ” It was under the red pattée cross of the Knights of Christ that Columbus had taken possession of what he called “las Indias” for King Ferdinand V of Spain, grandfather of Iñigo’s discreet patron, Charles I and V, the Holy Roman Emperor.
As early as August of 1523, as I hypothesized in the previous chapter, this vast yet fragmented subterranean empire, Roman Catholicism’s unseen root-system binding together the world, belonged to Iñigo de Loyola. His spiritual dynasty, which continues to this day, would use this system to cause God-fearing men who hated the papacy to perform, without realizing it, exactly how the papacy wanted them to.
But what of Iñigo’s education? His rise in academe is the subject of the next chapter.
With the esoteric experience of his Spiritual Exercises, he charmed the wives of important men. He received frequent invitations to dine at elegant tables, but preferred to beg food door to door and distribute the choice pickings to the poor and sick. He lived in an attic and slept on the floorboards, trying desperately to persuade God of his worthiness. He prayed for six hours each day, attended mass three times a week, confessed every Sunday, and continued whipping himself. He devised secret penances, such as boring holes in his shoes and going barefoot in winter.
Sometimes the Exercises aroused in his followers instances of bizarre conduct – swooning, long spells of fainting or melancholia, rolling about the ground, being gripped with corpse-like rigidity. The Spanish Inquisition investigated him on suspicion of preaching gnostic illuminism. When Iñigo insisted that he was not preaching at all, but was merely talking about the things of God in a familiar way, the Inquisitor released him. In successive frays, the Inquisition ordered Iñigo (1) to get rid of his eccentric clothing and dress like other students, (2) to refrain from holding meetings until he had completed four years of study, and (3) to refrain from defining what constituted a grave sin. Wearying of the harassment, he decided to seek his four years of education beyond the Inquisition’s reach.
He set out for the University of Paris with a pack mule carrying his belongings . He arrived at the University on February 2, 1528, and soon afterward registered in the run-down old College of Montaigu. John Calvin , who would become Protestantism’s great theological systems designer, was leaving Montaigu just as Loyola arrived. Erasmus, the College’s most famous alumnus, remembered graduating from Montaigu “with nothing except an infected body and a vast array of lice.” The student body consisted mostly of wayward Parisian boys kept under harsh discipline; Iñigo was thirty-seven.
Paris was expensive, even for students. Much of the funds Iñigo had raised in Barcelona had been stolen by one of his disciples. In early 1529 he went into Belgium, where it is believed he received money from people close to the Holy Roman Emperor. One of these was Juan de Cuellar , Treasurer of the Kingdom of Spain. Another was Luis Vives , personal secretary to the Emperor’s aunt, Queen Catherine of England, and private tutor to her daughter, Princess Mary (afterward the “Bloody” Queen). Iñigo returned to Paris much better off. He upgraded his lodgings.
In October, he left Montaigu and enrolled at the College of Ste. Barbe across the street. He pursued a course in arts and philosophy that would last three and a half years. His name appears on the Ste. Barbe registry as “Ignatius de Loyola.” Some Jesuit historians have guessed he adopted the name in veneration of Ignatius of Antioch, an early Christian martyr. It was at Ste. Barbe that Iñigo began earnestly organizing his army, but not before traveling again to Belgium to ask Juan de Cuellar and Luis Vives for yet more money.
Armed with his command of the Templar secrets and with introductions provided by the Emperor and Vives, Ignatius crossed to England. This significant voyage is mentioned only once in his autobiography. He admits that he “returned with more alms than he usually did in other years.” Perhaps Queen Catherine, the Emperor’s aunt, introduced him to the Howards and the Petres, known to be among the first families to receive and nourish Jesuits sent to England.
Starting with his two Ste. Barbe roommates, Ignatius soon gathered a circle of six close friends ranging in age from teens to early twenties. Somewhat like himself, they were adventurous, impressionable, intelligent, and unpersuaded of the Bible’s supreme authority. Their fondest dream was to save the Holy Land from the Muslims by performing heroic Templaresque exploits. One by one Ignatius gave them the Spiritual Exercises, and one by one they became disciples. Within a few years they were calling themselves La Compañìa de Iesus, the Company of Jesus.
On August 15, 1534, Feast Day of the Assumption of the Virgin into heaven, the companions swore oaths of service to the Blessed Virgin in Ste. Marie’s Church at Montmartre, and to St. Denis, patron saint of France, in his chapel. (The experience of the Montmartre Oaths must have been intense, for Francis Xavier, who would become St. Francis, Apostle to the East, made the Spiritual Exercises with “a penitential fervor,” says Broderick in Origin of the Jesuits, “that nearly cost him the use of his limbs.”) They vowed poverty, chastity, and to rescue Jerusalem from the Muslims. However, should the rescue prove infeasible within a year, they vowed to undertake without question whatever other task the pope might require of them.
Well before a year had passed, Clement VII died and the Jerusalem dream was overwhelmed by more present dangers. Luther’s Bible in German was creating defection in record numbers throughout Germany , Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. In France, the response to LeFevre’s Bible was so decisive that King Francis I exclaimed that he would behead his own children if he found them harboring the blasphemous heresies acquirable through direct contact with scripture. England was lost in its entirety, due not to Bible reading, which Henry VIII prosecuted as avidly as any pope, but to the royal love life. Henry had demanded that Clement VII grant him a divorce from the Emperor’s aunt Catherine, and then recognize the Protestant-oriented Anne Boleyn as his new Queen. When Clement stood mute, Henry took all of England away from Rome and made himself “complete owner of the lands and tenements [of England], as well at law as in equity.” 1
Clement VII was succeeded by the oldest cardinal, an erudite humanist with formidable diplomatic skills, 66-year-old Alessandro Farnese. Cardinal Farnese had been privately educated in the household of Lorenzo d’Medici and had been appointed Treasurer of the Vatican in 1492. He was crowned Pope Paul III. Vatican wags called Farnese “Cardinal Petticoat” because his strikingly beautiful sister Giulia had been mistress to the licentious Pope Alexander VI, for which the same wags nicknamed her “Bride of Christ.” Giulia posed undraped for the statue of the Goddess Justice that still reclines voluptuously on Paul III’s tomb in St. Peter’s Basilica. Two centuries later, at the command, in the interests of decency, of Pius IX, the first pope to be officially declared infallible, Giulia’s exposed breasts were fitted with a metal blouse. 2
Paul III is a major figure in the history of the Society of Jesus, and consequently of the United States of America, since it was he who approved, in the summer of 1539, Ignatius de Loyola’s business plan. Ignatius proposed a “minimal society” that would “do battle in the Lord God’s service under the banner of the Cross. ” The militia would be very small, no more than sixty members, and each would have to take four vows of poverty, chastity, obedience to the Church, and a vow of special obedience to the pope. They would not be confined to any specific parish but would be dispersed throughout the world according to the papacy’s needs. They would wear no particular habit, but would dress according to the environment in which they found themselves. They would infiltrate the world in an unpredictable variety of pursuits – as doctors, lawyers, authors, reforming theologians, financiers, statesmen, courtiers, diplomats, explorers, tradesmen, merchants, poets, scholars, scientists, architects, engineers, artists, printers, philosophers, and whatever else the world might demand and the Church require. [Sort of like a CIA for the church DC]
Their head would be a Superior General. In the Constitutions which Ignatius was writing, the Superior Genera l would be “obeyed and reverenced at all times as the one who holds the place of Christ our Lord.” 3 The phrase “holds the place of Christ” means that the Superior General would share with the Pope, at a level unperceived by the general public, the divine title of “Vicar of Christ” first claimed by Gelasius I on May 13, 495. Loyola’s completed Constitutions would repeat five hundred times that one is to see Christ in the person of the Superior General. 4 The General’s equal status with the Pope, advantaged by an obscurity that renders him virtually invisible, is why the commander-in-chief of the Society of Jesus has always been called Papa Nero, the Black Pope.
The Superior General’s small army would be trained by the Spiritual Exercises to practice a brand of obedience Loyola termed contemplativus in actione, active contemplation, instantaneous obedience with all critical thought suppressed. As stated in Section 353.1 of the Exercises, “We must put aside all judgment of our own, and keep the mind ever ready and prompt to obey in all things the hierarchical Church.” But Jesuit obedience would be more than mere obedience of the will. An obedient will suppresses what it would do in order to obey what a superior want s done. Ignatius demanded obedience of the understanding. An obedient understanding alters its perception of reality according to the superior’s dictates. Section 365.13 declares, “We must hold fast to the following principle: What seems to me white, I will believe black if the hierarchical Church so defines.” Francis Xavier would later describe this quality of submission in a vow that unintentionally summarized the Jesuit mission: “I would not even believe in the Gospels were the Holy Church to forbid it.” [the first useful idiots DC]
The Society does not open its extreme oath of obedience to public inspection. However , a script alleged to be a true facsimile was translated by Edwin A. Sherman and deposited in the Library of Congress with the number BX3705.S56. According to this document,
when a Jesuit of the minor rank is to be elevated to command, he is conducted into the Chapel of the Convent of the Order, where there are only three others present, the principal or Superior standing in front of the altar. On either side stands a monk, one of whom holds a banner of yellow and white, which are the Papal colors, and the other a black banner with a dagger and red cross above a skull and crossbones, with the initials ’I.N.R.I.,’ and below them the words ’ICSTUM NACAR REGES IMIOS,’ the meaning of which is ’It is just to annihilate impious rulers.’ [Biblically, these initials represent the Roman inscription above Christ’s head on the cross: ’Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews.’]
