Rebuild Spirit

An investigation of Trithemius, Maximilian I, Agrippa and William Lilly—with Peter of Abano, Albertus Magnus, Aquinas and the King James Bible as tests of the evidence In 1508, a Benedictine abbot addressed Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I (whom Agrippa calls Maximilian Caesar) with an extraordinary account of world history. Beneath God, seven intelligences associated with the seven planets supposedly took turns governing the world. Each government lasted 354 years and four mo

Johannes Trithemius is troubling precisely because he cannot honestly be dismissed as an eccentric magician standing outside Christianity. He was inside the institutional Church. He was a Benedictine monk, a priest, an abbot, a monastic reformer, a writer on Scripture, saints, repentance, priestly life and Benedictine discipline, a correspondent of bishops and princes, and a man whose library and scholarship attracted some of the most important intellectual figures of his gen

There is a point in Michael Müller’s The Holy Mass at which the investigation changes character. The question is no longer simply whether one agrees with Catholic teaching about the Eucharist. Nor is it merely whether words such as altar, sacrifice and priest can be found in early Christian literature. From Chapters X onward another question becomes impossible to avoid: are the witnesses Müller summons actually saying what he tells his readers they say? That question matters

There comes a point in Michael Müller’s The Holy Mass *Chapter IX when the issue can no longer be reduced to a disagreement between Roman Catholic and non-Catholic interpretations of the Eucharist. In his chapter on “The Sacrifice of the New Law,” a more fundamental problem repeatedly presents itself: Müller describes events, words, intentions and ceremonies as though they belonged to the biblical narrative when the inspired writers never record them. He begins with genuine p

Agrippa, Apollo, Egypt, Constantine, the Mass, and the Celestial Religion Scripture Condemns What happens when a single Latin word opens onto an entire celestial system? In Agrippa’s occult philosophy, the letters H-O-C correspond to the Spirit of the World, the Sun, and Taurus. His Sun bears the names Apollo, Horus and Osiris; his demonology links Apollo’s Pythian title to Pytho, prince of lying spirits; and his wider system joins words, numbers, celestial signs, consecrated

Part three Michael Müller, Nicola Aubry, and the extraordinary attempt to prove doctrine by demonic testimony Chapter V marks a disturbing escalation in Michael Müller’s method. In the previous chapters he attempted to establish transubstantiation by expanding Christ’s words, attributing unrecorded beliefs to the apostles, appealing to later Catholic ceremonies and treating theological inference as though it were apostolic testimony. Here, however, Müller introduces something

Part two Michael Müller, Corpus Christi, Luther, and the circular argument for the Real Presence Part One exposed a recurring problem in Michael Müller’s argument: he repeatedly moved beyond the words of Scripture, supplied explanations Christ never gave, attributed beliefs to the apostles that they never recorded, and then treated those additions as though they belonged to the Gospel itself. Chapter IV does not correct that problem. It enlarges it. Müller now begins using la

Part One After reading Michael Müller’s later claims about the power of the Mass—including language about effectively “binding the hand of God”—I realised that The Holy Mass could not be treated merely as a devotional work. Claims of that magnitude demand more than reverence; they demand evidence. If the Mass truly possesses the powers Müller attributes to it, then the foundations of those claims must be traceable to Christ and the apostles rather than assumed from later theo

Part Two The Character, the Wicked Priest, and the Power Behind the Altar Paul warned that men would depart from the faith, “giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils” (1 Timothy 4:1, KJV). Such a warning leaves the Christian no permission to assume that a doctrine comes from God merely because it is ancient, ecclesiastical, sacramental, administered at an altar or defended by generations of theologians. Part One established the biblical test and need not be re

PART ONE of the Doctrine of Devils NB: Before reading further, it is important to know that Agrippa later turned against much of the occult learning he had spent his youth studying, describing the pursuit of such arts as a deception not inspired by the Spirit of God but by the devil. He said that he had “for the most part” retracted his youthful work on magic—although he continued to distinguish what he regarded as corrupt or demonic magic from a purified “true” magic. This a

