Rulers of Evil; Useful Knowledge
about Governing Bodies
By F.Tupper Saussy
about Governing Bodies
By F.Tupper Saussy
Chapter 22
THE IMMACULATE
CONCEPTION
As IF IT WEREN’T enough that Christopher Columbus had
dedicated the New World to her, and that Andrew White
had dedicated Maryland to her, and that Bishop Carroll
had dedicated his See of Baltimore to her, the 1846 convention of
American Roman Catholic bishops declared the Virgin Mary to
be “Patroness of the United States.”
The first two years under her patronage enriched the national
government considerably. The Oregon territory and the Southwest
joined the Union. As did California, with its bursting veins of
gold. The blessings had their downside, however. They precipitated a corresponding increase in intersectional tensions that erupted
in a devastating interstate bloodbath some historians call the Civil
War. In that war, the Patroness of the United States dealt as cruelly with the enemies of her protectorate as the vengeful goddess
Ishtar did with the enemies of ancient Babylon.
In February 1849, “Pio Nono ” (the popular name for Pope Pius; there’s a boulevard named after him in Macon, Georgia) issued
an encyclical that colored America’ s Patroness with the fearsome
aspects of Ishtar. The encyclical, entitled Ubi primum (“By whom
at first”), celebrated Mary’s divinity, saying:
The resplendent glory of her merits, far exceeding all the
choirs of angel, elevates her to the very steps of the throne of
God. Her foot has crushed the head of Satan. Set up between
Christ and his Church, Mary, ever lovable, and full of grace,
always has delivered the Christian people from their greatest
calamities and from the snares and assaults of all their enemies,
ever rescuing them from ruin.
Holy as she may sound, a Satan-bashing, life-saving Virgin
Mary is a fabrication of sacred pagan tradition. The Bible does
prophesy that Satan’s serpentine head will be violated. But not by
Mary. At Genesis 3:15, we read God’s vow that Satan’s seed will
be bruised by the seed of Eve. It may be argued that Eve’s seed was
Mary. But according to the inspired understanding of the apostles,
it was Jesus. At Romans 16:20 Paul promises a Roman congregation that “the God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet.” Nor
was Mary given power to deliver people from their enemies . Only
the “one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus”
(1 Timothy 2:5), “a name which is above every other name ”
(Philippians 2:9), is a divinely-authorized deliverer.
No, the Mary of Ubi Primum will not be found anywhere in the
Bible. But then Pio Nono , the first pope ever to be declared Infallible, carried about a rather famous theological ignorance. His private secretary, Monsignor Talbot, defended Pio’s ineptitude in a
letter cited by Jesuit author Peter de Rosa in his Vicars of Christ:
As the Pope is no great theologian, I feel convinced that
when he writes his encyclicals he is inspired by God. Ignorance
is no bar to infallibility, since God can point out the tight road
even by the mouth of a talking ass.
The truth of the matter, according to J.C.H . Aveling , is that throughout Pius IX’s long reign (1846-1878), most of his theology
was written by Jesuits. On December 8, 1854, Superior General
Beckx brought three hundred years of Marian devotion to a glorious climax with Ineffabilis Deus (“God indescribable”), the encyclical defining the Immaculate Conception , the extra scriptural
doctrine that Mary, like Jesus, was conceived and remained free of
sin:
The doctrine which holds that the most blessed Virgin Mary,
in the first instant of her conception, by a singular grace and
privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus
Christ, the Saviour of the human race, was preserved free from
all stain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful.
Ineffabilis Deus mobilized the United States Congress to pass
extraordinary legislation. Congress became suddenly obsessed with
expanding the Capitol’ s dome. According to the official publication The Dome of the United States Capitol: An Architectural History
(1992), “Never before (or since) has an addition to the Capitol
been so eagerly embraced by Congress.” Within days of Pio Nono’ s
definition of the doctrine of Immaculate Conception, legislation
was rushed through Congress that effectively incorporated the new
Vatican doctrine into the Capitol dome’s crowning architectural
platform, its cupola. [guess they forgot the separation of church and state huh? DC]
A week following Ineffabilis Deus Philadelphia architect
Thomas Ustick Walter, a Freemason, completed his drawings for
the proposed dome. It would be surmounted by a bronze Marian
image which would come to be recognized as “the only authorized
Symbol of American Heritage.” 1
Her classical name was Persephone, Graeco-Roman goddess of the psyche, or soul, and leading
deity in the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece. Persephone
was abducted by Saturn’s son, Hades , and made queen-consort of
his dominion, the underworld. Persephone was distinguished for
her Immaculate Conception – described by Proclus, head of the Platonic Academy in Athens during the fifth century of the Christian era, as “her undefiled transcendency in her generations. ” In fact, most of the statues of Persephone in the Christianized Roman
Empire had been simply re-identified and re-consecrated as the
Virgin Mary by missionary adaptation.
Congress appropriated $3,000 for a statue of Persephone. President Franklin Pierce’s Secretary of War , Jefferson Davis, awarded
the commission to a famous young America n sculptor named
Thomas Crawford. Crawford lived and worked in Rome. His reputation had been established with a statue of Orpheus which, when
exhibited in Boston in 1843, was the first sculptured male nude to
be seen in the United States. Since another of Persephone’s ancient names was Libera (“Liberty”), Crawford named his Persephone “Freedom.” His work has worn this title ever since.