On the floor is a red cross upon which the postulant or candidate kneels. The Superior hands him a small black crucifix, which he takes in his left hand and presses to his heart and the Superior at the same time presents to him a dagger, which he grasps by the blade and holds the point against his heart, the Superior still holding it by the hilt....
The Superior gives a preamble, and then administers the oath:
I, now, in the presence of Almighty God, the Blessed Virgin Mary, the blessed Michael the Archangel, the blessed St. Paul and all the Saints and sacred Hosts of Heaven, and to you, my Ghostly Father, the Superior General of the Society of Jesus, founded by Ignatius Loyola, in the Pontificate of Paul the Third, and continued to the present, do by the Womb of the Virgin, the Matrix of God, and the Rod of Jesus Christ, declare and swear, that His Holiness the Pope is Christ’s Vice-Regent and is the true and only Head of the Catholic and Universal Church throughout the earth; and that by virtue of the keys of binding and loosing, given to His Holiness by my Saviour, Jesus Christ, he hath power to depose heretical kings, princes, states, commonwealths and governments, all being illegal without his sacred confirmation, and that they may safely be destroyed.
Therefore, to the utmost of my power, I shall and will defend this doctrine and His Holiness’ right and custom against all usurpers of the heretical or Protestant authority whatever, especially the Lutheran Church of Germany, Holland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, and the now pretended authority and churches of England and Scotland, and branches of the same now established in Ireland and on the Continent of America and elsewhere; and all adherents in regard that they be usurped and heretical, opposing the sacred Mother Church of Rome.
I do now renounce and disown any allegiance as due to any heretical king, prince, or state named Protestants or Liberals, or obedience to any of their laws, magistrates or officers.
I do further declare that the doctrines of the churches of England and Scotland, of the Calvinists, Huguenots and others of the name Protestants or Liberals to be damnable, and they themselves damned and to be damned who will not forsake the same.
I do further declare that I will help, assist and advise all or any of His Holiness’ agents in any place wherever I shall be, in Switzerland, German, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, England, Ireland, or America, or in any other kingdom or territory I shall come to, and do my uttermost to extirpate the heretical Protestants or Liberals’ doctrines and to destroy all their pretended powers, regal or otherwise.
I do further promise and declare that, notwithstanding I am dispensed with, to assume any religion heretical, for the propagating of the Mother Church’s interest, to keep secret and private all her agents’ counsels from time to time, as they may entrust me, and not to divulge, directly or indirectly, by word, writing, or circumstance whatever; but to execute all that shall be proposed, given in charge or discovered unto me, by you, my Ghostly Father, or any of this sacred convent.
I do further promise and declare that I will have no opinion or will of my own, or any mental reservation whatever, even as a corpse or cadaver, but will unhesitatingly obey each and every command that I may receive from my superiors in the Militia of the Pope and of Jesus Christ.
That I will go to any part of the world whithersoever I may be sent, to the frozen regions of the North, the burning sands of the desert of Africa, or the jungles of India, to the centres of civilization of Europe, or to the wild haunts of the barbarous savages of America, without murmuring or repining, and will be submissive in all things whatsoever communicated to me.
I furthermore promise and declare that I will, when opportunity presents, make and wage relentless war, secretly or openly, against all heretics, Protestants and Liberals, as I am directed to do, to extirpate and exterminate them from the face of the whole earth; and that I will spare neither age, sex, or condition; and that I will hang, burn, waste, boil, flay, strangle and bury alive these infamous heretics, rip up the stomachs and wombs of their women and crush their infants’ heads against the walls, in order to annihilate forever their execrable race. That when the same cannot be done openly, I will secretly use the poisoned cup, the strangulating cord, the steel of the poinard or the leaden bullet, regardless of the honor, rank, dignity, or authority of the person or persons, whatever may be their condition in life, either public or private, as I at any time may be directed so to do by any agent of the Pope or Superior of the Brotherhood of the Holy Faith, of the Society of Jesus.
In confirmation of which, I hereby dedicate my life, my soul, and all my corporeal powers, and with this dagger which I now receive, I will subscribe my name written in my own blood, in testimony thereof; and should I prove false or weaken in my determination, may my brethren and fellow soldiers of the Militia of the Pope cut off my hands and my feet, and my throat from ear to ear, my belly opened and sulphur burned therein, with all the punishment that can be inflicted upon me on earth and my soul be tortured by demons in an eternal hell forever!
All of which I, , do swear by the blessed Trinity and blessed Sacrament, which I am now to receive, to perform and on my part to keep inviolably; and do call all the heavenly and glorious host of heaven to witness these my real intentions to keep this my oath.
In testimony hereof I take this most holy and blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist, and witness the same further, with my name written with the point of this dagger dipped in my own blood and sealed in the face of this holy Convent.
He receives the wafer from the Superior and writes his name with the point of his dagger dipped in his own blood taken from over the heart....
WHEN Ignatius concluded his presentation, the Pope reportedly cried out “Hoc est digitus Dei!” – “This is the finger stroke of God!” On September 27, 1540, Paul III sealed his approval with the highest and most solemn form of papal pronouncement, a document known as a “bull” (from the Latin bulla, meaning “bubble, ” denoting the attached ovoid or circular seal bearing the pope’s name). Paul’s bull ordaining the Jesuits is entitled Regimini militantis ecclesiae, “On the Supremacy of the Church Militant.” The title forms a cabalistic device common to pagan Roman divining. Known as notariqon, this device is an acronym that enhances the meaning of its initialized words, in the way “MADD” tells us that Mothers Against Drunk Drivers are more than “against” drunken drivers, they’re very angry. “Regimini militantis ecclesiae” produces the notariqon “R[O]ME, ” the empire whose salvation the Society of Jesus was ordained by this bull to secure through the arts of war.
The following April, the original six and a few other members elected Ignatius de Loyola their first Superior General. What had been approved as a minimal society soon multiplied to a thousand strong. Ignatius did this by administering to only sixty the extreme oath of obedience to the pope, while admitting hundreds more under lesser oaths. Ever since, the exact size of the Society has been know n only to the Superior General. As the world gained increasing numbers of doctors, lawyers, authors, reforming theologians, financiers, statesmen, courtiers, diplomats, explorers, tradesmen, merchants , poets, scholars, scientists, architects, engineers, artists, printers, and philosophers, it was extremely difficult for an ordinary citizen to tell which were Jesuits and which were not. Not even Jesuits could say for sure, because of a provision in the Constitutions (Sections 81-8 6 of Part I) which authorizes the Superior General to “receive agents, both priestly agents to help in spiritual matters and lay agents to give aid in temporal and domestic functions.” Called “coadjutors,” these lay agents could be of any religious denomination, race, nationality, or sex. They took an oath which bound them “for whatever time the Superior General of the Society should see fit to employ them in spiritual or temporal services.” This provision was availed by so many black popes that the French had a name for people suspected of being Jesuit agents: les robes-petites (“short-robes”). The English called them “short-coats” or “Ignatians.”
Within two years of Regimini militantis ecclesiae, Paul III appointed the Society to administer the Roman Inquisition (not to be confused with the Spanish Inquisition, which reported only to the Spanish crown). When the Jesuits were comfortable with the Inquisition, Paul made his move to “reconcile ” with the Protestants.
For fifteen years the Edict of Worms and the Augsburg Confession kept Catholic and Protestant rulers in a Mexican standoff. Then, on December 13, 1545, Paul III called both factions to the small German-speaking northern Italian cathedral city of Trent. The promise was to resolve differences peacefully in an ecumenical council.
