ARCHAEOLOGY



Now, we resume the clarification of historiographical categories of method.

In archeology, one assembles the shards of available evidence, to the intermediate purpose of reconstructing a working-model conception of the society under study.

At this point, one has what might be described as the intermediate model. At this phase, the work of the archeologist suffers flaws analogous to those of the credulous historical narrative form. This phase is indispensable, but does not represent material which of itself is reliable for adducing historiographical knowledge.

To develop the "intermediate model," the work of the archeologist focuses on what was constructed, how it was constructed, and to what use it was employed. By organizing the study of this subject matter in terms of labor time and amounts' of household consumption of the population as a whole, archeological studies can be advanced to a high degree of rigor in accounting for the general features of a culture. In a more useful sort of site or group of sites, the evolution of the culture in these terms provides the most advantageous and a relatively rigorous reconstruction of the sort indicated.

The danger is that the study of the matter is concluded on that level of investigation. To put the matter crudely, but otherwise usefully, the emphasis on the "objective" evidence deprecates the decisive "subjective" side of the culture.

Human practice as a whole is not "objective." Something happens. That might be termed "objective." Yet, one such objective occurrence does not lead directly to a human action in response in an objective way. Man responds to the stimulating event "subjectively," interprets its import and character "subjectively," and selects his response (or, non-response) "subjectively." In first approximation, historiography focuses on the "subjective," determining linkage between an "objective" occurrence and responsive objective" human action. This locates the crucial, "subjective" area of investigation, but does not in itself represent yet competent historiography. The question is how that "subjective" behavior is itself determined. whence and how that manifest way of seeing and responding to the world is developed.

In the absence of literary records, or with aid of only some fragments of literary or protoliterary records, that subjective side of the archeological record must be interpolated. Unfortunately, most efforts of this sort extant are deceptively plausible, specious, and wrong. The same sort of rigor employed in determining how paleolithic man produced stone tools must be applied to the "technology" of development of ruling sets of ideas. This can not be done on the basis of archeology. We must develop epistemology for this work by working backward from history as such, by first applying archeological methods to the historical period, and thus develop a rigorous method to be applied to the archeological periods as such.

For one brief example, on the basis of knowing crucial features of the history from the eighth century BC, one can project judgments upon the subjective side of sites from the middle of the third millennium BC, and so forth. How this is to be accomplished, and how we may be certain that such methods are valid, we shall demonstrate in due course in this report. For the present instant, it is sufficient to announce that there can be no competent archeological historiography without commanding the secrets of the "inner elites."



HUMAN PALEONTOLOGY



It may be noted that we employ "human paleontology" here in an included sense which is more commonly associated with the rubric "anthropology." The compelling reasons for our preference will be qualified in due course below.

Otherwise, the reader should be forewarned that human paleontology, properly understood, is the uniquely competent premise for) all scientific knowledge, competent historiography included. Consequently, a certain intensity of focus is supplied for that aspect of our report. Not only are we concerned to communicate the secrets of the "inner elite," but also to reformulate them from the standpoint of insights and knowledge not available entirely to our predecessors.

We take up this matter now. beginning by treating the subcategory in question as we treated the other two facets of historiography, and then proceed to the deeper issues.

Human paleontology is occupied in a minor, if not insignificant way, with the varieties of hominids and other matters of physical, or biological anthropology. This feature pf the investigation gains importance as our attention focuses inclusively on those characteristic features of the human species' behavior which distinguishes our species from all other anthropoids and hominids, the power of reason. This distinction, we are obliged to assume, correlates with some specific biological distinction associated with human processes of mentation, even though the specific biological "substrate" in which that distinction is essentially located may not yet have been defined for investigation. We know that such a distinction exists, and are therefore obliged to pursue the nonbiological side of the investigation in such a way that our work will aid in isolating the biological feature of the matter. If that rigor were not observed, then the entirety of our work would suffer a correlated incompetence..

The proper, principal concern of human paleontology is the study of the development of the human species as a whole, a universality, through study of cultures over long sweeps of time.

Although human paleontology has some incidental overlaps of included techniques with animal paleontology, the evolution of human culture is a feature of the human species' existence which compares only with successful biological differentiation of more advanced varieties and species in animal paleontology. All animals but man are categorically limited, by variety and species, in their range of behavioral possibilities. This works to the effect that this range of possible variations in species-reproductive behavior is delimited as. if by genetic inheritance. Human "culture has, overall, successfully evolved to an effect approximated in the plant and animal kingdoms generally only by the emergence of biologically superior varieties and species. It is that feature of the cultural evolution of mankind which is the essential, primary subject-matter of human paleontology, and which absolutely distinguishes the subject, human paleontology, from the subject of animal paleontology.

There is a correlated difficulty arising from this distinction. Although paleontological evidence dates hominid existence to the Pleistocene according to prevailing estimates, it cannot be assumed that the present human species dates from the onset of that period. Skeletal fragments and a scattering of some artifacts do not enable us to rigorously or conclusively distinguish among hominid "relatives" or "ancestors" who lacked characteristic human qualities of reason and the modern, human species which possesses that distinguishing species-power. The fact that chimpanzees, gorillas, and baboons include the use of

"tools" within their range of behaviors in the wild state suggests, usefully, that a certain amount of tool-use may be associated with a species having a human-like skeleton but lacking the power of reason. Until the subsumed issues are resolved, we date human paleontology as an investigation to the Pleistocene, with the provision that adoption of this period has the function of defining the span within which we may locate more precisely the emergence of species-man.

The intrinsic methodological defect of "anthropology" as heretofore defined is that its adopted tion backwards to this or that notion of a "primeval horde." The fact of the matter is that the power to evolve culture, in the directed way man has secularly advanced his culture since the paleolithic, is the distinguishing quality of the human species, the quality by which we can distinguish the human species from other, inferior hominids. This distinction separates species-man from the hominids of any hypothesized "primeval horde."

Modern biological research has pointed to some helpful points in this connection. It is now determined that the notion of genetic determination of species and varieties is inherently defective. A heritable varietal change in a species can be induced "environmentally" without genetic variation. (2) The experimental evidence to this effect is conclusive, and already locates the functions of genetic material as heretofore defined within a much larger process which is actually determining. Closer study of the role of the ribosomes shows itself to be a fruitful, if not yet conclusive approach to comprehension of the actually determining processes. (3) What this current line of biological research implies is that without alteration of what is ordinarily considered genetic material, a heritable alteration in the hominid stock could be introduced to the effect of producing a new variety. If this new variety were distinguished by a suitably significant change from other varieties, we should be obliged to consider the new variation a new species on that account.

It is desirable to achieve rigorously defined answers. It is indispensable, first, to have rigorously defined questions. It is such questions which properly define science, questions to which we possess only sometimes satisfying answers.

The subject of human paleontology is the empirical investigation of the characteristic of the human species' capability for social evolution from lower into, higher forms of knowledge and social practice. This standpoint takes man of this distinction as a species, denying the existence of culture as a, development within a precultural "primeval horde." This subject , demands its own, appropriate, methods of historiography, which we define at some length below.

It is to be granted that the British and their dupes take officially a strong public stand against a principle of cultural evolution, proposing instead the dogma of "cultural relativism."

It would be nonetheless an insult to Oxford and Cambridge to assume that their inner circles actually believe their own publicized propaganda in behalf of "cultural relativism" as an anthropological-scientific thesis. Such propaganda is created for the stultification of the credulous. There is overwhelming evidence that the inner circles of the British intelligentsia are confidently convinced of the very opposite to what they teach credulous fools.

The fact of the matter is that the British colonial system has always followed the instruction of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, the policy that populations should be kept wherever possible in a backward state of economic and cultural development relative to Britain itself. This was the feature of Adam Smith against which the American Revolution was fought. It is also a fact that the British colonial office pursued a political doctrine of "cultural relativism'' with respect to colonial peoples in general, and promoted that doctrine as anthropological propaganda as a part of the effort of the London School of Economics and other institutions to recruit agents for British service and interest from among the natives of the nations they proposed to keep in cultural backwardness. This is otherwise an old propaganda trick of the cult of Apollo, the characteristic feature of its cult of Dionysus, as exemplified by the case of al-Ghazali.

The inner circles of the British intelligentsia are not so stupid as to believe their own propaganda on this issue It cannot be seriously proposed that they do not know that cultural evolution is efficient; it is certain that thev do believe that continued cultural evolution is contrary to the Utopian goals of the Black Guelph oligarchy.



PALEONTOLOGICAL METHODS



Modern historiography properly combines the results and methods appropriate to all three subcategories of historiography into a single methodology. The proper methods for human paleontology are the foundation for the elaboration of historiography — and also the axiomatics of all scientific knowledge — as a whole.

Since human paleontology's essential, primary subject matter is the qualitative difference, human reason, between man and the animal species, it is the rigorous focus upon evidence most directly and universally bearing upon that difference which is the proper kernel of all historiography.

The first approximation of the method required is obtained by focusing on the problem human ecological population-potential. This is. at first inspection. the potential number of persons humanity can sustain in a certain mode of producing the necessary means of existence. At second inspection, more accurately, it represents the rate of growth populations at various levels of population-density in a given mode of production and associated culture. The question is thus posed: What is the potential rate of expansion of the population which sustains the average individual in a condition of life equal to or better than the condition at a previous, less numerous population? Quality of condition is properly defined in the same way; quality is the equipotentiality of the culture representing individuals in such a condition to maintain at least the same rate of growth of population.

This admittedly involves a conceptual difficulty for the person of merely an ordinary university or even a more advanced education. The British doctrine of the inductive sciences." which has become relatively hegemonic in one guise or another, starts with countable objects, and derives notions of ordering and other kinds of relationship through formulations in which the quality of the counted objects is external to the process. Only the quality of the so-called dependent variable is ordinarily assumed to be subject, to constructive valuation by formulation. “Self-reflexive functions” are, considered outlawed by the dogma of "the inductive sciences" (4) Yet. we have admittedly introduced a “self-reflexive function" here. It is the inductive-science dogma which is in error, not our definition given just above.

Beginning with that rough definition of ecological; population-potential, we can refine this notion effectively only by considering the conceptual problem which arise as we study the processes through which the mode of production is bettered, and as we at the same time more rigorously define the criteria which determine what is a betterment of the mode of existence.

The first such conceptual difficulty which might pop into view is this. As the mode of culture changes, the requirements of consumption by individuals are altered. Consequently, we cannot compare successive states of cultural development with the included assumption that the normative spectrum of consumption required for the first case is appropriate for the second. Also, we cannot assume that a linear function can account for the transformation involved. Related conceptual problems will be faced as we proceed.

Changes in ecological population-potential are effected to human advantage through advances in mode of culture, in which advances in mode of production are,, decisive. These changes originate modally as discoveries mediated through individuals, which become more or less universalized for that culture's practice through, typically, the transmission of such an individuals discovery to numerous others.

This peculiarity of the individual defines the powers of reason (creative discovery) of the individual person as a singularity which characterizes the human species as a species. We shall develop the significance of, that in due.

Historically (paleontologically), the cumulative effect of such successful discoveries is a secular trend of increase in the number of calories of useful energy commanded by the average individual engaged in production. This secular increase in per capita energy-density of production has in fact risen secularly. Empirically, the cultural progress of the human species correlates with an exponential rate of increase of per capita energy-density for production (cf. Figure 1).

Not all cultures have maintained such advance. In general, those strains of cultural progress which are most rapid determine a superior rate of population-potential for the branches of culture involved. Stagnating cultures collapse, retrogress, and so forth. In this way the branches of culture which maintain progress determine the largest portion of the human population.

This is not contrary to the fact of population-expansion in the developing sector today. The recent tendencies for expansion of those populations are the consequence of European culture. However, because of the City of London's domination of the world financial markets, and because of related malignant influences, the growth of population in developing nations, itself caused by more advanced European cultural influences, appears to represent a problem. This is not a problem because of the numbers of persons existing, or population growth rates. Using presently available nuclear-energy technology and imminently available fusion technologies, the world would have already the technology to maintain a population of tens of millions of persons at current European standards. The problem is that the social productivity of populations kept at "labor-intensive" levels at or near barbarism is inadequate to sustain those persons.

There is a recurring "resources problem," of course; however, this problem has no resemblance to the hoaxes circulated under that rubric by Ralph Nader, the Club of Rome, or Barry Commoner.

From early in the existence of the human species, man has been perpetually, or with frequent recurrence, confronted at each such point with what a contemporary "Club of Rome" could have argued to be an "insuperable limit to growth" with as much finality as the actual Club of Rome argues presently. This problem existed when the human population of the earth could be counted in mere millions, and repeatedly so thereafter. Yet, in all those branches of cultural evolution which have led into modern civilization, man has repeatedly overcome what "environmentalist" maniacs of those times might have' decreed to be "insuperable limits to growth."

The British oligarchy's inner circle of intelligentsia knows this to be a fact. Privately, as some examples attest in fact, they should consider themselves insulted (privately) in respect of their intelligence if one accused them of actually believing the rubbish published by the Club of Rome. Similarly, since the British have developed and operated nuclear power plants, the British elite knows that nuclear energy production by established standards is the safest sort of energy production yet in existence.

They know, and sometimes concede privately, that the Club of Rome thesis and "environmentalism" generally are hoaxes, fit only for the consumption of very foolish, very credulous dupes. After all, it was they who ordered that those hoaxes be concocted.

As in the instance of "cultural revolution," their point is that they do not wish to maintain technological progress; they are only wicked, not stupid; they are not such abysmal idiots that they do not believe technological progress could not solve all the present ecological problems. It was to aid them in mobilizing adequate political support from masses of fools, to block technological progress, that they promoted the Club of Rome's hoax. They generated a myth to persuade the hysterical donkeys of plebeia that technological progress was undesirable — because they are determined to bring on the "new dark age" out of which they aim to establish enduring rule for their "feudalist" Utopia.

At first glance, the pseudo-limits to growth have been successively overcome by our species through increased per capita energy for production. The use of tools, the development of the simplest forms of agriculture, the simplest forms of livestock raising, increase the usable energy commanded by a calorie of human biological effort. The application of fire and its cultural derivatives have the same effect. The "reducing power" of the species relative to existing forms of man-altered nature is increased. The increase in calories of "artificial labor" commanded by a calorie of human biological effort tends toward a qualitative decline in costs of "primary materials" per calorie of human biological effort, such that marginal or out-of-reach primary resources of a lower state of culture become the abundant, cheap resources of a new stage of progress of culture.

It is man's movement away from labor-intensive forms of production into what are presently capital-intensive forms of increasing emphasis upon "artificial labor," which define the world-line of human survival and progress. Conversely! the shift from capital-intensive forms of production can have only one consequence: large-scale genocide against the populations so murderously oppressed.

The British who propose labor-intensive methods know this. They propose labor-intensive "full employment" methods precisely because they intend to reduce the earth's population to the order of between one and two billion persons by the end of the century.

They create movements for labor-intensive full employment measures, such as the U.S. draft Humphrey-Hawkins legislation, because they wish to induce populations to willfully mass-murder themselves in this emulation of the lemming.

Increased energy-density is indispensable for maintaining as well as advancing human culture. Yet, it is not undifferentiated, scalar increases in energy per capita which enable man to survive. It is inventions. It is inventions which make possible increases in the energy-density of production. It is inventions which make possible the effective conversion of that augmented energy-density into useful forms of production.

The effort to reconcile two interconnected causes, energy and reason, into something equivalent to a single "equation" points us immediately in the direction of the most fundamental issues of scientific knowledge. Energy is ordinarily measured in calories, watts, and so forth. These are all scalar measures. In what units is human reason to be measured? The concern of Thales and other lonians for the combined action of mind, fire (energy), and continuous primary substance cannot seem so unimportant a conception as Aristotle and his admirers have purported to make the issue — it is indeed so fundamental that the import of Thales' work is to this day concealed with aid of British frauds.

We shall turn attention to the subsumed physics of that problem subsequently. It is indispensable to note the existence of such a problem at this state of the report, so that it can be temporarily set to one side, and that we may proceed to examine one crucial facet of this matter seemingly independently of the physics problem as such. We shall show, subsequently, why energy cannot be fundamentally a scalar magnitude, and under what circumstances it might nonetheless appear to be a scalar.



THE MEANING OF SCIENCE



So far, we have outlined the premises for the following judgments concerning historiography. History, in both its narrowest and broadest meanings, is the history of the human species. Consequently, it is the history of the distinguishing characteristics of the human species, the history of reason, and of the consequences of actions taken according to or contrary to reason by individuals and societies. The advances in ecological population-potential, which determine whether or not the species shall continue to exist, determine successive advances (secularly, for the species as a whole) \n successive forms of culture.

Reason is not applied ex novo to raw, precultural conditions, but is always reason informed by an existing culture acting to change (advance) that culture. Hence, history and the internal history of science are inseparable facets of the same inquiry. It is the ordering 'of the evolution of human culture according to the principles internal to scientific progress which is the primary feature of competent historiography, the standard of reference with whose governance we comprehend inclusively the failures of human history.

Conversely, history so studied is the unique premise for competent scientific knowledge.

The key to scientific method, and thus to the mastery of both science and history, is the method of the Platonic dialogue. This is also properly termed the dialectical method, as such a method is associated with Thales, Heraclitus and Plato. It is not, however, the "dialectical method" represented in most of the available literary productions of the Moscow Institute of Marxism-Leninism — even though the kernel of Karl Mark's method was a distillate from the Ionian dialectical method.

This Platonic method has two inseparable facets. As a consequence of its findings, the Platonic method early correctly classified all forms of human knowledge into three primary categories, showing, as we have noted earlier, how the method of the Platonic dialogue ordered the progress of the mental development of the individual from the lowest to the highest of these three levels.

The lowest level is the level of simple belief, the level of individual judgment defectively based on narrow experience and informed chiefly by prejudices and mythologies. That is the level of "common sense," or "horse sense," the donkey-like state of the human intellect. The second level is the level of the understanding, as defined by Immanuel Kant, for example. It is on this level that underdeveloped and miseducated persons mislocate their definitions of "scientific knowledge." Those misdefinitions of scientific knowledge are what we must expose as fraudulent here. The third, highest level is the level Plato associated with Socratic reason, or, for our purposes here, simply reason, the Vemunft of whose existence Kant was certain, but whose efficiency he pronounced incomprehensible to the understanding. It is at this level that science properly defined is found.

That is the understanding, and application of science we must outline here.

The Platonic dialogue's method, the dialectical method, is essentially as follows.

It begins with the certainty that all knowledge presumably believed by the individual on the basis of his culture and narrow sense-experience is inherently false because of that very narrowness of its empirical basis. In the way this was defined by Spinoza, "such knowledge is inadequate or fictitious. In the Platonic dialogue, the individual examines his own consciousness in terms of the way this consciousness is consciously mirrored in the thinking of another person(s). The point of this is not to compare different views if one attributes such a trivial significance to the Platonic dialogue, one condemns oneself to benighted ignorance forever. The object of "mirroring" is to make one's own consciousness an object for, a subject of one's willful consciousness, to make consciousness an object of willful consciousness for itself.

The subject of such willful consciousness of one's own mirrored consciousness is not primarily the "what?" of the consciousness brought under willful scrutiny. The primary subject matter is the "how?" and "why?" of that consciousness. My concern is not simply to discover on what points I may have believed in error; my concern is to discover in my consciousness how previously prevailing criteria have led me into error, and why I have thought foolishly. The subject of willful consciousness of consciousness is willful mastery of the method of conscious thought. The object of the Platonic method is to develop in oneself an effective method of thinking, of judgment, to reduce consciousness itself to a subject of scientific inquiry concerning method.

The first goal of the Platonic method is negation, is to break out of the narrowness of fictitious, false knowledge ("common sense," "practical experience"), I must. in first approximation, determine what methods of conscious judgment will actually solve problems without significant error over entire ranges of experience.

These method-specific ranges of experience are termed categories of knowledge. In turn, what is termed a category is determined by the differences in specific methods of judgment required for various aspects of knowledge (understanding). Another term for category is a relative universality. For example, physics, chemistry, botany, internal medicine, economics, and so forth have been subcategories of knowledge on these grounds, even though they may otherwise overlap.

To arrive at methods of thought by which one has mastered such a universality of knowledge methodologically from the standpoint of relatively best contemporary levels of practice, is to have arrived at a condition of understanding for that category. However, this does not remove the case in which a person has an understanding of physics and yet is a donkey in matters of, for example, internal medicine and economics. To characterize persons as persons of understanding in general has a special meaning. It means that the philosophical outlook of the person toward categories of knowledge which he has not yet mastered in particular ,is methodologically in correspondence with the principles of understanding — although he may not yet have achieved yet the competence of particular understanding in that category. It means that his philosophical outlook, his governing sense of personal social identity, is governed by the methodological principles of understanding.

Consequently, derived from or subsumed under this level of mental development, we have given to us the usual misdefinition of scientific knowledge among educated persons. In the case of the mathematical sciences, science is usually associated with the range of conceptual apparatus currently developed by the culture in the indicated categories. There is another, worse meaning, we merely identify at this instant, the meaning given to "science" by the dogma of "the inductive sciences."

In reason, we advance a qualitative step beyond the mere understanding. In understanding, we seek to extend present elementary knowledge and special methods "horizontally," so to speak, to fill out the extent of knowledge in each category, to establish coherent connections among categories, and to correct included errors in the body coexisting knowledge in an ordinary fashion. Although creative-mental activity is essential to this work, it is largely unconscious mental activity, and so appears only as a tool of the effort; it is generally regarded as something outside the domain to which it is applied transiently in acts of creativity. In progressing from mere understanding to reason,. we apply the same Platonic method to the inadequacies of understanding that was applied, to achieve understanding, to donkey-like states of "common sense"

There is nothing properly mystical in this, no mumbo jumbo, yoga-like meditative gimmickry, or any "black magic" of that sort. Geniuses are grown, cultivated, not produced miraculously out of donkeys sucking on some, fortuitously acquired philosopher's stone.

The inadequacy of existing scientific knowledge generally is that it must be superseded, to arrive at a higher level of scientific knowledge. This is not solved, by the effort to leap abruptly into the next qualitative development of scientific knowledge

The process of progressive evolution of scientific knowledge must be made itself an object for willful consciousness. It is the internal history of progress of scientific and related knowledge, approached in this way which enables consciousness to willfully abstract the element of progress from the consciousness of scientific knowledge in particular. In other words, the subject of consciousness is transformed from the conscious contemplation of an existing body of scientific knowledge, into comprehension of the process which characterizes the historical progress of scientific knowledge. It is this element of science, the motion of scientific progress, from which we abstract for consciousness the method for willfully effecting scientific progress. The mastery of that indicated method, developed for knowledge in that way. is reason.

In that way, the kinds of unconscious process of thought by which the creative person otherwise on the level of mere understanding produces the exceptional insights turning up seemingly so abruptly in his conscious understanding, are brought into willful consciousness by the Platonic method, and thus made the ruling criteria of what then becomes ordinary, willful consciousness of reason for that person.

The way in which the contemporary nonsense-version of the "dialectical method" came into circulation, e.g., the case of the Moscow Institute, was that certain persons encumbered with the duty of professing that method, and yet without the slightest acquaintance with it, applied, at best, the mere understanding to the task of composing glosses on what seemed appropriate passages from Hegel, Marx, Engels and so forth, often with reference to Lenin's Materialism and Empiric-Criticism and "Philosophical Notebooks" added.

This method — in its actuality — is not only a method tor developing geniuses, or, more modestly and realistically, lor developing people's mental powers in directions converging upon genius. It is the indispensable point of reference for competently defining the lawful ordering of the universe. We shall turn to develop that facet of the point now, and return, later, to complete the notion of science on the basis of such grounding development.



THE PROOF OF SCIENCE



The proof of scientific knowledge is essentially that through the improved social practice with which its application is associated, man advances the power of his society in terms of ecological population-potential. Although the individual invention is expressed in this, the individual invention, defined only as an individual invention, does not define such a proof of the knowledge embodied in itself. It is the generality, or relative universality of invention, a generality which is at least implicitly expressible as a quality of prevailing scientific practice, which a society tests, tests by the I success of its existence through progress.

In a limited sense, therefore, the efficacy of existing scientific knowledge, as demonstrated in the indicated way, does prove that the laws attributable to scientific knowledge are in some form of correlation with the lawful ordering of the universe. However, the paradoxes of existing scientific knowledge, in particular, conclusively indicate that the existing body of scientific knowledge is not competently representative of comprehensive knowledge of universal laws. indeed that the flaws of existing mathematical-scientific knowledge are axiomatic on this account.

This apparently insuperable problem begins to evaporate once we shift the focus from an existing body of scientific knowledge to the history of progress of human scientific and related knowledge. At no point has the prevailing body of knowledge according to understanding been adequately in correspondence with reality. Yet, in respect of all those advances in understanding which are rankable as advances by the criterion of ecological population-potential, the progress in understanding determining such advances is progress in correspondence with the lawful ordering of the universe.

In other words, no form of understanding, mathematical physic as presently defined included, could possibly be in actual correspondence with the lawful ordering of the universe, but reason is. One could avoid the point, out of fear no doubt; and say merely that the successive, qualitative advances in physics appear to converge, as if asymptotically, upon some "true physics" which is in correspondence with fundamental laws. That view would be more credible to the taste of prevailing mythologies, but is false for that very reason. It is also a useless compromise, since such a fearful, conservative observation contributes nothing which points our attention in direction of fruitful scientific progress.

The problem which such fearful evasions of the point most explicitly incur is that the level of understanding, exemplified by mathematical physic's, involves axiomatic assumptions like those associated with mathematics as such. Once we shift our focus away from the standpoint of mere scientific knowledge to the process of historical progress of scientific knowledge, such axiomatic difficulties begin to vanish.

The formal solution to this problem for mathematical physics began to emerge for direct, conscious comprehension through the combined efforts of Riemann and Cantor. We sum up here the point to be extracted from those sources.

Throw away the mistaken notion of a universe which can be represented by the heurisms of a fixed, n-dimensional geometry. Imagine instead, a universe whose characteristic, defining feature as a whole is a constant self-elaboration from the equivalent of any given n-geometry into an (n+1)-geometry. Now, rather than considering the symbols of "n," "n+1," "n+2," as counting the numbers of geometric-like dimensions of such a universe, let "n," "n+1," "n+2," and so forth denote different qualities of universe, in the sense of transfinites as developed by Cantor.

Now. to illustrate the implications of this, we note the following applicable case, without, we trust, implying that this illustration offered is exclusive.

We have at hand a case which corresponds to such an "n," "n+1." "n+2" ordering. If the world of prevailing physics and chemistry knowledge is taken as such, this can be termed the "n-dimensional" continuum. Mathematically interpreted in presently prevailing ways, that continuum is presumed to be characterized by entropy. It is not entropic in fact, but the prevailing analysis of such an "n-dimensional" continuum might be and is usually construed to suggest that, on condition such a continuum were the universe. The phenomena of living processes correspond then to an "n+1" ""continuum, which is characteristically negentropic. The phenomena of creative reason in living beings, human cultural evolution, represents an "n+2" continuum, which is of a higher order of negentropy than the "n+1."

Moreover, "n+2" is efficient with respect to both "n" and "n+1", and "n+1" is efficient with respect to "n." Furthermore, "n+1" "historically" developed out of "n," and "n+2" "historically" out of "n+1."

That is, incidentally, the basis in conception on which Riemann explicitly developed all his principal contributions, and is also the basis on which Cantor, with explicit reference to relevant aspects of the work of Leibniz and Nicholas of Cusa, developed his complementary notion of transfinites.

The conception of reason employed by Riemann and Cantor was not original to them. This conception of the fundamental ordering of the universe was first documented, to our present knowledge, by ibn Sina, in his Metaphysics — as the conception of the "necessary existent," and also by Cusa, as his conception of the "Non-Other." This is also the guiding conception of Gottfried Leibniz, the "secret" of his Monadology, and of his development of the notion of "inertia" with aid of a methodological criticism of Descartes derived directly from this order of conception of universal law.

Two principal observations have to be made immediately on the points just developed. First, a matter of some importance, "n," "n+1," and "n+2" correspond significantly to the three qualities of the human intellect in the Platonic method. This not merely because they represent three levels, but because the characteristics of mental life at each level correspond to the epistemology of experience as seen from each of these levels. Second, the characteristics of neither an "n," "n+1" nor "n+2" continuum can correspond to the real universe. Only the principle which characterizes the going over from an "n" to "n+1" to "n+2," and so forth, can be the higher, relative transfinite in correspondence with the actual lawful ordering of the universe, (cf. Figure 2)

Again, the only aspect of human consciousness which is in correspondence with such a transfinite — or transinvariant— principle of the universe, is the quality of progress in human scientific knowledge, rather than any specific, subsumed scientific knowledge as such. The adducing of that principle, in turn, provides the methodological principle for ordering thought to the effect of willfully "energizing" the progress of scientific knowledge. That is the method of rigorous hypothesis. That is the meaning of the dialectical method, the method of rigorously developing valid hypotheses.

The method employed is the Platonic method of negation, as applied from the standpoint of the level of reason. The method of negation means to isolate those axiomatic fallacies of existing knowledge (understanding) which bear upon crucial-experimental problems confronting us. The qualitative elimination of the axiomatic fallacy permits the defining of experiments which can be represented in terms of quantitative relationships. The essential, underlying test of the validity of an hypothesis (as an hypothesis) posed in this way, is the test of whether the hypothesis, if successfully demonstrated, implies a means for increasing the negentropy of human practice.

Such hypotheses are defined by Riemann as "unique hypotheses." Their distinction in effect is that they test the laws of the universe for a category of knowledge, rather than merely testing the applicability of extension of established principles to a problem without involving a testing of general laws. Such hypotheses are more commonly, less rigorously, termed "crucial-experimental hypotheses."