After two years of labor in the shadow of the Gesu, Crawford
completed a plaster model of Freedom. Her right hand rested on a
sword pointing downward. Her left hand, against which leaned the
shield of the United States, held a laurel wreath. She was crowned
with an eagle’s head and feathers mounted on a tiara of pentagrams, some inverted, some not. When ultimately cast in bronze,
Freedom would reach the height of nineteen feet, six inches – a
sum perhaps deliberately calculated to pay homage to the work’s
final destination, the Beast of Revelation at Lot 666, for nineteen
feet, six inches works out to 6+6+6 feet, 6+6+6 inches. [Get it yet folks? Congress sits on Lot 666 DC]
Freedom would stand upon a twelve-foot iron pedestal also
designed by Thoma s Crawford. The upper part of the pedestal was
a globe ringed with the motto of the Bacchic Gospel, E PLURIBUS
UNUM, while the lower part was flanked with twelve wreathes (the
twelve Caesars?) and as many fascia, those bundles of rods
wrapped around axe-blades symbolizing Roman totalitarianism.
Crawford wanted his sculpture to be cast at the Royal Bavarian Foundry in Munich (where Randolph Rogers’ great ten-ton
bronze doors leading to the Capitol rotunda were cast), while
architect Thomas U. Walter preferred Clark Mills’ foundry, near
Washington. Their transatlantic argument ended abruptly when
Crawford died in London on September 10, 1857, of a tumor
behind his left eye.
In that same year, 1857, the United States Supreme Court handed down Dred Scott vs. Sanford, a decision which most historians agree ignited the Great American Civil War. The opinion
was written by the Roger Brooke Taney, who succeeded John Marshall as Chief Justice. A devout Roman Catholic “under the influence of the Jesuits most of his long life” according Dr. Walsh’s
American Jesuits, Taney held that Negro slaves and their descendants could never be State citizens and thus could never have
standing in court to sue or be sued. Nor could they ever hope to be
United States citizens since the Constitution did not create such a
thing as “United States citizenship.”
Taney’s opinion was widely suspected of being part of a plot to
prepare the way for a second Supreme Court decision that would
prohibit any state from abolishing slavery. American slavery would
become a permanent institution. This is exactly what happened,
although not quite as everyone supposed it would. First, slavery
was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment (1865). Then, the
Fourteenth Amendment (1868) created a new national citizenship.
Unlike State citizenship, which was denied to Negroes,
national citizenship was available to anyone as long as they subjected themselves to the jurisdiction of the United States – that
is, to the federal government, whose seat is the District of Columbia, “Rome.” What is so remarkably Jesuitic about the scheme that
proceeded out of Roger Taney’s opinion is that slavery was sustained by the very amendment that supposedly abolished it. Amendment Thirteen provides for the abolition of “involuntary servitude,
except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been
duly convicted. ”
In our time the federally regulated communications media, with their continually exciting celebration of violence and drug-use, have subtly but vigorously induced youthful
audiences to play on a minefield of complementary criminal
statutes. The fruit of this collaboration is a burgeoning national
prison population of men and women enslaved constitutionally.
American slavery has become a permanent institution.
Reaction to Taney’s decision animated Abraham Lincoln to
immerse himself in abolitionist rhetoric and challenge Stephen A.
Douglas for the Senate in 1858....
Meanwhile in Rome , Freedom’s plaster matrix was packed
into five huge crates and crammed, with bales of rags and
cases of lemons , into the hold of a tired old ship bound for New
York, the Emily Taylor. Early on, the Emily sprang a leak and had
to put in to Gibraltar for repairs. Once the voyage was resumed,
stormy weather caused new leaks. Despite attempts to lighten her
load by jettisoning the rags and the citron, things got so bad she
put in to Bermuda on July 27, 1858. The crates were placed in storage, and the Emily was condemned and sold.
In November , Lincoln lost his bid for Douglas’ seat in the Senate, and in December, another ship, the G.W. Norton, arrived in
New York harbor from Bermuda with some of the statuary crates.
By March 30, 1859 all five crates had been delivered to the
foundry of Clark Mills on Bladensburg Road, on the outskirts of
the District of Columbia, where the process of casting the Immaculate Virgin into bronze and iron was begun.
Lincoln opposed Stephen Douglas again in 1860, this time for
the Presidency, and this time victoriously. The northern states
rejoiced. The southern states, fearing Lincoln would abolish slavery, prepared to secede. “The tea has been thrown overboard! ”
shouted the Mercury, of Charleston, South Carolina, capital of
American Scottish Rite Freemasonry. “The revolution of 1860 has
been initiated!”
By Lincoln’s inauguration in March 1861 , six states had seceded from the Union. In April, General Pierre Beauregard, a Roman
Catholic who resigned his Superintendency of West Point to join
the Confederacy, fired on the United States military enclave at
Fort Sumter and brotherly blood began flowing. Jefferson Davis ,
who five years earlier had commissioned Crawford to sculpt the
Immaculate Virgin, served as President of the rebellious Confederate States of America. In historian Eli N. Evans’ book on Judah P.
Benjamin, I happened upon a strange and interesting link between
Davis and the Vatican.
While a young Protestant student at the Roman Catholic
monastery of St. Thomas College in Bardstown, Davis had pled to
be received into the Catholic faith, but was “not permitted to convert.” He remained “a hazy Protestant” until his confirmation into
the Episcopal Church at the age of fifty. Despite outward appearances of rejection, the Confederate President maintained a vibrant
communion with Rome. No one was more aware of this than
Abraham Lincoln. At an interview in the White House during
August 1861, Lincoln confided the following to a former law client
of his, a Roman Catholic priest named Charles Chiniquy, who
published the President’s words in his own autobiography, Fifty
Years In The Church of Rome:
“I feel more and more every day,” [stated the President] “that
it is not against the Americans of the South, alone, I am fighting. It is more against the Pope of Rome, his Jesuits and their
slaves. Very few Southern leaders are not under the influence of
the Jesuits, through their wives, family relations, and their
friends.
