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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
``... 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.
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!
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.
(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.
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