In the case such an hypothesis fails experimentally, no loss. The failure of the hypothesis narrows qualitatively our approach to the axiomatic fallacy it attacked, and thus acts as positive progress in knowledge for attacking that axiomatic fallacy in a more effective way.



THE CASES OF ARISTOTLE AND NEWTON



On the basis of surviving writings of Plato and of fragments of the work of his predecessors of the Ionian current, it is shown beyond admissible ambiguity that those Ionians and their collaborators were attacking precisely the problems we have so far defined, and also attacking them in a most rigorous and fruitful fashion. It is clear from the writings attributed to Aristotle, that he not only had direct access to numbers of these Ionian works — some of which he cites — but that he set out deliberately to obfuscate those writings, not only by falsifying his commentaries in a sweeping fashion, but by focusing his frauds upon the most crucial features of such writings. That most crucial feature was, in broadest terms, the Platonic — or dialectical— method, and. emphatically, the method of rigorous scientific hypothesis derived from it.

The same method was employed, with no advance in sophistication of mental exertions, by Francis Bacon and later, by the associates of John Locke in developing the program of the British Royal Society.

Notable is the comparison between Francis Bacon and William Gilbert. Gilbert, a Neoplatonic, competes with Avicennean Roger Bacon as the greatest scientific thinker England ever produced. Francis Bacon, by contrast, was a bungling, unproductive incompetent. It was Gilbert whose De Magneto provided Kepler with the indispensable final link for solving the problem of the solar orbits. Both were in the networks linked to Giordano Bruno, linked to the great center of Padua, the accomplishments of the Florentine Academy, and to the rigorous formulation of the method of crucial scientific hypothesis by Nicholas of Cusa. Bacon's obsessive attacks on Gilbert are a degraded scandal, and Bacon's Novum Organum a malignant "neo-Aristotelian" hoax.

The point is made clearer by comparing Bacon's attacks on Gilbert with his attacks on the English composer John Bull. (6)

Contrary to the mythology taught by the confused to the credulous in the music departments of our universities Johann Sebastian Bach did not develop the well-tempered system as such. That system was fully developed by the tenth century Ismaili al-Farabi, whose writings introduced the system to medieval Europe through such influences as Guido Aretino, centuries before Bach. Al-Farabi, writing in the tenth century, reports the well-tempered system to have been very ancient by his own time. and the surviving writings of a contemporary and adversary of Aristotle's corroborate this. Bach's accomplishment was not to develop the well-tempered system. Bach, previously thoroughly schooled in the well-tempered system, accomplished something quite different. Bach resolved the contributions of European vocal polyphony into a lawful, contrapuntal system of musical composition, to the effect that every note of a composition has a well-defined lawful significance, including those which represent dissonances. Later, Beethoven, himself intensely schooled in Bach during childhood, carried Bach's accomplishment a major, qualitative step forward, beyond Bach's formal system of reference, into the principle of self-developing systems of counterpoint — as exemplified by Beethoven's own late major works.

Bach's work on methods of composition was not original to him. Exemplary, John Bull taught the well-tempered system to bodies of students as a method of composition. Together with his contemporary Sweelinck, Bull was one of the leading masters of the well-tempered system of composition in his time, and part of the heritage directly transmitted to Bach's own teachers.

Bacon drove Bull out of England and caused Bull's writings on music to be destroyed.

Bacon's book-burning orgy is no isolated matter. The British intelligence services hounded Bach into isolation and attempted to suppress all knowledge of his work throughout Europe, to the point that even Bach's virtuoso son was intimidated against performing his father's compositions. A similar operation was deployed against the influence of Beethoven — through Mendelssohn, Richard Wagner, and others.(7) Although the factional issue so expressed was much older, there is a direct, unbroken factional tradition concerning music by the Black Guelph faction from Bacon to the present day. The British-promoted "rock" and the Frankfurt School's promotion of the school of Schoenberg, Webern, et al., are consistent continuations of that issue.

The British neo-Aristotelian music-doctrine was early associated — into the nineteenth century — with the irrationalist doctrine that musical thematic material was properly only an arbitrary selection of tunes, which were agreeable for one or another reason peculiar to the composer or to the relationship among the composer, performer and audiences. Harmony for the British was merely a matter of an agreeable form of embellishment of the performance of the arbitrary tune; the other forms of embellishment of the melodic line, for which rococo performances are notorious, were argued to be a matter of idiosyncratic taste by the performer. The promotion of, first, Schoenberg's school, and later "rock" by the British intelligence services, has the special significance of introducing the principles of the Phrygian cult of Dionysus into the neo-Aristotelian doctrine's general application.

From the ancient times, the well-tempered system was intrinsically associated with an opposite view of both musical composition and the function of music.

The prevailing mythology of the present-day music department bears on this issue directly. According to the neo-Aristotelian doctrine, the musical doctrine of Pythagoras defines a system of "natural" intervals. On this premise, with the aid of reference to the mechanics of vibrating strings, the ignorant edify the dupe with the doctrine that the Pythagorean scale is a "natural scale," and that. therefore, the well-tempered system is an "artificial system" adopted for this or that plausible reason. Al-Farabi's argument shows correctly that this view is nothing but absurd. The human requirement of the fifth, the derivation of the octave from this approach, and the fact of modulation from one mode (or, key) or other within a composition, illustrates the point that human beings are not "vibrating strings," and that human music has nothing to do with the purported amusement of inorganic substances.

Music is a sensuous medium of mental creative activity, in which the composer lawfully arrives at relative dissonances in various ingenious ways within terms of the lawful order of an initial mode. These relative dissonances are resolved as transitions to another lawful mode, and so on and so forth, such that the resolution of such developed relative dissonances in a composition defines a coherent totality, subsuming several modes and their made-necessary transitional connections. Thus, a good such musical composition resolves this process in the enunciation of a summarizing stretto or the equivalent, which, at the completion of the composition, resounds in the hearer's mind as an affirmation that the development which has occurred within the composition is now demonstrated to be lawful in its own right. In other choice of terms, a successful musical composition is a demonstration of the coherence of freedom (creative expansion of what is lawful) with necessity (that everything must satisfy some form of lawful ordering).

In consequence, music which satisfies the principles of the well-tempered system of composition (and its evolutionary derivatives) is both an abstract form of and also a sensuous exercise of the creative potentialities of the minds of composer, performers, and audiences.

The greatest possibilities for such musical development originate as polyphony is ordered in a well-tempered system. Thus, where the confused, miseducated dupe says "harmony," the musician says "voices." Each voice, elaborating its material according to the lawful ordering, is in active, lawful relationship to the concurrent voices, also proceeding lawfully. By shifts in accents and intonations, cross-voice "voices" are created, including relative dissonances. In this ordering, there are no "chords" being struck (or strummed) "in harmony" with a vocal melodic line. Every note is the ongoing activity of a voice, every note an activity of a voice which is in polyphonic (contrapuntal) relationship to everything else in the composition. Every voice, every note of each voice, must have a necessary role for the development of the composition, or it should not be sounded. . The folly taught as musical theory in most schools today is most directly derived from the nonsense produced by Rameau, the doctrine of harmony as arbitrary, neo-Aristotelian rules (fixed categories) enslaved to the irrationalist selection of a melodic element. It was this doctrine of Rameau's which the British intelligence services promoted against Bach during the early eighteenth century, and which nonsense has left its embedded influence in the axiomatics of nineteenth century musicological theoretics and their various twentieth century derivatives.

Notable is the nineteenth century "romantic" school, which in its most banalizing aspects substitutes an unhinged and arbitrary obsession with sheer chromaticism as what was deemed an adequate alternative to the rigorously defined dissonance of the contrapuntal development processes of composition.

In consequence of the destructive influence of British intelligence services on music, we have reached the circumstance today at which good .musical performers (and a vestige of a sane musical audience) exist almost entirely because of the influence of Bach, the late Mo/art, and Beethoven upon their childhood instrumental (and) other training. In this way they have arrived at an "instinctive" insight into music. Yet, because the musical theory taught is the wretched myths and nonsense of the British influence's effects, virtually no good performer is able to articulate his or her valid insights in the form of musical-theoretical statements — and there are no significant composers. There are those who possess valid "insight" into great music, but virtually none sufficiently familiar with the laws of music to be able to create a musical composition even by standards prevailing during the early nineteenth century, or the modern proper equivalent of such standards.

This indicated attempt to destroy music by Bacon and others was not original to the British neo-Aristotelians, or even their earlier, medieval predecessors. Aristotle himself was the ostensible author of the British neo-Aristotelian doctrine.

In the matter of music as in scientific knowledge generally, Aristotle and his imitators of the British Royal Society followed the same policy, and the same motive. Aristotle's objective, as in his fraudulent commentaries on Plato's and other writings, was to eliminate all evidence of and credit for scientific method, for the method of reason; Just as the principles of musical composition can be formally described only from the Riemannian standpoint we have identified earlier here, so the conceptions of Riemann are nothing but a derivative of the principles of reason in the Platonic-Neoplatonic sense of reason.

The same principle was applied by the British to Germany of the late nineteenth century. Most visibly, from approximately the time of Bismarck's accession to the Prussian Chancellory, but beginning, more modestly, earlier. British influence in Germany focused on promoting two philosophical methods. The first was the so-called neo-Kantian fad; the second was the convergent phenomenology and existentialism leading into the existentialism of the Nazi Martin Heidegger. and more immediately agreeable to post-Bentham varieties of British "philosophical radicalism." The nominal targets of this campaign were G.W.F. Hegel, and actually Immanual Kant himself — the neo-Kantians were in fact predominantly anti-Kantians.

Insofar as Kant defined the problem of Vernunft (pure reason), the British hated him. The premises on which Kant argued that the "thing-in-itself must be incomprehensible to the mere understanding, the British hostilely rejected. They used Kant because he was a famous (and. conveniently, dead) German philosopher, and because the by-products of his critiques could be perverted to the form of the British doctrine.

The point is crucial; we summarize it here.

The basis of Kant's notion of the incomprehensible "thing in itself was this.

Kant proceeded from the Platonic definition of the three categories — simple belief, understanding and reason. He also defined the progress from simple belief to understanding in the mode of the Platonic dialectic. The point to be considered is made, most succinctly in the second portion of his Critique of Practical Reason, "The Dialectic of Practical Reason." He recognized the existence of reason in the Platonic sense, adding the stipulation that reason must be efficient for practice, that knowledge created by reason was the basis for efficient practice in the world otherwise known to the understanding.

He stumbled at the problem of pure practical reason in the following way. Reason, standing "above" the deterministic ordering of the mere understanding, must affect the world in a way {freedom) not in conformity with the fixed deterministic rules of the understanding. However — and here is the crux of Kant's problem — since human knowledge of the determination of categories of knowledge is limited to the forms of the understanding, the efficient consequences of reason are unknowable, indeterminate, for the understanding. Hence/the real world, which must embody the efficiency of practical reason, must define 'existence (the. thing-in-itself) in a way which is not comprehensible to the understanding; hence, the thing-in-itself is incomprehensible.

The neo-Kantians (at least, in the main) ignored Kant's argument, and substituted the principle of irrationalist indeterminacy within the nominal form of Kant's formulation of the problem. Instead of Kant's judgment that the efficiency of reason was beyond human comprehension, the neo-Kantians proposed that the thing-in-itself was indeterminate because it was, intrinsically, arbitrarily anarchic. Thus, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke were smuggled into the neo-Kantian's commentaries on Kant.

This was the same result offered by Aristotle. On the one side, Aristotle adopted the appearance of a pure determinist. He proposed fixed, lawful orderings of categories, and so forth. However, embedded within that schema, the elementarily of the irrational takes the place of the problem of the comprehension of the specific lawfulness of reason. So, the Phrygian cult of Dionysus was embedded within the cult of Apollo. Roman stoicism was developed to the same effect by the cult of Apollo as the secularized version of the Apollonian mysticism.

Phenomenology and existentialism are simply such neo-Kantianism or Aristotelianism viewed through the microscope.

The complementary expression of this in contemporary Maoist cults is the secularized theological doctrine of "God is dead." The doctrine's source-rationale is as follows. If God created the universe with fixed universal laws, then by so doing, God precluded his own subsequent willful intervention into the universe. Hence, God may be omniscient, but is certainly impotent. Hence, to take the point a step further, God, because entirely impotent with respect to the universe, is dead with respect to the universe. Furthermore, although the individual will is entirely irrational (arbitrarily anarchistic), the laws of the universe are so fashioned that they succeed despite the anarchy of individuals. The contemporary Maoist doctrine follows: do whatever you please, what is going to occur will occur anyway. On this ground Maoists are secularized strict Lutherans. "The ordering of the world is governed by principles beyond your power to comprehend or change. What is of concern to you is merely your private exercise of your anarchistic impulses." This is also the doctrine of Bernard of Clairvaux. "You are only efficiently concerned with such matters, the matters of your personal, Hobbesian sub-universe. The fundamental error would be to follow Abelard, to attempt to be the helper of God in the ongoing work of creation. Abelardian elites, such elitists, are the only problem with which you have to deal."

The British purpose behind the neo-Kantian campaign in Germany was the destruction of science. The case of Georg Cantor is exemplary, as is. in a different form. the campaign of Ernst Mach and his allies against Max Planck, and the Copenhagen-centered assault on the leading scientific thinkers of the 1920s.

Cantor, the student of Weierstrass, inherited Weierstrass's conflict with the wretched, but influential, British-favored Kronecker. Cantor, sensible of the importance of his discoveries, was perplexed by the way — it seemed to him — that Kronecker was orchestrating a Europe-wide, successful effort to slander and isolate him. All Europe generally, was turned into' what was effectively a "controlled environment." such that even Cantor's supposed friends induced him to capitulate to Kronecker. Cantor broke under this orchestrated pressure, capitulated to Kronecker, and, as a result of this capitulation, went insane. A British operation.

From the foundation of the British Royal Society, its principal dedication was to the destruction of what it termed "continental science." This began — in that form — with Locke's coordination of attacks against Descartes (echoing Bacon's campaign against Bull and Gilbert), continued with Leibniz — next regarded as the chief danger — and continued through the nineteenth century. During the nineteenth century, Faraday was obsessed by this impulse. Maxwell was governed by it; (5) Pasteur was hated, harassed by British influences in France. Riemann's reputation as well as Cantor's was victimized by the British tools on the continent, just as British agent Niels Bohr played a prominent role in that filthy business during the present century...as a shocked Werner Heisenberg notes in respect to Bohr's atrocious antics toward Schroedinger.

Einstein, although predominantly a protege and prisoner of the British, had enough independence of character both to be shocked and to plainly discredit one of the architects of this evil, Bertrand Russell, in print, echoing similar views by the neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer.

Yet, although the British inner circles have known that they have been perpetrating knowingly monstrous frauds and crimes, in general they have also mystified themselves with respect to reason and scientific method. Newton's preoccupation with the most infantile sort of black magic, and his involvement in one of the nasty black religious cults developed within Royal Society circles, his insanity during the 1690s, involve the desperation of the members of the Royal Society on account of their inability to command the sort of creative powers manifest in those from whom they plagiarized and whom they defamed. It was the same with the wretched Aristotle.

The ruling British elite are like animals — not only in their morality, but in their outlook on knowledge. They are clever animals, who are masters of the wicked nature of their own species, and recognize ferally the distinctions of the hated human species. Nonetheless, obsessively dedicated to being such animals, they can not assimilate those qualities unique to true human beings.



THE PHYSICS OF THE MATTER



The "n" and "n+1" orderings of continua arise not only in the comparison of entropic doctrines of physics and chemistry with respect to living processes. They occur in the experimental domain of physics itself. They arise there in a twofold way: through the crucial fallacies intrinsic to accredited physics doctrines, and in certain key aspects of the experimental realm. Not accidentally, the two aspects often intersect: an "anomalous" experimental phenomenon often corresponds to the problem of an intrinsic fallacy of accredited physics.

The general problem has been outlined by Uwe Parpart (9) and matters of detail have been covered by a number of articles reported either in the journals of the Fusion Energy Foundation or by the science staff of U.S. Labor Party intelligence. (10) The problem of the electron (11) and the related problem of negentropic types of anomalous phenomena in plasma regimes locate the problem.

In certain types of phenomena occurring in plasma regimes, the process initially determined ostensibly according to ordinary, accredited physics doctrines, is transformed to produce self-sustaining or even reproductive phenomena, such as the vortices occurring in plasma-focus experiments or solitons. The latter phenomena "violate" the basic laws of physics as ordinarily defined, to the effect that the causal features of the process are subject to accountability, but the consequences of this causal connection are not determinable in terms of the initial conditions from which starting-point they are produced.

This intersects the fact that an electron-particle could not exist, according to prevailing doctrines of existing physics, if it were a particle, and yet in,many respects it behaves as if it were a particle. The crux of the difficulty is that the available gravitational forces to hold the particle together as a particle are miniscule with respect to the electromagnetic forces driving it apart. (12)

However, it has been shown that so-called elementary particles and negentropic sorts of plasma anomalies, such as vortices and solitons, are distinguished inclusively by the same Schroedinger-De Broglie properties. This indicates that the electron may be likened, at least conceptually, to the vortices in a plasma-focus experiment. In that case, the existence of the particle-form involves none of the paradoxes cited.

Therefore, we have a case of the "n continuum" being transformed into an "n+1 continuum." Moreover, the "n+1 continuum" for this case coincides on crucial points with the relevant biochemical evidence concerning the physics of living processes. If one discards the notion of chemical bonds associated with the paradoxical definition of the electron as a particle, and so forth, then chemical bonds must be reconceptualized accordingly. The altered conceptions indicated as appropriate are much improved in the sense of being more agreeable to the crucial biological evidence. Whether living processes are in the same "n+1 continuum" as the negentropic singularities of experimental physics is an open issue; perhaps we must go from an "n+1" to "n+2" to arrive at living processes.

What is conclusively illustrated by that sort of evidence (it is also demonstrated in other ways) is that the scalar notion of energy and of the characteristics of "n" continua traditional to modern physics, are useful but ultimately false. Insofar as we can treat the "n continuum" experimentally as if it were a continuum in those terms of conceptual reference — keeping away. in particular, from the singularities of the "very small" and the paradoxes of the "very large." the scalar notion of energy and the constant speed of .light are ostensibly adequate, experimental conceptions of physics. However, breaking outside those limiting circumstances for experimental invesigation, or attempting to complete the conceptual apparatus of physics for the universe in terms of the mathematical physics of the “n continuum,” science falls into contradictions and absurdities. This should cause no panic. Quite the contrary. All this we should have suspected. Science does not thus become less accessible to reason; it warns us that we must proceed now in accordance with what reason should have informed us beforehand.

The ostensible characteristic of a sub-continuum is a characteristic of that continuum in a conditional sense, but also merely a simplified aspect of the actual characteristic. The actual characteristic must be at the same time the characteristic of the universe described by the going over from an "n" into "n+1" into "n+2" and so forth continua, each continuum of which process is necessarily efficient with respect to its "predecessors." This characteristic is the transfinite for which the ostensible characteristics of each sub-continuum are enumerable predicates. Furthermore, this transinvariant cannot be linearizable, is not a constant, but is a constant principle of self-development. of true negentropy.

Abelard might, were he alive, put it this way. God, the prime existence, is a creative principle which creates Universes as the instruments for mediating the process of continued creation to ever higher states. Ibn Sina (Avicenna) has already defined this principle as the "necessary existent." Nicholas of Cusa defined it rigorously to the same effect as the "Non-Other."

Werner Heisenberg, among others, could not have erred as he did (in his adoption of the Copenhagen doctrine and postulating his notion of "indeterminacy") if he had grasped the epistemological significance of Max Planck's quantum-of-action. What Planck demonstrated, in effect, was that in the "very small" one encountered not some ultimate irreducible particle, but a singularity. The work of Schroedinger and De Broglie precisely intersected and advanced upon that feature of Planck's contribution. The cited paradox of the electron's existence as a supposed particle intersects Planck, Schroedinger, De Broglie et al. to the same effect. Indeed, during the middle 1950s De Broglie anticipated the existence of such phenomena as solitons and plasma vortices on related grounds. (13} If Heisenberg had been qualified in epistemology, rather than conditioned to the sort of neo-Kantian outlook he has reported and outlined, he "should have recognized that Riemann had already fully anticipated the necessary nature of physics to such purposes, and should have recognized, further that this entire problem was already posed by Leibniz's criticism of Descartes on "inertia," and otherwise anticipated in the broadest sense by Plato's Ionian and allied predecessors.

We focus on this point in two ways. First, we summarize the significance of the electron. Second, the connection between philosophy and physics.

The electron (and other "elementary" particles), being an existence determined in the "n+1 continuum," is efficient with respect to the "n continuum," but is not determinable as an existence within the latter. It is, therefore, a singularity within the latter. This state of affairs becomes paradoxical only if one clings to the mistaken notion that the scalar determination of energy in an "n continuum" characterized by a constant speed of light is an adequate representation of the universe. As long as that delusion is gripped, then the existence of the electron becomes a fact which threatens to demoralize science. Then. the doctrine of Heisenberg, or the more chaotic, despairing view of a von Weizacker tends to follow as a reflection of that demoralisation. If the evidence of the electron's existence as a singularity is accepted, the, opposite vantage-point, then the result is a mobilization of joyful efforts to discover the new, larger reality of the universe which has been proven available to us in this manner.

The problem of the well-tempered system is identical. Human beings are not vibrating rods, or anything else determinable according to the physics of an "n continuum." They are singularities of the "n+2" (for purposes of reference). They are efficient with respect to the n continuum. Their relations, insofar as they are mediated within the realm of the n continuum, have aspects which are partially determinable in terms of the physics of vibrating rods. However, music as human music, as the communication between the human singularities mediated in that way, is not determinable within the n continuum but only in the "n+2" continuum.

Physics can only progress as physics. It is the worst sort of absurdity to judge the fragments of Thales, Heraclitus, et al., from the standpoint of attempting to show how close or remote those minds were from the conceptions of modern physics. The issue of mind, fire (energy) and continuous substance (matter-field continuity) in Thales is not a matter of physics sub-categories as such. It is a matter of method. It is a question of how the categorical questions concerning the lawful ordering of the universe shall be posed to consciousness at the level of reason, for the purpose of rigorously ordering the production of hypotheses bearing upon the principles of universal lawfulness.

This knowledge concerning categorical questions of that sort is not physics in the sense we use the term "physics" ordinarily. It is a distinction between those directions of hypothesis-making which are useful, and those other directions which are methodologically manifestly absurd.

One cannot spin out concrete physics from a philosopher's chair. The relationship of philosophy to physics is, more narrowly, to discern which philosophical statements by physicists are' intrinsically, methodologically absurd. On the positive side, given adequate knowledge of physics to date, philosophy shows us how to select the experimental conception which will be most fruitful in gaining the next step of progress in mastery of the principles appropriate to physics. That, in general, is all that philosophy can accomplish with respect to positive sciences. That is all. but that is indispensable to the progress of science. That is the means by which the approach selected by the creative scientist is properly determined — just the approach, just the indispensable matter of approach.

The case of the electron paradox is appropriately illustrative. Confronted with a problem involving "elementary particle" experimentation, knowing that the electron doctrine of accredited physics is intrinsically absurd is representative of that kind of philosophical knowledge which guides the experimenter to the most fruitful experimental hypotheses. Thai illustrates the method to be applied in a more generalized way to order the progress of science in general.

Reason, which is definable in a consistent way in principle over the ages, is thus a kind of "constant." However, reason is not otherwise constant, not linearizable. As it assimilates to itself the fruits of its own accomplishments in mastering the lawful ordering of the universe, reason develops itself in its particular powers. In this process of self-development of reason, mediated through the practical scientific progress effected by efficient action of reason, reason parallels and intersects the fundamental, also self-developing lawful ordering of the universe.



THE HIERARCHY OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE



The discoveries in the domain of the physical sciences accomplished by the U.S. Labor Party and its collaborators, and reflected in part in this report, were accomplished in the manner indicated. Through assimilation of this method, as embodied for reference in the subject of political economy, recruits to the Labor Party and associated organizations were originally drawn from young persons representing the most promising minds of the late 1960s and early 1970s — and through their own individual and collaborative efforts in mastering physics, biology and so forth, some of these persons were able to produce original contributions to scientific progress in those fields. This represented, in some instances, important new discoveries by individuals or teams of individuals. In other instances, it represented the kind of discovery involved in appreciating the broader implications of the discoveries reported by others. Method, informed by existing scientific knowledge, acted, as the power of informed reason, to advance the body of knowledge by which it was informed.

Although those persons probably would have tended to succeed in their professions with distinction in any case, the overall quality of distinctions associated with the U.S. Labor Party's work has been added to their powers, directly or indirectly as a benefit contributed by this writer's work of the 1950s.

The kernel of this writer's distinctive, original contributions to human knowledge is the successful application, beginning in the early 1950s, of the cited Riemann and Cantor conceptions to solving the basic errors in Karl Marx's three-volume Capital. This effort was "energized" by a youthful adoption of the methodological outlook of Gottfried Leibniz — in which connection Leibniz's Monadology was outstanding. Any body of knowledge which erred from the standpoint of that methodological outlook was viewed as intrinsically in error, and the existence of such error became then a source of intellectual "tension," impelling the writer to reject the indicated doctrines as given, and, if the matter involved were important, to seek a remedy agreeable to appropriate method.

The fundamental error of Marx's Capital, for purposes of reference, is this. Although Marx's own Neoplatonic outlook led him to correct systematic conclusions concerning the essential "internal contradiction" of capitalist accumulation as a whole, in all Marx's efforts to develop a set of linear equations for "extended reproduction" from the set of linear equations for "simple reproduction," he failed — and necessarily so. "Simple reproduction" is an arbitrary, heuristic construct, an effort to imagine the simplest case in which a capitalist economy perpetuates itself on the same level of technology in the same extent. Marx attempted to move to the case of "extended reproduction," in first approximation, without considering the effects of technological progress, but only extension in scale (through investment of portions of surplus value in additional plant, equipment, materials, employment of productive labor, and so forth). Consequently, on this side of his efforts, Marx's work ends up in the wretched confusion typified by the material which Marx's editor, Friedrich Engels, assembled as the concluding chapter of Capital, Volume II. For related reasons, all efforts of Marxologists to explicate the "internal contradictions" of capitalist accumulation in terms of systems of equations for "extended reproduction" become increasingly absurd as the profession of convergence upon a solution within Marx's terms is more energetically advanced.

This is not the only political-economic error in Marx's work. As we have noted elsewhere, although the kernel of Marx's method was essentially a reconstitution of the Neoplatonic dialectical method of Leibniz et al., somewhat better informed in aspects than Leibniz, the elaboration of Marx's work was contained within his credulous acceptance of a prevailing historical mythology, essentially an acceptance of the British falsification of history. This infectious blunder affects many aspects of Marx's work. It affects his political-economic work in the respect that in his elaboration of the internal order of capitalist accumulation processes, he adopted the fictitious, British model of "industrial capitalist development" as the empirical case for which competent theory must account. This effort to adapt his elaboration of political-economic theory to the fictitious British model is the chief determinant of the major errors in Marx's work on that subject.

The results of this writer's work of the 1950s, which included an emphasis on the actuality of American industrial reality, a quality almost entirely lacking in Marx's work, led to a new, • independent political-economic theory, which in no way depended upon the presumed authority of elements of Marx's own work, although it benefited most substantially from knowledge of the work of Marx. This new economic-theoretical method was crucially proven by testing of hypotheses against emerging developments of the 1950s and 1960s, establishing the newly developed theoretical economics as uniquely competent in contrast to all extant competing theories, Marx's included. (14)

The essential feature of this economic doctrine was that the principle of technological progress was the primary determinant of economic processes, rather than an "added-in" feature, as Marx's approach had attempted erroneously to deal with the matter.

This effort not only circumscribed the problems of method generally, but was associated with an intensive study of history, both history as such and archeological history, to the purpose of discovering empirical indicators of the characteristics of precapitalist economies, and the characteristic philosophical outlooks of precapitalist societies. The results of this were coherently embodied in the instructional program on which the predecessor organization of the U.S. Labor Party was established as an organization ex novo (as opposed to an organization assembled from indoctrinated elements of previously existing organizations, etc.).

Over the years, the question often arose, what is the basis in authority for imposing certain criteria of hypothesis upon work in the physical sciences. To this question, the consistent answer given was, and rightly so. the proof of that method in political economy. The fact that the order of the universe appropriate to the above-indicated features of the physics of Riemann has been crucially proven once in the domain of political economy proves also that the entire universe is ordered according to such principles. Political economy, viewed and developed in that way, is the highest form of science, the crucial source of authority for scientific knowledge in all domains.

The crucial experiment upon which human knowledge is essentially dependent is human existence itself.{15) Since all particular knowledge is ultimately and necessarily superseded, no form of knowledge as such (understanding) can embody proof of the validity of scientific knowledge in a lasting way. What is proven by human existence is the efficiency of creative reason in ordering the progress of knowledge to the effect of maintaining and advancing the human specie’s ecological population-potential. It is as political economy situates the direct connection between progress of knowledge and changes in the ecological population-potential of human practice based on advancing knowledge, that the essential connection is made, and uniquely so. It could not be otherwise It is to Karl Marx's credit that he attempted to found his efforts on realizing that perception. His "Theses on Feuerbach" and the first section, "Feuerbach," of The German Ideology, are most notable to this effect. Also notable is the recurrence of that Neoplatonic notion as the conception of "Freedom-Necessity" in Capital III, Sec. 7. Marx's failure was broadly his effort to elaborate his work within British historical mythologies, and to close himself off from the "inner secrets" of the elite by his foolish "materialist" emphasis respecting the determination of ideas. Both these principal errors were necessarily interdependent.



