Magic and Paganism in the Reign of Elizabeth I

Part II: Conjuring the British Empire with 007

Copyright ©2024 by Independent History and Research

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Foreword to Part Two

“The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism. I believe that there are many rough beasts now slouching toward Bethlehem to be born and that I have reported on the progress of a few of them, and when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.”

—Flannery O’Connor

This second installment in our revisionist history of England’s Queen Elizabeth I, may perhaps puzzle some readers as to its relevance in our time, beyond a “mere chronicle” of her dark side —documenting it for documenting’s sake.

A judgment like that, which imagines this writer has the time or inclination for dilettante pursuits, misses the import of the 007 mystery cult in the late 20th and 21st centuries. James Bond’s starring role in the masculine imagination of the West endures. In 2010 when he was the Prince of Wales, England’s future King Charles III wrote:

“(Marsilio) Ficino’s highly influential book, Platonic Theology, found its way to England shortly after it was published and eventually, some 90 years later, into one of the most important libraries in Elizabethan London, owned by Dr. John Dee, Queen Elizabeth I’s astrologer...He coined the term ‘British Empire’ as part of his vision of creating a world- wide religion that emphasized the unity of all things, and was a close adviser to the Queen.

“Intriguingly, he may have been a spy for Elizabeth when he traveled to Poland and Prague. I am told that when he wrote to her from such places he signed his letters with a curious combination of symbols: two zeros, sometimes connected by a bridge, implying he was her ‘eyes,’ followed by an elongated 7, which happens to be the alchemical symbol for Mercury. As Mercury was the messenger of the gods, the implication is rather clear. Dee was the Queen’s secret and mercurial messenger.”

—His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales, with Tony Juniper and Ian Skelly, Harmony (HarperCollins 2010), p. 132.

“…two zeros…followed by an elongated 7.”

007 was Dr. Dee’s personal sigil.

In 2012 the Olympic Games were held in London and televised internationally. The Olympic ceremony’s theme was “Isles of Wonder.” It commenced on July 27, 2012, which coincided that year with the Kabbalistic holy day of Tisha B’av. The Olympic ceremony included a staging of a speech by Prospero’s slave, Caliban, from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a play about a sorcerer which offers a sympathetic portrayal of Dee, thinly disguised as Prospero and set on an “isle of wonder.”

The televised ceremony included a video of actor Daniel Craig (the 21st century agent 007 who from 2006 to 2021 portrayed James Bond in five movies), escorting a real-life, grim-faced Queen Elizabeth II to the Olympic ceremony. It appears that Dr. Dee may have been the intended guiding spirit of the London Olympics. He is surely the undying eminence grisé behind the throne of England.

European monarchies such as the Austro-Hungarian dynasty and the Romanovs of Russia, have long since been destroyed, but two survived and indeed, have thrived: the elected monarchy of the Renaissance and post-Renaissance Vatican, and England’s hereditary kingdom. Both of these power bases communed with the same god, or rather gods, and as usual all roads lead to “alchemical Mercury,” as Charles in 2010 styled the entity who is synonymous in many respects with the 15th century Catholic priest and Medici protégé Marsilio Ficino.

It has been a staple fiction of the Cryptocracy that England under Elizabeth I was the enlightened antipode to Iberia under the Spanish Inquisition, notwithstanding the little detail of Elizabeth’s bloody inquisition against Catholics. Here we approach a Gordian Knot which we hope to unravel not with a sword as did Alexander, but by excavating an entombed historical truth.

The Mystery of Iniquity

Spain, its Inquisition, and the Spanish ecclesiastical and intellectual hierarchy in the late fifteenth and subsequent centuries, all the way to the middle of the 19th, were enamored of the same Catholic priest-endorsed “sage” as Dr. Dee and his proto-masonic cohort in Britain — Rev. Fr. Marsilio Ficino’s avatar, Hermes “Mercurius” Trismegistus.