The Council of Trent had not been seated four months before it decreed that the books and biblical translations of Luther, LeFevre, Zwingli, Calvin, and other “unapproved persons” were “altogether forbidden and allowed to no one, since little advantage, but much danger, generally arises from reading them.” 1
Then the Jesuits moved in. Diego Lainez, Alfonso Salmeron, two of the original companions, and Claude LeJay, all three in their early thirties, distinguished themselves at Trent early on by spurning the grand style of the other delegates. They set up housekeeping in a “narrow, smoke-blackened baker’s oven” and wore clothing so heavily patched and greasy that other priests were embarrassed to associate with them. 2 They carried with them intricate advisories from Ignatius himself, written from the delegates’ point of view, as for example:
When the matter that is being debated seems so manifestly just and right that I can no longer keep silent, then I should speak my mind with the greatest composure and conclude what I have said with the words ’subject of course to the judgment of a wiser head than mine.’ If the leaders of the opposing party should try to befriend me, I must cultivate these men, who have influence over the heretics and lukewarm Catholics, and try to win them away from their errors with holy wisdom and love....
Most of the eighteen-year lifetime of the Council of Trent consisted of two intermissions spanning four and ten years each. At the beginning of the second intermission, Ignatius founded a special college in Rome for German-speaking Jesuits called the Germanicum. Three years later, the Peace of Augsburg established the principle cuius regio, eius religio, “whose the region, his the religion.” The Peace of Augsburg was Jesuit paydirt. They could now bring whole populations to Rome simply by winning over a few princes. And so they did. By 1560, the Society had returned virtually all of South Germany and Austria to the Church.
The fruits of the Germanicum were so successful that when the Council of Trent finally adjourned on December 4, 1563, its decrees and canons conceded nothing to the Protestant reformers. Indeed, under the spiritual direction of Superior General Diego Lainez – Ignatius had died in 1556 – the Council denied every Protestant doctrine point by point. Anathematized (eternally damned) was anyone who believed that salvation is God’s free gift to His faithful and does not depend upon partaking of Church sacraments. Anathematized was anyone who looked to the Bible for the ultimate authority on “doctrine, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness” 3 rather than to the teaching Church. Anathematized was anyone who regarded as unworthy of belief such unscriptural doctrines as (1) the efficacy of papal indulgences, (2) of confession alone to a priest as necessary to salvation, (3) of the mass as a true and real sacrifice of the body of Christ necessary to salvation, (4) the legitimacy of teachings on purgatory, (5) the celibate priesthood, (6) invoking saints by prayer to intercede with God, (7) the veneration of relics, and (8) the use of images and symbols. [Jesuits are a terrorist organization DC]
The Council of Trent hurled one hundred twenty-five anathemas, eternal damnations, against
Protestantism. Then, as an addendum to its closing statements, the Council recommended that the Jesuits “should be given pride of place over members of other orders as preachers and professors.” It was at Trent that the Roman Catholic Church began marching to the beat of the Black Papacy.
A generation later, the guidelines of the Roman Inquisition under Jesuit direction were published at the command of the Cardinals Inquisitors General. This Directorium Inquisitorum (1584) was dedicated to Gregory XIII, the pope who bestowed upon Jesuits the right to deal in commerce and banking, and who also decreed that every papal legate should have a Jesuit advisor on his personal staff. 4 Here follows a summary of the Directorium Inquisitorum (translated by J. P. Callender, 1838):
He is a heretic who does not believe what the Roman Hierarchy teaches — A heretic merits the pains of fire By the Gospel, the canons, civil law, and custom, heretics must be burned.... For the suspicion alone of heresy, purgation is demanded.... Magistrates who refuse to take the oath for defense of the faith shall be suspected of heresy Wars may be commenced by the authority of the Church.... Indulgences for the remission of all sin belong to those who signed with the cross for the persecution of heretics Every individual may kill a heretic. Persons who betray heretics shall be rewarded.... Heretics may be forced to profess the Roman faith.... A heretic, as he sins in all places, may everywhere be judged.... Heretics must be sought after, and be corrected or exterminated.... Heretics enjoy no privileges in law or equity.... The goods of heretics are to be considered as confiscated from the perpetration of the crime... The pope can enact new articles of faith.... Definitions of popes and councils are to be received as infallible.... Inquisitors may torture witnesses to obtain the truth.... It is laudable to torture those of every class who are guilty of heresy The Pope has power over infidels.... The Church may make war with infidels— Those who are strongly suspected are to be reputed as heretics He who does not inform against heretics shall be deemed as suspected— Inquisitors may allow heretics to witness against heretics, but not for them.... Inquisitors must not publish the names of informers, witnesses, and accusers.... Penitent heretics may be condemned to perpetual imprisonment Inquisitors may provide for their own expenditures, and the salaries of their officers, from the property of heretics.... Inquisitors enjoy the benefits of a plenary indulgence [a full papal forgiveness of sin] at all times in life, and in death.
The Inquisition’s effect, of course, was to send the more resourceful of the “heretics, Protestants and Liberals” who escaped torture or execution scurrying underground, or into the burgeoning world of commerce, or into regions where Protestant civil authorities kept Inquisitors at bay. Yearning for a less intrusive religious experience, they joined attractive philosophical fraternities where they could speak freely against Roman Catholicism. For this ostensible reason, these fraternities or cults or lodges operated in secrecy. In fact, they were the remnants of the Templar network – Rosicrucians, Teutonic Knights , the numerous and various rites of Freemasonry. Like the Templars and the Jesuits, they were religious hierarchies of strict obedience. They differed from the Jesuits, however, in that their pyramid culminated in an ultimate authority no brother could identify with certainty. The highest master of a Lodge received commandment s from an “Unknown Superior,” a Superior whose will the master’s whole struggle up the degrees had trained him to obey without question. What the masters never realized was that this mysterious personage, as we shall examine in more detail later, was in fact none other than the Black Pope.
A century after Trent, a descendant of Paul III, Ranuccio Farnese, commissioned the great Venetian painter Sebastiano Ricci to commemorate the genesis of this definitive Council. Sebastiano produced his famous “Paul III and the cardinals en route to Trent. ”The work is breathtakingly candid. In the air, above the pope’s head, hovers a deity, directing the entourage onward. The deity is not Jesus or Mary or Yahweh, God of the Bible. It is Mercury of the Sibylline and Virgilian gospels – the holy scripture of Caesarean Rome.
Mercury is the celebrated god of commerce. The metal most essential to commercial fluidity is named for him. Metallic mercury is known to scientists as the element Hg (derived from the Latin hydrargyrum, “liquid silver”). It is Hg’s unique chemical nature that produces refined gold, the fundamental substance in which commercial value is denominated. Liquid at room temperature, Hg draws impurities out of gold ore and binds them into an amalgam. When the amalgam is heated, the heat drives away both Hg and the impurities. What is left is pure gold suitable for further amalgamation into coin.
Mercury’s theological life began in ancient Babylon, where he was know n as Marduk. The Bible calls him Merodach, the Hebrews called him Enoch, the Egyptians called him Thoth, the Scandinavians worshiped him as Odin, the Teutons as Wotan, and the Orientals as Buddha. Livy says he was introduced to the Romans in 495 BC as a Latinate version of the Greek god Hermes. 5
By whatever name, in whatever culture, Mercury is considered the god of the Universal Mind, of Writing, Number, and Thought. Just as Mercury the metal draws out impurities and binds them into a mass that is burned and discarded, Mercury the deity uses his intellectual brilliance to play Pied Piper to impure humanity. He attracts followers and leads their souls to Hades, for which the Greeks gave him the title Psychopompas (from psycho- “soul” and pompous, “director”). Because Hades is not the most desirable of destinations, the Psychopomp had to construct elegant missionary adaptations. He had to charm souls, deceive them into following him any way he could – whether by words, sights, or sounds. Like Hg, his metallic form, Mercury could change his shape instantaneously. Did you see the villain in the movie Terminator II? With his ever-changing voices, physiognomies , and identities , he is state-of-the-art Psychopomp. In many cultures, Mercury’s ingenious deceptions earned him the title of “The Trickster.” He was patron deity of deceivers. And of thieves – even as a baby, Mercury couldn’t resist stealing Apollo’s cattle....
Was Sebastiano Ricci telling us that Mercury was the dominating spirit of the Council of Trent? Certainly the Council required, and still requires, Roman Catholics to honor many traditions which the Bible either condemns or does not authorize. Yet the Council also required, and still requires, that the Bible be honored as divinely inspired. Honoring the Bible by advocating unbiblical norms? This calls for a skill worthy of the Psychopomp, a skill that makes one believe that black is white. As we’ve seen, this is the Jesuit skill, securing obedience of the subject’s understanding. If indeed the Society of Jesus performs the function of Mercury, it is participating in a natural process known to pagan and biblical scriptures alike, a process by which impure humanity is attracted to oblivion, leaving behind only the pure. The theological implications of this process we shall discuss toward the end of this book.
With the Inquisition and the Council of Trent to pave their way, the Society of Jesus quickly became what Loyola had dreamed it would become: the resurrected Knights Templar. In the next chapter, we shall examine the continuation of their meteoric rise as developers of the modern world.