HISTORIOGRAPHICAL METHOD



History is to be understood as the subjective connection between "objective" events and conditions perceived, as they are "subjectively" perceived, and the "objective" consequences of the human actions (or acts of omission) taken in consequence of such perception. The crucial subject-matter is not merely that "subjective" element itself, but the processes which determine the character and development of that "subjective" element.

The accomplished historian must be both a person who has mastered that approach in essentials, and also a person who has progressed further, to the competence to adduce the "subjective" element of history from the patterns of "objective" behavior which the "subjective" clement has left as its spoor.

The case of the militia illustrates the problems of the latter work.

Putting the case of the Roman republic to one side for a moment, the most effective form of warfare is the mobilization of the resources of a state in the form of a well-trained militia. This depends, in turn, upon the constitution of the state in such forms that the general population can be "trusted" by the rulers as the armed population — trained in arms, with arms in hand when called. An oppressing ruler dare not persist in this practice, but prefers either special armed bodies of volunteer professionals or mercenary forces. His military policy centers as much on subjugating the population as contending against foreign adversaries;

The case is not cut and dried. There are exceptions of importance, and of some frequency of recurrence. Even so, the uses of the militia versus more limited or mercenary armed forces have clear, if partial implications concerning the political character of the state and the mentality of the state. The case of the mercenary force is virtually conclusive.

Rome has a double implication.

The fact that the affairs of the Roman republic were ordered from an early time, according to available knowledge, by the cult of Apollo, is of utmost importance in showing that accredited historiography on this subject is grossly flawed. The character of evolving Roman law, also consistent with the antihumanist doctrines of politics and law of the Peripatetics, is also relevant. Rome's successes, including its conquests of its Italian and Etruscan neighbors, have a different moral quality than Roman writers and their admirers would have us believe.

Nonetheless, the Roman policy of the militia was an integral feature of Roman successes overall. At the point that Roman moral and economic decay progressed to the point the militia basis evaporated, beginning the point that Rome could no Songer teed itself except by looting foreign nations, the Roman Empire was doomed.

Let there be no foolish assumption that perhaps this report exaggerates the folly of most existing appreciations of the history of the Roman republic. According to Livy and other sources, it was the cult of Apollo which governed Roman policy with the same sorts of tricks the cult employed during other regions at that period. Moreover, it is repeatedly noted that the ' loot taken in war was shared generously with the cult of Apollo. The role of the cult of Apollo in bringing the Roman legions to Greece, the cult's sponsorship of Julius Caesar of the Marian faction, using the methods of the Phrygian cult of Dionysus, and the Stoic cult, are also indicative. Rome was not some out-of-the-way development of the republican period, but during much of that period, at least, was a part of the relatively global apparatus being deployed by the cult at Delphi and by way of Ptolemaic Egypt.

The evidence of technological and scientific progress is another crucial objective fact of archeology. The existence of a flourishing city-state of large population is already an indication of the city-builders' faction and outlook. The rate of progress, and the quality of existence of various strata of the population, as well as their occupations, is similarly indicative.

The primary distinction to be made is whether the state was dominated by city-builders' forces, the oligarchical faction, or by a struggle between the two forces. Objective features of the archeological evidence, especially those bearing on rates and directions of developments, are crucial. These indications inform us, to a corresponding degree of accuracy, of the mentality of the leading forces of that state. We can presently correlate literary and archeological records adequately back to the eighth century BC to be able to go back at least two millennia earlier with principally archeological evidence in hand, to "reconstruct" essential features of the "subjective" element — the element decisive to historiography.

We know, both from history and modern experience, how the two, primary opposing policies are determined. The Hobbesian view and its correlatives are associated with the rule of heteronomic impulses, which tend to be strengthened by "entropic" developments in culture and political-economy. The humanist outlook is always originated through great intellects, an influential political and scientific intelligentsia, in whole sweeps of cultural progress usually associated with the most prominent influence of a single creative mind. These humanist influences become hegemonic through successful technological progress, which creates the conditions under which the ordinary individual of urban-centered culture values others and himself or herself in terms of the practical importance society attributes to the increased power of individuals for discovery, transmission and applications of technological and related advances in knowledge.

What defeats the human race repeatedly is "practical politics." The adaptation of policies of factions to prevailing mythologies and prejudices creates advantages for the enemies of humanity, because human progress occurs only through the hubristic intellectual leadership and action of a political intelligentsia — an elite! — to effects which are feasible but nonetheless contrary to traditional practice and prevailing prejudices concerning "practicality."

The history of man and of ideas is not determined by objective circumstances as such, but subjectively, by the action of creative powers of reason, informed by existing knowledge and with means available, to transform the objective domain according to directions specified by creative reason. Objective circumstances determine the potentialities of specific actions (and associated kinds of ideas) which reason may employ.

The history of mankind, those circumstantial aspects understood, is the history of reason's struggle against the oligarchical principle of unreason. Not to be a Neoplatonic humanist today is to be morally not a member of the human species.



NOTES



FOREWORD

1. Cf. Christopher White on the significance of the families, “The Noble Family," Campaigner Special Report No. 11, New York, 1978.

2. The majority of the following concerning Greek history is based upon or corroborated by the work of a task force coordinated by Criton Zoakos, plus work coordinated on behalf of the Wiesbaden Academy by George Gregory III.



3. Cf. Paul Arnest, "From Babylon to Jerusalem: The Genesis of the Old Testament," Campaigner, Vol. X, No. 4, Fall 1977, pp. 31-64.



4. Criton Zoakos.



THE LEGACY OF ARISTOTLE

1.Criton Zoakos, "Aristotle and the Craft of Intelligence." New Solidarity, Vol. VIII, Nos. 99. 100 (Feb. 24 and 28, 1978). See the policy statement authored by Persian-Macedonian agent Isocrates, of the Athenian school of rhetoric. The record of the "check stubs" of payments to agent Demosthenes by the Persian-Macedonian forces still exists.



2. Criton Zoakos, "Aristotle and the Craft of Intelligence."



3. Criton Zoakos et al. Also (cf. Gregory, "Aristotle and the Cult of Dionysus," [Unpublished: Wiesbaden, 1978]) the role of Alcibiades in pushing the Magna Grecia campaign in the form and at the time most expedient for the troubled Persians.



4. Gregory, "Aristotle and the Cult of Dionysus."



5. Cf. Paul Arnest, "From Babylon to Jerusalem," p. 64.



6. Livy is the standard source on this. See the commentaries on Livy by Machiavelli. On the role of the Ptolemies in the Romans' campaign against Greece, see Gregory.



7. Cf. Linda Frommer, "How Pitt's Jacobinism Wrecked the French Revolution," New Solidarity, Vol. VIII, No. 28 (June 3, 1977) and Vol. VIII, No. 29 (June 7, 1977) and David Goldman,"How the City of London Got Through the Revolutionary War Crisis," New Solidarity, Vol. VIII, No. 78 (Dec. 2, 1977) and Vol. VIII, No. 79 (Dec. 6, 1977) on the French Revolution. Lord Shelburne, allied to the Barings, and the British East India Company, used the circumstances of the 1783 Treaty of Paris to bring his circles into a dominant position within the British monarchy, putting William Pitt the Younger forward as the most visible accomplice of his circles. Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, the Mills, Thomas Malthus, (later) David Ricardo, and others were tools of this Shelburne-centered reorganization of British intelligence. This was the predecessor phase for the later reorganization toward the close of the nineteenth century, in which the emergence of the Fabian Society and Lord Milner's networks were the most prominent feature — including the Rhodes Scholarship project for aiding the subverting of the United States by the British intelligence services. Necker, who wrecked the French credit from within — much like W. Michael Blumenthal and James R. Schlesinger wrecked the dollar for the British during 1977-78. was a part of the Geneva-centered circles of British intelligence. The Duke of Orleans was a British agent to the end. Danton and Marat were British-trained and British-coordinated agents-provocateurs, deployed from London to organize the Jacobin Terror. Robespierre was a protege and dupe of Necker's circles. And, so on and so forth.



8. Criton Zoakos, "Aristotle and the Craft of Intelligence."



9. On the Royal Society and Newton, cf. Carol White, "The Royal Society," Fusion, Vol. I, Nos. 3-4, Dec.-Jan. 1977-1978, pp. 44-53.



10. Criton Zoakos, "Aristotle and the Craft of Intelligence."



11. Criton Zoakos and Erini Levedi, "The Paleologue Dynasty as Instruments of the Hohenstaufen Grand Design" (Unpublished: New York, 1978). The Paleologues developed a humanist faction in Russia, reflecting the conceptions of statecraft associated with Georgios Gemistos Plethon. Ivan Ill's policies were derived from this work, as was the later campaign against the Aristotelian-oligarchical faction (e.g., the Boyars) by Ivan IV ("The Awesome").



12. Konstantin George, "The U.S.-Russian Entente That Saved the Union," to be published in The Campaigner, Vol. XI, No. 6 (July 1978).



13. Cf. Alien Salisbury, The Civil War and the American System (New York: Campaigner Publications, Inc., 1978).



14. Ibid. See also. The Political Economy of the American Revolution (New York: Campaigner Publications, Inc., (1977), passim.



15. Criton Zoakos, "Aristotle and the Craft of Intelligence."



16. Helga Zepp, Unpublished paper: Wiesbaden, 1978.



17. The characterization of the Roman Empire as economically fascist is no hyperbole. The fascism associated with Mussolini and Nazism are only varieties of states based upon Aristotelian policies of genocidal fiscal austerity in behalf of monetarist debt pyramids and in opposition to technologically vectored solutions to "depressions." It is significant that the fascist movements of Italy and Weimar Germany were products of the work of British intelligence networks, and that both Mussolini and Hitler were put in power on directives from London. Turning attention from the monetarist policies which essentially characterized Mussolini's and Hitler's policies, and focusing on the kind of social base created to support such a state machine, the "leftism" of Mussolini's followers and of most of the Nazis' SA base not accidentally compares in essentials with the Maoism and "environmentalism" of present-day North America and Western Europe. The sociology of those base forces is the elaboration of the doctrines of the Phrygian cult of Dionysus. To see Julius Caesar as a fascist, and to see his relationship to his lumpen social base in Rome in those terms, is not only admissible, but is the only efficient conceptual approach to understanding Caesar and the policies and unfolding history of the Roman Empire.



18. Information based on unpublished studies by Costas Kalimtgis, Steven Douglas, and others.



19. Humanist Perspective on Medieval Islam" (Unpublished: New York, 1978).



20. Kalimtgis, Douglas, et al.



21. Criton Zoakos, "The Order of the Assassins," Lecture: Chicago. April 17, 1978.



22. Ibid.



23. Criton Zoakos, "Ibn Sina and the Dawn of the Humanist Heritage," The Campaigner, Vol. X, No. 3 (July-August, 1977) pp. 10-43.



24. Zoakos and Levedi, "The Paleologue Dynasty."



25. Ibid.



26. Ibid. Zoakos secured much of this on the Byzantine phase of the matter through the works of Greek historians of the 1920s. These sources documented facts contrary to the mistaken views of the usual secondary sources concerning the role of Plethon in connection with the fifteenth century ecumenical negotiations.



27. This summary of the events surrounding Bruno is based in large part on the coordinated efforts of a number of researchers in Europe and North America. Work on the Ismailis by Criton Zoakos, Helga Zepp, Judith Wyer and others. Work on the Tudor period coordinated by Christopher White. Work on Bruno by specialists on both continents, work on Nicholas of Cusa by Helga Zapp and others. Work on Leibniz by Uwe Parpart, Carol White, and others. A short biography of Bruno is given by Nora Hammerman in her preface to the first English translation of Bruno's dialogue, "The Cabala of the Winged Horse, with the Addition of the Cyllenian Ass," in The Campaigner, Vol. XI, No. 2 (March 1978).



28. Bruno's short dramatic works provide a key .to the work of Christopher Marlowe and others. Christopher White has been able to demonstrate the secrets of Elizabethan drama by a closely analyzed treatment of the immediate references embodied in Shakespeare's Hamlet. See Christopher White, "Shakespeare's Revenge,1J New Solidarity, Vol. IX, Nos. 3, 4, 5, 9, 11, March 10, 14, 17, 31 and April 7, 1978.



29.Christopher White, et al.



II. THE KEY TO HISTORY

1. Alien Salisbury.



2. Cf. Dr. Richard Pollak, "Evolution — Beyond Darwin and Mendel." Fusion Energy Foundation Newsletter, Vol. II, No. 4 (May 1977), pp. 42-53.



3. Cf. Dr. Ned Rosinsky, "Drosophila Embryology — The Dynamics of Evolution," Fusion Energy Foundation Newsletter, Vol. II, No. 4 (May 1977), pp. 54-59.



4. Bertrand Russell, notably, threw himself into a sort of psychedelic literary fit on this point.



5. Criton Zoakos has employed Greek-language sources to the effect of more than corroborating this writer's established judgment concerning the lonians.



6. The research and related work on this matter has been developed in part by Anno Hellenbroich and others, and by a New York-centered group of collaborators including Dr. Peter Wyer, Vivian Freyre, Katharine Burdman. On Bacon and Bull, see P. Wyer and M. Stahlman, "Rock Music and the Mass Marketing of Terrorism," New Solidarity, Vol. VIII, No. 85 (Dec. 30, 1977). See also, Anno Hellenbroich, "Think Like Beethoven," The Campaigner, Vol. XI, No. 1 (February 1978), pp. 46-61; and K. Burdman, "The Case ofJ.S. Bach," New Solidarity, Vol. VIII, No. 75 (Nov. 18, 1977).



7. Felix Mendelssohn is usually credited, wrongly, with "resurrecting" Bach's music. Rather, the British elected to abandon their near-century efforts to suppress Bach through Mendelssohn's resurrecting the "simpler" Bach as part of his effort to direct music toward romanticism, away from the "complicated" music of Beethoven. Wagner's contribution to this wickedness was his effort to edit features of Beethoven's works and to poison the musicological doctrine respecting their performance. Both were working for the antihumanist Black Guelph networks, and doing so as a matter of political consciousness.



8. Cf. Carol White, Energy Potential (New York: Campaigner Publications, Inc., 1978), passim.



9. Uwe Parpart, "The Concept of the Transfinite," The Campaigner, Vol. IX, Nos. 1-2, (January-February 1976), pp. 6-66.



10. Cf. Dr. Steven Bardwell's series on the implications of nonlinear processes in controlled plasmas: "Fusion Plasma, An Overview of the Research," Fusion Energy Foundation Newsletter, Vol. II, No. 1 (July-August 1976), pp. 21-23; "The History of the Theory and Observation of Ordered Phenomena in Magnetized Plasmas," FEF Newsletter, Vol. II, No. 2 (September 1976), pp. 19-31; "The Implications of Nonlinearity," FEF Newsletter, Vol. II, No. 3 (March 1977), pp. 4-16; "Geometry and Causality," Fusion, Vol. I, No. 7 (June 1978). See also Dr. Morris Levitt, "Linearity and Entropy: Ludwig Boltzmann and the Second Law of Thermodynamics," FEF Newsletter, Vol. II, No. 2 (September 1976), pp. 3-18.



11. The problem was developed primarily by Dr. W. Bostick, in the form it was attacked by him and also by members of the U.S. Labor Party's science staff. Cf. Dr. Winston H. Bostick, "The Pinch Effect Revisited," International Journal of Fusion Energy, Vol. I, No. 1 (March 1977).



12. Bostick et al. proposed the effort to apply the lessons of plasma-vortex physics to the electron, etc.



13. Louis De Broglie, Une tentative d'interpretation causale et non lineaire de la mecanique ondulatoire, (Paris: Gauthier Villars, 1956), chapter 18. This information was communicated to Uwe Parpart by Georges Lochak, director of La Fondation Louis De Broglie in Paris.



14. Lyn Marcus (Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.), Dialectical Economics (Lexington, Mass.: 'D.C. Heath, 1975). This textbook embodies the lectures given as a one-semester. course beginning Spring 1966, at various locations.



15. This point is embodied as the kernel-conception of Karl Marx's accomplishments. Cf. The German Ideology, §1: "Feuerbach."





"Be Careful, very Careful as to where you receive your information... Get your information only from trusted sources!!" - Stalin

The History of Black Magic and Magicians in the World –

ELITE POLICIES AND TECHNIQUES - HOW VENICE AFTER THE DEFEAT OF CAMBRAI IN 1500 DECIDED TO MOVE TO LONDON AND REIGN OVER EUROPE

CATHOLICISM COUNTERED BY PROTESTANT RELIGION CREATED BY VENETIAN AGENT LUTHER, AND ZORZI - CARDINAL CONTARINI. OTHER RELIGIONS ALCHEMY, HERMETIC ART AND MASONRY CREATED BY VENETIAN AGENT ORTES. NETHERLANDS AND ENGLAND TAKEN OVER BY VENETIAN ELITE TO PRESENT DAY.

THIS IS THE SECRET HISTORY

Preface -- by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
January 9, 1993

Introduction

The evaluation of the respective roles of the Protestant and Catholic churches, in respect to the sixteenth-century schisms between Reformation and Counter Reformation, requires a few points of emphasis for clarity.

In point of fact, as we know in the case of the English established church, currents within that English established church did retain crucial, traditional elements of Christian belief, despite the fact that the schism of Henry VIII was completely a Venetian-orchestrated event, a playing upon the susceptibilities of a monarch who was, to all intents and purposes, clinically insane. [fn1]

The cases of the Calvinists and Lutherans is more complex. Let us turn to the case of Luther first, and then consider the Counter Reformation and the Council of Trent itself.

Essentially, whatever Luther may have believed otherwise, and whatever the Lutheran Church may have been otherwise, the fact is, that the essential issue of controversy over Lutheran doctrine involved in the schism, places Luther not only in mere opposition to Catholicism, but in opposition to the most fundamental principle of Christianity: such that, if one were to assume Luther's stated doctrine to be the true belief of Luther himself, rather than probably a factional sophistry, one would have to conclude that Luther were not a Christian. It is not a question of division of opinion, or a division of anything, in the ordinary sense; but Luther's constructed rationalization of his schismatic act is, in its ostensible form, a rejection of Christianity in its entirety.

The issue is as follows:

The essence of Christianity, and of Mosaic Judaism, is identified historically first, by Philo Judaeus in his commentary on the first chapter of Genesis, that is, the account of Creation given by Moses. The point to be emphasized, is that man is defined in the image of God, Imago Viva Dei: not by virtue of any outward physical attributes of form, but rather by the fact that man, unlike all animals, contains that spark of creativity which places the human species apart from and above the animals in general. That spark is the crucial thing.

This view of man, which is emphasized for Christianity by God become man in the form of Christ, defines all human beings as potentially reconciled with God, because of that within them, that divine spark, which is in the image of God.

Thus, the notion of any form of elect, or a preselection by grace, except by a merit of choice by the individual who is self-selected, is an abomination. It is an abomination, because it denies the fundamental principle of Mosaic Judaism and Christianity, the species of individual man in the image of God, by virtue of man's creative mental powers.

By creative mental powers, we mean to include the notions of agapë or caritas; formally, we signify those powers by which man changes human society's behavior through progress in scientific and technological progress. This does not mean that this exercise of creative powers is limited to that. It means, that without that included manifestation, the agapic function of the creative powers of man are certainly not realized, the self-development of man in the image of God, is not realized.

This is the point on which all these issues hang. It is a fact--forget the formalities of other kinds of argument--that, if one believes in an Aristotelian deductive system, then, for that person, as Philo indicated, God does not exist, and certainly God in the image of man does not exist. Thus, we have all the problems concerning the Averroists and the Aristotelians and the definition of the soul, including, of course, the case of the influential Pompanazzi.

All of this hangs on the one point: That man is in the image of God by virtue of his agapic creative powers, and not by virtue of anything else.




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The Myth of Protestantism

The popular falsehood, the myth which is pushed by the British Fabians and similar types, is that the rise of Protestantism was based and impelled by the rise of the modern nation-state. That myth is pure bunk, despite the fact that it is heavily documented to be bunk.
The concept of the modern nation-state was first defined as we have defined it many times, in terms of the work of Dante Alighieri, particularly in the issues pertaining to De Monarchia. The resolution of the idea of the state, was clarified as the doctrine by Nicolaus of Cusa, over the course of his work, initially in his major work of 1431, Concordantia Catholica which is written in the conciliar context, but nonetheless the argument there bears out, even though Cusa himself modified his sense of what the application of that meant in the process of writing his Concordantia.

So the idea of the modern nation-state, under a Concordantia Catholica of sovereign nation-states, was established by the Catholic Church in the middle of the fifteenth century. Thus, it is absolutely absurd to suggest that later, in the early part to middle of the sixteenth century, that this issue became the crux of division between the Catholic Church and the emerging nation-states. That sophist explanation of Protestantism is absolute nonsense, and there is obviously no ground on which to perpetuate that sophist explanation of Protestantism.

The problem is essentially the problem of Banker Vampire Venice, as documented below. The essential evidence, as opposed to the Venetian bought apologetics written from the North later on, is, that, as Paolo Sarpi's crowd emphasizes, that the Protestant formations in the North, were the basis for the casa nuovi, the group which became the modern imperialist group, the descendents of the Drug running, Slave trading British East India Company, later the modern British Anglo-Dutch imperialist group. And, that the other part of the Venetian oligarchical faction remained with its emphasis upon penetrating and corrupting the Catholic South.

Here is where the problem has arisen, addressed below.

There is no doubt, except to people who refuse to face facts, that the Protestant political formation in the North, was essentially, relative to Christianity, something rather evil, which moved men and women in society generally away from Christianity. This schism was the political basis for the emergence of the Enlightenment, which was the evil which threatened to destroy Europe from the inside.

But the other side of the matter, the casa vecchi, the Southern part of the usurious oligarchy, which professed to ally itself with the Counter Reformation, was essentially just as evil as that which went North--in the sense that what it did, is to focus on destroying the reconstituted church of the middle of the fifteenth century. The Reformation and Counter Reformation were both an attempt to eradicate the church associated with Nicolaus of Cusa and to eradicate Cusa's influence specifically.

The unfortunate thing has been that (putative) modern historians and other related commentators, have written on this subject from the standpoint of adhering to and apologizing for one faction or the other, Reformation or Counter Reformation as defined in the simplest terms, and have refused to see the matter from a truthful standpoint, from the standpoint of imago viva Dei and its implications, and to see it from the practical historical standpoint of the fifteenth-century reemergence of the church, in the context of the Council of Florence from the fourteenth-century Dark Age.



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The Crucial Issue

Now, focus more on the crucial issue. The key to understanding the religious schisms and wars of sixteenth-century Europe, is irreconcilable opposition by Venice and Genoa's usurers to that principled conception of imago Dei which is the common feature of Philo's Mosaic Judaism and of Christianity. On account of this central issue, the oligarchy of Banker usury-practicing families hated that Christian church which this oligarchy sought then, and still today, to divide and conquer. These usurers and slave-traders hated most fiercely the 1439-1440 Council of Florence, which had reunited the church temporarily. They hated in the highest degree that Cardinal Nicolaus of Cusa who had played a crucial role in bringing about that reunification, and who was, not incidentally, also the Platonist founder of modern physical science.

The reason for this usurer's murderous hatred against the church and against Cusa is elementary.

The principle of imago Dei, as Cusa defined it, or, Philo of Alexandria nearly 1,500 years earlier, signifies that there exists but one, indivisible human race, such that every individual member of humanity is born with an innate distinction which sets all mankind apart from, and above the beasts. This quality, which casts the individual person in the image of God, is that divine spark of potential for developing the agapic power of true creative reason. The wisdom to know that we only have the free will only to do the right thing. This creativity, and nothing else, is the image of God in man.

This agapic creative reason is the power to create illustrated by the initial discovery, or fresh rediscovery of a valid, axiomatic-like principle of nature. This point is treated at length in sundry published locations, and so need not be redeveloped here. It is that quality of creative reason which renders each human life sacred, and defines all persons as born in the image of God, as imago viva Dei.

This principle of the first Mosaic Book of Genesis defines as a most horrid abomination the holding of any person in chattel slavery or any like condition of oppression. For related reasons, the practice of usury is among the most monstrous of all crimes against humanity. Venice's ruling oligarchy owed the basis for its wealth and international power chiefly to usury, but also to Venice's leading position in the Mediterranean slave-trade. Hence, the usury-practicing oligarchy, then, or, now, like the evil Confederacy of President Lincoln's adversaries, continues to be the mortal enemy of Christianity.

Usury is defined as private banks owned by families of Vampire Bankers. Families centuries, thousands of years old who vampirise through rates of interest of 20% and above. All banks are now private and belong to these families - even the national banks. Some people suggest that the American system of Franklin was based upon government created credit, for industry and other good things based upon that plenty, based upon 1% per annum rates of interest, to allow such good things to thrive, rather than be destroyed through Vampire Usury.

In Mediterranean history, since the time of Plato, Plato's deadly adversary Aristotle has been used as the leading apologist for slavery and usury, and as the official philosopher of those who denied the existence and free choice of the individual human soul. Aristotle was employed as a secret agent of the Babylonian oligarchs. Like the assassin James Bond he murdered and poisoned his masters enemies, such as Alexander the Great who was a student of the Platonic city builders, opposed to the Oligarchs.

The importance of Aristotle in service to the enemies of Mosaic Judaism and Christianity is located in Aristotle's deductive system of formal argument. In Aristotle's essentially nominalist system of deductive sophistries, the individual soul cannot exist except as something arbitrary deus ex machina. Aristotle's formalist method stultifies science, and eliminates the notion of imago Dei. For such and related reasons, the usurious oligarchy has adopted Aristotle as its official court philosopher.

The notion that God chooses arbitrarily to bestow the grace of election (of those to be saved) upon some members of society, is the most notable way in which these Venetian-sponsored sectarians rejected the principle of imago Dei, and allowed usury and chattel slavery in their system.

The schismatic quarrel of the sixteenth century is a reflection of about 2,600 years of European civilization to date, a continuation of the conflict between the evil, oligarchical model of slave society, Lycurgus's Sparta, and the contrasting overthrow of usury by the great Solon of Athens. Thus, are the issues of Christianity and law of nations joined still today.

If the person is imago Dei, then the welfare and creative self-development of all persons, and of all family households which give birth and nurture to new persons, are the standard of performance by which nations and laws as well as churches are to be judged.




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Notes
In fact, there are strong indications, that the entire family was clinically insane. I'm not suggesting any necessary hereditary reason for this, it probably was simply that they were all raised in the same, continuing, extended family household, which probably was not good for their mental health. Return to text

Writing in his 1540s Harmonice Mundi, the Venetian Francesco Giorgi (Szorzi) attacked Nicolaus of Cusa's De Docta Ignorantia as follows: ``Those who retreat from the direct knowledge of the universe will retreat into the Docta Ignorantia'' (as quoted in Francis A. Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979). Return to text.

Venice: The Methodology of Evil -- Part II
by Donald Phau
Printed in The American Almanac, May 23, 1994.

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End of Page Venice -- The Oligarchical System Site Map Overview Page

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Introduction
In the first part of this series, we introduced the reader to the Italian city-state of Venice, also called the Serenissima or ``most serene republic.'' This small city on the Adriatic Sea was, for over 600 years a major European empire. We learned how its methodology of evil, practiced by its ambassadors throughout the world, targeted, profiled, and corrupted the kings and the courts of Europe. We saw that an alliance of European nations with the Vatican wiped out Venice's empire between 1509-1513. Venice responded and rebuilt, by turning nation against nation through the perfected use of the art of ``divide and conquer.''
In this second part we hope to give the reader an understanding of how the Serenissima's methodology of evil sought to reach into and steal mankind's very soul. We will see how Venice instigated the religious wars of Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, killing millions and devastating nations.

As in Part I of this series, we will make extensive use of the contemporary reports written by the ambassadors of Venice, using their own words to illustrate one point: Venice's strategy was to never take sides, especially in the very battles they provoked. In the wars between Catholics and Protestants, Venice's goal was to turn the victims of both sides into a mindless, pagan mob. Such a mob could then be easily used as a battering ram against the institutions of Venice's enemies. Reflecting this knowledge are the words of one Venetian ambassador, who, commenting on the spread of Protestantism, said that ``as a result, doubts and uncertainties arise in men's minds; they don't know which is the true faith, and, not satisfied with any of them, they end up believing in none.''

Alarmed by Venice's near-annihilation by the League of Cambrai, a faction of the Venetian nobility decided to regroup, and to formulate a new war strategy. A network was formed, consisting of young nobles from the University of Padua, and another group which had decided to become Camaldolese monks, an order of the Benedictines. Together, these cultural warriors laid the ideological groundwork for radical Protestantism as the new weapon of religious warfare.

The Vatican and the Catholic Church, the one institution which could unite the Christian nations of Europe, was especially targeted by Venice. The strategy was twofold: to penetrate and corrupt the Church itself, while simultaneously creating a mass anti-Catholic movement to destroy the Church from the outside. Venice, of course, would be on both sides.

Venice's targeting of the Roman Catholic Church was on the level of epistemological warfare. Venice's real enemy was the concept that man is made in the image of God, and is therefore endowed by the Creator with a spark of divinity which separates men from the beasts. The Church's responsibility was to protect this spark given to man. Venice's strategy was to snuff out this spark forever or, like the Devil in Christopher Marlowe's play The Tragical Historie of the Life and Death of Dr. Faustus, to steal man's soul. Once this was accomplished, the Vatican would be just one more tool in Venice's policy of divide and conquer.



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Enter the Devil...
Venice's key agent in its new strategy was the Venetian nobleman Gasparo Contarini. Let's take a quick trip back in time to learn more.
The year is 1501 and we are sitting in a gondola on one of Venice's canals. We watch, as Gasparo Contarini, his belongings packed, leaves his palace for the day's trip to Padua. Gasparo is 18 years old and he is going to complete his education at the University of Padua.