The Spanish Inquisition was in the hands of Mercurian Neoplatonic Hermeticism and the great secret of that fearsome institution was its prosecution, imprisonment and execution of conservative Catholics implacably opposed to the occult infiltration of the Church and falsely accused by the Inquisition of crimes against the Faith. In the annals of the Italian Inquisition the most notorious case of a stalwart Catholic Conservative consigned to the flames was that of the Servant of God Girolama Savonarola (1452-1498).

Ignorance of these facts has caused the conservative and “traditional” Catholic movement, both elite and rank and file, to be outclassed and out-fought by their “wide awake” occult rivals who, like King Charles, are fully cognizant of their debt to Ficino and his godling, Hermes “Mercurius.”

In the minds of duped Catholics the Spanish Inquisition stands as a bulwark of opposition to an occult gnosis that allegedly first arose in Reformation England. Among the dupes we also find Protestant believers and their New Age progeny who suppose that Elizabeth I represented some sort of departure, however flawed, from papal inquisition and conspiratorial occult control.

When the eminent Protestant philologist Isaac Casaubon proved in 1614 that Hermes Trismegistus never existed, Catholic Counter Reformation thinkers continued to esteem this occult fantasy figure as one of the most illustrious theologians of antiquity.

Catholic inquisitors defended Hermes and continued to believe that this mythological figure was the actual historical author of Pimander and similar esoteric grimoires attributed to him.

They dodged the fact that “Hermes Trismegistus” is a mind virus, not a historical person; a spiritual and ideological principle central to the prisca theologia hoax which holds that there is one root for all religions, and a branch of sorcery which constitutes benign “white magic.” These ideas are radical departures from Biblical truth and the faith of the Early Church (cf. Against the Heresies, volumes 1-3 [Newman Press, 1992], by the second century A.D. saint, Irenaeus of Lyons).

When Ficino’s translation of Pimander was reprinted in Catholic Spain in 1630 it was published under papal auspices, accompanied by engravings of the cross with IHS lettering and an image of the Shroud of Turin. The contents of Pimander consisting of the idolatrous advocacy of theosophical, magical and alchemical doctrines of pagan Egyptian, Greek, and Kabbalistic provenance did not prevent the book’s promotion by papal authorities at the same time that those prelates were burning Protestant translations of the Bible.

“For Spanish intellectuals Hermes Trismegistus remained a trusted and respected authority through the middle of the nineteenth century” (cf. Susan Byrne, Ficino in Spain [2015], pp. 132-133).

This is not the place to attempt to explicate the inner recesses of the matrix of occult doctrine which unites otherwise warring rivals in London and Rome. So complex a task necessarily entails the marshaling of extensive evidence beyond the scope of this study of Elizabeth’s reign.

As a prolegomenon to this part of our deconstruction of the cult of Double Aught Seven and Elizabeth I whose occult imperium persists into our age—I will however, venture to sketch a groundwork for an apprehension of that matrix by drawing your attention to the fundamental belief of the western secret societies that Satan and God are one and the same.

This concept is personified by the preeminence of a devil sometimes termed, “Great God Power”—characterized as the deity who sanctions all behavior that is successfully conducted. Consequently, this spirit is exclusively the god of winners, in view of the fact that the deeds of losers are never sanctioned.

Students of the Kabbalah know of the Zohar’s identification of God with Satan and of the goddess Shekhinah as God’s spouse. With reference to the parents of “Baal Shem Tov” (Yisroel ben Eliezer, 1698-1760, the founder of the Kabbalistic Hasidic movement), Elie Wiesel in Souls on Fire: Portraits and Legends of Hasidic Masters (1972, p. 10), observes that their son was born to them “…as a reward…they had shown themselves hospitable and indulgent toward the prophet Elijah according to one version and toward Satan according to another.”