“Several members of the family of Jeff Davis belong to the
Church of Rome. Even the Protestant ministers are under the
influence of the Jesuits without suspecting it. To keep her ascendency in the North, as she does in the South, Rome is doing
here what she has done in Mexico, and in all the South American Republics; she is paralyzing, by civil war, the arms of the soldiers of liberty. She divides our nation in order to weaken,
subdue and rule it....
“Neither Jeff Davis not any one of the Confederacy would
have dared to attack the North had they not relied on the promises of the Jesuits that, under the mask of democracy, the money
and the aims of the Roman Catholics, even the arms of France,
were at their disposal if they would attack us. I pity the priests,
the bishops, and monks of Rome in the United States when the
people realize that they are in great part responsible for the tears
and the blood shed in this war. I conceal what I know, for if the
people knew the whole truth, this war would turn into a religious war,
and at once, take a tenfold more savage and bloody character....
2
The Great Civil War rampaged for another year. In autumn of
1862, the Confederacy’s invasion of the Union was defeated at the
Battle of Antietam in Sharpsburg, Maryland. As if in celebration, the Immaculate Virgin was moved from the foundry and brought
to the grounds of the Capitol construction site. The lower floors of
the building were teeming with the traffic of a Union barracks and
makeshift hospital. Above all this loomed Thomas U. Walter’s
majestic cast-iron dome, patterned after that of St. Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg, Russia.
In March 1863, Freedom was mounted on a temporary pedestal, “in order that the public may have an opportunity to examine it before it is raised to its destined position,” as stated in Walter’s Annual Report dated November 1 , 1862. One would expect
photographers to be climbing all over themselves to make portraits
of “the only authorized Symbol of American Heritage” while she
was available for ground-level examination. America’ s pioneer
photographer , Matthew Brady, had shot a comprehensive record
of the Capitol under construction, including portraits of both
Capitol architect Thomas U. Walter and Commissioner of Public
Buildings Benjamin B. French. But neither Brady nor anyone else
photographed Freedom while she was available for closeups. 3
Why ?
Was there a fear that perhaps some Protestant theologian might
raise a hue and cry about the pagan icon about to dominate the
Capitol building?
Apparently, not too many Protestants ever examined Freedom
at ground-level. The District of Columbia was still virtually a
Roman Catholic enclave. Moreover, the nation in 1863 had been
drastically reduced in size. The secession of the southern states had
left only twenty-two northern states, and these twenty-two were
heavily populated by Catholic immigrants from Europe and Ireland. “So incredibly large,” we recall from Sydney E. Ahlstrom’s
Religious History of the American People, “was the flow of immigrants
that by 1850 Roman Catholics , once a tiny and ignored minority,
had become the country’s largest religious communion.” Thus,
Crawford’s towering goddess was being examined mostly by
Roman Catholic eyes, eyes that could not help but see in her the
dreadnaught Mary described by Pius IX in Ubi Primum: “ever lovable, and full of grace, set up between Christ and his Church,
always delivering the Christian people from their greatest calamities and assaults of all their enemies, ever rescuing them from ruin.”
The war rapidly advanced to conclusion while Freedom held
forth on the east grounds of the Capitol. The Union forces under
Burnside lost to Lee at Fredericksburg, but Rosecrans defeated the
Confederates at Murfreesboro, and Grant took Vicksburg. In summer, Lee’s second attempt to invade the North failed at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. By fall, Grant won the Battles of Chattanooga and Missionary Ridge with Sherman and Thomas . By the
end of November 1863, the Union had taken Knoxville, and the
Confederacy found its resources exhausted and its cause hopelessly
lost.
On November 24, a steam-operated hoisting apparatus lifted
the Immaculate Virgin Mother of God’ s first section to the top of
the Capitol dome and secured it. The second section followed the
next day. Three days later, in a driving thunderstorm, the third
section was secured. The fourth section was installed on November 31 .
At quarter past noon December 2, 1863, before an enormous
crowd, the Immaculate Virgin’s fifth and final section was put into
place. The ritual procedure for her installation is preserved in Special Order No . 248 of the War Department. Her head and shoulders rose from the ground. The three-hundred-foot trip took
twenty minutes. At the moment the fifth section was affixed, a flag
unfurled above it. The unfurling was accompanied by a national
salute of forty-seven gunshots fired into the Washington atmosphere. Thirty-five shots issued from a field battery on Capitol Hill.
Twelve were discharged from the forts surrounding the city. Reporting the event in the December 10 issue of the New York Tribune, an anonymous journalist echoed the qualities that Pius IX
had given Mary:[They are hiding S.O. 248 DC]
During more than two years of our struggle, while the
national cause seemed weak, she has patiently waited and
watched below: now that victory crowns our advances and the
conspirators are being hedged in, and vanquished everywhere,
and the bonds are being freed, she comes forward, the cynosure
of thousands of eyes, her face turned rebukingly toward Virginia and her hand outstretched as if in guaranty of National Unity
and Personal Freedom.
If Tribune readers felt more nationally united and personally
free because Freedom was glaring at rebellious Virginia and outstretching her hand to her beloved America, they were deceived.
For the goddess faced in precisely the opposite direction! She faced
east, as she does to this day, faced east across Maryland, the “land
of Mary,” across the Atlantic , toward her beloved Rome. In fact,
neither hand outstretches in any direction. Both are at rest, one
on her sword, the other holding the laurel wreath.
And her forty-seven Jupiterian thunderbolt-gunshots? They
were a tribute to the Jesuit bishop who had placed the District of
Columbia under her protection. For December 2, 1863 tolled the
forty-seventh year from John Carroll’s last full day alive, December 2,
1815!