Martin Luther spent Loyola’s year of recovery imprisoned at Wartburg Castle for insulting the papacy with his Ninety-Five Theses. Remarkably, while one prisoner experienced mystical visions that urged him to defend the Church’s honor in the romantically chivalrous manner of the Knights Templar, the other was translating (with the miraculous permission of his keepers) the New Testament into German so that ordinary people might learn the will of God directly. These parallel, simultaneous quests for holiness would define modern life’s underlying conflict: Which Master Do I Serve, Rome or the Word of God?
PURIFIED by the Spiritual Exercises, Iñigo’s sensual attachment to Princess Catherina was transformed through Saint Catherine into a higher, spiritual attachment to a higher femininity – to Mary, the Queen of Heaven. An apparition of the Virgin appeared to him one night and validated that he was free of fleshly lusts and was now worthy of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In Martin Luther’s opinion, “as far as God is concerned, Jerusalem and all the Holy Land are not one whit more, or less, interesting than the cows in Switzerland.” 5 But to a spiritual warrior preparing to lead the Church to war against Scripture, a touchdown in Jerusalem was absolutely necessary. Jerusalem was the domain of King Solomon’s Temple , the geo-spiritual center of the Knights Templar. If Iñigo was to revive the Templars, as the Emperor desired, it was liturgically imperative that his newly-washed spirit present itself in the Sacred City for initiation into the mysteries of holy warfare.
All pilgrims to the Holy Land were required by law to apply to the pope at Easter for permission to proceed. In early March 1522, more than a year in advance, Iñigo set out for Rome in all his aristocratic finery, riding on the back of a mule. The corrupt Leo X had died suddenly of malaria in December 1521 , and on January 9, 1522, Charles Habsburg (King and Emperor ) had engineered the nearly unanimous election of his former tutor, Adrian Dedal, to succeed Leo as Adrian VI. Iñigo headed for Rome coincidentally with Adrian’ s journey across Spain to Barcelona, the point of embarkation for voyages to Italy. The new pope stopped in Navarre, in northern Spain, for an official reception by the Duke of Najera’s successor. Iñigo, too, stopped at Navarre to do some undescribed business at the Duke’s residence at Navarette. Perhaps Adrian gave him a discreet audience.
Further on, the pilgrim kept an all-night vigil at a chapel of the Virgin of Aranzazu, Protectress of the Basques, vowing his chastity to her small, dark statue. He continued on to Montserrat, where he lodged in a Benedictine abbey. There , he rededicated himself to God’ s service before another statue of the Virgin, the Black Madonna of Montserrat, Protectress of Catalonia , Patroness of Christian Conquest. The spiritual exercise here must have been intense, for in the late afternoon of the third day, Iñigo traded clothes with a beggar, hung his sword and dagger on the Madonna’s shrine, and gave his mule to the abbey.
While Adrian VI proceeded on to Barcelona, Iñigo detoured on foot to the village of Manresa for ten months of penances, spiritual preparation, and note-taking. Stripped of everything but sackcloth, a gourd for drinking, and a pilgrim’s staff, he adopted the lifestyle of the early Knight s Templar, begging food and alms. He was initiated into the Illuminati, the “Enlightened Ones,” a secret society of gnostic fundamentalists who preached that all matter is absolutely and eternally evil.
The gnostics taught that humanity itself is of Satanic origin. Adam and Eve were the offspring of devils. Humanity can achieve salvation from death and eternal punishment, however , by freeing soul from body for absorption into the pure light of Godliness . This is done by withdrawing from sensual pleasure and intuitively discovering hidden truths as conveyed by the cabalah. (The gnostics’ contempt for anything having to do with the physical side of existence translated into wildly ironic behavior . Some practiced radical celibacy because they believed the result of sexual intercourse, conception, would only imprison more souls in physical bodies. Others practiced unbridled sexual libertinism in order to prove they were completely free from all physical inhibition. Still others combined the two, pursuing hypocritical lives of celibate fornication, of which “safe sex” is the modern institution. Loyola’s particular cult apparently chose the asceticism of self-flagellation, for Iñigo wandered many nights about the Manresa countryside whipping himself with a scourge studded with iron barbs. Later in life, he would decide that the whips and barbs “sapped one’s strength,” that the Godhead could as adequately be sought by the more humane self-mortification of the Spiritual Exercises.)
While Iñigo was outlining the Exercises in Manresa, Luther’s translation of the New Testament was introducing readers and listeners in Germany, Switzerland, France, Bohemia, and England to a different form of spiritual exercise, one in which God’s will, ancient and immutable, was expressed not within the private imagination but publicly, in the printed Word, for all to see. People devoured the New Testament even before it reached the bindery. In one contemporary’s words, “The sheet, yet wet, was brought from the press under someone’ s cloak, and passed from shop to shop.” 6
THE pilgrim sailed from Barcelona to the Italian port city of Gaeta , and walked the remaining distance to Rome , arriving there on Palm Sunday, March 29, 1523. Two days later, according to Vatican archives, “Iñigo de Loyola, cleric of the diocese of Pamplona” received permission from Pope Adrian VI to visit Jerusalem.
From Rome , Iñigo proceeded to Venice , where one of Charles Habsburg’s agents received him graciously and introduced him to the Doge, Andre a Gritti, the highest official in Venetian civil government. A famed diplomat and linguist, Gritti arranged free passage for Iñigo aboard a small ship whose name – the “Negrona” – was appropriate for an evangelist dedicated to the Black Virgin of Christian Conquest.
On July 14, 1523, the Negrona left Venice , arriving a month later at the island of Cyprus. At Cyprus, one Diego Manes and his servant, along with several Cypriot officials, boarded ship for the rest of the voyage to Haifa. Diego Manes was a Commander of the Knights Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem. 7 Since 1312 , the Hospitallers had held title to the vast wealth of the Knights Templar. They had been drawing upon these assets to defend the Roman economy against Islamic marauders in the east. But when the Turks attacked the Hospitallers’ headquarters on the Island of Rhodes, the assets were frozen by the pope and his former pupil, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles. No assistance in any form was forthcoming from either party. Consequently, in December 1522, the Hospitallers had no choice but to surrender Rhodes and retreat to what would become their final domicile, Malta. The message was clear. Now that Luther’s German-language New Testament was in print, Protestantism loomed a greater menace to Rome than Islam ever did.
It is possible that in a Jerusalem-bound ship named Negrona, Commander Diego Manes turned over the litanies, lists, secret codes, formulae, cabalah, and other portable assets comprising the Knights Templar resources to Iñigo. If this indeed happened, the western world’s secret infrastructure was now Loyola’s to populate and manipulate in the cause of learning against learning. That is my hypothesis . What is not hypothesis is that as soon as the pilgrim returned from Jerusalem he began vesting himself with Medici learning.
The idea of uniting the Templars with the Hospitallers was first argued publicly in a book published in 1305 by Raimon Llull, a renowned illuminatus from Majorca. Llull’s book, Libre de Fine, (“Free At Last” ) appeared in the midst of a raging controversy between the French monarchy and the Roman papacy over who held jurisdiction over the Templars. That is the subject of our next chapter.
Chapter 6
THE EPITOME
OF CHRISTIAN VALUES
SINCE THEIR FOUNDING on French soil in 1118 , the Knights
Templar had grown from a pair of self-impoverished knights
hoping to keep Muslim terrorists from molesting pilgrims in
the Holy Land to a mammoth organization controlling international finance and politics. The founders, Hugh de Payen and
Godfroide St. Omer, organized a group of excommunicated
knight-crusaders and secured their absolution by a bishop. After
placing the restored knights under oaths of poverty, chastity, secrecy, and obedience, they pledged the organization to rebuilding
Solomon’s Temple. Given space adjacent to an Islamic mosque situated upon the Temple’s supposed ruins, they took the corporate
name “Poor Knights of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon.” Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux, the leading propagandist of the day, extolled the Templars as “the epitome and apotheosis of Christian values.” Bolstered by such unprecedented promotion, the Poor Knights attracted the best and the brightest young men of Europe to become Crusaders , to vow celibacy and leave their families in defense of Christ’s tomb against Muslim terrorists.
The mission failed within nine years. Even so, Bernard’s propaganda caused the Templars to be received as conquering heroes when they returned to France. They set up their permanent lodge at Troyes under the patronage of the court of Champagne . (For nearly a century, Troyes had been Europe’s leading school for the study of the kabbalah, which may explain why the city is laid out in the shape of a champagne cork.)