All the noble families of Venice had been sending their brightest sons to Padua for many years. Gasparo's brothers had entered business or were managing the family's extensive land holdings. But he was being prepared for other things. The family itself dated its ancestors to the Roman tribunes of the fifth century. Throughout Venice's history, the Contarinis would give the city of Venice eight doges and 22 bishops.

Venice by this time had grown from a city of 65,000 people a century earlier to an empire of millions. But as Gasparo took the road to Padua, Venice was on the decline and the power of Spain, England, and France was growing. The discovery of the trade route around the Cape of Good Hope of Africa in 1486, 15 years earlier, had already shifted trade centers to the northern cities of Europe. Venice's role as the crossroads between East and West was being eclipsed.

At Padua, Contarini threw himself into his studies, especially of Aristotle. Four years before his arrival, the Venetian Senate had voted up funding for the first chair dedicated to the study of Aristotle, and had secured a renowned Greek scholar for the position. Gasparo's intensive study of Aristotle prompted a friend to say that, ``hypothetically,'' if all of Aristotle's works were lost, Contarini knew them so well he would be able to write them down from memory.

At Padua, Contarini embarked on a philosophic investigation which brought him in contact with the works of Pietro Pomponazzi. Pomponazzi's questioning of the immortality of the soul had caused a furor in the Catholic Church. A decade later, in 1514, the Lateran Council of the Church had declared such writings heretical. Nevertheless, two years later, in 1516, Pomponazzi would publish his famous work, On the Immortality of the Soul, dedicated to a member of the Contarini family. Gasparo and Pomponazzi would maintain an extensive correspondence, and jointly define the theological basis for the Enlightment and Protestantism.

Pomponazzi exerted tremendous influence over his student, Contarini. Pomponazzi's works were thoroughly based on Aristotle, but provided an up-to-date philosophical justification for Venice's empire-building as well as for its massive trade in human slaves. Pomponazzi's book, On the Immortality of the Soul, asserts that man is by nature an animal and is not capable of seeking higher ideals which, he says, is the province of the ``gods.'' Two hundred and fifty years later, Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, would pick up on the themes of Pomponazzi's work.

Pomponazzi writes:

``Nor ought a mortal to desire immortal happiness, since the immortal is not fitting for the mortal: just as immortal wrath is not fitting for mortal man, as Aristotle says in Rhetoric ii. Whence we first suppose that each thing a proportionate end is assigned. For if man will be moderate, he will not desire the impossible, nor does it suit him. For to have such happiness is proper to the gods, who are in no wise dependent on matter and change. The opposite of this occurs in the human race, which is a mean between the mortal and immortal'' (p. 357).
At Padua, Gasparo developed a circle of Venetian friends which included Sebastiano Zorzi, of the famous Zorzi family of which we will hear more later, and two nobles: Tammaso Giustinian and Vincenzo Querini who later became Camaldolese hermits. But Gasparo would never complete his studies in Padua; events outside the gates of the university would intervene.



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Justification By Faith
In 1508, most of Europe's Christian nations and the Pope formed the League of Cambrai. The League's treaty states that it was dedicated to end ``the insatiable cupidity of the Venetians and their thirst of dominion.'' A year later, in 1509, the University of Padua was forced to shut down, and Contarini returned home. By 1513, the first cannons were fired on Venice.
By 1516, the Peace of Brussels was signed. Venice lost all her territories, and barely saved herself.

In one of the numerous letters that Contarini wrote from Padua to his Venetian friends, now Camaldese hermits, he outlines the anti-Christian principles which would, two decades later, split the Church. The letter is important, for it expresses a view of mankind which would later be adopted by radical Protestants. Contarini, however, is writing at least three years before Martin Luther goes through his famous Thurmerlebnis, or tower experience, the revelation which leads to his break with the Church.

Contarini writes:

``I began to think to myself what that happiness [salvation] might be and what our condition is. And I truly understood that if I performed all the penances possible, and even many more, even if they were all taken together, they would not be enough to make up for my past sins, to say nothing of meriting that felicity. And having seen that that infinite goodness, that love which always burns infinitely and loves us little worms so much that our intellect cannot fathom it, having only by its goodness made us out of nothing and exalted us to such a height.... We must attempt only to unite ourselves with our head [Christ] with faith, with hope, and with that small love of which we are capable. As regards satisfaction for sins committed, and into which human weakness falls, His passion is sufficient and more than sufficient. Through this thought I was changed from great fear and suffering to happiness. I began with my whole spirit to turn to this greatest good which I saw, for love of me, on the cross, with his arms open, and his breast opened up right to his heart. This I, the wretch who had not had enough courage for the atonement of my iniquities to leave the world and do penance, turned to him; and since I asked him to let me share in the satisfaction which he, without any sins of his own, had made for us, he was quick to accept me and to cause his Father completely to cancel the debt I had contracted, which I myself was incapable of satisfying.''
Contarini's letter contains the kernel of the conception that man's salvation lies through faith alone, a kernel which would later grow until it split the Church. Yet equally important is his view of mankind, which he calls ``us little worms.'' Contarini's mankind is devoid of love or of what the Bible calls charity--[agapë]--for his fellow man. To be a real Christian means to act out of love for one's fellow man, by acting in the image of the Creator--doing creative works. In doing so, man is fulfilling God's command in Genesis Chapter 1, verses 26-28.
Contarini's beliefs are anti-Christian because without love or charity man is reduced to a creature whose sensual gratification becomes the central purpose of his existence and whose reason, or as Contarini says, intellect, plays no role. Indeed, Contarini's model of man is the lowest of the beasts, a mere worm, which can hardly be expected to act on love through creative works; instead the Venetian substitutes an empty construct of ``faith alone.''

The Venetian oligarchy was acutely aware that the success in defeating their enemies lies on this level of epistemology and that the battle was for the minds of the population.



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Religious Warfare
In the latter half of the sixteenth century, Venice's two main foes were Spain, led by the Holy Roman Emperor Philip II, and France, the most populous nation in Europe. In his 1573 final report, Leonardo Dona, the Venetian ambassador to Spain, writes of the devastating power that Venice had developed 50 years earlier and that the city-state now hoped to use against Spain.

Dona writes:

``Spain might be quick to rebel if there were a leader courageous enough to direct a revolt.... There would be a special danger if the rebels used religion as a battle standard, since religious faith lends itself very well to subverting and destroying monarchies. Spain would be particularly susceptible because there are so many there who are Moors at heart, many others who secretly remain Jews, and even some heretics'' [emphasis added].
Eight years later, in 1581, the Venetian ambassador to Spain, Gianfrancesco Morosini, was even more blunt about Venice's plans to use religious strife:
``Once an idea takes root in a Spaniard's mind it is very hard to remove it. If some misfortune allowed religious dissension to spread, some claim that present circumstances would make stamping it out a very dangerous process. The peasants might prove especially susceptible to this disease, because the tithe of all income which is paid to the churches is a particularly heavy burden for them....''
In France, in 1562, Venetian ambassador Michele Suriano was also reporting on the power of the Protestant movement to subvert nations, while maintaining Venice's public guise as defender of the Catholic faith. Suriano lays the blame on Martin Luther, whom he calls that ``insignificant man.''
Suriano reports:

``There is a great deal of truth in the old saying that you must look sharp at the beginning of things because when an evil is small no one considers it dangerous, and when it becomes great there is nothing to be done about it....
``Everyone knows that the first to revive old heresies and introduce the new sects of our own times was a single insignificant man, and yet the disease spread to many parts of the world in a few years, and changed the religion of not only Germany but also Denmark, Sweden ... and all the northern countries.''


But did the discussions of the young Contarini and his hermit friends ever get from Venice to Luther in Germany? Was Venice really behind the rise of Protestantism? In a speech at the Sept. 16, 1992 conference of the Schiller Institute, historian Webster Tarpley traces a pathway that Contarini's Venetian network could have used to spread their anti-Christian doctrine into Germany where it was then adopted by Martin Luther.
Key players in this transmission belt were the Venetian Aldus Manutius and the German Georg Burckhardt, also known as Spalatinus. Aldus directed one of the largest publishing houses in Europe from his headquarters in Venice. Aldus's extraordinary influence in publishing and distribution of books was one of Venice's key weapons of cultural warfare; his publishing house handled not only the Protestant authors, but leaders of the Erasmian faction of reformers, including Erasmus himself.

Aldus was also an admirer of Spalatinus. In 1501, both Spalatinus and Martin Luther resided in an Augustinian monastery. Later, Spalatinus became the personal secretary to the future protector and defender of Luther, Frederick the Wise, the Elector of Saxony.

Spalatinus was also in charge of the library of the University of Wittenburg, where he was responsible for ordering books from Aldus's publishing house in Venice. By 1514, Spalatinus and Luther were in regular correspondence. According to one historian, Spalatinus ``influenced Luther very strongly in the direction of clarity.''

The first written expression of Luther's doctrine of salvation through faith alone was in an Oct. 19, 1516 letter to Spalatinus. Later, in 1518, when Luther was ordered to Rome to face charges of heresy, it was Spalatinus who interceded with Frederick, the Elector of Saxony, to prevent his going. This incident incited a faction of German princes to later break from Rome.



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Ambassador Contarini
While many of Contarini's friends entered into the service of the Church, Contarini himself embarked on a different path--the diplomatic service of Venice. At age 39, Contarini was appointed ambassador to the court of Venice's most feared enemy, the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. The appointment to such an important ambassadorship, is indicative of the degree of trust Venice already had in him.
Contarini spent 52 months at Charles V's court, starting in 1521. His instructions from the Serenissima were to keep ``an indissoluble league'' between Charles V and Venice's ally Francis I of France and also maintain England as an ally. Even more important, he was to keep Charles out of Italy and away from Venetian interests.

Contarini put a great deal of effort into profiling Charles's chancellor, Gattinara. A blunt example of the Venetian art of psychological manipulation is described in a dispatch Contarini sent to Venice on Aug. 16, 1524. After a meeting with Gattinara, Contarini reported:

``I urged the chancellor strongly to maintain the friendship with England, and made use of many arguments which the chancellor admitted, so I believe him now to be better disposed than he was formerly. It is requisite above all to sustain the fancies of the chancellor, and then adroitly to dispel them, because he is a man of very small brains, and when he once takes an impression he becomes obstinate....''
Contarini, according to his biographer Elisabeth Gleason, had a more difficult time in dealings with Gattinara's boss, the Emperor Charles V himself. Gleason reports that Contarini ``praised the Hapsburg ruler's seriousness, habits, and willingness to work long hours,'' and ``gave him credit for his devotion to the Catholic religion,'' but then cited a trait the Venetian is less than happy about. Contarini had made use of Charles's own confessor, who had informed him that the emperor had ``an inability to forgive injuries readily.'' For Venice, this trait was dangerous, especially since the Venetians were known to knife one in the back--and then ask forgiveness.
Contarini left Charles V's court in 1525. As we shall see, they were to meet again 15 years later in Regensburg, Germany.

Contarini's next assignment was as Venetian ambassador to the Vatican. It was here that Contarini honed his skills in the art of deception, while profiling the curia, and especially Pope Clement VII.

Contarini's appointment in 1528 came at a time when Venetian forces were occupying the papal cities of Ravenna and Cervia. The cities provided Venice with lucrative tax revenues which it did not want to lose. Venice had occupied the cities a year earlier when France, England, Milan, Venice, and the pope had joined forces against Charles V. Charles's Protestant mercenary forces had sacked Rome and captured the pope that year.

The pope was freed; nevertheless, Venice continued to occupy the papal cities of Ravenna and Cervia. Contarini's job as ambassador was to use his ``skill and pleasant manners'' to keep the pope focused on Charles V as the cause of all his sufferings, and to keep the papal cities in the possession of Venice.

With typical Venetian duplicity, Contarini tried to convince the pope, whom in his dispatches he called ``timid and cowardly,'' that it was Venice which had saved the papal cities. Contarini told the pope:

``In the past, we have been the Church's frontline defense against the Turks. So we are still.... Now the Lutheran Germans ... are greater enemies of the Holy See than the Turks!''
Contarini reports that despite his ulterior motives, he won the pope's confidence.
``I continually seek to placate the mind of His Holiness by various means. Therefore I sometimes try to be in his presence, seeing that I am not displeasing him. In this way I can always drop some word or make some courteous and appropriate gesture, which certainly does no harm. In my judgment, it is necessary to proceed step by step in this business, and to use all possible skill.''
In dispatches between 1528-1530, the doge continually exhorted Contarini, in Gleason's words, ``to draw Clement VII into firmly supporting anti-Hapsburg forces.''
Contarini reported that the pope had told him,

``I trust you to such an extent, that if you were not the Venetian ambassador, and a nobleman of that city, I would place all my disagreements in your hands.''
Despite this expression of confidence, Contarini's efforts failed. Pope Clement reached an accord with Charles V in 1529. The following year, Venice was forced to return Ravenna and Cervia to the Vatican.
Contarini spent three years in the halls of the Vatican, profiling, spying, and reporting back to Venice. In September 1530, he returned to Venice, where he was appointed to the government's ruling body, the Council of Ten. Shortly afterward, Contarini became part of the group that commanded life-and-death power over all of Venice and sometimes beyond, the dreaded Council of Three.

There is little known about Contarini's activities for the following five years when he served on the ``Three.'' As we noted in the first part of this series, the ``Three's'' operations were secret. What we do know, is that during Contarini's tenure, laws were passed which reinforced the Venetian oligarchy's top-down dictatorship. One law restricted even the nobility, making it a crime for more than eight members of the nobility, unless related, to meet in a private house. Another law placed the power of the Council of Ten above all state prosecutors and attorneys. Also, the ``Ten'' concluded a peace treaty with the Turk, without the knowledge of the Venetian Senate.



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Cardinal Contarini
In 1535, Contarini moved to his last and final assignment: He was named by Pope Paul III to the College of Cardinals. Like a termite which gnaws away at the foundation of an edifice until it collapses, Contarini used his position as cardinal to advance Venice's operations against Rome.
As cardinal, Contarini resumed his correspondence with Pomponazzi. Though he would publicly refute Pomponazzi, the two were in total agreement on fundamentals. Both men denied the possibility that man's faith in God could be based on his reason; instead, they asserted, true faith could only come through ``revelation'' and the ``non-rational.''

Though now a cardinal, Contarini's writings take a noticeable turn toward the Satanic. In today's terms, his philosophy could be summed up as ``doing your own thing,'' where there is no difference between good and evil, right or wrong, the Good being whatever one wants it to be.

In a letter to his friend Gabriele he writes, ``everyone should choose the good which is most appropriate and in accordance with his own nature, his condition, and his time.'' These same ideas would later be taken up again by the British, including ideologues such as Jeremy Bentham, and be the basis for a modern Satanic movement.

As cardinal, Contarini immediately began work to dismantle the Church from within. He joined what could be called today a ``Project Democracy''-type movement, a commission to ``reform'' the Church. Contarini's ``reforms'' would later be echoed by the Protestants. He attacked the absolute power of the pope over matters of Church doctrine and criticized the adoration of the saints, which, he said, took away from the worship of God. He also called for a halt to the visual portrayal of the saints through paintings by such contemporary artists as Michelangelo and Raphael. Labeling this great art irreligious, he struck out at the Italian Renaissance and its celebration of the power of human creativity. Such attacks would, a century later, be taken up by the English Puritans, and reified as religious doctrine.

Contarini's ``reform'' commission became the center of operations within the church called the ``spirituali.'' It included the English Cardinal Reginald de la Pole who, as potential heir to the throne of England, would play a major role in destabilizing the English monarchy after its break from the church. Another member, Cardinal Morone, would in 1557 be imprisoned by the Inquisition.

The reform commission, through its Consilium, attacked the pope for his ``worldly'' concerns, insisting that he remain solely a ``spiritual'' father. Contarini, in a letter to the pope, proposed that the Church stop granting benefices and charging fees for services. If his proposals had been accepted, which they weren't, fully half the income of the Church would have been cut and subsequently its operations drastically reduced. Contarini's reforms were later taken up by the Protestants, who accused the pope of practicing simony.

Despite rejecting his reforms, Paul III next asked Contarini to draft ``a formula to be used for preaching everywhere in Germany, Italy, and elsewhere....'' Contarini submitted a draft unabashedly reflecting Venice's contempt for man's ability to develop his reason. His draft urges priests to keep their ``sheep'' ``ignorant.''

Contarini writes:

``We must definitely avoid discussing these deep questions before the ignorant people. Let the pious and prudent preacher therefore descend to the [level of] knowledge and capacity of the people, and treat of the divine things in such a way as to be understood by the people and be able to instruct the sheep of Christ in clarity.''


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Regensburg
No history of Cardinal Contarini would be complete without including a discussion of his role in the 1541 Diet of Regensburg. The Diet was possibly the last chance to reconcile the split within the Church between Catholics and Protestants. Venice made sure the reconciliation would never happen.

The Diet was initiated by Charles V in an attempt to ally the German princes, split along religious lines. The Catholic principalities were in the south of Germany and the Protestant ones to the North. Luther himself was directly under the protection of the Elector of Saxony. Charles needed the support and money of the German princes to aid his brother Ferdinand, who was fighting to stop the Turks' advance into Hungary. The Turk had taken Buda, on the west side of the Danube, but Ferdinand's army was holding Pest on the east side. Raising the reinforcements was dependent on Charles's success at Regensburg.

Charles appointed six leading theologians, three Protestant and three Catholic, to come to Regensburg to work out an agreement to reunite the Church. Though the Vatican did not officially participate, it did send a legate--none other than Cardinal Contarini. On hearing the news that Contarini had been appointed papal legate to Regensburg, Florence's representative to Rome commented, ``May God grant that Contarini achieves something good ... since he is a blood brother of Lucifer.''

Venice saw the Diet of Regensburg as an opportunity to discredit both Charles V and the Vatican. Contarini performed the role at which he was a master: He played both sides. At first, he sided with the Protestants, only to abruptly turn against them. In the end, failure was ensured.

When the six theologians first sat down to work out the articles of agreement, the talks went surprisingly well. Each morning and each night, however, Contarini met privately with the Catholic delegation.

When it came to the critical discussion of how a human being may be redeemed, a compromise was made. Called ``Article V,'' the compromise was actually an endorsement of the Protestant belief that man is justified by faith alone, without the necessity for good works.

Contarini's stand on the key issue addressed by Article V is pure Venetian obfuscation. In his commentary supporting the article, he wrote,

``Those who say that we are justified through works are right; and those who say that we are not justified through works but through faith are also right.''
At the beginning of the Diet, Charles V had ordered that all negotiations be conducted in secret, but word of Article V leaked out. Let us look in on John Calvin as he sits with the Protestant members of the Strasburg delegation at Regensburg. On reading Article V, he exclaims,
``You will marvel when you read the copy [of the article on justification] ... that our adversaries have conceded so much. For they have committed themselves to the essentials of what is our true teaching. Nothing is to be found in it which does not stand in our writings.''
Despite the compromise, Luther opposed the Regensburg program, as did a number of the German princes. Some of the Catholic princes wanted to lead a war against the Protestants and get rid of Charles.
On June 8, 1541, the very day the princes had agreed to meet to review all the Articles, everything came to a halt.

The Vatican had sent a dispatch to Contarini charging that he or someone in his household had leaked the content of the discussions at Regensburg. Copies of Article V and letters detailing the talks were being published in Venice and circulated throughout Italy. The dispatch called Article V ``ambiguous,'' and Contarini was ordered not to approve any resolution either as the papal legate or privately. He was ordered to submit everything to the Apostolic See for approval.

At this point, the Diet broke down and Contarini made a total policy reversal. Charles had wanted to grant the Protestants limited toleration, allowing them back into the Church. Contarini rejected this completely.

Contarini now told the Catholic princes that he rejected any agreement ``in toto.'' He then urged the Pope to call a council immediately. Four years later, Contarini's call would be joined by others, and the Council of Trent, considered the founding council of the Counter-Reformation, would be convened.

Soon some of the German princes left Regensburg. Charles V commanded the theologians to remain to complete the agreements.

On July 10, Contarini was called before the emperor. Charles angrily told him that he neither got a religious agreement or money for stopping the Turk. He accused Venice and France of allying with the pope against him. Two weeks later, there was a bare outline of an agreement after all-day sessions at Charles's quarters. The Diet was declared over and Charles left Regensburg.

After the Diet, Contarini sent a letter to Venice in which he wrote that the failure of the discussions at Regensburg was ``the greatest good fortune.'' He wrote,

``Now concord is entirely out of the question.... I now see clearly that the greatest good fortune which I had in the course of this legation was that no concord was achieved, because I would certainly have been stoned by various groups, and some would have even become heretics in order to make me appear to be one.... Be of good cheer, more are with us, than with them'' [emphasis added].
The reader should take note of Contarini's concluding sentence. Clearly, when he writes ``more are with us,'' he is speaking not as a Catholic or a Protestant, but as a Venetian.
After Regensburg, Contarini maintained a lively correspondence with the ``spirituali'' network within the Church. In his letters to Cardinal Pole, he addresses him ``as a friend who, like myself, accepts justification by faith....'' Contarini continued to play both sides, writing to Pole,

``The foundation of the Lutheran edifice is most true and we must not contradict it in any way, but must accept it as true and catholic, indeed as the basis of the Christian religion.''


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Religious Wars in France
The seeds of evil that Venice germinated in the discussions between Contarini, Pomponazzi, and the Camaldolese monks in the second decade of the sixteenth century had, by the century's end, led to 300,000 deaths in religious wars. The seventeenth century would be far worse. To conclude this section we'll examine what happened in France as a case study and as recorded through the eyes of Venice's ambassadors.
Between the years 1562-1598, France was wracked by eight different wars of religion. Next to Spain, Venice considered France the power most to be feared. Despite her small territory, France's population of 16 million was twice that of Spain's. Militarily, France's armies, when united, were capable of defeating any enemy.

In his 1562 final report to Venice, Ambassador to France Michele Suriano writes that France is the ``eldest daughter of the Church,'' having accepted Christianity in the fifth century. He describes how France has more people, arms, and wealth than any other nation in Europe but then adds,

``yesterday her power and smiling fortunes made her a bulwark to her friends and the terror of her enemies, but the truth is today that great engine rests on weak supports.''
The king was also in debt for 15 million ducats in gold.
His report, that France ``rests on weak supports,'' must have been for Venice a signal, much like blood in the water is a signal to a pack of sharks.

By the time of Suriano's report, the Calvinism of the Huguenots had spread throughout France. By 1572, one-sixth of the French nobility had converted. The Huguenots had originally come from Germany and Switzerland to be recruited into the French army.

The worst of the French wars of religion had occurred under the reigns of King Charles IX and Henry III. Both were little boys when they became king, and both were under the regency of their mother, Queen Catherine de Medici. The queen, a Florentine, was a primary target for Venetian profiling and manipulation. Ambassador Suriano reveals just how effective Venice had been when he writes:


``I don't know her Majesty's personal religious opinions, I can say that I noticed definite signs that she is not happy about the disorders in the kingdom. If she has not been that energetic about suppressing them as we would like to see, this is because she is afraid that if she uses force this will lead inevitably to civil war. I also know that she has always been glad to hear urgings of others on the matter, especially what the signory of Venice has had to say, and has been so receptive to them that they were by no means ineffective.''
Ten years after Suriano's report, France would suffer one of the most brutal religious holocausts in history, the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre. The Venetians would report, ``the whole thing was the work of the Queen.'' The massacre began late on a Saturday night and led to the wholesale slaughtering of tens of thousands of French Huguenots by Catholics. The ghastly events are described by Suriano's successor, Giovanni Michiel, in his 1572 final report. He wrote:


``The massacre showed how powerfully religion can affect men's minds. On every street one could see the barbarous sight of men cold-bloodedly outraging others of their own people, and not just men who had never done them any harm but in most cases people they know to be their neighbors and even relatives. They had no feeling, no mercy on anyone, even those who kneeled before them and humbly begged for their lives. If one man hated another because of some argument or lawsuit all he had to do was say, `This man is a Huguenot' and he was immediately killed. (That happened to many Catholics.) If their victims threw themselves in the river as a last resort and tried to swim to safety, as many did, they chased them in boats and then drowned them....
``The killing spread to all the provinces and most of the major cities and was just as frenzied there if not more so.''

The massacre began with the failed assassination of the military and Huguenot leader Admiral de Coligny. It brought to an end a period of religious peace in France. The ``explanation'' for the massacre was that the Catholics attacked out of fear of a suspected retaliation by the Huguenots for the assassination attempt.

Venice's Michiel placed the entire responsibility for the massacre on Catherine, claiming that Catherine was jealous of the admiral's influence over the young king. He wrote:


``Serene Prince, there are different opinions as to whether the death of the admiral and what was done to the Huguenots was spontaneous or planned. I think I should tell your Serenity what I have managed to learn from some very important people who are in on the secrets of the government. I can state to your Serenity that from start to finish the whole thing was the work of the queen. She conceived it, plotted it, and put it into execution.''
Since the ambassador's final reports were semi-public, Michiel made no mention of Venice's own part in the massacre. The whole matter was placed on Catherine's shoulders. But the reader should recall the ``urgings'' by the previous Venetian ambassador ten years earlier. The Venetian Senate did vote to send congratulations to France afterward, and King Philip of Spain wrote Catherine that ``to hear of it was the best and most cheerful news which at present could come to me.''

The nation of France suffered from the loss of Admiral Coligny, who was stabbed to death in the holocaust. The admiral had acted as a unifying force between the religious factions and was in the process of rebuilding France's divided army, an army which was the terror of Europe and especially Venice. The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre ended that immediate threat and soon led to the fourth war of religion followed by the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth.

Finally, in 1598, a new King of France, Henry IV, issued the Edict of Nantes and reconciled the Huguenots to his rule. Henry united France once again, but on his death, Europe would be devastated by religious turmoil. This time the Thirty Years' War, accompanied by the plague, would bring on the death of millions.

In England, Venice would consolidate its grip over the monarchy that had begun with the divorce of Henry VIII. By the end of the seventeenth century, Venice permanently established its base of operations in London. This story will be told in the next and last part of this series.

To be continued. See "Venice Moves North -- The Metamorphosis of England" for Part III.



Venice: The Methodology of Evil -- Part III
by Christina N. Huth
Printed in The American Almanac, May 30, 1994.

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This article is the final installment of this series. Parts 1 and 2, written by LaRouche associate and political prisoner Donald Phau, appeared in the American Almanac editions of May 9 and May 16, 1994 (Vol. VIII, No. 17 and No. 18).
In 1527, Henry VIII of England resolved to divorce his wife. His concern was predominantly dynastic. The Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon, his queen of 18 years, had failed to produce a male heir, after suffering several miscarriages and losing two sons in the early stages of infancy. The single surviving Tudor child, Princess Mary, was not considered by her father or his advisers to be a suitable candidate to rule England after Henry's death.
The divorce and remarriage of a Catholic king was infrequent, but not unheard of. Annulments of royal marriages for dynastic and political reasons were even more common. Around 1450, the pope even granted Henry VI of Castile a dispensation to marry a second wife, while still married to his first wife, who had borne no royal heir. At the outset of his negotiations with the Vatican, Henry had every reason to expect that, in time, his request would be granted.

Instead, the case of Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII of England was to become the most famous divorce in history. Before the curtain fell on this historical drama, the nation of England had been transformed. Henry VIII had pulled England out of the Catholic Church, establishing the Church of England under the authority of the monarchy; he had beheaded Sir Thomas More, one of the greatest thinkers of the Renaissance, for not supporting his break with Rome; and he had steered his country off the path leading to industrial-capitalist economic development and republican government.

Henry VIII had also thrown open the door for the cultural, political, and financial takeover of England by agents of the city-state of Venice. By the middle of the 1530s, Henry's government was in the hands of Venetian agents, and being shaped into a model of police-state political terror. By the end of Henry's reign, Venetian bankers were in control of a burgeoning English foreign debt, and dictating terms to the English throne. Within slightly over a century following Henry's death, England had been transformed into the usurious, slave-trading, imperial power of Great Britain, under the dictatorship of a Venetian party, which had been transplanted directly from the lagoons of Venice.



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Cui Bono?
Who benefitted?
The manipulation of Henry's divorce was a foreign policy matter of some importance to the ruling oligarchy of Venice. As Donald Phau has documented in the first two parts of this series, the tiny Italian city-state established and maintained its vast influence over the economies, trade, and governments of Europe by the artful application of ``divide and conquer'' trickery, applied with the help of the largest and most sophisticated diplomatic corps in all the known world. Though successful during the first decades of Henry's reign in provoking two expensive and bloody wars between England and France--the most populous country in Europe--Venetian diplomacy had failed to do serious damage to cooperative relations between England and Spain, the homeland of Henry's queen.

Together, England and Spain controlled the Straits of Gibraltar, Atlantic entry-point to the Mediterranean; the English Channel, entry-point to the North and Baltic seas, as well as the location of rich Low Countries (what today are Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands) port cities; and, in the case of Spain, half of the New World. As recently as the 1480s, Henry VII had overturned the privileges of Venetian merchants in English ports, awarding this carrying trade to ships of his own citizens; in 1494, the first Tudor king successfully challenged Venetian monopolies in trading of French wines and Spanish sherry. Together, Henry VII and King Ferdinand of Spain had played a forceful role in encouraging reforms from within the Catholic Church.

This alliance was to come to an abrupt end over the matter of Henry and Catherine's divorce.