ONCE the pressures of the installation were over, an exhausted
but relieved Capitol Architect Thomas U. Walter wrote his
wife, Amanda , at their Philadelphia home , to say that “her ladyship looks placid and beautiful – much better than I expected, and
I have had thousands of congratulations on this great event, and a
general regret was expressed that you were prevented from witnessing this triumph.” Someone else had missed the triumph, too,
someone who by all the rules of protocol should have been there
no matter what: the Commander-in-Chief of the United States
Armed Forces, whose War Department had engineered the whole
Capitol project from top to bottom – President Abraham Lincoln.
At noon on the day the temple of federal legislation was placed
under the patronage of Persephone, Freedom, Wife of Hades,
Queen of the Dead, Immaculate Virgin of Rome, Protectress of the
Jesuits, Protectress of Maryland, and Patroness of the United
States, the record shows that Lincoln sequestered himself inside
the White House, touched with “a fever.” A telling detail.
But the sacred iconography was still not complete . The engineers began now preparing the interior of the dome, its canopy, for
a massive painting Congress had approved back in the spring of 1863. This painting would depict George Washington undergoing
the secular version of the canonization of Ignatius Loyola. It contains even more data useful to our understanding of the character
and provenance of American government. We examine this masterpiece in our next chapter.
“Apotheosis of Washington.”
Chapter 23
THE DOME OF
THE GREAT SKY
“”It’s like St. Peter’s!“”
— Tourists describing the rotunda fresco,
as quoted in the official Capitol guidebook
WE, THE PEOPLE
ARCHBISHOP JOHN HUGHES of New York sailed for Rome in
the autumn of 1851, just after Congress had approved
funds to enlarge the Capitol. Hughes had laid the cornerstone for St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan, and had helped the
Jesuits establish Fordham University in Westchester. Now he was
helping them decorate the Capitol’s interior.
In Rome, Superior General John Roothaan introduced the
Archbishop to Constantino Brumidi, an artist boasting an impressive list of credits. Brumidi had painted an acclaimed portrait of
Pio Nono (which the Vatican still exhibits), an Immaculate Conception in the little Sanctuary of the Madonna dell’Archetto in
Via San Marcello, and the restoration of three sixteenth-century
frescoes in the Vatican Palace. Brumidi was good. General
Roothaan had determined to make him America’s Michelangelo.
Archbishop Hughes let it be known that Brumidi would be welcome to paint some frescoes in churches of the New York bishopric. General Roothaan then went
about making the Vatican’s artist acceptable to American egalitarianism.
Soon after the Archbishop left Rome
for Ne w York, the Vatican accused Constantino Brumidi of criminal acts. Supposedly, Brumidi had committed crimes
during his membership in the Republican
Civil Guard under Giuseppe Mazzini, the
Italian Freemason who had recently led
ill-fated nationalist revolutions against
the papacy. These crimes were said to
have included (a) refusing to fire on his
Republican friends, (b) looting several
convents , and (c) participating in a plot
to destroy the Catholic Church, acts reasonably sure to merit a
hero’s welcome in Protestant America. The Architect of the Capitol’s unpublished dossier on Brumidi, which I was permitted to examine during 1993, notes that “several widely divergent accounts
suggest that Constantino Brumidi himself was probably the source
of at least some of the legends.”
Vatican justice found the artist guilty in December 1851 and
sentenced him to eighteen years in prison. Several weeks later the
sentence was reduced to six years. And within two months, on
March 20, Pio Nono himself quietly granted Brumidi an unconditional pardon. General Roothaan then placed his newly-created
republican freedom fighter on a ship bound for America.
Brumidi arrived in New York harbor on September 18. On
November 29 he filed for state citizenship with the New York
Court of Common Pleas. Although the invite had come to paint
New York churches, there was no such work to be done there.
Instead, the Archbishop sent him to Mexico City, by way of
Washington, D.C. In Washington, Brumidi was received by his
Masonic brother Thomas Ustick Walter. For two years Walter had
been serving President Millard Fillmore as Architect of the Capitol. When the cornerstone for Walter’s Capitol expansion plan was laid on the Fourth of July of 1851, President Fillmore and Commissioner of Public Buildings Benjamin B. French, who also happened to be “Grand Master of the Masonic fraternity,” led a
colorful ceremony. Washington’s popular National Intelligencer
reported the occasion was “welcomed by a display of National flags
and the ringing of bells from the various churches and engine
houses.” 1
Thomas Walter needed Constantino Brumidi. An edifice as
important as the United States Capitol, like the palaces of
Augustus and Nero , the Baths of Titus and Livia, the Loggia of
Raphael at the Vatican, required the most noble and permanent
interior decoration possible. Only fresco painting, in which pigments are mixed with wet mortar immediately before application
to the surface, would suffice. And only Constantino Brumidi, of all
the artists living in America , knew how to paint fresco. But the
dome was not yet ready to be frescoed. So the artist was routed to
the sunny, Italianate climate of Mexico City to enjoy life, to ponder his subject matter at a casual pace, to wait for the call.
Two years later, on December 28, 1854, less than three weeks
following Pio Nono’ s decree of the doctrine of Immaculate Conception, Constantino Brumidi appeared in the office of Montgomery C. Meigs, Supervising Engineer of the Capitol extension
project. The Capitol’s unpublished dossier on Brumidi relates that
as the two men conversed in broken French, Brumidi struck Meigs
as “a lively old man with a very red nose, either from Mexican suns
or French brandies.” The immediate upshot of their conversation
was a commission to paint a fresco covering an elliptical arch at
one end of Meigs’ office in the Capitol. It was the first fresco ever
painted in the United States, as well as Brumidi’s first in five years.
The fresco celebrated the coming Civil War in terms of Roman
history.