For making the Templars a world power, Bernard shares credit with Cardinal Aimeric of Santa Maria Nuova . Aimeric was the Church’ s highest judicial officer. It was his unlawful connivance 1 that created Honorius II, the pope who ordained the Templars as the Church’s most highly-esteemed religious order. It was Aimeric, too, who devised a radical “inner renewal of the Church,” which inspired noblemen throughout England, Scotland, Flanders, Spain, and Portugal to shower the Templars with donations of land and money, over and above the properties required of all initiates upon joining the Order.
When Honorius died in 1130, Aimeric led a minority of cardinals in another connivance resulting in the election of Innocent II, who was consecrated pope in Aimeric’ s titular church of Santa Maria Nuova . In 1139, Innocent issued a bull placing the Templars under an exclusive vow of papal obedience – a measure by which Aimeric effectively put all Templar resources at the disposal of the papacy. Within another decade, the Knights were given exclusive rights by Pope Eugenius III to wear the rose croix, the rosy cross, on their white tunics. As their list of properties lengthened with donations from Italy, Austria, Germany , Hungary, and the Holy Land, the Templars built hundreds of great stone castles. Wealthy travelers lodged in these castles because of their unmatched security. Convinced they were building a new world, the Templars called each other frère maçon (“brother mason”). Later, this term would be anglicized into “Freemason.”
The Templars invented modern banking by applying an oriental invention to their commerce. Agents of the Chinese emperor Kao-tsung, inventor of paper currency called fei-chi’en, “flying money,” sought trade with the middle east during the period of Templar occupation.2 Kao-tsung’s was the first government on earth to enforce circulation of drafts as legal tender for debts. Evidently, Kao-tsung’s agents introduced the Knights to this new medium of exchange created out of merchant drafts. The Templars enhanced their already booming business of (1) accepting current accounts, deposit accounts, deposits of jewels, valuables and title deeds, (2) making loans and advances (charging “fees” because the Church forbade interest), and (3) acting as agents for the secure transmission of such things by (4) adding circulating letters of credit – flying money – to serve as paper currency. To supply the Templars’ currency needs may explain why paper in France was first manufactured in the Poor Knights’ hometown of Troyes.
By 1300, presiding over the world economy from their Paris office, 3 the Templars had become an international power unto themselves. Engaged in diplomacy at the highest levels of state from the Holy Land westward, they set the tastes, the goals, the morality, the rules of the civilized world. Kings did their bidding – when Henry III of England threatened to confiscate certain of the Order’s properties, he was upbraided by the Master Templar in the city of London:
“What sayest thou, O King? So long as thou dost exercise justice, thou wilt reign. But if thou infringe it, thou wilt cease to be King.” 4
But suddenly, at their very zenith, the Poor Knights suffered a strange reversal of fortunes. In 1302, King Philip IV of France dared to challenge their sovereignty on his own soil. He asserted that in France everyone, Knights Templars included, was subject to the King. Pope Boniface VIII jumped in and declared that France, the King, the Templars, all of them, and everybody else as well, belonged to Pontifex Maximus – “It is absolutely necessary for the salvation of every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff.” Philip then accused the pope of illegitimacy, sexual misconduct, and heresy. Boniface prepared a bull excommunicating Philip, but before it could be published, a band of the Philip’s mercenaries stormed the Vatican and demanded the pope’s resignation. Although the intruders were driven off, the shock to body and soul was too much for Boniface, and he died a month later.
Two successor popes held firm against Philip, until Bertrand de Got, Archbishop of Bordeaux, was elected in 1305. Crowned in Lyons with the papal name Clement V, de Got moved the papacy to Avignon, and began a long train of concessions to Philip’s royal prerogative. Finally, on Friday, October 13, 1307, Philip arrested all but thirteen of the Templars in France, tried them and, upon evidence of their practice of the kabbalah, found them guilty of blasphemy and magic. At least fifty knights were burned at the stake.
From captured documents it was learned that the Templars, from the very beginning, had renounced what Roman theologians called “the religion of St. Peter.” They had been initiated into a secret gnostic branch of the Eastern Church known as “the Primitive Christian Church. ” Because the Primitive Christians ’ apostolic succession claimed to flow from John the Baptist and the apostle John they were called “Johannites.” 5 [huh,the dude with the massive head wound,imagine that DC]
The Johannites believed that although Jesus was “imbued with a spirit wholly divine and endowed with the most astounding qualities,” he was not the true God. Consistent with gnostic logic, the true Johannite God would never lower Himself to become vile human matter. Jesus was in fact a false Messiah sent by the powers of darkness. He was justly crucified – although when his side was pierced he did repent of his pretensions and receive divine forgiveness. Thanks to his repentance , Jesus now enjoys everlasting life in the celestial company of the saints.
Regarding miracles, the Johannites believed that Jesus “did or may have done extraordinary or miraculous things,” and that “since God can do things incomprehensible to human intelligence , all the acts of Christ as they are described in the Gospel, whether acts of human science or whether acts of divine power ” can be accepted as true – except for the Resurrection, which is omitted from the Templars’ copy of the Gospel of St. John. 6 Therefore, for all his wonderful attributes, Christ “was nothing , a false prophet and of no value.” Only the Higher God of Heaven had power to save mankind. 7
But the Higher God avoided human matter, and so lordship over the material world belonged to Satanael, the evil brother of Jesus. Satanael alone could enrich mankind. Templar kabbalah represented Satanael as the head of a goat emblazoned with, sometimes contained within, a pentagram. 8 This symbol is deeply rooted in Old Testament kabbalah, in which the goat is identified with power in the world and separation from God. On the greatest Israelite feast day, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, one goat was spared the sacrificial knife, and was sprinkled with the blood of another goat killed for the sins of Israel. The spared goat, the scapegoat, was then banished from the congregation to bear Israel’s sins into the wilderness, which typified the world. 9 The scapegoat escaped with his life, his freedom.
King Solomon conferred with evil spirits, 10 but Scripture describes the spirits only generally. However, the Zohar, or “Book of Splendor, ” one of the main works of ancient kabbalistic literature, tells us evil spirits appeared to the Israelites “under the form of he-goats and made known to them all that they wished to learn.” 11 The Templars called this goat-idol “Baphomet,” from baphe- and –metis, Greek words combined to mean “absorption into wisdom.” Baphomet encapsulates the career of Solomon, who Scripture says was absorbed into the wisdom of God more than any other human being, 12 yet finished out his life in communion with he-goatish evil spirits. 13 By the Templars’ Johannite standard, communing with the evil spirits was the secret to controlling the world. By the biblical standard, however, Solomon represents the impossibility of human perfectibility. Perfectibility is indeed attainable, according to Scripture, but only through the redemptive process shown in the Ne w Testament which Rome kept the Templars from reading.
ON March 22, 1312, Clement V dissolved the Knights Templar with his decree Vox clamantis (“War Cry”). But the dissolution proved a mere formality to further appease Philip. More importantly, it permitted the Templars, in other manifestations, to continue enriching the papacy. For Grand Master Jacques de Molay, just prior to his execution in 1313 , sent the surviving thirteen French Templars to establish four new Metropolitan lodges: one at Stockholm for the north, one at Naples for the east, one at Paris for the south, and one at Edinburgh for the west. Thus , the Knights remained the militant arm of the papacy. Except that their wealth, their secrecy, their gnostic cabalism, and their oath of papal obedience were obscurely dispersed under a variety of corporate names.
A subtle provision in Vox clamantis transferred most Templar estates to the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, who took possession after King Philip’s death. In Germany and Austria, the Templars became “Rosicrucians” and “Teutonic Knights.” The Teutonic Knights grew strong in Mainz, birthplace of Gutenberg’s press. Six centuries later, as the “Teutonic Order,” the Knights would provide the nucleus of Adolf Hitler’s political support in Munich and Vienna.
The Edinburgh lodge would become the headquarters of Scottish Rite Freemasonry, which Masonic historians call “American Freemasonry” because all but five of the signers of the Declaration of Independence are said to have practiced its craft. In Spain and Portugal the Templars became the “llluminati” in whom Iñigo had taken membership at Manresa, and “Knights of Christ. ” It was under the red pattée cross of the Knights of Christ that Columbus had taken possession of what he called “las Indias” for King Ferdinand V of Spain, grandfather of Iñigo’s discreet patron, Charles I and V, the Holy Roman Emperor.
As early as August of 1523, as I hypothesized in the previous chapter, this vast yet fragmented subterranean empire, Roman Catholicism’s unseen root-system binding together the world, belonged to Iñigo de Loyola. His spiritual dynasty, which continues to this day, would use this system to cause God-fearing men who hated the papacy to perform, without realizing it, exactly how the papacy wanted them to.
But what of Iñigo’s education? His rise in academe is the subject of the next chapter.
Chapter 7
THE FINGER STROKE
OF GOD
DETERMINED ON a priestly life, Iñigo de Loyola returned to
Barcelona from Jerusalem in the spring of 1524. He spent
the next three years in Spain getting the requisite Latin.