In Book Six of Virgil’s Aeneid (lines 243-249), we read of the propitiation of the goddess Hecate, on whose behalf, “some struck with knives and caught in shallow bowls the smoking blood” of the sacrificial victim:

“…quattuor hic primum nigrantis terga iuvencos constituit frontique invergit vina sacerdos, et summas carpens media inter cornua saetas ignibus imponit sacris, libamina prima, voce vocans Hecaten caeloque Ereboque potentem. supponunt alii cultros tepidumque cruorem succipiunt pateris. ipse atri velleris agnam…”

Notice that in the third line this goddess figure is identified as “Hecaten caeloque Ereboque potentem” — “Hecate supreme both in heaven and hell.”

This is a reflection of the Kabbalistic teaching that the highest manifestation of the goddess, the Shekhina, dwells with God, is coequivalent with His essence and shares His omnipresence.

The key occult point here is that without the Shekhina, God is incomplete. He can become whole only through human intervention in a process the Zohar terms tzorekh gavoha. This intervention can take the form of human sacrifice to and invocation of the female deity.

To make God whole the sorcerer manifests the goddess by facilitating the possession of a human female chosen for that purpose in a particular time and place. Queen Elizabeth I appears to have the woman chosen in the historical period under study. She seems to have been good at it in that her iridescence continues to glow across the centuries.

If I were tasked with summarizing Kabbalistic dogma in one sentence, I would describe it as “mandating the intervention of human brain power by tampering with the source code of divine Creation.”

The collective ego represented by scientism’s genetically modified crops is pure Kabbalah. Ditto for the implantation of spider genes into goats and other forms of trans-human monstrosity.

Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai, Sifrei: Ve-zo’t ha-berakhah, 346.

In the Kabbalistic Zohar, God is incomplete without the intercession of the human brain. Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai, the legendary inaugural author of the Kabbalah, in Sifrei: Ve-zo’t ha-berakhah (section 346; reproduced above), declares that God cannot exist without Israel’s acknowledgment, and even if He receives it, He cannot finish building the world to come without human assistance.

Rev. Fr. Marsilio Ficino’s collaborator, Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), launched Kabbalism into the Church of Rome and western civilization itself. It was subsequently institutionalized by another “Catholic” arch-Kabbalist, Johannes Reuchlin (1455-1522), who enjoyed the protection of Pope Leo X.

The goddess Shekhina, representing co-equivalence with God, was thereby propelled forward in the respectable habiliments of “white magic” —she of a thousand names—Gloriana, Athena, Isis, Hecate, Shekhina.

Michael J.B. Allen notes that Edmund Spenser was “profoundly indebted to Ficino for his basic conceptions.” In Part One we pointed to Spenser’s association of the goddess Isis with Elizabeth. In Book 7, Canto 6, Stanza 3 of The Fairie Queen, he makes reference to Hecate’s “almighty hand…(given) all rule and principality / To be by her disposed diversely / To gods, and men / as she them list divide.”

In 1596 who was nearly “almighty” in England, having “all rule and principality”? In the mind of Spenser this could be none other than Her Britannic Majesty for whom his book was intended as a looking glass. Spenser informed Elizabeth that The Fairie Queen was "this fair mirror” where thou “mayest behold thy face, and thine own realms…”

She was delighted with Spenser’s epic monument to her as Gloriana/Isis and, covertly, Hecate. Elizabeth granted him a lifetime pension as his emolument.

The contemporary Cryptocratic conférés of Elizabeth I, and in our time the likes of Hillary and Kamala, Samantha Power and Victoria Nuland, look forward to an eternity, “Hecaten caeloque Ereboque potentem.”

This is an esoteric fixation of the western secret societies and of the British Crown in the realm T. H. White demarcated as “once and future”—ritually endowed with an inexhaustible relevance— from Medici Florence to papal Rome, from the Elizabethan Age up to and encompassing our own time. The Mystery of Iniquity.

Part Two: CONJURING THE BRITISH EMPIRE

I. The Spycraft of Her Majesty’s Secret Service