The Venetian oligarchs, who hated the Christian view that all men are created in the image of God, (particularly as it was reflected in the Church's disapproval of slavery and prohibition of usury) were also interested in cutting down the influence of the Catholic Church. Venice spawned, nurtured, and sponsored both the leadership and footsoldiers of the Protestant Reformation. The theological apologetics for the schismatic movement within the Church were manufactured in the Camaldolese monastery of Santa Giustina, and in the salons of Lucca and other Italian cities, satellites of Venice, from whence they were injected into the academic institutions and courts of Europe. It was not until Henry VIII's break with Rome, however, that the Venetian efforts resulted in the establishment of a Protestant state church.

No wonder the Venetian gamemasters pounced on the opportunity to use Henry's dissatisfaction with Catherine to their own ends. And, they succeeded in doing just that by 1535, with the death of Thomas More, Henry's break with the Church, and the destruction of the English-Spanish alliance.



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Cultural Warfare
Thus far, however, we have examined only Venice's tactical considerations vis-a-vis the King's Great Matter. The oligarchs of the lagoons had far more important, strategic goals in mind. These longer-term projects centered on questions of culture, especially Venice's hatred of the conceptions of man and nature which were the foundations of Western Judeo-Christian culture, in particular as it was being spread throughout Europe and the New World in the decades following the Golden Renaissance in Italy.
The Venetian deployment into England around Henry's divorce reveals the nature of the cultural warfare directed from Venice against the influence of the Golden Renaissance. From every nook and cranny popped out-and-out Venetian agents, ready to assist Henry. Right behind--in a classic display of the Venetian maneuver known as ``playing both sides against the middle''--followed Venice's candidates to enter the lists on the side of Queen Catherine.

And with them came everything bad Venice wished to impose on humanity: Aristotelianism, occultism, gnosticism, and other forms of mysticism and irrationalism. In short order, this invading force was to deal a mortal blow to English humanist circles led by Thomas More and Erasmus, which had struggled to build institutions to uplift society to the level befitting each individual human being's identity as man made in the image of God. England, a strong outpost of the Renaissance Christian cultural tradition in Europe, was to be turned into a new Venice of the north. < p>


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Cromwell Comes First
First with his foot in the door was the Venetian-trained bureaucrat Thomas Cromwell, who rose to power on the corpse of Thomas More. Cromwell lay in wait as a court underling during the latter 1520s. He assumed the chancellorship upon More's resignation in 1532, after he had--according to More's son-in-law and biographer William Roper--presented the King with a theory of government based on the idea ``that his will and pleasure [be] regarded as law.''
Cromwell surrounded himself with a coterie of radical Protestants, similarly trained in Venice or at the University of Padua. These included Thomas Starkey and Richard Morison, both of whom entered Cromwell's service in the early 1530s. Morison and particularly Starkey served as the pamphleteer-propagandists during Cromwell's reorganization of the English church and government. Cromwell's thoroughgoing reforms--accompanied by a reign of terror and hundreds of political conspiracy trials and executions--transformed England from a polity based on the rule of law, toward the ideal of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, in which the rule of men--in this case the suggestible and unstable Henry VIII--was concealed behind the appearance of the rule of law.

One historian of the period summarizes Cromwell's outlook thus:

``Cromwell wished to free statutes from that older limitation which wished to test it by reference to some external law--the law of nature, the law of Christendom (Thomas More's test). He held that [the positive law of a nation or state] was omnicompetent, and must be obeyed.''
It was this lawless regime which framed up and murdered Thomas More.
To fortify Henry's case for divorce from Catherine, Cromwell compiled reports from more than a dozen royal emissaries, including John Stokesley, Richard Croke, and Thomas Cranmer (later to be named the first Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury) who had been sent to comb Europe's universities and religious institutions for scholars and divines who would buttress the King's position. This dragnet produced, among others, one Marco Raphael, a Venetian Jew converted to Christianity, and the reputed inventor of a new invisible ink. Though he held the high position of chief cipherist for the diplomatic service of Venice, Raphael traveled to England to assist the King.

Also materializing at the English court, one might imagine in a puff of grey and aromatic smoke, was Francesco Giorgi, nicknamed the ``Cabalist Friar of Venice,'' by the Warburg Institute's late occult-specialist, Frances Yates. Giorgi was there to help Henry VIII, and brought with him armfuls of manuscripts, letters, and other documents supporting Henry's arguments for the divorce. Giorgi remained in England for more than five years, gaining the king's ear and entry into the inner court circle.

Meanwhile, partisans of Catherine's cause were busy trying to recruit another leading occultist--Henry Cornelius Agrippa--on her behalf.



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Black Magicians
Giorgi and Agrippa were two sides of the same coin. They were both political-intelligence agents, deployed at the instruction of their oligarchist masters. They were also agents of cultural warfare, carrying and propagating the Venetian currency of antiscientific irrationalism. Their occultist poison was--and remains--Venice's most powerful weapon to prevent the development of an educated and rational population, equipped to dispense with aristocrats and govern itself.
Let us take a longer look at the necromancer and black magician, Henry Cornelius Agrippa, keeping in mind that Agrippa's outlook, and even his main writings, were virtually identical in essential content to those of Henry VIII's adviser and confidante, Francesco Giorgi.

Agrippa, who learned astrology at his mother's knee, was perhaps the leading occultist of early sixteenth-century Europe, rivaling Johannes Reuchlin for that title by dint of his energetic travels across the continent and back again, to build the sixteenth century occultist movement. He was born about 1486, in Nettesheim, Germany, and educated at the University of Cologne. How he was started on the road toward black magic and the occult is not known. But he spent a significant portion of his younger years in Italy, studying the mystical and occultist works of Pico della Mirandola, and in Paris, in the circles of occultists who were very active there. In Italy, France, and later Germany, Agrippa organized and recruited for a secret society reminiscent of the later freemasons.

This secret society was unabashedly gnostic. Its brotherhood was committed to the study of an ancient knowledge [Gnosis is the Greek word for knowledge] which it believed must be limited to an elite, kept secret as it had the power to be dangerous to the inferior masses of humanity. This secret knowledge could secure eternal salvation for initiates, while the common man was excluded from knowledge of God and eternal life. Agrippa wrote in his 1516 The Three Ways of Knowing God (De triplici ratione cognoscendi Deum), ``even the Gospel, like the Mosaic law, has one meaning on the surface for the more simple, another in its core, which has been separately revealed to the perfect ... nothing could be more absurd'' than the law, if taken literally.

Agrippa's tome, De occulta philosophia (1510) catalogued the elements of this secret knowledge, and became the virtual bible of the occultist movement. It was the handbook of John Dee around the turn of the fifteenth century in England, and later of Robert Fludd, the founder of the Rosicrucian cult which prefigured freemasonry.



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The Cabala
What superstitious nonsense did Agrippa peddle in De occulta philosophia? Among other things, the conjuring of demons, magic rituals, astrological formulae, numerological combinations, and songs, poems and spells for controlling the actions of angels, demons, other human beings, and the physical universe. This passage from Book III discusses a spell for changing the weather:
``I have seen and known a certain man inscribing the name and sign of a certain spirit on virgin paper in the hour of the moon. When afterwards he had given this to a river frog to devour, and had murmured a certain song, having replaced the frog in the water, soon showers and storms rose up.''
De occulta philosophia delved at length into the so-called Jewish Cabala, the secret knowledge believers asserted had been handed to Moses by God when he declared the 10 Commandments. Cabalists like Agrippa asserted that God revealed his law in a literal form for the masses, but in an elaborated form for the inner elite. To this was added the study of other ancient secret knowledge, passed from the Egyptians, through the Greece of Plato and transmitted to the West during the middle of the fourteenth century with the Greek texts brought to Florence by Gemisthos Plethon. Among these texts were those attributed to Hermes Trigmegistus, the probably fictional Egyptian high priest whose writings are known as hermeticism.
Christian cabalists like Pico, Giorgi, and Agrippa sought to syncretize this ancient secret knowledge with the tenets of Christianity. In his Three Ways of Knowing God, Agrippa described three paths to knowledge of the Almighty: the natural world, which reveals only a reflection of God in His creations; the cabala--the ancient, secret knowledge; and, after the coming of Christ, the divinely inspired Holy Gospels. But, specifies Agrippa, the New Testament, like the Old Testament, is divided into an open revelation available to all who read it, and a secret revelation, available only those who possess the secret knowledge.

At their irrational extremes, Giorgi and Agrippa studied the numerological significance of the Hebrew letters in the name of Jesus Christ, which they believed proved that Jesus was the Messiah. Both Giorgi and Agrippa also asserted that the universe is divided into three realms--the natural world, the celestial world, and the supercelestial world, Heaven--all under the control of angels and demons upon whom a magician may call for special aid. Giorgi's elaboration of this three-fold system appears in his 1525 textbook of the occult, De harmonia mundi (The Harmony of the World).

Also on the occult fringe were astrology, alchemy, and magical music and poetry, such as the so-called Orphic hymns which fascinated Pico. These date back to Attic Greece in the centuries before Christianity. The Orphic hymns were part of violent orgiastic rituals, in which maddened women, known as Maenads, drugged or otherwise intoxicated, roamed through the forests at night, tearing animals from limb to limb; the same fate befell any man who was unfortunate enough to cross the path of one of these rampaging bands.

(Agrippa--perhaps under the influence of an Orphic hymn--argued vociferously that women are superior to men. In his De nobilitate et pracellantia foeminei sexus of 1509, Agrippa advanced a number of occultist and feminist arguments that women are more perfect than men.)

The influence of the stars on the human personality traits (which Agrippa called ``humours'') is put forth in the following passage from De occulta philosophia:


``The humor melancholicus, when it takes fire and glows, generates the frenzy (furor) which leads us to wisdom and revelation, especially when it is combined with a heavenly influence, above all with that of Saturn.... Therefore, Aristotle says in the Problematica that through melancholy some men have become divine beings, foretelling the future like Sybils ... while others have become poets ... and he says further that all men who have been distinguished in any branch of knowledge have generally been
``Moreover, the humor melancholis has such power that they say it attracts certain demons into our bodies, those whose presence and activity men fall into ecstacies and pronounce many wonderful things.... This occurs in three different forms, imagination ... the rational ... and the mental... [When] the soul is fully concentrated in the imagination, it immediately becomes a habitation for lower demons, from whom it often receives wonderful instruction in the lower arts.... But when the soul is fully concentrated in the reason, it becomes the home of the middle demons; thereby it attains knowledge of natural and human things;... But when the soul soars completely to the intellect, it becomes the home of the higher demons, from whom it learns the secrets of divine matters....''


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Witchcraft
Though Giorgi, Agrippa, and other occultists of the day moved in the intellectual circles of the university and the church, their ideas radiated with some intensity into society around them. By the 1530s, De occulta philosphia was the handbook for sorcerers, witches, and wizards all over Europe. Giorgi's De harmonia mundi was translated into French in 1578, and spurred the witchcraft movement in France.
Jean Bodin, the leader of France's politiques faction, which sought to promote religous toleration, took very seriously the extent of Giorgi's influence, and fiercely attacked him as a chief architect of the witchcraft movement plaguing Europe. In 1580, Bodin published a his De la démonomanie des sorciers, a treatise on the philosophical foundations of satanism, with suggestions for dealing with witchcraft.

In Elizabethan England, where the ideas of Agrippa and Giorgi were at work in the occult movement that was to become freemasonry, dramatist Christopher Marlowe attacked black magic head on. In his Tragical History of the Life and Death of Dr. Faustus, Marlowe presents the cynical, devil-conjuring Dr. Faustus as a student of Agrippa. When Faustus conjures up Mephistopheles using cabalist numerology and anagrams, Faust tells the devil that he is too ugly to appear as himself: ``Go and returne an old Franciscan Frier, That holy shape becomes a devill best.'' < p>


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Dark Age in England
Under the influence of Venetian agent Thomas Cromwell's Aristotelian ``might makes right'' philosophy of government, and the occultism spewed by such as Giogi and Agrippa, it is no wonder that Henrican England descended toward a new dark age, both culturally and economically, after Thomas More's death in 1535. The country which, on the occasion of Henry VIII's coronation in 1509, Erasmus had hailed as a new opportunity to develop a society based on the dignity of man, was set on the downward path toward slave-trading, drug-dealing, and imperialist conquest. So today, those who love the United States must fight to reverse our nation's takeover by the very same ideology of bestialism.
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Captions and Displays
St. Mark's Cathedral, adorned by the four bronze horses looted from Constantinople in 1201, overlooks the Grand Canal of Venice.
lead display:
``The Venetian deployment around Henry's divorce reveals the nature of the cultural warfare directed from Venice against the influence of the Golden Renaissance. From every nook and cranny popped out-and-out Venetian agents....''

Display:

``Giorgi and Agrippa were two sides of the same coin. They were both political-intelligence agents.... They were also agents of cultural warfare, propagating the Venetian currency of antiscientific irrationalism.''

``Their occultist poison was--and remains--Venice's most powerful weapon to prevent the development of an educated and rational population, equipped to dispense with aristocrats and govern itself.''

The title page of Francesco Giorgi's De harmonia mundi.

From De harmonia mundi, Giorgi's illustration of the relationships among the physical, celestial, and spiritual realms.

This passage from Giorgi's De harmonia mundi discusses the manipulation of the letters in the Hebrew name of Jesus, to prove that He was the Messiah.

The Cave of the Illuminati from the writings of seventeenth-century occultist H. Khunrath.




The Role of the Venetian Oligarchy in the Reformation, Counter-Reformation, Enlightenment and the Thirty Years' War -- Part I


by Webster Tarpley
Printed in The American Almanac, March 22, 1993.

The following speech, which will be presented in the New Federalist in three parts, was delivered on September 6, 1992 at a conference co-sponsored by the Schiller Institute and the International Caucus of Labor Committees in Northern Virginia.

During the last dozen years, our philosophical association has advanced the thesis that many of the disasters of modern history have been rooted in the heritage of the former Venetian Republic. This includes the central role of the Venetians in cutting short the Golden Renaissance of Italy, in precipitating the Protestant reformation and the wars of religion, and in creating the pseudo-scientific, irrationalist currents of thought that are called the Enlightenment. I would like to return to some of these themes today in order to explore them in greater detail.
Our interest in exposing the Venetian war against the Italian renaissance of the Quattrocento is coherent with our commitment to the Renaissance as an ideal, and with our efforts to launch a new Renaissance today. As has just been stressed, the benchmark for civilization, culture, religion and morality in the last half millennium is constituted by the work of Cardinal Nicolaus of Cusa, the founder of modern science, and of his associate Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, Pope Pius II. Through their cooperation with the best representatives of Medici Florence in the time of the Council of Florence of 1439, Nicolaus and Aeneas Silvius saved western civilization from the Dark Age that had begun with the defeat of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen at the hands of the Black Guelph oligarchs.

During that Dark Age, the Roman Catholic Church had been substantially destroyed by the Avignon captivity and the Great Schism, both against the backdrop of such events as the Hundred Years' War, the Wars of the Roses, and the advance of the Ottoman Empire. Without Nicolaus and Aeneas Silvius, there would have been no Europe and no church by 1500; Venice opposed both through the Morosini agent Gregory von Heimburg [Gilbert, 191]. Paolo Morosini dedicated to Heimburg one of the landmark propaganda pieces on the Venetian oligarchical system to be published during the fifteenth century, ``Concerning the affairs and structure of the Venetian Republic, dedicated to Gregory of Heimburg, the most eminent doctor of the Germans.''

Gregory was the thug and agent provocateur who attempted to sabotage the work of Pius II, Cusanus, and Bessarion, and who is thus a prominent and typical representative of the anti-papal, anti-imperial current among the electors and other princes (Fuersten) of the Holy Roman Empire. This was the stratum of oligarchs played by the Venetians during the conciliar movement, mobilized by Venice against Pius II's proposed crusade, and which would form the basis of Luther's support during the ``Reformation.''

The essence of Venice is oligarchism, usury, slavery, and the cult of Aristotle. The traditional rate of interest was above 20%--a Volcker prime rate. The Venetians were the first in western Europe to read Aristotle directly in the Greek text--first at the School of the Rialto, where leading patricians lectured on Aristotle, and later, after about 1400, at the University of Padova, where the Venetian nobles studied. We must remember that Venice was a branch of the Byzantine Empire which became powerful enough to capture Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade, shortly after 1200. Venice, like Byzantium, saw religion as a tool of state power, with new cults to be concocted as the need arose.



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The Aristotelian Network
During the Quattrocento, Venice developed in Italy and in Europe an extensive Aristotelian network. Bernardo Bembo, the Venetian ambassador to Florence and the Florence handler for the Venetian Signoria was part of this (``The Venetians are called the new Romans,'' he wrote.), as was his son Pietro Bembo. The Barbaro family was represented by Francesco, Ermaolao the elder and Ermolao the younger. Giorgione's painting ``The Three Philosophers'' can be seen as depicting three Arsistotles: the scholastic Aristotle of the Paris Sorbonne, the Averroistic Aristotle derived from the Arabs, and the ``modern'' Aristotle of Padova-Rialto, perhaps depicted here with the features of the younger Ermolao Barbaro. Another family prominent in the effort were the Dona', who will pop up again and again in this account.
This painting hints at an important feature of Venetian method, namely the strategy of dominating culture, religion, and politics through the expedient of concocting a series of Aristotelian cults or schools which then contend among each other. In the 1400's the Aristotelian school-men of the Sorbonne were a formidable force in theology. But the Venetian oligarchs Giustinian and Quirini, in their pioneering 1513 reform proposals addressed to Pope Leo X attacked the decadent scholasticism of the Sorbonne, saying that the education of clergy must no longer be based on the ``fallacious erudition of the Parisians'' and similar ``pagan fables.'' [Jedin, ``Contributo,'' p. 112] (Instead, Giustinian-Querini recommended Holy Scripture and Church fathers, especially St. Augustine. They appear to have been thinking of the fundamentalism of isolated Biblical quotations as it has in fact flourished among the Protestant sects.) [See also Schnitzer, p. 236]

It should then come as no surprise to find Martin Luther, a few years later, packaging his own reform movement in a very similar ``anti-Aristotelian'' garb, despite the Manichean dualism in Luther which led right back to Aristotle's method. Similarly, the pseudo-scientific method cooked up by Francis Bacon using the epistemological writings of Paolo Sarpi portrayed itself as tearing down the authority of Aristotle in favor of scientific experiment. But this does not change the fact that Bacon's method was Aristotelian through and through. Bacon touted induction as the great alternative to syllogisms, but there is no qualitative difference.

Another prong of the Venetian war against the Renaissance was Venice's expansion inside Italy, on the terraferma, with the aim of conquering the entire Italian peninsula and then of using Italy to dominate the world. When it proved impossible to conquer Milan, Florence, the Papal states and Naples, Venetian diplomacy invited France and Spain, the emerging great powers, to invade Italy; the Venetians thought they could pick up the pieces. Between the French conquest of Milan in 1494 and the sack of Rome in 1527, Italy was indeed devastated by these rival armies. But the entry of the new great powers into Italy also prepared the greatest shock in Venetian history: the War of the League of Cambrai. Fighting began in 1509.

The League of Cambrai was the first broad coalition of European states against a nominally Christian nation. It included just about all of Europe: the France of Louis XII, the Holy Roman Empire of Maximilan I, Spain, Pope Julius II, the King of Hungary, the Duke of Savoy, the King of Cyprus, the Dukes of Ferrara, Milan, Florence, Mantova. Some accounts include England. There was a plan to carve up Venice. A painting by Palma Giovane in the Doge's palace depicts Doge Loredan and the lion of St. Mark fighting Europa, who rides a bull and carries a shield embossed with the arms of the member states of the league. Venice sought help from the Ottoman Empire, but was left with no allies. In the decisive battle of Agnadello, French troops crushed the Venetian mercenaries. Venice, as Machiavelli exulted, lost all the land it had stolen in the course of centuries. The Venetians were driven back to their lagoon; their destruction was imminent.

Pope Julius II was induced to drop out of the League of Cambrai, but between 1509 and 1513 the French forces, with Florentine money, kept the Venetians on the brink of doom. The state was close to bankruptcy, and had to borrow from the Chigi of Siena. It was also at this time that the Jewish community of Venice came into existence. Previously Jews had been restricted to the role of moneylenders on the terraferma. Jews were obliged to live in the quarter called the ghetto, whose residents were subjected to special discriminatory laws and were obliged to wear a yellow star of David. As the Cambrai crisis deepened, demagogic preachers attempted to blame the disasters of Venetian policy on the new Jewish community. [Gilbert, 18, 39]

In the midst of the hysteria in the lagoon, a religious revival broke out, spurred on by Antonio Contarini, the Patriarch of Aquilea. Religious processions and demonstrations multiplied, for the deified state and the immortal fondi were in gravest danger. Contarini, whose family will be at the center of our story, harangued the Senate on Venetian immorality: ``Nunneries served the sexual needs of the rich and powerful. Homosexuality was so widespread that female prostitutes had come to him complaining that they earned so little they had to exercise their profession into old age.'' [Gilbert, p. 38] Indeed: 10% of the population were female prostitutes at any given time; even more important was the prevalence of sodomy, a sure marker for the presence of the Bogomil-bugger tradition in epistemology.

A badly mauled, indebted and humiliated Venice survived the War of the League of Cambrai, but the Doge told the 2,500 patricians that the new Spanish power had reduced the republic from a great power to ``2,500 flies.'' [H. Brown, p. 150] At the deepest level, some patricians realized that the lagoon city could now be crushed like an egg-shell, and was not a suitable base for world domination. As after 1200 there had been talk of moving the capital, perhaps to Constantinople, so now plans began to hatch that would facilitate a metastasis of the Venetian cancer towards the Atlantic world. To make matters worse, the Portuguese access to India had undercut the Venetian spice monopoly through the Levant; there was talk of building a Suez canal, but this was abandoned. Venice had always thrived through divide and conquer. If Europe could unite against Venice, what could Venice do to divide and rend Europe so thoroughly that it would tear itself to pieces for more than a century?



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A Look At Contarini
To see how this was done, let us look at Gasparo Contarini, whose studies under the Aristotelian Pomponazzi were interrupted when Emperor Maximilian seized Padova. Contarini had helped entertain Agostino Chigi when he was negotiating that vital loan. Back at Venice, Contarini gravitated to a group of young patricians who gathered at the Camaldolese monastery of San Michele on the island of Murano to discuss the salvation of their souls. Remember what Pius II had said of the Venetians: ``they wish to appear Christians before the world, but in reality they never think of God and, except for the state, which they do regard as a deity, they hold nothing sacred.'' [Pius II Commentaries, p. 743]
One participant was Vincenzo Quirini, who had just been in Germany, where he had been serving as the Venetian ambassador to the Empire. ``All the princes of the empire, be they prelates or secular rulers, harbor a very ill will towards your most illustrious Lordship, which I have seen and touched with my hands....'' [Alberi, series 1, vol. 6, p.43], he warned the Doge. Quirini had seen that war was imminent. Another was Paolo Giustinian, who had gone to the Levant in 1507 (looking for Turkish help?). During the grim winter of 1510-1511, in the midst of the mortal emergency of Cambrai. Guistinian and Quirini turned away from their patrician state careers and entered the austere Camaldolese order, first on Murano and later near Arezzo. Giustinian and Quirini became the advance guard of the Catholic reformation, shaking up the Camaldolese order and later sending the first Catholic reform manifesto, ``Pamphlet to Leo X'' to the Lateran Council. (This proposes the death penalty for Jews who do not convert and a war with the Turks in alliance with the young leader of Persia, identified as ``Sophi.'' This is all in addition to the attacks on the schoolmen mentioned above. [Schnitzer, p. 227 ff.]

Gasparo Contarini corresponded with Quirini and Giustinian for more than a decade. Parts of this correspondence have survived, and illuminate the actual orgins of the Protestant Reformation. To put them in perspective, let us jump from Gasparo Contarini in Venice in 1511 to Martin Luther in the tower of his Wittenberg monastery in the years 1513-1514, the years of Luther's so-called ``Thurmerlbenis'' or experience in the tower, generally regarded as the starting point of the Protestant reformation.



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Faith and Works
The ``Thurmerlebenis'' brought Luther to the definitive standpoint of his theology: that salvation is by faith alone, with the good works of charity playing no role whatsoever. Luther describes the experience thus:
``These words `just' and `justice of God' were a thunderbolt in my conscience. They soon struck terror in me who heard them. He is just, therefore He punishes. But once when in this tower I was meditating on those words, `the just lives by faith,' `justice of God,' I soon had the thought whether we ought to live justified by faith, and God's justice ought to be the salvation of every believer, and soon my soul was revived. Therefore it is God's justice which justifies us and saves us. This knowledge the Holy Spirit gave me on the privy in the tower.'' [Grisar, ``Luther,'' VI, p. 506.]
This was Luther's celebrated explication of Paul's Letter to the Romans I.17:
``For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith.''
This passage was ripped out of scriptural and traditional context and made the total passkey.
Luther's allegedly new insights into the problems of justification, faith, and works were a thoroughly disingenuous revival of an old controversy that had long been solved in theology by the magisterium of the Roman Church. St. Paul, at certain places in his epistles, was at pains to convince the non-Christians in his audience that first justification and thus salvation could only come through faith, and not through the works of the law without faith. These observations by St. Paul were part of his polemic against the so-called Judaizers. The New Testament itself contains a warning against one-sided interpretations of St. Paul such as the one practiced one and one-half millenia later by Luther:

``As also in all [St. Paul's] epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction.''
This prophecy of Luther comes from none other than St. Peter (2 Peter 3.16).
Of course, a balanced reading of St. Paul leaves no doubt that while faith is clearly primary and prior to works, both faith and works of charity are necessary for salvation. See for example Galatians 5.6:

``For in Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision; but faith which worketh by love.''
Beyond this, the epistle of St. James contains a lengthy and trenchant polemic against the obscurantists who, like Luther, attempt to separate faith from works. These lines are of special importance for all Protestants today, and may explain Luther's attempts to get St. James thrown out of the New Testament altogether. St. James says:
``What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he have faith, and have not works? can faith save him?... Seest thou how faith wrought with [Abraham's] works, and by works was faith made perfect? ... Ye see then how that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only.... For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.'' (James 2.14-26)
This debate was summed up several centuries later by St. Augustine. Here we must read carefully because of Luther's attempt to dress himself in a neo-Augustinian cloak. St. Augustine was in fact the author of an entire book in which he warned against precisely the kind of vicious error which Luther later promulgated. Looking back retrospectively over his life in his Retractiones, Augustine writes:
`` ... I received from certain laymen who however, were learned in the Scriptures, certain writings which so distinguished good works from Christian faith as to say that it was possible to obtain eternal life without the former but not without the latter.''
This is the subject of Augustine's book On Faith and Good Works. Considering the question of faith, Augustine warns,
``we feel that we should advise the faithful that they would endanger the salvation of their souls if they acted on the false assurance that faith alone is sufficient for salvation or that they need not perform good works in order to be saved.... When St. Paul says that man is justified by faith and not by the observance of the law, he does not mean that good works are not necessary or that it is enough to receive and to profess the faith and no more. What he means rather and what he wants us to understand is that man can be justified by faith, even though he has not previously performed works of the law. For the works of the law are meritorious not before but after justification.... [T]his opinion originated in the time of the apostles, and that is why we find some of them, for example, Peter, John, James, and Luke, writing against it in their epistles and asserting very strongly that faith is no good without works.... [St. Peter] was aware of the fact that certain unrighteous men had interpreted certain rather obscure passages of St. Paul to mean that they did not have to lead a good life, since they were assured of salvation as long as they had the faith.... See, then, what a great mistake they make who think that they can be saved by a faith that is dead!'' (On Faith and Works, pp. 23-30)
In the concluding chapter of this work, Augustine recapitulates his views, saying that:
``those who are preparing for baptism should be instructed not only in what they must believe but also in what they must do; that we should not tell the faithful that they will obtain eternal life if their faith is dead, if it is without works and therefore cannot save, but rather that they will obtain eternal life if they have that faith of grace that works by charity.'' (pp. 55-56)
These themes are constantly repeated in Augustine's writings. Compare for example the following segment of his treatise Grace and Free Will:
``Because they fail to grasp what the apostle means when he says: `We reckon that a man is justified by faith independently of the works of the law,' some men have understood him to say that faith is sufficient for man, even though he lives a bad life and is without good works. It is unthinkable that the Vessel of Election should hold this view. It was he who, after having stated in a certain passage, `For in Christ neither circumcision is of any avail nor uncircumcision,' at once added, `but faith which works through charity.'|''
The best Renaissance Christian humanist theology shared this same view. See Nicolaus Cusanus in his On Learned Ignorance:
``For without love faith is not living, but dead, and is not faith at all. But love is the form of faith giving to faith new being; indeed, love is the sign of the most steadfast faith.''
See also Nicolaus' On the Peace of Faith, where we find the following:
``it is impossible that someone please God without faith. However, it must be formed faith, for without works it is dead.''
``Fides caritate formata,'' faith formed by charity, is a common medieval and renaissance expression for the necessity that faith be expressed and developed by acts of charity towards one's neighbor. ``Fides caritate formata'' was not coincidentally a citation that was capable of throwing Luther into hysteria during theological debates.
For Luther, the devil is an independent power who rules over the material world, so good works belong to the devil; human reason is the ``bride and whore'' of the devil. In those days of greater theological knowledge, this could be clearly recognized as a new variation on Manicheanism, the idea that good and evil are equally necessary parts of the creation. According to such a gnostic view, the material world is inherently bad, and only the spiritual world can be good. Something not so different was professed by the Bogomils. Luther's contemporary and sometime associate Philip Melanchton saw Luther in exactly these terms: ``Manichaean delirium.'' Luther attempted to portray his own viewpoint as a return to St. Augustine's stress on grace as against the ethical notions of the late Graeco-Roman world, but this was disingenuous. Luther's marginal jottings to Augustine's Confessions have come to light; an interesting one recaptures Luther's reaction to Augustine's polemics against the Manichaeans and their idea of the two coequal cosmic forces locked in struggle. Luther's annotation: ``This is false. This is the origin of all Augustine's errors.'' [see Socci and Ricci, and Theobald Beer.] Luther appears to reflect the influence of the pseudo-Hermes Trismegistus and his ``Book of the 24 Philosophers.''