According to the commission’s report it depicted “a senator, who points to Rome and appeals to Cincinnatus to come to
the help of his country.” Cincinnatus , the fifth-century BC Roman
dictator, was called to defend Rom e twice, first from foreign
invaders, then from his own common people. Likewise, American
heroes first defended their Rome against foreign British invaders, and were now about to be called to defend the same Rome against
her own seceding states.
Brumidi completed the Cincinnatus in March 1855. Meigs
invited various Congressmen to behold it. They were impressed.
Thomas U. Walter was “much delighted.” On March 20, Jefferson
Davis approved of the Cincinnatus and authorized Meigs to negotiate a salaried contract with Brumidi. Constantino Brumidi’s lifetime career spent decorating the Capitol began on a salary of $8.00
a day. His contract allowed him to accept other artistic projects
but not to leave Washington. In November 1855 he began a canvas painting of the Blessed Virgin for St. Ignatius’ Jesuit church in
Baltimore, but was not present for its December 4th installation,
on the occasion of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception.
IN the summer of 1862, even as Thomas Crawford’s statue was
being cast at the Mills foundry, Thomas U. Walter wrote to Brumidi asking him to paint something monumental “in real fresco”
to cover the 4,664-square-foot inner surface of the Capitol’s dome.
Three weeks later, Brumidi submitted sketches of something he
entitled “Apotheosis of Washington.” The word “apotheosis” was
then commonly understood by its definition in Webster’s 1829
Dictionary:
Apotheosis – the act of placing a prince or other distinguished
person among the heathen deities. This honor was often
bestowed on illustrious men of Rome, and followed by the
erection of temples, and the institution of sacrifices to the
new deity.
Walter responded ecstatically to the “Apotheosis,” writing the
artist that “no picture in the world will at all compare with this in
magnitude. ” He praised the design before Worshipful Master and
Commissioner of Buildings Benjamin French as “probably the
grandest, and the most imposing that has ever been executed in
the world.” French enthusiastically agreed, adding that the Secretary of Interior was also greatly impressed. Final approval of
“Apotheosis ” at a price of $40,000 came on March 11 , 1863, just as the Immaculate Virgin was being placed on her temporary pedestal on the Capitol’s east grounds. “Frustrating delays in manpower,” according to official histories, would hold the fresco in
abeyance until December 1864.
On April 9, 1865, Richmond fell and the Confederacy surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant. Less than a week later, on the evening
of April 14 at Ford’s Theatre, during an instant of hilarious laughter, one of the country’s leading actors, John Wilkes Booth, cried
out an oath summarizing the liberation theology of Cardinal
Robert Bellarmine: “Sic Semper Tyrannis” (“Always this [i.e., death]
to tyranny”), and fired a shot into the head of President Abraham
Lincoln. Sic Semper Tyrannis is also the motto of Virginia, then
considered a State in rebellion.
Might Booth’ s cry have been
intended to give the assassination the look of an official act of the
Confederacy, much in the way Lee Harvey Oswald’s much-touted
sympathy for Cuba initially gave the Kennedy assassination the
look of communist revenge? An illusion of official Confederate
responsibility for a beloved president’s assassination justified the
elaborately cruel revenge which the federal government inflicted
upon the southern states in order to bring all the states under the
jurisdiction of Washington D.C. (The inferiority of states to the
federal “Rome” is expressed in the law of flag. Wherever state and
national flags are flown together, the national is always higher.)
Booth had associated with seven people who were brought to
trial less than a month following the assassination. It was not a
civilian trial but a special eleven-man military tribunal appointed
by President Andrew Johnson called “The Hunter Commission.”
Counsel for the defendants objected to the Commission, arguing that the military had no jurisdiction over civilians, and therefore the proceeding was unconstitutional. The objection was
overruled and the trial moved forward. Within seven weeks , the
Commission (a two-thirds majority, not the unanimity required of
a civilian jury) found four of the conspirators guilty. On July 7,
1865 they were hanged.
“The great fatal mistake of the American government in the
prosecution of the assassins of Abraham Lincoln,” wrote Charles Chiniquy, the excommunicated priest whom Lincoln had
successfully defended in his early law career (see note 2, Chapter
22),
was to cover up the religious element of that terrible drama. But
this was carefully avoided throughout the trial.2
The religious element – the fact that all seven of the conspirators were devoted Roman Catholics – was carefully avoided
because of who controlled the trial. As Commander-in-Chief of
the armed forces, it was Johnson himself who quite constitutionally reigned supreme over the Hunter Commission. But Johnson was also a Freemason,
which meant that he followed the wise directives of the Unknown Superior. Thus , the real
power behind the Hunter Commission was
Superior General Pieter Jean Beckx , a relatively young Belgian who was a great favorite
of Pio Nono , Pope Pius IX, the only head of
state in the world to recognize the Southern Confederacy as a sovereign nation. Obedient
to the will of Genera l Beckx, President Johnson issued an executive order closing the courtroom to the working press. At the end of each day, officials would ration to selected
reporters from the Associated Press news carefully evaluated to
keep “the religious element” out of the public consciousness.
Charles Chiniquy tirelessly investigated the assassination.
After the conspirators were executed, he went incognito to Washington and found that:
not a single one of the government men would discuss it with me
except after I had given my word of honor that I would never
mention their names. I saw, with a profound distress, that the
influence of Rome was almost supreme in Washington. I could
not find a single statesman who would dare to face that nefarious influence and fight it down. 3
One official told him: “This was not through cowardice, as you
might think, but through a wisdom you ought to approve, if you
cannot admire it.” Had there not been censorship, had the witnesses been pressed a little further, “many priests would have been
compromised, for Mary Surratt’s [one of the four executed conspirators] house was their common rendezvous; it is more than probable that several of them might have been hanged.”