Since direct contact with the Bible was prohibited by law, his reading coursed the humanities. With the esoteric experience of his Spiritual Exercises, he charmed the wives of important men. He received frequent invitations to dine at elegant tables, but preferred to beg food door to door and distribute the choice pickings to the poor and sick. He lived in an attic and slept on the floorboards, trying desperately to persuade God of his worthiness. He prayed for six hours each day, attended mass three times a week, confessed every Sunday, and continued whipping himself. He devised secret penances, such as boring holes in his shoes and going barefoot in winter.
Sometimes the Exercises aroused in his followers instances of bizarre conduct – swooning, long spells of fainting or melancholia, rolling about the ground, being gripped with corpse-like rigidity. The Spanish Inquisition investigated him on suspicion of preaching gnostic illuminism. When Iñigo insisted that he was not preaching at all, but was merely talking about the things of God in a familiar way, the Inquisitor released him. In successive frays, the Inquisition ordered Iñigo (1) to get rid of his eccentric clothing and dress like other students, (2) to refrain from holding meetings until he had completed four years of study, and (3) to refrain from defining what constituted a grave sin. Wearying of the harassment, he decided to seek his four years of education beyond the Inquisition’s reach.
He set out for the University of Paris with a pack mule carrying his belongings . He arrived at the University on February 2, 1528, and soon afterward registered in the run-down old College of Montaigu. John Calvin , who would become Protestantism’s great theological systems designer, was leaving Montaigu just as Loyola arrived. Erasmus, the College’s most famous alumnus, remembered graduating from Montaigu “with nothing except an infected body and a vast array of lice.” The student body consisted mostly of wayward Parisian boys kept under harsh discipline; Iñigo was thirty-seven.
Paris was expensive, even for students. Much of the funds Iñigo had raised in Barcelona had been stolen by one of his disciples. In early 1529 he went into Belgium, where it is believed he received money from people close to the Holy Roman Emperor. One of these was Juan de Cuellar , Treasurer of the Kingdom of Spain. Another was Luis Vives , personal secretary to the Emperor’s aunt, Queen Catherine of England, and private tutor to her daughter, Princess Mary (afterward the “Bloody” Queen). Iñigo returned to Paris much better off. He upgraded his lodgings.
In October, he left Montaigu and enrolled at the College of Ste. Barbe across the street. He pursued a course in arts and philosophy that would last three and a half years. His name appears on the Ste. Barbe registry as “Ignatius de Loyola.” Some Jesuit historians have guessed he adopted the name in veneration of Ignatius of Antioch, an early Christian martyr. It was at Ste. Barbe that Iñigo began earnestly organizing his army, but not before traveling again to Belgium to ask Juan de Cuellar and Luis Vives for yet more money.
Armed with his command of the Templar secrets and with introductions provided by the Emperor and Vives, Ignatius crossed to England. This significant voyage is mentioned only once in his autobiography. He admits that he “returned with more alms than he usually did in other years.” Perhaps Queen Catherine, the Emperor’s aunt, introduced him to the Howards and the Petres, known to be among the first families to receive and nourish Jesuits sent to England.
Starting with his two Ste. Barbe roommates, Ignatius soon gathered a circle of six close friends ranging in age from teens to early twenties. Somewhat like himself, they were adventurous, impressionable, intelligent, and unpersuaded of the Bible’s supreme authority. Their fondest dream was to save the Holy Land from the Muslims by performing heroic Templaresque exploits. One by one Ignatius gave them the Spiritual Exercises, and one by one they became disciples. Within a few years they were calling themselves La Compañìa de Iesus, the Company of Jesus.
On August 15, 1534, Feast Day of the Assumption of the Virgin into heaven, the companions swore oaths of service to the Blessed Virgin in Ste. Marie’s Church at Montmartre, and to St. Denis, patron saint of France, in his chapel. (The experience of the Montmartre Oaths must have been intense, for Francis Xavier, who would become St. Francis, Apostle to the East, made the Spiritual Exercises with “a penitential fervor,” says Broderick in Origin of the Jesuits, “that nearly cost him the use of his limbs.”) They vowed poverty, chastity, and to rescue Jerusalem from the Muslims. However, should the rescue prove infeasible within a year, they vowed to undertake without question whatever other task the pope might require of them.
Well before a year had passed, Clement VII died and the Jerusalem dream was overwhelmed by more present dangers. Luther’s Bible in German was creating defection in record numbers throughout Germany , Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. In France, the response to LeFevre’s Bible was so decisive that King Francis I exclaimed that he would behead his own children if he found them harboring the blasphemous heresies acquirable through direct contact with scripture. England was lost in its entirety, due not to Bible reading, which Henry VIII prosecuted as avidly as any pope, but to the royal love life. Henry had demanded that Clement VII grant him a divorce from the Emperor’s aunt Catherine, and then recognize the Protestant-oriented Anne Boleyn as his new Queen. When Clement stood mute, Henry took all of England away from Rome and made himself “complete owner of the lands and tenements [of England], as well at law as in equity.” 1
Clement VII was succeeded by the oldest cardinal, an erudite humanist with formidable diplomatic skills, 66-year-old Alessandro Farnese. Cardinal Farnese had been privately educated in the household of Lorenzo d’Medici and had been appointed Treasurer of the Vatican in 1492. He was crowned Pope Paul III. Vatican wags called Farnese “Cardinal Petticoat” because his strikingly beautiful sister Giulia had been mistress to the licentious Pope Alexander VI, for which the same wags nicknamed her “Bride of Christ.” Giulia posed undraped for the statue of the Goddess Justice that still reclines voluptuously on Paul III’s tomb in St. Peter’s Basilica. Two centuries later, at the command, in the interests of decency, of Pius IX, the first pope to be officially declared infallible, Giulia’s exposed breasts were fitted with a metal blouse. 2
Paul III is a major figure in the history of the Society of Jesus, and consequently of the United States of America, since it was he who approved, in the summer of 1539, Ignatius de Loyola’s business plan. Ignatius proposed a “minimal society” that would “do battle in the Lord God’s service under the banner of the Cross. ” The militia would be very small, no more than sixty members, and each would have to take four vows of poverty, chastity, obedience to the Church, and a vow of special obedience to the pope. They would not be confined to any specific parish but would be dispersed throughout the world according to the papacy’s needs. They would wear no particular habit, but would dress according to the environment in which they found themselves. They would infiltrate the world in an unpredictable variety of pursuits – as doctors, lawyers, authors, reforming theologians, financiers, statesmen, courtiers, diplomats, explorers, tradesmen, merchants, poets, scholars, scientists, architects, engineers, artists, printers, philosophers, and whatever else the world might demand and the Church require. [Sort of like a CIA for the church DC]
Their head would be a Superior General. In the Constitutions which Ignatius was writing, the Superior Genera l would be “obeyed and reverenced at all times as the one who holds the place of Christ our Lord.” 3 The phrase “holds the place of Christ” means that the Superior General would share with the Pope, at a level unperceived by the general public, the divine title of “Vicar of Christ” first claimed by Gelasius I on May 13, 495. Loyola’s completed Constitutions would repeat five hundred times that one is to see Christ in the person of the Superior General. 4 The General’s equal status with the Pope, advantaged by an obscurity that renders him virtually invisible, is why the commander-in-chief of the Society of Jesus has always been called Papa Nero, the Black Pope.
The Superior General’s small army would be trained by the Spiritual Exercises to practice a brand of obedience Loyola termed contemplativus in actione, active contemplation, instantaneous obedience with all critical thought suppressed. As stated in Section 353.1 of the Exercises, “We must put aside all judgment of our own, and keep the mind ever ready and prompt to obey in all things the hierarchical Church.” But Jesuit obedience would be more than mere obedience of the will. An obedient will suppresses what it would do in order to obey what a superior want s done. Ignatius demanded obedience of the understanding. An obedient understanding alters its perception of reality according to the superior’s dictates. Section 365.13 declares, “We must hold fast to the following principle: What seems to me white, I will believe black if the hierarchical Church so defines.” Francis Xavier would later describe this quality of submission in a vow that unintentionally summarized the Jesuit mission: “I would not even believe in the Gospels were the Holy Church to forbid it.” [the first useful idiots DC]
The Society does not open its extreme oath of obedience to public inspection. However , a script alleged to be a true facsimile was translated by Edwin A. Sherman and deposited in the Library of Congress with the number BX3705.S56. According to this document,
when a Jesuit of the minor rank is to be elevated to command, he is conducted into the Chapel of the Convent of the Order, where there are only three others present, the principal or Superior standing in front of the altar. On either side stands a monk, one of whom holds a banner of yellow and white, which are the Papal colors, and the other a black banner with a dagger and red cross above a skull and crossbones, with the initials ’I.N.R.I.,’ and below them the words ’ICSTUM NACAR REGES IMIOS,’ the meaning of which is ’It is just to annihilate impious rulers.’ [Biblically, these initials represent the Roman inscription above Christ’s head on the cross: ’Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews.’]