This investigation begins with two works that, at first sight, have almost nothing to do with one another. The first was written by J. Dwight Pentecost, an American Bible teacher and theologian who spent most of his academic life at Dallas Theological Seminary. Things to Come: A Study in Biblical Eschatology grew out of his doctoral research and became one of his best-known works on biblical prophecy. The edition before us carries its original 1958 copyright—a date that will

The story has been repeated for centuries. Constantine marched toward Rome, saw a Christian cross blazing above the sun, received the promise of victory from Christ, placed the divine sign upon his army, defeated Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge, and emerged as the emperor through whom Christianity would triumph over pagan Rome. There is only one serious problem with beginning the story there. The earliest surviving account of Constantine’s great vision does not name Jesus Chr

Muller part 2 Celestial Characters, Sacramental Power and the Priest at the Altar There is a point at which theological vocabulary can no longer be allowed to conceal theological machinery. A system may call one operation “magic” and another “sacrament,” but names do not by themselves establish that the underlying mechanisms are fundamentally different. If one system employs a qualified operator, prepared matter, determinate words, an impressed character, superior power desce

Part one Michael Müller and the Internal Contradictions of the Mass Michael Müller, C.Ss.R. (1825–1899), is worth studying precisely because he was not trying to discredit the Roman Catholic Mass. He was a priest of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, the Redemptorists, writing from within the Roman system and writing in defence of it. The edition examined here identifies him on its title page as a “Priest of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer,” describes itse

In the last study, we followed a disturbing thread from Thomas Aquinas’s sacramental theology into Agrippa’s occult philosophy: the language of character, seal, power conferred from without, priestly mediation, sacred signs and invisible spiritual effects. The point was not that Aquinas simply copied Agrippa, but that the theological structure we had been examining stood uncomfortably close to concepts openly employed within Renaissance magic. That trail then carried us furth

Part Seven — The Final Exposé There comes a point in an investigation when isolated verbal similarities cease to be the real issue. A word can coincide accidentally, an image may recur in unrelated traditions, and rites belonging to different religions can resemble one another without proving historical dependence. The situation becomes considerably more serious when the resemblance is not confined to one word or one object but extends to an entire architecture of spiritual o

Part 6 —Did I find The Source of The "Other" Spiritual Power? Parts 1–4 of this investigation established a problem which we now need to pursue rather than repeatedly re-prove. Thomas Aquinas teaches that certain sacraments imprint an indelible character upon the human soul, that this character is a real spiritual power, and that in Holy Orders it equips the ordained man for a sacerdotal function which other believers do not possess. The difficulty is not that Scripture knows

Part 5 Mithras Beneath Rome When the archaeological evidence for the Roman mysteries of Mithras is examined carefully, one of the most striking features is not merely the imagery of the cult itself, but where some of that imagery was discovered, where other pieces eventually came to be housed, and what later Christian buildings now occupy or stand beside the sites in which Mithraic worship once took place. This does not prove that medieval popes secretly practised Mithraism,

Part 4 Quick recap followed by the mysteries Part 4 turns from Aquinas’s own sacramental claims to something far more unsettling: the ancient religious world in which similar ideas of initiation, sacred marks, priestly hierarchy and spiritual belonging were already present. The question is not yet where those similarities lead, but whether they are too striking to ignore. There is a point at which an appeal to antiquity, custom or ecclesiastical tradition is no longer suffici

In Parts One and Two of our examination of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, Question 63, we followed a remarkable theological progression. What Scripture calls the believer’s sealing by the Holy Spirit became, in Aquinas’s system, another kind of “character”: a mark impressed upon the soul through certain sacraments. That character became a “spiritual power,” a participation in Christ’s priesthood, and ultimately a power which Aquinas describes as “coming from without.” He