Thirty years after the assassination, a member of the Hunter
Commission, Brigadier General Thomas M. Harris, published a
small book revealing that Lincoln’s assassination had actually been
a Jesuit murder plot to extirpate a Protestant ruler. Harris stated:
It is fact well established that the headquarters of the conspiracy was the house of a Roman Catholic family, of which Mrs.
Mary E. Surratt was the head; and that all of its inmates, including a number of boarders, were devoted members of the Roman
Catholic Church. This house was the meeting place, the council chamber, of Booth and his co-conspirators, including Mrs.
Mary E. Surratt, and her son, John H. Surratt, who, next to
Booth, were the most active members of the conspiracy.4
Commissioner Harris went on to relate that Mary Surratt’s son
John had been a Confederate spy for three years, “passing back and
forth between Washington and Richmond, and from Richmond to
Canada and back, as a bearer of dispatches.” John’s mentor during
this period was a Jesuit, Father B.F. Wiget, president of Gonzaga
College and a priest noted for his sympathies for the Confederacy.
John introduced Father Wiget to his mother and the priest became
Mary Surratt’s confessor and spiritual director. As well, Father
Wiget gave spiritual direction to the famous John Wilkes Booth
who , though “a drunkard, a libertine, and utterly indifferent to
matters of religion, ” was spiritually attracted to him. “The wily
Jesuit, sympathizing with Booth in his political views, and in the
hope of destroying our government, and establishing the Confederacy ... was able to convert him to Catholicism.” Hard evidence
of that conversion was found on the assassin’s corpse: “On examination of Booth’s person after his death, it was found that he was
wearing a Catholic medal under his vest, and over his heart.”
At the conspiracy trial, Father Wiget testified to Mary Elizabeth Surratt’s “good Christian character.” Even assuming her complicity in the assassination, Wiget as a Jesuit could truthfully say
Surratt was a good Christian simply by reserving mentally (a) that
by “Christian” he meant “Roman Catholic;” (b) that under the
terms of the Directorium Inquisitorum (see Chapter 8), “Every individual may kill a heretic;” and (c) that President Lincoln was twice
a heretic : for his Protestantism and for his having successfully
defended an excommunicated priest.
But Mary after all “kept the nest that hatched the egg,” as President Johnson put it, and was hanged. Conditional to her death
sentence was a provision that a petition for mercy would be attached and sent to Johnson. By execution day, July 7, 1865, Surratt’s daughter Anna had heard nothing from the President.
Distraught, she appeared at the White House to beg him for
clemency. Two government men stood in her way. Preston King
and Senator James Henry Lane denied her access to the President,
who later declared he had never received any petition for mercy.
The following November, Preston King drowned, his body laden
with weights. In March, Senator Lane shot himself. (In the judgment of one modern investigator, “Some person or persons were
apparently determined that Mary Surratt should not live.” 5 ) Shortly thereafter, the Supreme Court rendered a landmark decision
that would have won all the conspirators a jury trial. Ex parte Milligan held that military courts have no jurisdiction over civilians.
Milligan lent Mary Surratt’s death at the hands of Protestants an
aura of tragedy and Catholic martyrdom.
Charles Chiniquy obtained important testimony supporting
the widely held suspicion of Jesuit responsibility for the assassination. He received from Rev. Francis A. Conwell, Chaplain of the
first Minnesota Regiment, a sworn affidavit saying that on April
14, 1865, he was visiting St. Joseph, Minnesota, location of a
Roman Catholic seminary. Rev. Conwell swore that at about six
o’clock that evening the man in charge of the seminary, a storekeeper by the name of J.H. Linneman, told him and another visitor, Mr. H.P. Bennett, that President Lincoln had “just been
killed.”
The next day, Rev. Conwell journeyed ten miles to the town
of St. Cloud. As soon as he arrived, he asked the hotelier, Mr.
Haworth, if he had heard any news of a presidential assassination.
Mr. Haworth had heard nothing, as St. Cloud had neither railroad
nor telegraph. On the following morning, April 16th, on his way
to preach a sermon in church, Rev. Conwell was handed a copy of
a telegram brought up by stagecoach from Anoka, Minnesota. The
telegram announced that President Lincoln had been assassinated
on Friday evening at about nine o’clock.
On the morning of Monday the 17th, Rev. Conwell hurried to
St. Paul and reported to the newspaper that in St. Joseph he had
been informed of President Lincoln’s assassination three hours
before the event took place. The paper published his report.
“We have now before us,” wrote Commissioner Harris,
positive evidence that these Jesuit Fathers, priests of Rome,
engaged in preparing young men for the priesthood away out in
the village of St. Joseph, in far off Minnesota, were in correspondence with their brethren in Washington City, and had been
informed that the plan to assassinate the President had been
matured, the agents for its accomplishment had been found, the
time for its execution had been set, and so sure were they of its
accomplishment, that they could announce it as already done,
three or four hours before it had been consummated. The anticipation of its accomplishment so elated them that they could not
refrain from passing it around ... as a piece of glorious news.
MEANWHILE , through the Lincoln assassination and its aftermath, the Vatican’s artist, Constantino Brumidi, along with
some seventy French and Italian assistants, applied pigmented
mortar to the interior canopy of the Capitol dome. They were still
working when the first session of the Thirty-ninth Congress met
on December 4, 1865. Not until the following January did the scaffolding come down. When it did, viewers were awestruck by what
they beheld. Brumidi had crowned the ceiling of America’s legislative center with a glorious, panoramic visualization from Book VI
of Virgil’s Aeneid, where Aeneas’ blind father, Anchises, explains
NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM:
“Here is Caesar, and all the line of Julius, all who shall one
day pass under the dome of the great sky. This is the man, this
one, of whom so often you have heard the promise, Caesar
Augustus, son of the deified, who shall bring once again an Age
of Gold to Latium, the land where Saturn reigned in early times.
