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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