by William A. White
From its
inception, there has been a struggle within the Catholic Church between those
who wish to uphold the words of Christ and those who wish to perpetuate the
pagan mystery cults which Catholicism absorbed. This struggle continued
throughout the Middle Ages, with the Church dominated by an Empire often truer
to the doctrines of Christ than the Church itself. The abandonment of the
link with the German empire—a process that spanned two hundred years from the
collapse of the Carolingian empire to the time of the Gregorian reforms—led to
a renewed Church militant that reintroduced pagan elements, derived from
Dionysian ritual, that conflicted with a number of equally powerful occult
European tendencies which would end in the Reformation and the collapse of the
universal Church as a central ideal of the European people.
Carolingians to Capetians
The rise of
Islam and the collapse of the old Byzantine power in the West caused the Church
to seek a new protector, and it did so in the person of Charlemagne and his
empire. Before the usurpation of the French throne from the Merovingians
in 751 AD by Pepin the Short, the competing kingdoms of the Franks had little
to offer the Papacy; there was no dominant power with which the Church
could align to counterbalance the influence of the Byzantines in Italy.
But with Charlemagne's conquests in Saxony, Bavaria and Lombardy,
among others, an opportunity for a counter-weight was created that Leo III,
near-blinded and nearly tongueless from an encounter with Byzantine justice,
seized upon, anointing Charlemagne Emperor in the West and uniting Germanic Christendom
for the next 16 years.
While
Charlemagne has been just, legislating against usury and the excesses of the
Jews, his son, Louis I the Pious, was less so, inviting the Jews back to court
and freely turning his fiscal policy over to a cartel of Hebrew coiners and tax
factors. But it was not the Jews who were primarily responsible for the
disintegration of the Carolingian Empire. As they had learned at Rome, in Byzantium
and in the Caliphate, a global order could be more profitable than global disorder—as
long as the Jews ended sitting near the head of it.
Two causes
destroyed the Carolingians. The first was the continuation of the
Merovingian notion of the kingship as property to be divided among the sons of
the kings. Louis' death prompted a four fold division of the Empire into
the West, middle and East Franks and Italy. This left open the
question of who would hold the Imperial Crown, provoking war among the
brothers, and their descendents, just as it had among the
Merovingians. The difference, though, was that none of the successor
states were strong enough to conquer the others, unlike as occurred under the
descendents of Clovis.
Lotharingia, modern Lorraine, along
with the Low Countries and the Rhineland, was divided between the West Franks, France and the East Franks, Germany.
But, the kings of those nations, Charles II the Bald of France and Louis II the
German of Germany, could not defeat each other, despite a war that continued
late into the 9th century. The other cause of the failure of the Carolingians
was the fracturing of their nations by foreign invasion. In Germany, the Carolingian Dukes of Saxony,
Bavaria, Swabia, Franconia, Thuringia, Carinthia, and the Lorraine were made marcher lords and left to
defend their lands against the Slavs and Magyars, while Louis II and Charles II
the Fat sought the throne in the West, became functionally independent,
deposing the Carolingians for good in 911 AD.
But, in
France and German Friesland, it was the Vikings who ended Charlemagne’s line.
The Vikings began attacking France
as early as 812 AD, when Charlemagne still reigned, but their attacks
intensified after his death. Armed with a berserker rage that some
speculated may have been augmented with the ergot fungus, an early form of LSD,
the Vikings proceeded along the ample coastline of France and down its wide and
deep rivers, killing and enslaving all in the name of Odin. France lost its southern territories—Aquitania, Toulouse and the Spanish
March—with the division that followed Louis I’s death. Shortly afterward,
the Celtic people of Brittany under Nomeno,
their Count, seized Nantes and Rennes, beginning an independent existence as
what would become a duchy in the next century under Conan I. As the
Vikings raided what would become Normandy,
Charles II incorporated the territory just south of Brittany
and Normandy
into the Duchy of Anjou, naming Robert the Strong its first Duke in 866
AD. Baldwin I Strong-Arm, Charles’ brother-in-law, was named Count of
Flanders in 876 AD. The Viking Gerulf was named Count of West
Frisia—later Holland—in 885 AD by Charles III
the Fat of Germany, and was
charged with protecting the Low Countries from
his own people. This pattern continued with the appointment of Rollo as
Duke of Normandy in 911 AD by Charles III the Simple of France.