He will extend his power beyond the Garamants [Africans] and
Indians, over far territories north and south of the zodiacal stars,
the solar way....”
The epicenter of “Apotheosis of Washington” is a solar orb,
the Sun-God into which Augustus Caesar was said to have been
absorbed when his body died. From the Capitol’s highest interior
point Augustus radiates his golden light outward and downward to
the next in the “line of Julius,” the deified George Washington.
The god Washington occupies the judgment seat of heaven, sword
of Justice firmly clasped in his left hand. Basking in the light of
Augustus – Pontifex Maximus – he rules “over far territories north
and south of the zodiacal stars, the solar way.” Like his Caesarean
forebears, Washington is God , Caesar, Father of his Country. [These people are sick f*#ks DC]
On the right hand of the Father sits Minerva , holding the
emblem of Roman totalitarianism, the fasces. Minerva, we recall,
was the virgin goddess of the Sacred Heart – it was she who rescued the heart of the Son of God , and placed it with Jupiter in
heaven. She was called “Minerva” when praised for her justice and
wisdom. When praised for her beauty and love, Minerva was
known as Venus, the Queen of Heaven. She and Venus were often
identified with each other, just as statues of both were reconsecrated “Mary” through Roman Catholic missionary adaptation. Minerva’s most persistent role in ancient paganism was Dea Benigna,
“The Mediatrix. ” She heard the prayers of sinful mortals and
passed them on to Jupiter, in the same way the Roman Mary is
believed to pass Catholic prayers on to Christ.
Completing the circular composition around the solarized Augustus are thirteen nubile goddesses. These are the original States.
They dance weightlessly in space, supporting a white banner inscribed with the soul of the Bacchic Gospel, “E PLURIBUS UNUM.”
Above the head of each State-goddess floats a magical white pentagram.
Beneath all this celestial revelry, Brumidi painted more Roman
gods mingling with American
mortals. Here is Vulcan, the god of
fire and craftsmanship, planting
his foot on a cannon, while his
workers prepare munitions and
weapons of death and destruction. And over here Neptune rises
with his trident from the sea in a horse-drawn scallop-shell chariot. And here the wise Mediatrix communicates with American
scientists Benjamin Franklin, Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of the
Code, and Robert Fulton, inventor of the steamship.
And here, the Goddess Immaculately Conceived, the Dreadnaught Mary. Wearing the pentagrams and eagle headdress of
Thomas Crawford’s statue atop the dome’s exterior, she mobilizes
her sword and shield against a
pack of fleeing sinners labeled
“Tyranny” and “Kingly Power.”
Jupiter’s mascot, the Roman
eagle, glides just behind her
clutching a bunch of thunderbolts in his talons. Innocent in
her flowing scarlet cape, the
Goddess is situated exactly
beneath the deified George
Washington, coming between him and the embattled viewing
public gazing up from ground level. It is the graphic realization of
Pio Nono’s Ubi primum, which decreed the Virgin Mary was “set
up between Christ and his Church, always delivering the Christian people from their greatest calamities and from the snares and
assaults of all their enemies.”
The eagle gliding behind Mary explains the otherwise
inscrutable seal of the United States Justice Department, which
contains a wingspread eagle surrounded by the motto “QUI PRO
DOMINA JUSTITIA SEQUITUR” (“He who follows the Goddess Justice”). Persephone, or Minerva the Mediatrix, when judging the
The Virgin pursues evildoers sinfully dead in Hades was called Justitia, or Justice. The “HE” of the Justice Department’ s
motto identifies the eagle, symbol of Rome .
Rome follows the Goddess Justice – that is,
the Immaculately Conceived Mother of
God in her judicial capacity.
A
rainbow sweeps across the lower quadrant
of the Dome of the Sky from Benjamin Franklin to a young
boy wearing a Smurf-cap and a toga. The boy attends a goddess
who reclines on a large horse-drawn reaper. She is Persephone’s
mother Ceres, who was reconsecrated by early missionary adaptation as Anna , mother of the Virgin Mary. The golden boy is officially designated “Young America.” Although
Brumidi has hidden the boy’s face from us, he
deserves our careful scrutiny for one very important reason. Bearing the name “America,” he is
the only element in the sacred national iconography that defines the character of the American
person as perceived by government.
Young America’s Smurf-cap is a style of headgear known as the
“Phrygian cap.” Phrygia was a district in the Kingdom of Pergamum. We remember Pergamum. It was the middle point in the
transfer of Babylonian religion westward to Rome. Phrygia is a
Greek word meaning “freemen” (our English word “free” comes
from the first syllable, “phry-”). Phrygian caps were given to freed
Roman slaves to indicate their new liberated status. Roman law
regards liberty as a conditional status. Once granted by a patron, it
could be revoked at any time for cause. Phrygian-cap freedom,
then, means liberty (freed Roman slaves, by the way, were called
“liberti”) to please Caesar. We remember from Chapter 8 how
Ignatius described such freedom in Section 353.1 of his 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. ” Of course, those liberti bold enough to protest what their
superiors commanded lost their freedom, no matter how lucid and reasonable their own judgment might have been. They were
reverted to slavery. Since the advent of the Febronian State
Church, the reversion of protestant liberti, or Protestants, to slavery has been so methodically insidious that it’s hardly noticeable.
The shackles are psychological, humanely fitted by increasing varieties of spiritual exercise. Like Aeneas , Anchises, Julius Ascanius
and their Trojan followers, most Americans are indeed Phrygian cap freemen, free to sacrifice their individuality to the greater glory
of Rome .