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Contarini and Luther
But in the given historical context it is more than interesting that the top Venetian oligarch of the day--Gasparo Contarini--in 1511 went through a Thurmerlebnis of his own. In the Camaldolese monastery of Monte Corona above Frascati in the summer of 1943, the German scholar Hubert Jedin, acting on the advice of Giuseppe de Luca, discovered 30 letters from Gasparo Contarini to the Cambai Camaldolese, Giustinian and Quirini. One is from Eastertide 1511, when Contarini went first to the Benedictine monastery on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, and then to San Sebastiano. Contarini would have us believe that he was contemplating becoming a monk himself, but concluded that even monastic life of asceticism and good works would never been enough to atone for his sins. This is similar to Luther's starting point. A holy father told Contarini that the way to salvation is ``much broader than what many people think.'' Contarini writes:
`` ... I began to think to myself what that happiness [salvation] might be and what our condition is. And I truly understood that if I performed all the penances possible, and even many more, even if they were all taken together, they would not be enough to make up for my past sins, to say nothing of meriting that felicity. And having seen that that infinite goodness, that love which always burns infinitely and loves us little worms so much that our intellect cannot fathom it, having only by its goodness made us out of nothing and exalted us to such a height ... We must attempt only to unite ourselves with our head [Christ] with faith, with hope, and with that small love of which we are capable. As regards satisfaction for sins committed, and into which human weakness falls, His passion is sufficient and more than sufficient. Through this thought I was changed from great fear and suffering to happiness. I began with my whole spirit to turn to this greatest good which I saw, for love of me, on the cross, with his arms open, and his breast opened up right to his heart. This I, the wretch who had not had enough courage for the atonement of my iniquities to leave the world and do penance, turned to him; and since I asked him to let me share in the satisfaction which he, without any sins of his own, had made for us, he was quick to accept me and to cause his Father completely to cancel the debt I had contracted, which I myself was incapable of satisfying.'' [Jedin, ``Ein `Thurmerlbenis' des jungen Contarini,'' p. 117 and Dermot Fenlon, ``Heresy and Obedience in Tridentine Ital.'' p.8.]
The parallels to Luther are evident, even though Contarini still allows hope and a little love a role in salvation, in addition to faith. Later, in a letter of 1523, after Contarini had seen Luther, he would go beyond this and wholly embrace the Lutheran position:
``Wherefore I have truly come to this firm conclusion which, although first I read it and heard it, now nonetheless through experience I penetrate very well with my intellect: and that is that no one can justify himself with his works or purge his soul of its inclinations, but that it is necessary to have recourse to divine grace which is obtained through faith in Jesus Christ, as Saint Paul says, and say with him: `Blessed is the man without works, to whom the Lord did not impute sin....' Now I see both in myself and in others that when a man thinks he has acquired some virtue, just at the moment it is all the easier for him to fall. Whence I conclude that every living man is a thing of utter vanity, and that we must justify ourselves through the righteousness of another, and that means of Christ: and when we join ourselves to him, his righteousness is made ours, nor must we rely on ourselves to the smallest degree, but must say: `From ourselves we received the answer of death.'|''[Jedin, p. 127]
Contarini was always much more careful in the writings he published; in his treatise De Praedestinatione he says that Chrsitians should
``seek to exalt as much as possible the grace of Christ and faith in him, and to humble as much as possible the confidence we feel in our works, our knowledge and our will.''
These letters, first published in 1950, make Contarini the first Protestant, the undisputed caposcuola among those in Italy who argued for salvation ex sola fede, and who were called evangelicals, crypto-Protestants, or ``spirituali,'' to whom we will return shortly.
To be continued.





The Role of the Venetian Oligarchy in the Reformation, Counter-Reformation, Enlightenment and the Thirty Years' War -- Part II


by Webster Tarpley
Printed in The American Almanac, April 5, 1993.

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The following speech, which is being presented in the New Federalist in three parts, was delivered on September 6, 1992 at a conference co-sponsored by the Schiller Institute and the Internatinal Caucus of Labor Committees in Northern Virginia.
Let us consider first whether there was any way that the tidings of Contarini's new stress on faith, developed during the Cambrai crisis, might have been transmitted to Germany. There was, in the form of a Venetian Aristotilean network which reached into the court of Frederick the Wise, the Elector of Saxony, who protected Luther from Pope Leo X's extradition demands and from the ban of the empire placed on Luther by Emperor Charles V.



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Mutianus Rufus and Spalatin
Our knowledge of this network begins with the figure of one Conradus Mutianus Rufus, who was in the early 1500s the Kanonikus of the Marienstift in Gotha, a Latin and Greek scholar and cleric who had travelled to Italy during the period 1499-1503, and who had studied in Bologna and visited other cities, including Venice. Mutianus Rufus had been in contact with members of the Signoria: ``I saw Venetian patricians wearing a silken belt which hung down on one side and went around one arm,'' [Briefwechsel des Conradus Mutianus, p. 249] he wrote to a correspondent in 1509. Mutianus came to know Aldus Manutius, the celebrated Venetian publisher of Latin, Greek, and other learned texts (and the target of Erasmus's satire in the hilarious Opulentia Sordida).
With Aldus we are at the heart of the Venetian intelligence networks among the self-styled humanists around 1500. In February 1506, with the Cambrai war clouds on the horizon, Aldus had written to Mutianus's disciple Urbanus: ``I most highly esteem S. Mutianus Rufus because of his learning and humanity and confess myself to be very much in his debt, on the one hand because he constantly speaks well of me, and on the other because he kindly procured for me the friendship of a man decked out with learning and holy ways like you. And therefore if I did not only esteem you and Mutianus and Spalatinus completely as men both learned and well-disposed towards me, but also love you so very much in return, I would be the most ungrateful man of all. But I love you and honor and render you immortal thanks because you have summoned me to this mutual good will.'' [See Briefwechsel, p. 37.]

The other disciple of Mutianus Rufus named here, Spalatinus, is the one we focus on.

Georg Burckhardt was born in the town of Spalt, near Nuremberg, in 1484. His birthplace is an omen, for Burckhardt, or Spalatinus in his humanist name, was destined to play a decisive role, second perhaps only to Luther himself, in the greatest church split [Kirchenspaltung] of recent history. Spalatin, a student at Erfurt, became a protege of Mutianus Rufus in 1504, visiting him in his Gotha office where ``Farewell to cares'' was inscribed on the door. Another of Mutianus's network was Johann Lang of Erfurt, who would shortly reside in an Augustinian monastery alongside a certain Martin Luther, who had studied in Erfurt after 1501 at the same time as Spalatin. [Irmgard Hoess, George Spalatin (Weimar, 1956)]

In 1505, Mutianus Rufus found Spalatin a job at the monastery in Georgenthal, where he was responsible for purchasing books for the library. The orders were made with Aldus Manutius in Venice, with payment by way of the Fugger copper mines in Hohenkirchen. In December 1505, Spalatin wrote to Mutianus to make sure that he included in the order the Castigationes Plinianae, written by Ermolao Barbaro the Younger. Later Spalatin became a personal secretary to the Elector of Saxony, Frederick the Wise, gradually acquiring responsibility for Frederick's prized collection of relics of the saints, and also for the newly founded University of Wittenberg and for its library. Gradually Spalatin became something like a junior minister, responsible for educational and religious affairs.

In 1512, during the Cambrai war, Mutianus and Spalatin received a report that Aldus was on his way to Germany with a cargo of precious Greek and Latin manuscripts; Spalatin wrote to Aldus on March 25, 1512, proposing that Aldus meet with Frederick the Wise for a major book purchase. Was Aldus planning a mission in order to secure strategic help for the Most Serene Republic in Venice's hour of need? Aldus apparently did not make the trip, but in December 1512, Frederick the Wise wrote to Aldus, and Spalatin prepared the Latin text. In 1515, Spalatin placed a new book order for Greek and Latin texts with the Aldus firm.

It is not known exactly when Spalatin met Luther for the first time, but Luther's first extant letter to Spalatin is placed in about February 1514, in the middle of the Thurmerlebnis [tower experience] period. Spalatin had asked Luther's opinion on the controversy over the Hebrew and Talmudic studies of Johannes Reuchlin, whom Frederick was supporting. This began a correspondence, of which 400 of Luther's letters to Spalatin, but only a few of Spalatin's to Luther, have survived. Spalatin appears as Luther's interlocutor in theology (``he influenced Luther very strongly in the direction of clarity,'' says Hoess), but his adviser and indeed his controller in matters of political tactics and strategy. The letters peak in 1521, but continue therafter; ``there is no one in our group whom I would prefer to you,'' wrote Luther to Spalatin on December 12, 1524.

In 1515-16 Luther gave his lecture on salvation through faith alone, although the first written expression of this seems to have been in a letter to Spalatin of October 19, 1516, where he wrote: ``First man must change himself; only then can his works be changed''--a leading idea expressed by Giustinian-Quirini.

In September 1516 Spalatin joined the Kanzelei of Frederick. Here Spalatin acted as Luther's intercessor, especially after he became the confessor to the vacillating and indecisive Frederick in 1517-18. After Luther, on Halloween 1517, had posted his theses on the door of the Wittenberg cathedral, it was Spalatin who convinced Frederick to keep the matter in Saxony, and not permit the case to go to Rome. When Luther went to Heidelberg for a theological debate, Spalatin made sure he had an escort provided by Frederick. In July 1518, Luther was summoned to Rome by the Holy See, and he appealed urgently for help: ``I now need your help most urgently, my Spalatin, and so does the honor of our whole university!'' At the next imperial diet, Cardinal Cajetan asked for money to fight the Turks, only to be answered by a rehearsal of the complaints of the German nation against the Holy See. Here Frederick was able to convince Maximilian to allow Luther's case to stay in Germany. The anti-papal and anti-imperial princely oligarchical party coalesced in support of Luther. This made what Leo X had dismissed as ``a quarrel among monks'' into the Reformation.

Later we find Spalatin unsuccessfully telling the hot-headed Luther to keep a low profile. At one point Luther was requesting that official documents of Saxony be falsely dated to protect him. (Hoess, p. 131) When Luther was called to Augsburg, Spalatin secured an escort, by indirect means.

So sure was Luther of Frederick's support (and Spalatin's influence) that he could write to Cardinal Cajetan on October 18, 1518: ``For I know that I can make myself more agreeable to our most illustrious prince by appealing rather than by recanting.'' (Hoess, p. 136) Later the same autumn, Spalatin, fearing Luther was in danger, warned him to flee, and Luther organized a farewell dinner in his cloister, but a message from Spalatin then arrived telling him that the danger was past, and he could remain. (This puts Luther's ``Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders'' [``Here I stay, I cannot do otherwise''] in a new light.) After Luther had publicly burned Leo X's bull of excommunication in December 1520, Frederick protected him from extradition. Spalatin appealed for and got from Erasmus a statement in support of Luther against Rome. In his response, Erasmus warned that those handling Luther's case on behalf of the Roman curia were in effect acting as provocateurs, seeking to exploit the Luther issue in order to suppress humanistic learning. For Erasmus, humanistic learning was Platonic. There is every indication that Cajetan, Eck, Aleandro, and others acting in the name of Leo X were indeed doing what Erasmus suggested.

Spalatin accompanied Luther to the Diet of Worms in 1521 as his principal handler, spin doctor, and adviser. Here Contarini was also present, though all sources consulted are suspiciously emphatic that Contarini, present as the Venetian ambassador to Charles V, never met personally with Luther, although the two were at the plenary sessions. After Charles V had set the ban of the empire on Luther, Spalatin organized the coup de main which brought Luther into the safety of Frederick's Wartburg Castle. Here Luther's fame and following grew rapidly while he enjoyed immunity; the empire shortly went to war with France in one of the sequelae of Cambrai. Later, Spalatin would go on to become Saxony's chancellor or prime minister.

Were there other channels of Venetian communication between the lagoon and Saxony during this period? There was at least one other, which involved Frederick's hobby of collecting the relics of the saints, a practice Luther condemned as idolatrous.

``Since 1515, a German friar, Burckhard Schenk von Simau, had been a reader in theology at the Franciscan convent of San Nicolo' in Venice. Perhaps because of his kinship with the Ernestine branch of the Saxon ruling line, he had a standing commission from Frederick the Wise to purchase books and relics for the Elector's outstanding collections. One of Schenk's most useful Italian contacts proved to be [Pier Paolo] Vergerio's brother Giacomo, a fellow Franciscan, who told him that the eastern coast of the Adriatic was a rich hunting ground for relics and suggested that younger members of his family might be available to make deliveries to Saxony. Accordingly, in July 1521, Aurelio Vergerio set off on a trip to the domain of Frederick the Wise, only to turn back at Innsbruck on account of illness. Schenk then turned his attention to another member of the Vergerio clan. Writing on October 19, 1521 to Georg Spalatin, the Elector's counsellor, he stated that he had met Pier Paolo [Vergerio], a gifted youth who ranked high among the students of law at Padova [Padua] and was well trained in the humanities. The young Capodistrian, Schenk asserted, was interested in completing his legal studies at Wittenberg. Assuring Spalatin that Vergerio would be a credit to the university, the friar urged that he be strongly recommended to the Elector. Apparently the response from Spalatin was encouraging, for Pier Paolo made preparations to leave for Saxony; he was deterred from starting his journey, however, by reports of an outbreak of plague along the route. By the following summer the invitation had been withdrawn.
``On July 28, 1522, Spalatin informed Schenk that in the light of the recent religious developments in Wittenberg, Frederick the Wise considered it prudent to cease collecting relics. Spalatin added that he could promise nothing further to the Vergerios.'' (Schutte, pp. 30-31.)

According to another account, Spalatin wrote to an unnamed ``Venetian merchant'' at this time:
``I am returning herewith the relics as well as the crucifix, in hopes you will sell them as advantageously as possible, for in Venice they probably cost more and are valued more highly than here. Here the common man is so well instructed that he thinks (and rightly so) that only faith and confidence toward God, and brotherly love, are enough.'' [H.G. Haile, p. 8]


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The Spirituali
Pier Paolo Vergerio of Capodistria attended the University of Padova and married Diana Contarini of the Contarini family in 1526. [Nuntiaturberichte aus Deutschland, I, p. 14] He later became a papal diplomat and met with Luther in Wittenberg in 1535, during the period of the Smalkaldic League, the Protestant alliance which warred against Charles V in 1546-47. Later, Vergerio was to become an active publicist in the Protestant cause. Vergerio belongs to the group of Spirituali around Contarini.
When Contarini returned in 1525 from his mission with Charles V in Germany, the Low Countries, and Spain, he told the Senate:

``The character and customs of the Germans are close to feral; they are robust and courageous in war; they have little regard for death; they are suspicious but not fraudulent or malicious; they are not sublimely intelligent, but they apply themselves with so much determination and perseverance that they succeed as well in various manual crafts as they do in letters, in which many are now devoting themselves and make great profit.... The forces of Germany, if they were unified, would be very great, but because of the divisions which exist among them, they are only small....'' [Alberi, p. 21]
Venetian publishing and Venetian networks would now be mobilized to guarantee the spread of Lutheranism and its variants all over Germany in order to perpetuate and exacerbate these divisions...

In 1516, a year before Luther's Wittenberg theses, Contarini wrote De Officio Episcopi a treatise of church reform for his friend Lippomanno, who was about to become a bishop. Contarini then, as we have seen, served as Venetian ambassador to Charles V and the Pope. During the early 1530s, Contarini began meeting with a group of patricians who represented the heart of the Italian evangelical or crypto-Protestant movement, and who would launch the Reformation inside the Roman Catholic Church during the pontificate of Paul III Farnese. The meetings were often held in the gardens of Cortese's San Giorgio Maggiore. These were the Spirituali, interested in the writings of Juan Valdez of Spain, who had come to Naples to teach that justification was given to us as God's gratuitous gift. Our responsibility, said Valdez, was to take this Beneficio Cristo given to us through the Holy Spirit and manifested in good works, which were however without merit. Awareness of all this came to Valdez, like Contarini, through ``esperienza.'' Valdez's followers were mainly oligarchs, and his works were published in Venice.

Along with Contarini there were now: Gregorio Cortese, the abbot of the Benedictines of San Giorgio Maggiore; the English emigre Reginald Pole, a member of the former English ruling house of Plantagenet now living at Pietro Bembo's villa (Bembo had changed his lifestyle enough to become Bishop of Bergamo and would become a cardinal); and G.P. Caraffa of Naples, linked to the Oratory of Divine Love in Rome, co-founder of the new Theatine Order and later Pope Paul IV.

Arrayed later around these were the Bishop of Carpentras Jacopo Sadoleto, G.M. Giberti, the spirituale bishop of Verona on Venetian territory, and Cardinal Morone, who presided at the last sessions of the Council of Trent. There was the papal legate Vergerio. Later, through the circle set up by Reginald Pole at Viterbo, Vittoria Colonna and Giulia Gonzaga would come into the picture, joined by Marcantonio Flamminio, Ochino, Vermigli, and others. Vergerio, Ochino, and Vermigli later became apostates, going over to Protestantism.

Many ideas common to this group were expressed in a tract called the Beneficio di Cristo, and were popular among Benedictines. The Beneficio had been written by a Benedictine (Benedetto Fontanino) using Calvin's ``Institutes of the Christian Religion'' of 1539. This Benedetto had been at Cortese's San Giorgio Maggiore around 1534. [Fenlon, chapter 5] With the help of Marcantonio Flamminio, the Beneficio was published in Venice in 1543, and sold 40,000 copies in that city alone.

The Spirituali later tended to separate into two wings: The first were liberal, tolerant, conciliatory, open to dialogue with Protestants, and included especially Pole, Morone, and Vittoria Colonna. Then there were the zelanti, like Caraffa, who tended towards militant and inquisitorial methods, and who came into conflict with Spirituali like Pole and Morone, accusing them of heresy. Contarini had died before this division became pronounced.

Reginald Pole had been sent to Padova by Henry VIII because his claim on the English throne was as good as or better than Henry's: Pole was a Plantagenet. When he joined the general post-Cambrai shift out of Aristotelian letters and into piety, he was influenced by a certain Padre Marco of the Paduan Benedictines of Santa Giustina. Pole was close to the Venetian banker Alvise Priuli. Around 1540, Pole was the governor of Viterbo in the Papal states, where he developed a close relation with Vittoria Colonna of the Roman black nobility. She had been in the Juan Valdez circle and the Oratory of Divine Love. In 1541, her kinsman, Ascanio Colonna, waged civil war against Pope Paul III Farnese but was defeated. Vittoria Colonna was known as a poetess whose ``Rime Spirituali' expressed some of the favorite themes of the pro-Venetian Spirituali. Pole on one occasion advised Vittoria Colonna that she should believe as if salvation depended on faith alone, while acting as if it were dependent on good works as well. Contarini dedicated his treatise on the freedom of the will to Vittoria Colonna. As for Pole, he is important because of his later role in England.



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The English Schism
In 1527, the year of the Sack of Rome, King Henry VIII began to mature his plan to divorce his wife Catharine of Aragon, who had given him a daughter but no son, and to marry the court lady Anne Boleyn. When Pope Clement VII Medici, under occupation by Charles V, refused to grant an annullment, Henry VIII appealed to scholars and universities for their opinions. One such opinion came from the Franciscan Friar Francesco Giorgi, a member of the Venetian Zorzi patrician clan. Giorgi was the author of De Harmonia Mundi (Venice 1525), a mystical work with influences deriving from the Hebrew Cabbala. Giorgi assured Henry VIII that the Biblical text applicable to his situation was Leviticus 18:16, in which marriage between a man and his brother's wife was forbidden. Catharine had been previously married to Henry's brother Arthur. Deuteronomy 25.5-6, in which such a marriage is prescribed, was irrelevant, Giorgi-Zorzi told Henry.
Giorgi, accompanied by the Hebrew scholar Marco Raphael, journeyed to England, where they arrived in 1531; Giorgi remained at the English court until his death in 1540. Giorgi is reputed to have contributed mightily to the initiation of a school of Venetian pseudo-Platonic mysticism in England. This was later called Rosicrucianism, among other names, and influenced such figures as John Dee, Robert Fludd, Sir Philip Sydney, Edmund Spenser, and Sir Francis Bacon. Such were the masonic beginnings of the Venetian Party, which, by the accession of James I, became the dominant force in British life.

Bembo and Pole had their own contacts with cabbalists, but Contarini had the inside track: Giorgi lived in Contarini's immediate neighborhood, and Contarini grew up and went to school with Giorgi's nephews. Later, Contarini and Giorgi became close friends. (Dittrich, p. 456) Giorgi and Raphael were clearly acting for the Signoria and the Council of Ten.

Shortly before the arrival of Giorgi, Thomas Cromwell replaced Cardinal Wolsey as the chief adviser to Henry VIII. Cromwell had all the marks of the Venetian agent. Cromwell had reportedly been a mercenary soldier in Italy during the wars of the early 1500s, and, according to Pole, was at one time the clerk or bookkeeper to a Venetian merchant. One version has Cromwell working for 20 years for a Venetian branch office in Antwerp. This was the man who judicially murdered St. Thomas More, the eminent Erasmian.

``Yet it was apparently at this very time, just after Cardinal Wolsey's fall, that [Cromwell] found means of access to the king's presence and suggested to him that policy of making himself head of the Church of England,''
which would enable him to have his own way in the matter of the divorce and give him other advantages as well. So at least we must suppose from the testimony of Cardinal Pole, writing nine or ten years later. Henry, he tells us, seeing that even Wolsey
``could no longer advance the project [of his divorce], was heard to declare with a sigh that he could prosecute it no longer; and those about him rejoiced for a while in the belief that he would abandon a policy so fraught with danger. But he had scarcely remained two days in this state of mind when a messenger of Satan (whom [Pole] afterwards names as Cromwell) addressed him and blamed the timidity of his councillors in not devising means to gratify his wishes. They were considering the interests of his subjects more than his, and seemed to think princes bound by the same principles as private persons were. But a king was above the laws, as he had the power to change them, and in this case he had the law of God actually in his favor....''
Pole wrote this in a dedicatory epistle to Charles V. [Pole, Epistolae, 113-140] Pole says that Cromwell offered him a copy of Machiavelli's The Prince, which he highly recommended.
``I found this type of book to be written by an enemy of the human race,'' Pole wrote later. ``It explains every means whereby religion, justice, and any inclination toward virtue could be destroyed.'' [Dwyer, p. xxiii]
But The Prince was published years later.
Henry VIII later called on Pole for his opinion on ``the king's great matter.'' Pole responded with a violently provocative tirade designed to goad the paranoid Henry into a homicidal fit. ``I have long been aware that you are afflicted with a serious and most dangerous disease,'' Pole wrote.

``I know that your deeds are the source of all this evil.'' ``The succession of the kingdom is called into doubt for love of a harlot.... Anyone resisting your lies is punished by death. Your miserable apes of sophists talk nonsense.... Your pestilential flatterers.... By the stench of his mind a flatterer happens upon such tricks.'' [ Dwyer, p. xviii]
Pole also revealed to Henry that he had urged Charles V to cease hostilities with the Ottoman Empire, and direct his military might to wiping out Henry's regime. [Dwyer, pp. 271-78] Since Pole could easily have assumed the role of Plantagenet pretender, Henry had to take this very seriously, which added to his mental imbalance. Henry took revenge by executing Pole's mother and brother, who had both stayed behind in England and whose fate Pole had curiously neglected when he sent his challenge to Henry.
The creation and preservation of a Protestant regime in England was one of the principal goals of Venetian policy. Wars between England and France, and between England and Spain, were the essence of Venetian policy. After the death of Henry VIII and the death of his son Edward VI, Pole returned to England as the chief adviser and virtual controller of the Catholic Queen Mary Tudor, known as Bloody Mary. Earlier Pole had been considered a candidate to marry Mary, but now he was a cardinal and papal legate. Mary was wed to Philip II of Spain, creating the possibility of an Anglo-Spanish rapprochement that was highly unacceptable to Venice. Mary's succession was helped by Sir William Cecil, the first Baron Burghley, a Venetian agent who had been a key figure of the last period of Edward VI's reign. Pole, even though he was one of the Spirituali, could be highly inquisitorial when the interests of Venice required slaughter to create religious emnities that would last for centuries: Between 1553 and 1558, Pole and Mary presided over what many British historians claim to be the largest number of politically motivated executions in the history of England. Their claim is dubious, but some 300 persons were burned for heresy, and one Anglican prelate described Pole as ``butcher and scourge of the Anglican church.'' Pole, acting under instructions from Pope Paul IV, also insisted on full restitution of the church lands and property seized by Henry VIII, which would have wiped out a large section of the English nobility. These measures made Mary so unpopular that it was clear that she would not have a Catholic successor. That successor would be Elizabeth, under the dominant influence of Cecil, who had early gone over to the opposition to Bloody Mary Tudor. In his 1551 report to the Venetian Senate, Daniele Barbaro remarked on the religious habits of the English,

``among whom nothing is more inconstant than their decrees on matters of religion, since one day they do one thing and the next day they do another. This feeds the resistance of those who have accepted the new laws, but who find them most offensive, as was seen in the rebellions of 1549. And in truth, if they had a leader, even though they have been most severely punished, there is no doubt that they would rebel again. It is true that the people of London are more disposed than the others to observe what they are commanded, since they are closer to the court.'' [Alberi, series I, volume 2, pp. 242-43]


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The Counter-Reformation
What is called the Catholic Reformation or Counter-Reformation is said to begin with the pontificate of Paul III Farnese. Paul III had studied with the humanist Pomponius Laetus. He had been made cardinal by Alexander VI Borgia, usually seen by church historians as the most reprobate of the Renaissance popes. Because Giulia Farnese had been Alexander VI's mistress at this time, Cardinal Farnese was known as the petticoat cardinal. Paul III had several children of his own, two of whom he made cardinals and governors of provinces controlled by the church. It was Paul III who elevated Contarini, Pole, Sadoleto, and Caraffa and the rest of the Venetian group to the cardinalate. Later, Pietro Bembo, Morone, and other Venetians and Venetian assets followed.
In 1537, Paul III directed Contarini to chair a commission that would develop ways to reform the church. Contarini was joined by Caraffa, Sadoleto, Pole, Giberti, Cortese of San Giorgio Maggiore, plus prelates from Salerno and Brindisi--an overwhelmingly Venetian commission. This was the Consilium de Emendenda Ecclesia. The Contarini commission at the outset sought to identify the cause of the evils and abuses of the church, including simony, multiple benefices, bishops who did not live in their sees, moral failures, sybaritic lifestyles among prelates, and the like. The commission said nothing of oligarchism or usury, but gave all the blame to the excessive power which the Roman pontiffs had arrogated to themselves.

``From this results, even more because adulation always follows the supreme power just as a shadow follows a body, and the path of truth to the ears of the prince was always a very difficult one, that, as the doctors immediately proclaim, who teach that the pope is master of all benefices, on that account, since a master can by law sell what is his, it necessarily follows that the pope cannot be accused of simony, so that the will of the pope, whatever it might be, must be the rule which directs these operations and action. From which it results without doubt that whatever the pope wants is also sanctioned by law. And from this source, as if from a Trojan horse, have come into the church of God so much abuse and such serious sickness, that we now see the church afflicted almost by despair of recovery. The news of these things has reached the unbelievers (as Your Holiness is told by experts) who ridicule the Christian religion chiefly for this reason, to the point that because of us, because of us we say, the name of Christ is blasphemed among the peoples.'' [Concilium Tridentinum, XII, pp. 134-35]
The overall thrust of the document is best summed up in the following two passages:
``We think, Holy Father, that this has to be established before all other things: as Aristotle says in his `Politics', just as in any republic, so in the ecclesiastical governance of the church of Christ, this rule has to be observed before all others: that the laws have to be complied with as much as possible. For we do not think we are permitted to exempt ourselves from these laws, except for an urgent and necessary reason.'' (p. 135, emphasis in original)
Thus, Aristotle was made the guiding light of the ``reform,'' in the document that opened the campaign for the Council of Trent. The leading anti-Aristotelian Platonist of the day did not escape condemnation:
``And since they habitually read the colloquia of Erasmus to children in the schools, in which colloquia there are many things which shape these uncultivated souls towards impiety, therefore the readings of these things and any others of the same type ought to be prohibited in literary classes.'' (p. 141)
Erasmus had broken with Luther very early, despite the maneuvers of Spalatin, and had attacked Luther's ideas of the bondage of the will with a reaffirmation of the Platonic concept of the freedom of the will. Contarini and Pole had both corresponded with Erasmus, and Paul III offered to make him a cardinal on one occasion. The accusation made here is almost identical to Luther's, who had told Erasmus, ``You are not pious!''
The Vatican archives, then and now, contained the detailed reform proposals elaborated by Pius II and Nicolaus of Cusa during the previous century. An honest attempt at reform would have based itself explicitly on these proposals. The reform undertaken by the Contarini commission was going in a very different direction, and some of the works of Pius II were shortly placed on the Index of Prohibited Books.

The Vatican wanted the Contarini commission's report to be kept secret, but it was promptly leaked and published by such diverse sponsors as Vergerio, Luther, and the German Protestant Sturmius; the English version was issued by one Richard Morsyne in 1538.

In 1539, Contarini was instrumental in convincing Paul III to approve the creation of Ignazio de Loyola's Society of Jesus as a holy order. In 1541, Contarini was the papal representative along with Morone at the discussions among Catholics and Protestants in Regensburg, where he proposed a compromise solution on the key issue of justification; on the one hand recognizing a justitia imputata to satisfy the Lutherans, while retaining some role for the justitia inhaerens. The compromise was rejected by both Wittenberg and Rome, and to some it seemed that Contarini had been trying to create a third camp. Contarini died in 1542.