Essentially, these appointments made the coast of Northern France a Nordic march, and
soon, the Nordic marcher lords would demand control of the French throne.
Just as the
German duchies brought down Charles the Fat in Germany, the French duchies soon
began a contest with Charles the Simple of France. Despite having
Charlemagne's blood in their veins, neither Charles had the vigor of their 6'4”
blond warrior grandfather or great-grandfather. Charles III was brought
down by an uprising in 888 AD, and his descendents never fully regained
control, the empire passing to Conrad I, Duke of Franconia in 905 AD.
Charles III had gained his throne by displacing Eudes, a son of Robert the
Strong who had been “elected” to the kingship on the death of Louis II’s son
Carloman in 889, and Charles was displaced in turn by the usurper Robert I,
another son of Robert the Strong, and by King Rudolph, Robert I’s son-in-law,
in a struggle that began in 923 and ended with Charles' death in 929.
Robert I’s other son, Hugh the Great, Count of Paris, allowed the kingship to
return to the descendents of Charles III, and the Carolingians struggled on,
largely impotent on the throne, until the deaths of Louis IV Outremer, Luther
and Louis V Le Fauneant exhausted the legitimate line and allowed Hugh’s son,
Hugh I Capet, to seize the throne in 996 AD.
[Yes, I
know, it’s boring to modern day Americans who have the attention span of house
flies. Believe it or not, all this stuff is pretty important, because it was
during these Dark Ages, as they came to be called, that our race picked up a
lot of our rambunctious habits that later brought the whole world to our feet.
Think “Game of Thrones” without the dwarves and dragons and sword-babes in
armored bikinis.—HAC]
The rise of
the Robertians and the Capets has been supported by the other Nordic Dukes,
particularly William I Longsword and Richard I of Normandy, precisely because of Capet's
relative weakness. Though the Robertians and last Carolingians had
restored much of Southern France to the crown, Burgundy—including Provence and
modern Franche-Comte—has been made an autonomous kingdom in 933 AD, and the
kingdom of Aquitania, which had been destroyed by the Vikings, was restored
as a Duchy independent as the others in 950.
Further,
Anjou had passed to a separate branch of the Robertians, and Blois, a county at
the east end of Anjou, near Paris, had broken free in 940 and was rapidly
encircling the Isle de France—Paris and its environs—making the land claims
leading to the absorption of Champagne in the next century. At the time
he was made King, Hugh I governed only Paris, Orleans, Beauvais, Soissons and Compiégne. The weak king at
the center of France left that country divided three ways, into the Norman
north, with their allies at Flanders and Anjou; into the royal
domains; and into the largely heretical south, comprising Toulouse,
Provence, and the Aquitaine.
The Bad Popes
[Okay, this
gets more interesting, because there’s a lot of sleaze of the kind Americans
love.]
While the Papacy had remained
in the Byzantine sphere, its temporal power limited to Rome,
its interests in the North and west of Europe
had been primarily spiritual and had focused on the conversion of the Germanic
people. But, when the conquests of Islam weakened the Byzantines, the now
free Papacy saw an opportunity in the conquests of Charlemagne to embrace—and,
through anointment, control—a new protector.
Charlemagne
lived as Holy Roman Emperor only 16
years, however, and his sons and grandsons were a disappointment to Rome. Louis I held
all of the Empire but Italy
together—but also invited Jews, slavers and usurers to his court. He
lived until 849 AD, and the warfare that erupted between his sons left Rome undefended to fend
for itself. In 846 AD, the Arabs, who had seized Sicily,
sacked the Holy City. As France, Lorraine
and Germany
fought for dominance, Popes like Nicholas I and John VIII urged a united
Christendom under Papal guidance. John VIII was assassinated,
though—poisoned and beaten to death with a hammer by a rebel faction of the
Church—and his death marked the ascension of the faction that would be called
the Marozians—the Bad Popes—a group of devil worshipping madmen and slutty
women who would publicly revive the Bacchus rites which Catholicism had early
subsumed.
After the
murder of John VIII, the Dukes of Spoleto, Guido, from 881 to 894, then
Lambert, from 892 to 898, declared themselves Emperor, challenging Charles the
Fat and then his cousin, Arnulf of Bavaria, and promoting a series of
candidates to the Papacy. When the wars with Islam made the Dukes of
Spoleto too weak to protect their candidates, Germany’s Charles the Fat, busy
with a war to usurp the throne of France after the death of Louis III, was
helpless to intervene, as the occult faction which had slain John VIII aligned
itself with the line of kings descended from Charlemagne’s son, Pippin of
Italy, and then loosely, with the Capets of France, to raise their demonic
candidates to the Papacy.