The Black Obelisk of Calah, which stands in the Babylonian/Assyrian Wing of the British Museum, records the great accomplishments of the ninth-century BC god-king Shalmaneser II. In a
scene depicting various monarchs paying obeisance to Babylon, we
see one monarch kneeling before Shalmaneser , worshiping him.
Shalmaneser in turn offers a sacrifice to an eight-pointed star set
within a bird’s wings and tail-feathers. Inscriptions identify this
kneeling monarch as King Jehu of Israel. Remarkably, according
to the New Catholic Encyclopedia, Jehu’s likeness here is the only
known contemporaneously-rendered portrait of a biblical personage. More remarkably, Jehu is wearing the Phrygian cap. Like Brumidi’s Young America , Jehu’s liberty is subject to the mood of his
god-king.
THE FREEDOM CAP Jehu submitting to Shalmaneser
The Bible confirms the testimony of the Black Obelisk. At II
Kings 10:31 we read: “Jehu took no heed to walk in the law of the
Lord God of Israel with all his heart.” Scripture further tells us that Jehu worshiped the golden calf, a sacred Babylonian icon made
fashionable in tenth-century-BC Israel by Jehu’s predecessor, Jeroboam. Jeroboam renounced “the law of the Lord God of Israel”
and instituted... democracy. Democracy opened the Israelite priesthood, originally appointed by Yahweh exclusively to the family of
Levi, to all applicants. Consequently, Yahweh’s priesthood was
infiltrated by non-believers and foreign sympathizers. They prepared the way for Jehu to make of himself a Phrygian freeman,
obligated to concur with obedience of the understanding in all
things which his superior, Shalmaneser II, commanded – exactly
as the Black Obelisk explains in lucid visual terms. As a direct
result of Jehu’s departure from the God of Israel, the Israelite
nation began falling apart. It was ultimately destroyed by Caesarean Rome , the legitimate heir to Shalmaneser’s Babylonian authority as it passed down through Pergamum.
Running throughout this cosmic Battle of the Faiths is a highly refined cabalah involving the concept of “golden calf.” The
word “calf” in Hebrew, the language of Jehu and Jeroboam, is ﬥﬧﭏ pronounced “eagle.” Where as Jehu gave his people Shalmaneser’s
golden ﬥﬧﭏ to worship, the Church Militant has trained the American public to worship Rome’s golden eagle, which surmounts
every flagpole. Could it be that if we show respect, affection, or
loyalty toward the national eagle we create the presumption of
worshiping the golden calf, and so alienate ourselves from the God
of the Bible and in the vacuum find ourselves under the rule of the
Church Militant? [Do not mean to offend so I have to say I am uncertain about that Hebrew spelling of 'calf' DC]
ACCORDING to J.C. Judson, in his Biography of the Signers of the
Declaration of Independence, as General Washington was planning his famous expedition against Cornwallis at Yorktown, “the
army was destitute, the government treasury was empty, her credit
shivering in the wind. ” Suddenly, a miracle in the annals of philanthropy occurred. Robert Morris, Superintendent of Finance ,
the highest officer in the United States under the Articles of Confederation (1781), personally raised eighty cannon and a hundred
pieces of field artillery. In addition, he raised “all other necessary supplies not furnished from other sources” and became
personally
responsible to the amount of $1,400,000 upon his own notes,
which were promptly paid at maturity. This enabled the American army to give the finishing stroke to the revolution, and triumph, in victory complete, over a proud and merciless foe.
So goes a historian’s version of how Robert Morris saved
America. The official version is revealed in Constantino Brumidi’s
“Apotheosis of Washington.” Here we see Superintendent Morris
gazing up from his accounts ledger at yet another Roman deity. We
recognize the deity from the familiar caduceus in his right hand,
from the winged sandal he’s thrust to within kissing distance of
Morris’ lips, and from the
shadowy bag of gold he
tantalizingly dangles in
Morris’ face. The deity is
Mercury, the Psychopomp,
the Trickster, the patron
deity of commerce, deceivers, and thieves. Mercury, the brilliant, lovable
Pied-Piper deity who deceives the souls of sinful
humanity into following
him exuberantly down
into the oblivion of
Hades. Just as Sebastiano
Ricci’ s painting subtly established Mercury as the guiding spirit of modern Roman Catholicism, Brumidi’s painting acknowledges the same deity’s ascendancy over the fulfillment of the American Revolution.
Amazing stuff, these pictures. And like so many of the testimonies presented in this book – the supremacy of the Church Militant, the publication of Sun-Tzuan strategies in a western
language, the names, the numbers, the dates, the locus and layout
of the federal city, the architecture, the statuary, the monuments, the emblems, the frescoes, the ceremonies – they come not from
the Trickster’s victims , but from the Trickster himself. It’s as if the
point of the trick is to warn the victim beforehand, in words and
pictures, that he or she is about to be tricked. A con is much
sweeter when the mark actually consents to the con. That way, the
Trickster’s conscience is clear.
CONSTANTINO Brumidi continued decorating the Dome of the
Great Sky well into his seventies. In 1879, at the age of 74,
while painting “Penn’s Treaty with the Indians” on the Rotunda
frieze, he slipped from a scaffold. Dangling fifty-eight feet from the
marble floor, he held on until help came. He escaped a deadly fall.
But the shock of the experience killed him a few months later.
NEXT
THE MARK OF CAIN
1 comment:
thanks, much more information than me could dig up.
natives have been enslaved by words.
wake up feeling younger each day because, have blocked all negative thoughts from entering me mind.
mother nature provide's the best education entertainment and support.
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