The first session of the Council of Trent was convoked under Paul III, with Pole and Caraffa as members of the committee of cardinals to oversee the proceedings. At the death of Paul III Farnese in 1549, Pole turned out to be the papal candidate of the Emperor Charles V and of the Spirituali. He was assisted by Priuli, the Venetian banker. The anti-Spanish Caraffa was the other homestretch contender, receiving support from the French cardinals led by Guise. At one point, Pole was almost made Pope by imperial acclamation. During one ballot, Pole came within a single vote of a two-thirds majority and thus of Peter's chair. Caraffa turned against Pole during the conclave and accused him of ``certain errors'' in religion; Caraffa claimed that Pole had maintained ``a platoon of heretics and of highly suspect persons'' in his home in Viterbo. Guise accused Pole of leaving the Council of Trent in order to avoid a debate on justification.




The Role of the Venetian Oligarchy in the Reformation, Counter-Reformation, Enlightenment and the Thirty Years' War -- Part III


by Webster Tarpley
Printed in The American Almanac, April 12, 1993.

The following speech, which is being presented in the New Federalist in three parts, was delivered on September 6, 1992 at a conference co-sponsored by the Schiller Institute and the International Caucus of Labor Committees in Northern Virginia.
Let us sample the epistemology of the giovani, using Sarpi and his precursor Paolo Paruta. The giovani were skeptics, full of contempt for man and for human reason. Sarpi admired the French essayist Michel de Montaigne, who had been educated by a father who had been in Italy as a soldier and probably imbibed Venetian teachings; Montaigne himself had made the pilgrimage to Venice. Sarpi agreed with Montaigne that man was the most imperfect of animals.
Sarpi was a precursor of Bentham's hedonistic calculus. Man was a creature of appetites, and these were insatiable, especially the libido dominandi.

``We are always acquiring happiness, we have never acquired it and never will,''
wrote Sarpi. [Pensiero 250]
Paruta had been an empiricist:

``Although our intellect may be divine from its birth, nevertheless here below it lives among these earthly members and cannot perform its operations without the help of bodily sensation. By their means, drawing into the mind the images of material things, it represents these things to itself and in this way forms its concepts of them. By the same token it customarily rises to spiritual contemplations not by itself but awakened by sense objects.'' [Bouwsma, p. 206]
Sarpi was an empiricist:
``There are four modes of philosophizing: the first with reason alone, the second with sense alone, the third with reason and then sense, and the fourth beginning with sense and ending with reason. The first is the worst, because from it we know what we would like to be, not what is. The third is bad because we many times distort what is into what we would like, rather than adjusting what we would like to what is. The second is true but crude, permitting us to know little and that rather of things than of their causes. The fourth is the best we can have in this miserable life. (Scritti filosofici e teologici, Bari: Laterza, 1951, Pensiero 146)
That is Francis Bacon's inductive method. Bacon's ideas about inductive method were taken from the Arte di ben pensare and other Sarpi writings.
For Sarpi, experience means the perception of physical objects by the senses. For Sarpi there are no true universals: ``Essence and universality are works of the mind,'' he wrote disparagingly. [Pensiero 371] Sarpi was brought up on Duns Scotus and William of Ockham.

Sarpi was also a pragmatist, arguing that ``we despise knowledge of things of which we have no need.'' [Pensiero 289]

Sarpi was also a cultural relativist, and a precursor of David Hume: Every culture has its own idea of order, he said, and ``therefore the republics, the buildings, the politics of the Tartars and the Indians are different.'' [Pensiero 159].

With Paolo Paruta, we already have the economic man enshrined in the myths of Adam Smith:

``The desire to grow rich is as natural in us as the desire to live. Nature provides the brute animals with the things necessary for their lives; but in man, whom it makes poor, naked, and subject to many needs, it inserts this desire for riches and gives him intelligence and industry to acquire them.'' [Bouwsma, p. 211]
A speaker in Paruta's dialogues expresses the views of the Physiocrats, saying that wealth derived from farming and grazing is ``more true and natural'' than other forms. [Bouwsma, p. 212]
Paruta's treatment of the fall of the Roman empire appears to be the starting point for Gibbon:

``This stupendous apparatus, constructed over a long course of years through the great virtue and the many exertions of so many valorous men, had finally run the course common to human things, that is to be dissolved and to fall to earth; and with its ruin it brought on the greatest revolution in things.'' [Bouwsma, p. 283]
In religion, Sarpi and his right-hand man, Fulgenzio Micanzio, were very much Spirituali on the ex sola fede line of justification. A papal nuncio assigned to surveil the two wrote that Fulgenzio ``greatly exalts faith in the blood of Christ and the grace of God for our salvation, and leaves out or rarely refers to works.'' [Bouwsma, p. 498]
Sarpi sounds very much like Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, and Hume. This is no surprise, since Sarpi and Micanzio were in close contact with Hobbes and Bacon, sometimes directly, and sometimes through the intermediary of William Cavendish, Earl of Devonshire, a friend of Francis Bacon and the employer of Thomas Hobbes. Bacon was of course a raving irrationalist, a Venetian-style Rosicrucian, and a bugger. Cavendish may have introduced Bacon to Hobbes, who soon became a couple. In Chatsworth House in Cornwall there is a manuscript entitled ``Hobbes' Translations of Italian Letters,'' containing 77 missives from Micanzio to the Earl (called ``Candiscio''). According to Dudley Carleton, Cavendish visited Venice and Padova in September 1614, accompanied by Hobbes. At that time meetings with Sarpi and Micanzio would have been on the agenda. [De Mas, p. 155]




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Venice and England
The contacts between Venice and England during the period around 1600 were so dense as to constitute an ``Anglo-Venetian coalition,'' as Enrico De Mas asserts. The son of the Venetian agent William Cecil (Bacon's uncle) was Robert Cecil, who visited Venice shortly after 1600. Bacon himself was attorney general and lord chancellor for King James I. English ambassadors like Dudley Carleton and Sir Henry Wotton were also important intermediaries. Bacon was also in frequent contact by letter with the Venetian senator and patrician Domenico Molino. Bacon knew Italian because his mother had been active as the translator of the writings of Italian heretics. [De Mas, p. 156] Fulgenzio Micanzio was literary agent for Bacon in Venice, arranging for the translation and publication of his writings.
One letter in Latin from Bacon to Micanzio has been located; here Bacon discusses a plan for a Latin edition of his complete works. Another translator of Bacon was the Archbishop of Spalato and Venetian agent Marcantonio de Dominis, who turned against Rome and stayed for some time as an honored guest of the English court before returning to Rome. There was a Bacon cult among the Venetian nobility in those years, and Venice led all Italian cities in the number of editions of Bacon's works.

As for Sarpi, his History of the Council of Trent was first published in English in London in an edition dedicated to King James I, and translated by Nathaniel Brent.

Towards the end of the sixteenth century, Spain was showing signs of economic decline, and was attempting to retrench on her military commitments. Spain made peace with France in 1598, with England in 1604, and, after decades of warfare, began to negotiate with the Dutch. Spain also started peace talks with the Ottoman Empire. The Venice of the giovani was horrified by the apparent winding down of the wars of religion. Especially the Spanish truce with the Dutch was viewed with alarm by the Venetians, since this would free up veteran Spanish troops who could be used in a war against Venice. After taking over Venice in 1582, the giovani had favored a more aggressive policy against the papacy and the Hapsburgs. After 1600, Venice passed laws that made it harder for the church to own Venetian land and dispose of it; this was followed by the arrest of two priests by the civil authorities. Pope Paul V Borghese responded on profile by declaring Venice under the papal interdict, which remained in force for almost a year, well into 1607.

The use of the papal interdict against a nominally Catholic country caused a sensation in the Protestant world, where tremendous sympathy for Venice was generated by an avalanche of propaganda writings, above all those of Sarpi himself. The Jesuit Bellarmine and others wrote for the papacy in this pamphlet war. Bellarmine puffed the pope as the arbiter mundi, the court of last resort in world affairs. Sarpi, who was an official of the Venetian regime, soon became the idol of the libertines and freethinkers everywhere, and was soon one of the most famous and most controversial persons in Europe. In the end, the Vatican was obliged to remove the interdict without securing any expression of penitence or regret; the Venetian government released the two clerics to a French cardinal who had undertaken a mediation, and the French gave the clerics back to the pope.

Lutherans and Calvinists cheered Venice, which appeared to have checked the inexorable advance of the Counter-Reformation. Much was made of national sovereignty, which the Venetians said they were defending against the pope in the name of all nations.



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Venice and James I
French Gallicans and Huguenots, Swiss and Dutch Calvinists were for Venice, but none supported Venice more than the degenerate King of England, James I. James was the pedantic pederast who claimed that he got his divine right directly from God, and not by way of the pope. James was delighted with Sarpi's arguments, and with their seeming victory. Venice, by asserting an independent Catholic Church under state control during the interdict, also appeared to be following the example of Henry VIII and the Anglican (or Anglo-Catholic) Church.
Sir Henry Wotton advanced the idea of a Protestant alliance encompassing England, Venice, the Grisons (the Graubuenden or Gray league of the Valtellina region in the Swiss Alps, sought by Spain as a land route between Austria and Milan), Holland, and the Protestant princes of Germany. The former Calvinist King Henry IV of France might be won for such a league, some thought. The Doge Leonardo Dona' of the giovani group even threatened indirectly to lead Venice into apostasy and heresy. ``You must warn the Pope not to drive us into despair,'' he told the papal nuncio, ``because we would then act like desperate men!'' Sir Henry Wotton took this literally, and included in his alliance proposals plans to get Venice to go Protestant. He forwarded this to London where it was marked in the margin ``The Project of Venice, 1608'' by Robert Cecil. This was the Cecil who, as David Cherry has shown, staged Guy Fawkes' Gunpowder Plot, an alleged Catholic attempt to blow up the king and the Houses of Parliament, in order to guarantee that James would be suitably hostile to Rome and Spain. The project included a plan for James to become the supreme commander of the Protestant world in a war against the pope. This was clearly a line that Sarpi and company sought to feed to the megalomaniac James I. As part of the scheme, Charles Diodati, one of the Italian Spirituali who had fled to Geneva, was brought to Venice to preach. But later Sarpi and the Venetians found reason to be bitterly disappointed with the refusal of James I and Charles I massively to intervene on the European continent.

During this period, according to one account, an emissary of the Elector of the Palatinate reported that he had been taken by the English ambassador to Venice to visit a Calvinist Congregation of more than 1,000 people in Venice, including 300 of the top patricians, of which Sarpi was the leader. Sarpi invited the German Protestants to come to the aid of Venice in case of war, for in defending Venetian territory they would be helping the Protestant cause as well. [Scelte Lettere Inedite di Fra Paolo Sarpi, (Capolago, Canton Ticino: Tipografia e Libreria Elvetica, 1833, pp. cxi-cxii]



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The Roots of War
In reality, the Venetians used the conflict around the Interdict to inflame the religious passions of Europe so as to set the stage for a revival of the wars of religion. The seventeenth century would thus repeat the hecatomb of the sixteenth on an even vaster scale. The Venetian gambit of a clash with the Vatican set the stage for the Thirty Years' War.
The grand design Sarpi peddled to Protestants called for an apocalyptic war between Catholics and Protestants with the latter led by James I and the Dutch United Provinces. In a battle between Venice and the papal states, foreign Protestant armies would fight on Venetian soil, making possible the religious conversion of the terra ferma (Bergamo, Brescia, Verona, Vicenza, etc.) to some sort of Calvinism. [Cozzi, pp. 265-68] At a deeper level, Venice wanted a catastrophic general war in Europe from which Venice could hold aloof, thus surviving at least until the process of the metastasis of the fondi into northern Europe could be completed--until the time, say, of the founding of the Bank of England at the end of the 1600s. Beyond that, the oligarchs would seek to preserve the Rialto as a cultural and ideological center. But the survival of the withered mummy of Venice for a century or two would be possible only if all the other European powers were throughly devastated.

It is remarkable to observe how many of the key protagonists who detonated the Thirty Years' War can be identified as Venetian agents.

During the Interdict battle, Sarpi's intelligence agencies went into action to create the preconditions for such a war, not in Italy, but beyond the Alps in Germany. The first step was to organize Germany into two armed camps, similar to the pre-1914 or post-1945 European military blocs. First came the creation of the Protestant Union of 1608, helped by the crushing of the free city of Donauwoerth by the Counter-Reformation under Maximilian I of Bavaria.

The Protestant Union was organized by Prince Christian of Anhalt, the senior adviser to the Elector Palatine. Christian of Anhalt was a vital node of Paolo Sarpi's network, and in the 1870s the Archives of the German city of Bernburg contained a correspondence between Christian and Sarpi. [Julius Krebs, p. 45]

When Christian von Anhalt created the Protestant Union, he sent one Christoph von Dona (or Dohna) to talk to Sarpi in Venice about the entry of Venice into this alliance. Christoph von Dona and his brother Achatius von Dona kept up a correspondence with Paolo Sarpi in their own right [Cozzi, p. 245, 258].

In August 1608, Christoph von Dona met with Sarpi in Venice, and Sarpi told Dona about the measures taken by the giovani in 1582 to ``correct'' the functions of the Council of Ten and its subcommittee of three (Zonta), which up until that time had constituted a factional stronghold of the adversaries of the giovani, who were called the Vecchi (old) and who favored a more conciliatory line towards Spain and the papacy. The Ten had been accused, Sarpi told Christoph von Dona, of being arrogant, and of usurping the main functions of the government, including foreign policy, from the senate, or Pregadi.

The Venetian diplomatic corps was mobilized to exploit the Interdict to create the Protestant Union. The papal nuncio in Paris reported on March 3, 1609 to Pope Paul V on the activities of the Venetian ambassador, Antonio Foscarini, a close associate of Sarpi: ``From the first day that he came here, he has always comported himself in the same way: His most confidential dealings are with the agents of various German Protestants, with the Dutch, with the English ambassador and with two or three French Huguenots, who can be considered his houseguests. His business has been to attempt to impede in any way possible any peace or truce in Flanders.... In addition to these fine projects, he has been in a big rush to set up this league of Protestants in Germany, and although he has not been able to do much in this direction, in any case I am sure that if he can contribute to this, he'll do it.'' [Federico Seneca, La Politica Veneziana Dopo L'Interdetto, Padova, 1957., pp. 21-22]

Within a year of the creation of the Protestant Union in 1608, a Catholic League was formed under the aegis of Maximilian of Bavaria with Spanish support. The conflagration was set.

Academic accounts of the Thirty Years' War often stress the conflict over the succession in Juelich-Cleves (around Duesseldorf) after 1609, which embroiled the Dutch and the Protestants against the imperial Catholics. Some accounts portray Henry IV of France as eager to attack the Hapsburgs in Milan and on the Rhine during 1610, just before Henry IV was assassinated by the alleged Catholic fanatic Ravaillac, who accused Henry IV of being a threat to the Catholic Church. According to other accounts, Henry IV ``had decided to reveal to the pope and to the Venetian Republic what was being plotted in Venice by Sarpi, or at least by those who were moving around him.'' [Cozzi, p. 257]

From Venice, Giovanni Diodati wrote to his friend Philippe Duplessis Mornay telling him of the ``petite eglise reformee'' (small reformed church) there. Diodati added that ``the English minister and ambassador [William Bedell, Wotton's secretary] has been very helpful.'' This letter was intercepted by Henry IV of France, who passed it to the papal nuncio, who sent it on to Rome and to the Venetian government. Sarpi was soon aware of what had happened. Writing to Christoph von Dohna on 29 September 1608, Sarpi complained, ``The King of France has written that Venice is in favor of religion, and he has played a very bad role.'' ``How did it happen that that great principle was put to sleep?'' he wrote to another correspondent that summer, referring to the French mediation of the Interdict crisis; ``that is also the reason why it is impossible to incite others.'' [Cozzi, p. 259] Sarpi's animus against Henry IV suggests that the superficial explanation of Henry's assassination in 1610 may not be the correct one. In any case, Henry's death increased the tensions among the German Protestant leaders, since they had now been deprived of their protector. Henry's death meant that France, a power Venice ultimately hated and feared just as much as Spain, would be plunged again into the internal conflicts epitomized by the St. Bartholomew's massacre of 20,000 Huguenots in 1572; Pope Gregory XIII had called those killings ``more agreeable than fifty Lepantos.'' [R.R. Palmer, p. 106] In the 1600s this civil strife was called the Fronde, and it would be decades before the Fronde was suppressed to the point that France was capable of international action once again.



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The Thirty Years' War
In 1615, the Venetians started a border war with Austria, called the Guerra Arciducale. This was the signal that something big was coming. The Austrian Hapsburgs, in order to defend their frontier with the Ottoman Empire, employed a force of refugees from the Balkans called uzkoks (``uzkok'' is the Serbian word for refugees). Uzkoks settled in Segna and some other ports of the eastern Adriatic where they operated as corsairs against Turkish shipping, and also against the Venetians. The uzkoks, through their depradations and through the cost of measures undertaken against them, were depleting the Venetian treasury. So in December 1615, Venetian land forces crossed the Isonzo River and laid siege to Gradisca. Count John Ernest of Nassau-Siegen raised forces totaling 5,000 men in the Dutch Republic to assist the Venetians; ten English and twelve Dutch warships maintained a blockade of the Adriatic against any ships from Spain or Naples which might have sought to aid their Austrian Hapsburg allies. But Spanish forces did reach the front, forcing the Venetians to accept a negotiated peace. A recent study highlights the significance of this Venetian-staged conflict in the runup to the general conflagration:
``The uzkok war was one of the more bizarre episodes of the earlier seventeenth century, yet it offered an alarming example of how a minor political conflict in a remote corner of Europe could threaten to engulf the whole continent with war.... The uzkok war, although apparently minor, was important because it brought a general European conflict perceptibly nearer. On the diplomatic plane, it cemented or occasioned alliances that favored aggression.'' [ Parker, pp. 40, 42]
In the spring of 1618, executions in Venice were attributed to the discovery by the Council of Ten of an alleged Spanish plot to overthrow the Venetian regime. Some skeptical historians consider that this was a cover story for a Venetian intrigue in which the Spanish governor of Naples, Osuna, was to declare himself independent under Venetian auspices. [Carl J. Friedrichs, p. 151]
The immediate detonator for the Thirty Years' War is usually considered to be the revolt of the Bohemian nobles against the new Hapsburg Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II, who was also the King of Bohemia. Under Rudolph II, the previous emperor, the Bohemian nobles had been granted the Letter of Majesty of 1609 which guaranteed them their religious self-determination (ignoring the cuius regio eius religio) and the right to elect their own king. The Bohemians, many of whom were Calvinists, Hussites, and Utraquists, feared that Ferdinand would introduce the militant Counter-Reformation into Bohemia. There followed the celebrated defenestration of Prague of 1618, in which two representatives of Ferdinand were thrown out of the window by a group of Bohemian nobles organized by the Count of Thurn. When Ferdinand sent troops to restore his authority, the Bohemian nobles deposed him and decided to elect a new king. They chose Frederick V, the Elector Palatine, who had his court in Heidelberg, and who, as we have seen, counted Christian von Anhalt and Christoph von Dona among his most trusted advisers. When the Electoral Palatine, now styling himself King Frederick of Bohemia, was routed at the battle of the White Mountain in 1620, he went into the history books as the ``unlucky Winter King.'' Let us attempt further to reveal the fine Venetian hand behind these events, which are the opening rounds of the Thirty Years' War.

The key figure among the Bohemians is the Count Heinrich Mathias of Thurn-Valsassina (1567-1633). This is the senior branch of the family, originally from Venetian territory, which is otherwise known as della Torre, Torre e Tasso, and later as Thurn und Taxis. Thurn's parents had become Protestants, but he entered the imperial army and fought during a campaign against the Ottoman Empire. As a reward he had gotten the important post of Burggraf of Marlstein in Bohemia. Here Thurn built a base among the local nobility, including especially the branch of the Hussites known as the Utraquists. His announced program was the maintenance of Bohemian liberties for these nobles. Heinrich Mathias von Thurn demanded and got the Letter of Majesty, which soon turned into the apple of Bohemian discord. He was named to a special committee of 30 Defenders of the Faith in Prague. He was vehemently opposed to the election of Ferdinand as Holy Roman Emperor, and Ferdinand responded by attempting to oust Thurn as Burggraf, within the framework of other anti-Protestant measures. Thurn then incited the Bohemians to rebel, and this led directly to the defenestration of Prague of May 23, 1618. In the face of Ferdinand's military response, Thurn was made the commander of the Bohemian armed forces. He had captured some of the suburbs of Vienna when he was forced to retreat. During the campaign leading up to the rout at the White Mountain, Thurn was constantly disputing with the Palatine Elector's generals about who was in command. After the rout, he made his career as a general in later phases of the war. [Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Oesterreich, XLV, pp. 104-06]

Finally, let us look at Frederick V the Elector Palatine himself. The future Winter King, a Calvinist, had married Elizabeth, the daughter of King James I of England, and the English presence at the Palatine court in Heidelberg was associated with the same sorts of cultist kookery we have observed in the cases of Zorzi and Bacon. Rosicrucians in particular were heavily present at the electoral Palatine court. One of them was the English irrationalist and freemason Robert Fludd, whose lengthy treatise on universal harmony, the Utriusque cosmi historia was published on the Palatine city of Oppenheim in 1617-19. During the course of the Thirty Years' War, after Frederick had been deposed by the Catholic forces, parts of the Heidelberg library, the Bibliotheca Palatina, were confiscated by the Inquisition and moved to Rome. [Yates, pp. 169-171] Frederick was not the only one infected by the Rosicrucian bacillus in these years in which the saga of ``Christian Rosenkreuz first appeared in Germany. One of Fludd's friends was a certain German Rosicrucian alchemist named Michael Maier, who was reputed to be close to the Hapsburg Emperor Rudolph II. [See Serge Hutin, Histoire des Rose-Croix, p. 125]

Such Venetian-Rosicrucian irrationalism may provide the key to the Winter King's legendary mental lability and failures of strategic planning. We must also remember that the Elector was constantly controlled and advised by Sarpi's friends Christian von Anhalt and Christoph von Dona. Christian was notorious for his adventurism and brinksmanship; one German account of these events speaks of ``Anhalt's crazy plans''; these included the ambitious project of wiping out the House of Hapsburg and making Frederick Holy Roman Emperor, a thoroughly utopian undertaking. Frederick V was encouraged to believe that with the aid of a few troops from Venetian-allied Savoy, plus the Bohemians, and support from a few other German states, he could break the Spanish-Austrian-Catholic hold on central Europe.

In August-September 1619, Frederick vacillated over whether or not to accept the Bohemian crown offered to him by Thurn and his cohorts. Bohemia was prime Hapsburg territory, and it was clear that Frederick could not keep Prague without some serious fighting. Some advisers wrote position papers for Frederick warning him not to take the crown, saying that ``acceptance would begin a general religious war.'' [Parker, p. 55] But Christian von Anhalt and his friend Camerarius answered that such a war was inevitable anyway as soon as the twelve years' truce between the Spanish and the Dutch ran out. The Sarpi networks were fully mobilized; Dudley Carleton, the Anglo-Venetian representative of James I in the Hague, wrote in September 1619 that ``this business in Bohemia is like to put all Christendom into combustion.''

Frederick accepted the Bohemian crown, rushed to Prague, and then found himself in a hopelessly exposed position. After the White Mountain, he never stopped retreating; he failed to rally the Palatinate for a war of self-defense, and was permanently ousted. The death of Gustavus Adolphus some years later closed the books on Frederick V's hopes of being restored in the Palatinate.

The Thirty Years' War, which extirpated about half of the population of Germany between 1618 and 1648, is thus exposed as a piece of utopian-geopolitical tinkering from the satanic cell around Fra Paolo Sarpi.



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More on Bacon
Even after he was ousted from all his court posts in the wake of confessed bribery and corruption, Francis Bacon remained a loyal Venetian agent. In about 1624, Bacon addressed a memorandum to the new King Charles I in which he urged that England declare war on Spain in order to help restore the Elector Palatine (and Charles's sister) in Heidelberg. The alliance proposed by Bacon was to include new variations on the usual Paoli Sarpi constellation: France, Navarre, Naples, Milan, Grisons, Savoy, Bavaria, the Protestant leader Gabor of Transylvania, and now even Persia, which was attempting to seize the straits of Hormuz. Bacon stressed the Venetian contribution:
``It is within every man's observation also that Venice doth think their state almost unfixed if the Spaniards hold the Valtoline.'' [Bacon, Considerations Touching a War...]
Sarpi had many English admirers; one was Izaak Walton, the author of the famous Compleat Angler. Another was John Milton, who had repeated praise for Fra Paolo. Milton called Sarpi ``Padre Paolo the great unmasker of the Tridentine Council,'' ``Padre Paolo the great Venetian antagonist of the Pope,'' and ``the great and learned Padre Paolo.'' Indeed, a whole passage in Milton's famous ``Areopagitica,'' the one dealing with the Council of Trent, closely follows Sarpi's account.
Ludwig Dehio and other historians have pointed out that the characteristic Venetian methods of strategy were also typical of the later English and British colonialism. It was the Venetian asset and architect of the English religious schism, Thomas Cromwell, who wrote, ``this realm of England is an empire.'' Gaining strength under James I, the Venetian party acted out its imperialist impulse during the Stuart and Cromwell periods, and most obviously under the post-1688 oligarchical system. [See Graham Lowry, How the Nation was Won] Thus it is that the Venetian methods that were used deliberately to provoke the wars of religion of the sixteenth century, and later the Thirty Years' War itself, can be discerned in the global strategic commitments of today's British oligarchy tending to unleash a global cataclysm, a bellum omnium contra omnes (war of each against all) which no nation and no people could seriously hope to survive.

The ascendancy of Venice after 1200 was instrumental in precipitating the near-collapse of European civilization between about 1250 and 1400. Later, the combined effect of the Venice-sponsored Protestant Reformation and the Venice-sponsored Counter-Reformation was to visit upon Europe the renewed horrors of 1520-1648, to which the British historian Trevor-Roper has referred under the heading of the ``little Dark Age.'' Today the shadows of another such nightmare epoch lengthen over the ruined economies, gutted cities and ethnic conflicts of the late twentieth century. Those wishing to survive must learn to defend themselves from the Anglo-Venetian hecatomb now looming.



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Bibliography
See the published and unpublished works of Al and Rachel Douglas, Graham Lowry, David Cherry, and Pietro Cicconi.

Eugenio Alberi (ed.), Le Relazioni degli ambasciatori veneti al Senato durante il secolo decimosesto (Firenze, 1853).

Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (Leipzig, 1876), for Christian von Anhalt and Frederick V Elector of the Palatinate.

Aurelius Augustinus, On Faith and Works, ed. Gregory J. Lombado (New York: Newman Press, 1988).

Aurelius Augustinus, The Teacher, Thre Free Choice of the Will, Grace and Free Will, trans. by Robert P. Russell (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1968).

Theobald Beer, ``Der Froeliche Wechsel und Streit'' (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1980).

Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums (Vienna, 1882).

Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty (Berkeley, 1968).

Horatio Brown, The Venetian Republic (London, 1902).

Concilium Tridentinum (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1901).

Cozzi, Paolo Sarpi fra Venezia e l'Europa (Torino, Einaudi, 1978).

Dictionary of National Biography

(London, 1921). Franz Dittrich, Gasparo Contarini 1483-1542 (Nieuwkoop, 1972).

Stephan Ehses, ``Der Reformentwurf des Kardinals Nikolaus Cusanus,'' in Historisches Jahrbuch, XXXII, 1911, pp. 274-97.

Enrico De Mas, Sovranita' politica e unita' cristi






How The Venetians Took Over England and Created Freemasonry

Conference Address by Gerald Rose, Schiller Institute Conference, September, 1993

Printed in The American Almanac, November 29, 1993

Gerry Rose is a member of the editorial board of Executive Intelligence Review magazine and the International Caucus of Labor Committees' executive committee. He spoke on September 5, 1993.

I had become increasingly interested for many years, beginning with my research into the American Revolution, as to why England seemed to be the source of such evil. This is not only on the level of geopolitics and the unbelievable savagery that the British Empire carried out in its usury and slavery, but also on the level of culture. The British creation of Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, leading to the outright Satanism of Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, Aleister Crowley, etc. underscores the motivation that created the British Empire. As you look deeper, there is no doubt that the New Age issued from England. This includes emphatically the creation of the Jacobins at the hands of Lord Shelburne and the creation of communism--with its twin evil, fascism--at the British Foreign Office by Lord Palmerston and in his collaboration with Giuseppe Mazzini.

The stated goal of the New Age is the destruction of monotheistic religion and a return to outright paganism. Freemasonry is the instrument created to carry out this return to paganism. It is the Venetian takeover of England and its creation of Freemasonry that is our subject today.

I think it is important here, to reference the prime satanic evil that Venice really is. There are two works of art which deal most effectively with the methods of Venice. They are The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe and The Ghostseer by Friedrich Schiller.

In both masterpieces, we see a portrait of pure evil, where there is no right or wrong, just corruption. The key to this is Aristotle, and it should not come as any surprise that it was the University of Padua, run by Venice, that trained the elite of Venice explicitly in Aristotle. Aristotle rejects Plato's method of successive approximations of perfection, which bring one closer to the Creator. For Aristotle, the Creator has nothing to do with the unfolding of the universe and the continuing creation. For Aristotle, man's progress is a mere illusion and we are always infinitely far from the Creator.