On the floor is a red cross upon which the postulant or candidate kneels. The Superior hands him a small black crucifix, which he takes in his left hand and presses to his heart and the Superior at the same time presents to him a dagger, which he grasps by the blade and holds the point against his heart, the Superior still holding it by the hilt....
The Superior gives a preamble, and then administers the oath:
I, now, in the presence of Almighty God, the Blessed Virgin Mary, the blessed Michael the Archangel, the blessed St. Paul and all the Saints and sacred Hosts of Heaven, and to you, my Ghostly Father, the Superior General of the Society of Jesus, founded by Ignatius Loyola, in the Pontificate of Paul the Third, and continued to the present, do by the Womb of the Virgin, the Matrix of God, and the Rod of Jesus Christ, declare and swear, that His Holiness the Pope is Christ’s Vice-Regent and is the true and only Head of the Catholic and Universal Church throughout the earth; and that by virtue of the keys of binding and loosing, given to His Holiness by my Saviour, Jesus Christ, he hath power to depose heretical kings, princes, states, commonwealths and governments, all being illegal without his sacred confirmation, and that they may safely be destroyed.
Therefore, to the utmost of my power, I shall and will defend this doctrine and His Holiness’ right and custom against all usurpers of the heretical or Protestant authority whatever, especially the Lutheran Church of Germany, Holland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, and the now pretended authority and churches of England and Scotland, and branches of the same now established in Ireland and on the Continent of America and elsewhere; and all adherents in regard that they be usurped and heretical, opposing the sacred Mother Church of Rome.
I do now renounce and disown any allegiance as due to any heretical king, prince, or state named Protestants or Liberals, or obedience to any of their laws, magistrates or officers.
I do further declare that the doctrines of the churches of England and Scotland, of the Calvinists, Huguenots and others of the name Protestants or Liberals to be damnable, and they themselves damned and to be damned who will not forsake the same.
I do further declare that I will help, assist and advise all or any of His Holiness’ agents in any place wherever I shall be, in Switzerland, German, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, England, Ireland, or America, or in any other kingdom or territory I shall come to, and do my uttermost to extirpate the heretical Protestants or Liberals’ doctrines and to destroy all their pretended powers, regal or otherwise.
I do further promise and declare that, notwithstanding I am dispensed with, to assume any religion heretical, for the propagating of the Mother Church’s interest, to keep secret and private all her agents’ counsels from time to time, as they may entrust me, and not to divulge, directly or indirectly, by word, writing, or circumstance whatever; but to execute all that shall be proposed, given in charge or discovered unto me, by you, my Ghostly Father, or any of this sacred convent.
I do further promise and declare that I will have no opinion or will of my own, or any mental reservation whatever, even as a corpse or cadaver, but will unhesitatingly obey each and every command that I may receive from my superiors in the Militia of the Pope and of Jesus Christ.
That I will go to any part of the world whithersoever I may be sent, to the frozen regions of the North, the burning sands of the desert of Africa, or the jungles of India, to the centres of civilization of Europe, or to the wild haunts of the barbarous savages of America, without murmuring or repining, and will be submissive in all things whatsoever communicated to me.
I furthermore promise and declare that I will, when opportunity presents, make and wage relentless war, secretly or openly, against all heretics, Protestants and Liberals, as I am directed to do, to extirpate and exterminate them from the face of the whole earth; and that I will spare neither age, sex, or condition; and that I will hang, burn, waste, boil, flay, strangle and bury alive these infamous heretics, rip up the stomachs and wombs of their women and crush their infants’ heads against the walls, in order to annihilate forever their execrable race. That when the same cannot be done openly, I will secretly use the poisoned cup, the strangulating cord, the steel of the poinard or the leaden bullet, regardless of the honor, rank, dignity, or authority of the person or persons, whatever may be their condition in life, either public or private, as I at any time may be directed so to do by any agent of the Pope or Superior of the Brotherhood of the Holy Faith, of the Society of Jesus.
In confirmation of which, I hereby dedicate my life, my soul, and all my corporeal powers, and with this dagger which I now receive, I will subscribe my name written in my own blood, in testimony thereof; and should I prove false or weaken in my determination, may my brethren and fellow soldiers of the Militia of the Pope cut off my hands and my feet, and my throat from ear to ear, my belly opened and sulphur burned therein, with all the punishment that can be inflicted upon me on earth and my soul be tortured by demons in an eternal hell forever!
All of which I, , do swear by the blessed Trinity and blessed Sacrament, which I am now to receive, to perform and on my part to keep inviolably; and do call all the heavenly and glorious host of heaven to witness these my real intentions to keep this my oath.
In testimony hereof I take this most holy and blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist, and witness the same further, with my name written with the point of this dagger dipped in my own blood and sealed in the face of this holy Convent.
He receives the wafer from the Superior and writes his name with the point of his dagger dipped in his own blood taken from over the heart....
WHEN Ignatius concluded his presentation, the Pope reportedly cried out “Hoc est digitus Dei!” – “This is the finger stroke of God!” On September 27, 1540, Paul III sealed his approval with the highest and most solemn form of papal pronouncement, a document known as a “bull” (from the Latin bulla, meaning “bubble, ” denoting the attached ovoid or circular seal bearing the pope’s name). Paul’s bull ordaining the Jesuits is entitled Regimini militantis ecclesiae, “On the Supremacy of the Church Militant.” The title forms a cabalistic device common to pagan Roman divining. Known as notariqon, this device is an acronym that enhances the meaning of its initialized words, in the way “MADD” tells us that Mothers Against Drunk Drivers are more than “against” drunken drivers, they’re very angry. “Regimini militantis ecclesiae” produces the notariqon “R[O]ME, ” the empire whose salvation the Society of Jesus was ordained by this bull to secure through the arts of war.
The following April, the original six and a few other members elected Ignatius de Loyola their first Superior General. What had been approved as a minimal society soon multiplied to a thousand strong. Ignatius did this by administering to only sixty the extreme oath of obedience to the pope, while admitting hundreds more under lesser oaths. Ever since, the exact size of the Society has been know n only to the Superior General. As the world gained increasing numbers of doctors, lawyers, authors, reforming theologians, financiers, statesmen, courtiers, diplomats, explorers, tradesmen, merchants , poets, scholars, scientists, architects, engineers, artists, printers, and philosophers, it was extremely difficult for an ordinary citizen to tell which were Jesuits and which were not. Not even Jesuits could say for sure, because of a provision in the Constitutions (Sections 81-8 6 of Part I) which authorizes the Superior General to “receive agents, both priestly agents to help in spiritual matters and lay agents to give aid in temporal and domestic functions.” Called “coadjutors,” these lay agents could be of any religious denomination, race, nationality, or sex. They took an oath which bound them “for whatever time the Superior General of the Society should see fit to employ them in spiritual or temporal services.” This provision was availed by so many black popes that the French had a name for people suspected of being Jesuit agents: les robes-petites (“short-robes”). The English called them “short-coats” or “Ignatians.”
Within two years of Regimini militantis ecclesiae, Paul III appointed the Society to administer the Roman Inquisition (not to be confused with the Spanish Inquisition, which reported only to the Spanish crown). When the Jesuits were comfortable with the Inquisition, Paul made his move to “reconcile ” with the Protestants.
Chapter 8
MOVING IN
THE TERM “PROTESTANT” was coined in 1529 to describe the
large number of princes and delegates of fourteen cities,
largely German, who protested Emperor Charles Habsburg’s
attempt to enforce the Edict of Worms. This edict bound the
Empire’s three hundred princely states and free cities to Roman
Catholicism. The Protestants proposed a compromise formula, basically a statement of the Lutheran faith, known as the Augsburg Confession. For fifteen years the Edict of Worms and the Augsburg Confession kept Catholic and Protestant rulers in a Mexican standoff. Then, on December 13, 1545, Paul III called both factions to the small German-speaking northern Italian cathedral city of Trent. The promise was to resolve differences peacefully in an ecumenical council.
The Council of Trent had not been seated four months before it decreed that the books and biblical translations of Luther, LeFevre, Zwingli, Calvin, and other “unapproved persons” were “altogether forbidden and allowed to no one, since little advantage, but much danger, generally arises from reading them.” 1
Then the Jesuits moved in. Diego Lainez, Alfonso Salmeron, two of the original companions, and Claude LeJay, all three in their early thirties, distinguished themselves at Trent early on by spurning the grand style of the other delegates. They set up housekeeping in a “narrow, smoke-blackened baker’s oven” and wore clothing so heavily patched and greasy that other priests were embarrassed to associate with them. 2 They carried with them intricate advisories from Ignatius himself, written from the delegates’ point of view, as for example:
When the matter that is being debated seems so manifestly just and right that I can no longer keep silent, then I should speak my mind with the greatest composure and conclude what I have said with the words ’subject of course to the judgment of a wiser head than mine.’ If the leaders of the opposing party should try to befriend me, I must cultivate these men, who have influence over the heretics and lukewarm Catholics, and try to win them away from their errors with holy wisdom and love....
Most of the eighteen-year lifetime of the Council of Trent consisted of two intermissions spanning four and ten years each. At the beginning of the second intermission, Ignatius founded a special college in Rome for German-speaking Jesuits called the Germanicum. Three years later, the Peace of Augsburg established the principle cuius regio, eius religio, “whose the region, his the religion.” The Peace of Augsburg was Jesuit paydirt. They could now bring whole populations to Rome simply by winning over a few princes. And so they did. By 1560, the Society had returned virtually all of South Germany and Austria to the Church.
The fruits of the Germanicum were so successful that when the Council of Trent finally adjourned on December 4, 1563, its decrees and canons conceded nothing to the Protestant reformers. Indeed, under the spiritual direction of Superior General Diego Lainez – Ignatius had died in 1556 – the Council denied every Protestant doctrine point by point. Anathematized (eternally damned) was anyone who believed that salvation is God’s free gift to His faithful and does not depend upon partaking of Church sacraments. Anathematized was anyone who looked to the Bible for the ultimate authority on “doctrine, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness” 3 rather than to the teaching Church. Anathematized was anyone who regarded as unworthy of belief such unscriptural doctrines as (1) the efficacy of papal indulgences, (2) of confession alone to a priest as necessary to salvation, (3) of the mass as a true and real sacrifice of the body of Christ necessary to salvation, (4) the legitimacy of teachings on purgatory, (5) the celibate priesthood, (6) invoking saints by prayer to intercede with God, (7) the veneration of relics, and (8) the use of images and symbols. [Jesuits are a terrorist organization DC]
The Council of Trent hurled one hundred twenty-five anathemas, eternal damnations, against
Protestantism. Then, as an addendum to its closing statements, the Council recommended that the Jesuits “should be given pride of place over members of other orders as preachers and professors.” It was at Trent that the Roman Catholic Church began marching to the beat of the Black Papacy.
A generation later, the guidelines of the Roman Inquisition under Jesuit direction were published at the command of the Cardinals Inquisitors General. This Directorium Inquisitorum (1584) was dedicated to Gregory XIII, the pope who bestowed upon Jesuits the right to deal in commerce and banking, and who also decreed that every papal legate should have a Jesuit advisor on his personal staff. 4 Here follows a summary of the Directorium Inquisitorum (translated by J. P. Callender, 1838):
He is a heretic who does not believe what the Roman Hierarchy teaches — A heretic merits the pains of fire By the Gospel, the canons, civil law, and custom, heretics must be burned.... For the suspicion alone of heresy, purgation is demanded.... Magistrates who refuse to take the oath for defense of the faith shall be suspected of heresy Wars may be commenced by the authority of the Church.... Indulgences for the remission of all sin belong to those who signed with the cross for the persecution of heretics Every individual may kill a heretic. Persons who betray heretics shall be rewarded.... Heretics may be forced to profess the Roman faith.... A heretic, as he sins in all places, may everywhere be judged.... Heretics must be sought after, and be corrected or exterminated.... Heretics enjoy no privileges in law or equity.... The goods of heretics are to be considered as confiscated from the perpetration of the crime... The pope can enact new articles of faith.... Definitions of popes and councils are to be received as infallible.... Inquisitors may torture witnesses to obtain the truth.... It is laudable to torture those of every class who are guilty of heresy The Pope has power over infidels.... The Church may make war with infidels— Those who are strongly suspected are to be reputed as heretics He who does not inform against heretics shall be deemed as suspected— Inquisitors may allow heretics to witness against heretics, but not for them.... Inquisitors must not publish the names of informers, witnesses, and accusers.... Penitent heretics may be condemned to perpetual imprisonment Inquisitors may provide for their own expenditures, and the salaries of their officers, from the property of heretics.... Inquisitors enjoy the benefits of a plenary indulgence [a full papal forgiveness of sin] at all times in life, and in death.
The Inquisition’s effect, of course, was to send the more resourceful of the “heretics, Protestants and Liberals” who escaped torture or execution scurrying underground, or into the burgeoning world of commerce, or into regions where Protestant civil authorities kept Inquisitors at bay. Yearning for a less intrusive religious experience, they joined attractive philosophical fraternities where they could speak freely against Roman Catholicism. For this ostensible reason, these fraternities or cults or lodges operated in secrecy. In fact, they were the remnants of the Templar network – Rosicrucians, Teutonic Knights , the numerous and various rites of Freemasonry. Like the Templars and the Jesuits, they were religious hierarchies of strict obedience. They differed from the Jesuits, however, in that their pyramid culminated in an ultimate authority no brother could identify with certainty. The highest master of a Lodge received commandment s from an “Unknown Superior,” a Superior whose will the master’s whole struggle up the degrees had trained him to obey without question. What the masters never realized was that this mysterious personage, as we shall examine in more detail later, was in fact none other than the Black Pope.
A century after Trent, a descendant of Paul III, Ranuccio Farnese, commissioned the great Venetian painter Sebastiano Ricci to commemorate the genesis of this definitive Council. Sebastiano produced his famous “Paul III and the cardinals en route to Trent. ”The work is breathtakingly candid. In the air, above the pope’s head, hovers a deity, directing the entourage onward. The deity is not Jesus or Mary or Yahweh, God of the Bible. It is Mercury of the Sibylline and Virgilian gospels – the holy scripture of Caesarean Rome.
Mercury is the celebrated god of commerce. The metal most essential to commercial fluidity is named for him. Metallic mercury is known to scientists as the element Hg (derived from the Latin hydrargyrum, “liquid silver”). It is Hg’s unique chemical nature that produces refined gold, the fundamental substance in which commercial value is denominated. Liquid at room temperature, Hg draws impurities out of gold ore and binds them into an amalgam. When the amalgam is heated, the heat drives away both Hg and the impurities. What is left is pure gold suitable for further amalgamation into coin.
Mercury’s theological life began in ancient Babylon, where he was know n as Marduk. The Bible calls him Merodach, the Hebrews called him Enoch, the Egyptians called him Thoth, the Scandinavians worshiped him as Odin, the Teutons as Wotan, and the Orientals as Buddha. Livy says he was introduced to the Romans in 495 BC as a Latinate version of the Greek god Hermes. 5
By whatever name, in whatever culture, Mercury is considered the god of the Universal Mind, of Writing, Number, and Thought. Just as Mercury the metal draws out impurities and binds them into a mass that is burned and discarded, Mercury the deity uses his intellectual brilliance to play Pied Piper to impure humanity. He attracts followers and leads their souls to Hades, for which the Greeks gave him the title Psychopompas (from psycho- “soul” and pompous, “director”). Because Hades is not the most desirable of destinations, the Psychopomp had to construct elegant missionary adaptations. He had to charm souls, deceive them into following him any way he could – whether by words, sights, or sounds. Like Hg, his metallic form, Mercury could change his shape instantaneously. Did you see the villain in the movie Terminator II? With his ever-changing voices, physiognomies , and identities , he is state-of-the-art Psychopomp. In many cultures, Mercury’s ingenious deceptions earned him the title of “The Trickster.” He was patron deity of deceivers. And of thieves – even as a baby, Mercury couldn’t resist stealing Apollo’s cattle....
Was Sebastiano Ricci telling us that Mercury was the dominating spirit of the Council of Trent? Certainly the Council required, and still requires, Roman Catholics to honor many traditions which the Bible either condemns or does not authorize. Yet the Council also required, and still requires, that the Bible be honored as divinely inspired. Honoring the Bible by advocating unbiblical norms? This calls for a skill worthy of the Psychopomp, a skill that makes one believe that black is white. As we’ve seen, this is the Jesuit skill, securing obedience of the subject’s understanding. If indeed the Society of Jesus performs the function of Mercury, it is participating in a natural process known to pagan and biblical scriptures alike, a process by which impure humanity is attracted to oblivion, leaving behind only the pure. The theological implications of this process we shall discuss toward the end of this book.
With the Inquisition and the Council of Trent to pave their way, the Society of Jesus quickly became what Loyola had dreamed it would become: the resurrected Knights Templar. In the next chapter, we shall examine the continuation of their meteoric rise as developers of the modern world.
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