For Aristotle, there is no right or wrong, because there is no knowable truth. For Aristotle, there is only ethics but no morality, and ethics is only a matter of convention. In The Ghostseer Schiller captures this in the most profound way. He shows that the essence of Venice is that it is always on both sides of every issue--but the essence of its method is corruption: Find the adversary's weakness, and then corrupt him.

This is Satanic. It is evil for evil's sake. Its method is to degrade humanity and take delight in that. We will recount how this Venetian evil took over England and created the New Age.



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Cultural Warfare
How did the ``New Age'' come into existence? This story will be told today. Further, we will achieve a most startling result: We will learn that what we call modern scientific method is basically occult belief created by Freemasonry to destroy the work of Cardinal Nicolaus of Cusa. It was the Venetian creation of Freemasonry that imposed upon science a radical split between the science of the Spirit which is theology and the science of matter. As you will learn, this is literally gnostic. This is not an epithet; it is quite literally true. Our major problem looking at this period is that we are trying to track two secret societies, both the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons. If you were Sherlock Holmes you would never find them. If they were careful, they would leave contradictory clues and you would never be able to reach a conclusion as to who they are, using traditional empiricist methods.
How do you proceed? you must use the method of the Necessary Existent.

What do I mean by that? We must proceed from what we know to be the case.

What do we know about all warfare? Ninety percent is cultural and only 10 percent is physical.

And the key is culture. Analyze the culture and no matter what name a thing is given, you will never be fooled.

It is on the level of culture that our enemy must drop his guard. He is not that bright and when Satan is forced out on the level of culture, he is scared. As we can document, after the initial debates with Lyndon LaRouche on the question of economics, these cultists never dared debate him again. They are, as Satan is, primarily frauds.

We will focus intensively on the Venetian takeover of England, for it was England that had the misfortune of becoming the new Venice and where Freemasonry was to establish itself.

At our conference a year ago, Webster Tarpley presented the documentation showing how Venice created the Reformation and the Counterreformation in order to implement the New Age [published in a longer version in New Federalist in three installments, March 22, April 5, April 12, 1992]. It is important to state this, because any competent approach must focus on the cultural climate as the basis on which any intelligence operation can be run. It is prima facie imcompetent to believe that history is run by assassinations and gossip, without first accounting for what are the cultural paradigms which are being fought out.

Now to our story.



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The Venetian Reformers
After the League of Cambrai almost destroyed Venice in 1509-13, Gasparo Contarini, from one of the leading noble families in Venice created a grouping, later known as ``I Spirituali,'' that decided that the hedonism that had overcome the Venetian ruling families would have to change. Contarini was able to create a a group of ``reformers'' that created all the essentials of protestantism while remaining nominally within the Catholic Church. Gasparo Contarini was trained by Pietro Pomponazzi, the leading Aristotelian at the University of Padua. Under the guise of Christian piety, Contarini led a dramatic return to Aristotle within the Catholic Church. It was Contarini who set up the commission that led to the Council of Trent, which was to prosecute the war against the Reformation, while on the other side, as Webster documents, Contarini and his associates created Luther. What was the purpose of this?
From a limited standpoint it was clear that the very existence of the Catholic Church and a powerful Spain would always threaten a Venice whose naval power was formidable, but whose ability to defend itself on land was very limited because of its size. As the Venetians saw in the League of Cambrai, the very existence of these institutions was a threat to Venice.

Yet, on a deeper level, something much more devastating was going on. As LaRouche pointed out in his paper ``On the Subject of God,'' the abiding commitment to Aristotelianism stemmed from an oligarchical outlook of tremendous contempt for humankind as imago viva Dei. Aristotelianism is an oligarchical disease. It was Christianity that asserted that all men were in the image of God, which represented a mortal threat to the Venetian oligarchy. They believed themeselves to be the ``Gods of Olympus'' and who thought themselves above God's law. Indeed they considered themselves the creators of the law. They hated Christianity and the Renaissance's reassertion of this idea, in a profoundly personal way.

We could develop this more if there were more time. I wanted to reference it because freemasonry and the New Age are a Venetian attempt to wipe Christianity from the face of the earth.



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Venice Invades England
It is not an accident that Venice focused much of its attention on England.
The Venetians said it themselves. In the Venetian ambassadors' reports to the Venetian Senate, which are now public, England was the key to the destruction of Spain. One report outlines that Flanders and the Netherlands were the workshop of the Spanish Empire. If you could control the English Channel, then you could break the Spanish sea route to the Netherlands and weaken Spain irrevocably. It is uncanny how accurate the Venetian report on this is. It is in fact exactly what happens during the Thirty Years' War.

I believe this story begins with the break of Henry VIII from continental Europe with his setting up of the Anglican Church. This cataclysm in English history set up the basis for religious warfare that was to rip England apart for centuries.

It was the hope of the Renaissance men such as Erasmus and Colet and emphatically Sir Thomas More that England would become an island of great learning and a benefit to all mankind. Erasmus dedicated his Enchiridion of the Militant Christian to England's Henry VIII, just as he dedicated his Education of a Christian Prince to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

The Venetians were not to allow this. Venice's big concern ever since the League of Cambrai almost wiped them out was to assure that Spain was never to have a league with France and England again. The papacy had some interest in this, because the contest between France and Spain tended to be fought out on Italian soil. I state this because the papacy was among the first to form the League of Cambrai and declare a war on Venice. The league came within an inch of crushing them forever, yet the papacy was the first to break ranks and conclude a peace with Venice. If we look at English diplomacy during the League of Cambrai, when Spain went into the league, so too, did England join. When the alliance broke down, and Spain had a quarrel with France, Henry immediately declared war on France. The obvious point is that, as long as Henry VIII was married to Catherine of Aragon, the daughter of the Spanish king, the ability to manipulate Henry against Spain was greatly diminished. This came to a head after the Sack of Rome. At the Battle of Pavia in 1525, the French troops were so badly defeated by Charles V, that the French king was seized and held for ransom.

Venice panicked. Besides the fact that a victorious Spanish army was on Italian soil, the French, who were critical to the Venetian balance of power against Spain, had just fallen apart. This was the year 1525. From the Venetian standpoint, England had to break with Spain.

There was only one way to do that: Henry had to be induced to divorce Catherine. The pretext for divorce was to be Catherine's failure to produce a male heir. Clearly Henry was driven mad by this adventure if he were not mad already. There were ways that Henry could have resolved this matter peaceably without a divorce or a break with Rome. One way--it was suggested even by Henry--was to legitimize his bastard son so that this offspring could have been his rightful heir. This, by the way, had been sanctioned by the papacy in a previous case. Another way was to marry his lover Anne Boleyn while remaining married to Catherine, in order to produce male offspring for the succession. Such arrangements had been made before for reasons of state with papal sanction.

On the one hand, the papacy under Spanish control could not allow any of this, but more significantly it seems that Henry was induced to take the most violent path possible. His chief adviser for the initial phase was Cardinal Wolsey. Wolsey was perfectly happy to get some kind of dispensation from the papacy for Henry. Wolsey did not want anything too precipitous to happen because he had pretensions to be elected pope with French help.

Then something dramatic happened. Henry dumped Wolsey and the Howard family became Henry's top advisers. In their midst was the top Venetian agent Thomas Cromwell--I mean literally trained in Venice. One can speculate on the exact way this was done, but there can be no doubt of Venetian control of the split.

In the middle of this, in 1529, the Venetian friar and cabalist Francesco Giorgi (Zorzi) comes on the scene. He is sought out by Thomas Cranmer, who is soon to become the first archbishop of Canterbury agreeable to the break with Rome. The pretext for bringing in Giorgi was that he could read the original Hebrew of the Old Testament to discern whether Henry's marriage to Catherine had been valid in the first place. The background is that Catherine had originally been married to Henry's elder brother, the crown Prince Arthur, who then died within a few months. There is one passage in the Old Testament recognizing a man's obligation to marry his deceased brother's wife, and one passage forbidding the same. To cover all possibilities, a papal dispensation had been issued permitting Henry's marriage to Catherine. Giorgi was now brought in to persuade Henry that the biblical passage prohibiting such a marriage was authoritative, and that the opposing passage was not applicable. The dispensation on which Henry's marriage rested, by virtue of having contravened scripture, was null and void. The pope had exceeded his authority by issuing it, according to Giorgi. Catherine's credible testimony that her first marriage had never been consummated was simply ignored.

According to Giorgi, therefore, Henry had never been legally married to Catherine. Giorgi, with the full power of Venice behind him, assured Henry that he would be supported in his break. Henry was by now inflamed with passion for Anne Boleyn, the granddaughter of Thomas Howard, second Duke of Norfolk, and eagerly grasped for Giorgi's conclusions.

Once Cranmer was named archbishop of Canterbury, he officially rendered a new decision using Giorgi's reasoning. Appeals to Rome had now been made high treason.



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Giorgi and the Occult
Giorgi was no minor figure. His family was one of the ten top ruling families of Venice and he became one of Venice's ambassadors during critical years after the sack of Rome in 1527.
Yet, more significant than his interpretation of scripture relating to the divorce, as critical as that was, was that he was the transmission belt for a counterculture movement which was to culminate in the occult takeover of England and eventually lead to the creation of Speculative Freemasonry. It is striking that Giorgi was aware of who his major enemy was. In his major work, Harmonice Mundi, Giorgi attacks Nicholas of Cusa. In what should become known as the very founding statement of Speculative Freemasonry, Giorgi states: ``The seeker after the Monas (the one) may retreat into negative theology and the Docta Ignorantia, or he may seek to follow the divine Monas in its expansion into the three Worlds.''

Harmonice Mundi is one of the first systematic works of the Neoplatonic so-called Christian Cabala. Giorgi makes a deadly cultural assault on England. He introduces two critical notions which set England up for Freemasonry. First, the Neoplatonic idea that the ``One'' is directly knowable. In Plato's Parmenides dialogue, he proves that there is only one way human beings can have knowledge of the One. He proves it by a method later called by Cusa ``docta ignorantia,'' by the method of proving exhaustively that any approach that attempts to resolve the paradox of the one and the many leads to hopeless contradiction. Therefore, he leaves the reader of the dialogue with the necessity to hypothesize another solution. The idea that the one is directly knowable is a direct distortion of Plato.

The idea that God is directly knowable is a mystical notion. Here we get directly to the point of Venetian epistemology. As Lyn elaborates in his paper on ``History As Science,'' the face of evil is empiricism, or the belief that the only thing you can know is what is verified directly by your senses. It would seem that mysticism and empiricism are directly polar opposites. This is the exact opposite of empiricism. The logic of the mystic Giorgi, is that indeed we can only know through our senses; therefore the only way to truly know God is to directly experience him through our senses. This is the essence of mysticism. It is also empiricism.



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Attack on the Renaissance
It is here I want to develop what might seem like a diversion--but there is no way you can understand what happens next without such a discussion. Frances Yates, an enemy of ours at the Warburg Institute, has done, from an enemy standpoint, some useful work on the creation of a pagan revival around the Platonic Academy of Florence. I must add a cautionary point here which is indicative of how our enemies create myths. The Warburg Institute is the major research institute into the Renaissance. It is Yates at Warburg who attempts to prove that the Renaissance came from an occult return to pre-Christian religions and a revival of Neoplatonism.
So in her typical fashion, she goes much too far, but her identification of the tendency is irrefutable. The attack on the Aristotelian Schoolmen issuing from the Renaissance is useful and has a spinoff effect, particularly in England, of creating a highly literate grouping around John Colet and others, who travel to Florence and learn ancient Greek. They group around Erasmus and Sir Thomas More. They create a flowering of real Christianity and culture which leads to Shakespeare.

It should also be noted that Erasmus came out of the great teaching movement called the Brethren of the Common Life and not predominantly from Ficino's Platonic Academy.

One has to understand what insanity it was for Aristotle to be allowed to remain the predominant force in universities, to understand what a relief it was to reintroduce Plato in the original. This useful work was translated by Ficino and funded by Cosimo De Medici.

Yet, alongside of this came a Neoplatonic fraud and the translation of an ancient mystic by the name of Hermes Trismegistus. According to the legend believed in the fifteenth century, which had come from Lactantius, a father of the Church, Hermes Trismegistus was supposed to have foretold the coming of Christ. Hermes Trismegistus, in the book titled The Perfect Word, made use of these words: ``The Lord and Creator of all things, whom we have thought right to call God, since He made the second God visible and sensible.... Since, therefore, He made Him first, and alone, and one only, He appeared to Him beautiful, and most full of all good things; and He hallowed Him, and altogether loved Him as His own Son.'' The fraud perpetrated by Neoplatonics of the second century was that Hermes was supposed to have been living at the time of Moses and his creation story and the quote which I read you was all about 1,500 years before Christ. In reality it was dated about the second century A.D. Ficino did not know that. Therefore, the reverence for Hermes was based on the belief that he foretold by 1,500 years the coming of Christ.

In the hermetic works that Ficino translated, he personally was very struck by some of the Natural Magic elements that were in the writings. He meant no heresy and was later defended by the Pope, but it opened the door to legitimizing what turned out to be a Neoplatonic fraud. The danger here is the same danger that was always inherent in the Neoplatonics as opposed to the real Plato. The Neoplatonics belived in a world spirit, and that one could coax the spirit into matter through the use of the soul, which was located midway between spirit and matter. This use of the soul is what is known as magic. Augustine was revulsed by this practice and strongly admonished Hermes for practicing such magic.



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The Cabala
The worst aspect of this came in through Pico della Mirandola. He went back to an idea of the world soul, asserting that man participated only as a receptacle of the world soul. Presumably, the body died but the world soul lived on. This denied the individual soul and the uniqueness of the individual. Pico, in his ``Oration on The Dignity Of Man,'' gives his most dramatic formulation of this idea:
``... Whatever seeds each man cultivates will grow to maturity and bear in him their own fruit. If they be vegetative, he will be like a plant. If sensitive, he will become brutish. If rational, he will grow into heavenly being. If intellectual, he will be an angel and the son of God. And if, happy in the lot of no created thing, he withdraws into the center of his own unity, his spirit, made one with God, in the solitary darkness of God, who is set above all things, shall surpass them all. Who would not admire this our chameleon? Or who could more greatly admire aught else whatever? It is man who Asclepius of Athens, arguing from his mutability of character and from his self-transforming nature, on just grounds says was symbolized by Proteus in the mysteries. Hence those metamorphoses renowned among the Hebrews and the Pythagoreans.''

Pico also went futher into mysticism, as he insisted that the Cabala was the fount of ancient wisdom that Moses passed down to elite disciples, an esoteric doctrine that only an elect can interpret. This is the idea that through the manipulation of symbols you could directly acess God and His universe. It is a rejection of scientific method in favor of the manipulation of symbols.

Pico wrote: ``35. In exactly the same way, when the true interpretation of the Law according to the command of God, divinely handed down to Moses, was revealed, it was called the Cabala, a word which is the same among the Hebrews as `reception' among ourselves; for this reason, of course, that one man from another, by a sort of hereditary right, received that doctrine not through written records but through a regular succession of revelations.... In these books principally resides, as Esdras with a clear voice justly declared, the spring of understanding, that is, the ineffable theology of the supersubstantial deity; the fountain of wisdom, that is, the exact metaphysic of the intellectual and angelic forms; and the stream of knowledge, that is, the most steadfast philosophy of natural things.''

It is this movement that Giorgi is a part of and this branch of Venetian philosophy founds Freemasonry and the New Age.

Here is a point of enormous importance. One of the main confusions that the present-day Catholic Church has on the question of the Renaissance is that Aristotelians in the Church used the identification of this Neoplatonic problem to attack the Renaissance as pagan and humanistic, when in fact this was launched as an operation by Paduan Aristotelians in the guise of Platonism to destroy Cusa and Christianity.

This occult Neoplatonism and Cabalism came pouring into England. No less than Christopher Marlowe took up the attack against it.

In his play on Faustus, Marlowe identifies the problem of the whole Elizabethan elite. Marlowe himself was an intelligence operative and was on the inside of major decisions being made by Walsingham, who was in a sense CIA chief under Elizabeth.

Marlowe sums up the problem of the age and exposes the mysticism and necromancy around the court of Elizabeth. The whole of Faust was that he was fed up with all knowledge. Presumably this was an attack on Aristotelian Schoolmen, but Faust, in the end, makes a deal with the devil. In this, Marlowe identifies the truth about the relationship between Arisotelianism and mysticism.

Marlowe's play caused complete pandemonium in the Venetian networks around Elizabeth. In a coup de grace, Marlowe directly references Giorgi. When Mephistopheles appears to Faust and he is too ugly, Faust says, ``Go and return an old Franciscian friar, that holy shape becomes a devil best.''

It was shortly after this play was written that Marlowe was assassinated.



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The Creation of Freemasonry
Now we pick up the story of the 1580s and how the Venetians created Freemasonry in England.
As I said, occultism was pouring into England. With the defeat of the Spanish Armada, a Venetian grouping around Fra Paolo Sarpi, called the Giovani, decided to become more aggressive.

Venice gets into a war with the papacy in 1606. It is a jurisdictional dispute over money and the right to try criminals who happen to be under papal jurisdiction. The pope puts Venice under the interdict. Sarpi is chosen by Venice to defend the city-state and is excommunicated. He successfully writes several pamphlets against Rome which are immediately translated into English and widely distributed. After Venice wins this battle, Sarpi is nearly assassinated, and despite several wounds to the neck and head, he survives. The assassination attempt is put correctly at Rome's doorstep. At that point, Sarpi becomes the most celebrated man in Venice and England. Henry Wotton, the English diplomat, was in touch with Sarpi the whole time, through go-betweens.

The next escalation occurred in 1616, when a royal marriage was arranged. This marriage was the talk of England and was called the Marriage of the Thames and the Rhine. James I's daughter was to marry the Elector of Palatine. This Protestant-Anglican marriage was, in the view of Venice, a significant counterweight to the Habsburgs.

Then the strangest thing occurs. The year of the marriage the first Rosicrucian tract is written. It is called the ``Fama.'' It calls for the formation of a Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross and for the reformation of all knowledge. It is not too distant from what Francis Bacon, a friend of Sarpi, is calling for. Shortly thereafter, another document, the ``Confession,'' again explicitly Rosicrucian, is written. It calls the pope the anti-Christ. Both are written in German and circulated in the territory of the Elector of Palatine.

This stuff is straight Neoplatonic Cabalism. Here is a description of the grave of Christian Rosenkreutz from the first pamphlet, ``Fama'':

``In the morning following, we opened the door, and there appeared to our sight a vault of seven sides and corners, every side five foot broad, and the height of eight foot. Although the sun never shined in this vault, nevertheless it was enlightened with another sun, which had learned this from the sun, and was situated in the upper part in the center of the ceiling. In the midst, instead of a tombstone, was a round altar covered over with a plate of brass, and thereon this engraven: ... ``This is all clear and bright, as also the seven sides and the two Heptagoni: so we kneeled altogether down and gave thanks to the sole wise, sole mighty and sole eternal God, who hath taught us more than all men's wits could have found out, praised be his holy name. This vault we parted in three parts, the upper part or ceiling, the wall or side, the ground or floor. ``Of the upper part you shall understand no more of it at this time, but that it was divided according to the seven sides in the triangle, which was in the bright center; but what therein is contained, you shall God willing (that are desirous of our society) behold the same with your own eyes; but every side or wall is parted into ten figures, every one with their several figures and sentences, as they are truly shown and set forth Concentratum here in our book.''

Several other documents on the Rosicrucian thesis were written, all confessing to have solved the riddle of the relationship between the microcosm and the macrocosm. This was also the name of a book written by Robert Fludd. Fludd is attacked by Kepler as a mystic who uses numbers as a form of cabalistic symbolism, and engages in a wild defense of his writings. Almost immediately, several Rosicrucian documents are written and circulated, all published by the same publisher in the Palatinate.

The political, Venetian side to this was totally obvious. The military adviser to the elector was Christian Anhalt, a friend of Henry Wotton and Paolo Sarpi. Their hopes were that a Protestant League would form around the prince in his effort to take the Bohemian Crown and defeat the Habsburgs. The elector is massively defeated. This incident touched off the Thirty Years' War. It is reported that the reason he was so defeated was that James of England refused to go along with the plan. We would not be far off the mark if we said that from Venice's standpoint James was not adequate, and Venice had to bring a more radical government into power. It was they who supported Oliver Cromwell. Venice always wanted parliamentary sovereignty as a form of government to control any king.

What were the Venetians up to? Now it becomes interesting. Consider two quotes, one by Sarpi and the other by Paruta, you have a fundamental attack on scientific method. Paruta had been an empiricist:

``Although our intellect may be divine from its birth, nevertheless here below it lives among these earthly members and cannot perform its operations without the help of bodily sensation. By their means, drawing into the mind the images of material things, it represents these things to itself and in this way forms its concepts of them. By the same token it customarily rises to spiritual contemplations not by itself but awakened by sense objects.''

Sarpi was also an empiricist: ``There are four modes of philosophizing: the first with reason alone, the second with sense alone, the third with reason and then sense, and the fourth beginning with sense and ending with reason. The first is the worst, because from it we know what we would like to be, not what is. The third is bad because we many times distort what is into what we would like, rather than adjusting what we would like to what is. The second is true but crude, permitting us to know little and that rather of things than of their causes. The fourth is the best we can have in this miserable life.''

This is Francis Bacon's inductive method. Bacon's ideas about inductive method were taken from the ``Arte di ben pensare'' and other of Sarpi's writings.

Here I would like to quote from Webster Tarpley's series in The New Federalist: ``Sarpi sounds very much like Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, and Hume. This is no surprise, since Sarpi and Micanzio were in close contact with Hobbes and Bacon, sometimes directly, and sometimes through William Cavendish, Earl of Devonshire, a friend of Francis Bacon and the employer of Thomas Hobbes. Bacon was of course a raving irrationalist, a Venetian-style Rosicrucian, and a bugger. Cavendish may have introduced Bacon to Hobbes, who soon became a couple. In Chatsworth House in Cornwall there is a manuscript entitled `Hobbes' Translations of Italian Letters,' containing 77 missives from Micanzio to the Earl (called `Candiscio'). According to Dudley Carleton, Cavendish visited Venice and Padua in September 1614, accompanied by Hobbes. At that time meetings with Sarpi and Micanzio would have been on the agenda.

``This is clearly the inspiration for Francis Bacon's ramblings on method.'' Now the most startling result.

Bacon, Fludd, and Descartes, all claim to be Rosicrucians or searching for the Rosicrucians. The coincidence is overwhelming.

What was this movement? It becomes the British Royal Society and Freemasonry. This Venetian cult actually runs the science establishment of Western Europe! Our scientists today are the most buggered epistemologically of any group in society!



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The Royal Society
Now to the creation of the British Royal Society. We date the formation earlier than was previously thought. There was a series of meetings in England in 1640. This is an important year because it was the beginning of the Long Parliament. Comenius and Samuel Hartlib were involved. Comenius was originally from Bohemia, and was in the Palatinate during the fateful Rosicrucian years, along with the Englishman Samuel Hartlib, with whom he was in close contact. With the defeat of the Palatinate they both, through different routes, end up in England. When the Long Parliament started, there was another outburst of ecstatic literature. One piece written by Hartlib in 1640, ``A Description of the Famous Kingdom of Macaria,'' is a utopian work addressed to the attention of the Long Parliament. A year later, Comenius wrote ``The Way of Light.'' They call for an ``Invisible College,'' which is a Rosicrucian code name.
Now the plot thickens. In 1645, a meeting takes place for a discussion of the natural sciences. Present at the meeting are Mr. Theodore Haak from the Palatinate and Dr. John Wilkins, who at the time was the chaplain to the elector of Palatine. Wilkins was the man behind the Oxford meetings which become, in 1660, the British Royal Society. Another founder of the Royal Society was Robert Boyle, who in letters in 1646, refers to, again, an invisible college. John Wilkins writes a book in 1648 called Mathematical Magic, in which he explicitly mentions the Rosy Cross and pays homage to occultists Robert Fludd and John Dee.

The key to the actual Rosicrucian tradition in the British Royal Society is Elias Ashmole. He was unabashedly a Rosicrucian and in 1654 wrote a letter to ask the ``Rosicrucians to allow him to join their fraternity.'' His scientific works were a defense of John Dee's work, in particular Dee's Monas Hieroglyphicas, and the Theatrum Chemicum Britanicum of 1652. This is a compilation of all the alchemical writings by English authors. In the opening of this work he praises a mythical event in which a brother of the Rosy Cross cures the Earl of Norfolk of leprosy.

Ashmole was one of the official founding members of the British Royal Society. The other major, explicitly Rosicrucian figure was Isaac Newton. He had copies of both the Fama and the Confessio in his possession, and the book compiled by Ashmole, The Theatrum, was Newton's bible. Also, as we uncovered earlier, Newton had a series of papers on the book of Daniel calculating the end times.

Historian Frances Yates, in her book The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, in a chapter entitled ``Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry,'' quotes one De Quincey, who states, ``Freemasonry is neither more nor less than Rosicrucianism as modified by those who transplanted it in England, whence it was re-exported to the other countries of Europe.'' De Quincey states that Robert Fludd was the person most responsible for bringing Rosicrucianism to England and giving it its new name. What is fascinating is that Elias Ashmole was one of the first recorded inductees into the Freemasons, but the actual first recorded induction was Dr. Robert Moray in Edinburgh in 1641. Both Ashmole and Moray were founding members of the British Royal Society. While there are many stories about the ancient origins of the Freemasons, here is an announcement for one of their meetings in 1676: ``To give notice that the Modern Green-ribboned Cabal, together with the ancient brotherhood of the Rosy Cross: the Hermetic Adepti and the company of Accepted Masons....'' It is interesting to note how clear the tradition is.

In conclusion, we have demonstrated that Venice created the Rosicrucian movement that dominates England and creates Freemasonry. Freemasonry in turn creates the British Royal Society, which engages in total war with Cusa's influence upon Kepler and Leibniz. We have also accomplished a surprising result in understanding the war over what is called modern scientific method.


This speech was prepared with the collaboration of Webster Tarpley and David Cherry.

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Captions
``What we call modern scientific method is occult belief, created by freemasonry to destroy the work of Nicolaus of Cusa. It was the Venetian creation of freemasonry that imposed upon science a radical split between the science of the spirit, theology, and the science of matter.''
(Bacon, Ashmole, Newton monument):


National Portrait Gallery

Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), from 1618, Baron Verulam and Lord Chancellor of England. Bacon, who corresponded with Venetian superagent Paolo Sarpi, is falsely credited with contributing to the founding of scientific method.

Elias Ashmole (1617-1692), alchemist, one of the founders of the Royal Society. Ashmole was deeply interested in Rosicrucianism, and wrote in defense of the Elizabethan astrologer John Dee.


Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

A monument to scientific fraud Isaac Newton, the other major Rosicrucian figure in the early Royal Society. Titled Allegorical Monument to Isaac Newton, it was painted by the Venetian artist Giovanni Battista Pittoni.

``This story begins with the break of Henry the VIII from continental Europe with his setting up of the Anglican Church. This cataclysm in English history set the basis for religious warfare that was to rip England apart for centuries.''

``As long as Henry VIII was married to Catherine of Aragon, the daughter of the Spanish king, Venice's ability to manipulate Henry against Spain was greatly diminished. This came to a head after the Sack of Rome.''

British Museum

Henry VIII (1491-1547) toward the end of his life, in a drawing by Cornslys Matsys.

National Portrait Gallery

Henry VIII's queen, Catherine of Aragon, was a powerful living embodiment of the traditional alliance between England and Spain. Artist unknown.


The Duke of Norfolk

Thomas Howard, second Duke of Norfolk, led the Venetian party among the English nobility until his death in 1524.

National Portrait Gallery

Anne Boleyn, granddaughter of the second Duke of Norfolk, was set up as sexual bait to detach Henry from Catherine. Venetian friar and cabalist Francesco Giorgi counseled Henry that his marriage to Catherine had never been valid.

Frick Collection, New York

Thomas Cromwell (1485?-1540) became Henry's first minister with the ascendancy of the Venetian party. Cromwell had a clear vision of an amoral state as a law unto itself, as delineated by Aristotle in his Nichomachean Ethics.

``Giorgi's work was the transmission belt for a counterculture movement which was to culminate in the occult takeover of England and eventually led to the creation of speculative freemasonry.''

``Venice created the Rosicrucian movement that dominates England and created freemasonry. Freemasonry in turn created the British Royal Society, which engaged in total war against Cusa's influence upon Kepler and Leibniz.''

The alchemical, occult, and mystical writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus from about the third century A.D. were insinuated into the Judeo-Christian tradition by its enemies. Robert Fludd continued this tradition in Elizabethan England, as did Newton (1642-1727), from his post as president of the Royal Society. Clockwise from top left, two woodcuts of Hermes Trismegistus; an illustration from the title page of Fludd's Summum Bonum, which defends Rosicrucianism.


The Venetian Takeover of England: A 200-Year Project
by Gerald Rose
Printed in The Executive Intelligence Review, April 15, 1994.

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It was one of the most well-known ``secrets'' of the British oligarchy, that the model for the British Empire was Venice. Benjamin Disraeli, the late-nineteenth-century prime minister of England, let the cat out of the bag in his novel Coningsby when he wrote, ``The great object of Whig leaders in England from the first movement under Hampden to the last most successful one in 1688, was to establish in England a high aristocratic republic on the model of the Venetian.... William the Third told ... Whig leaders, `I will not be a doge.'... They brought in a new family on their own terms. George I was a doge; George II was a doge.... George III tried not to be a doge.... He might try to get rid of the Whig Magnificoes, but he could not rid himself of the Venetian constitution.'' The well-known secret of all the Whig insiders was that the Venetian takeover of England was a 200-year project beginning with the break of Henry VIII with Rome and concluding in 1714, with the accession to the throne of George I.