The last of
the good popes was Formosus, the “good looking”, an elderly man who died in
896. His successor, Boniface VI, was the first Pope of the Marozian
ascension, an immoral monk who had twice been defrocked for assorted unnatural
acts before his elevation. His short reign was followed by that of the mad
pope, Stephen VI(I), who, shortly after his elevation, exhumed the body of
Formosus for the necromantic “Cadaver Synod,” in which he accused Formosus’ exhumed
corpse of heresy, excommunicated it, mutilated it, and threw it in a rive,
where it was saved and re-interred by monks. [See, didn’t I promise
you sleaze?] Shortly afterwards, the Latin Basilica at the Vatican
collapsed—taken as a sign from God that incited an angry mob to depose
Stephen.
The faction
of the “Good Popes” then tried to regain the Papacy—nominating Romanus, who was assassinated after four months,
followed by Theodore II, who survived only 20 days—just long enough to revoke
the decree of the Cadaver Synod. On Theodore's death in 897, two candidates
were elected simultaneously to replace him. Sergius III, a Cluniac monk
from the “bad” faction, and John IX, a “good” Pope. A brief civil
conflict erupted between their supporters from Rome, and Sergius was driven out of the city
to exile in the Court of the Duke of Tuscany. John IX continued the
policies of Theodore II, taking the extra step of declaring that trials could
not be conducted of the dead, but he survived less than two years, and his
faction survived less than five, through the subsequent reigns of Benedict IV,
900-903, and Leo V.
What became
the Marozian faction allied with the nobility of Northern Italy, Southern France, and the remnants of the
Byzantines. Their power bases were in the old Etruscan lands of the Duke
of Tuscany and in the former Byzantine capital of Ravenna,
as well as within the Vatican,
where the Papal treasurer, Theophylact, was able to use the chaos created to
declare himself Duke (later “Senator”) of Rome.
Theophylact’s wife was Theodora, and his daughter was Marozia, from whence
these Bad Popes take their name. These three, their family, and their
lovers, dominated Rome
until the middle of the 11th century. When Leo V was deposed after a
month in office by Pope Christopher—a rebel Cardinal who kidnapped and
imprisoned Leo—the Marozians acted. Sergius II returned from Tuscany with an army and
captured both competitors—and then strangled them, seizing the Holy Office.
Upon
Theodore’s death in 897, two candidates were elected simultaneously to replace
him. These were Sergius III, a Cluniac monk from the “Bad” faction, and
John IX, a “Good” Pope. A brief civil conflict erupted in Rome, and Sergius was
driven out of the city to the Court of the Duke of Tuscany. John IX
continued the politics of Theodore II, taking the extra step of declaring that
trials could not be conducted of the dead, but he survived less than two years,
and his faction survived less than give, through only the reigns of Benedict
IV, 903-903, and Leo V.
The
Marozians, the Bad Popes, were allied with the nobility of Northern Italy,
Southern France, and the remnants of the Byzantine empire.
Their power bases were in the traditionally Jewish-dominated courts of Southern
France, the old Etruscan lands that were now the Duchy of Tuscany, and the
Byzantine regional capital of Ravenna, as well as within the Vatican, where the
Papal treasurer, Theophylact, was able to use the chaos created to declare
himself Duke (later, “Senator”) of Rome.
After the
death of Louis III of Provence, whose family had been preferred as Emperor by
the Good Popes, Sergius III raised Pippin of Italy's grandson Berengar I to the
imperial throne, gaining control of the title, if not the territory of the Holy
Roman Empire. Making alliance
with the Robertian (soon to be Capetian) faction in France, this “malignant,
ferocious and unclean” Pope, an ally of Stephen the mad, cemented his alliance
with Theophylact by seducing and beginning an affair with Marozia, then no more
than fifteen years old, and fathering her bastard child. On Sergius’
death, Theodora raised Anastasius III and then Lando, before handing the Papacy
to Theodora's lover, John X, in 914. John X was initially compliant with
the wishes of the Marozians, crowning Berengar King of Italy in 915 and appointing their candidates to
Archbishoprics in France and
Italy.
But
something happened which turned John X against the Marozians. He
rebelled, naming Rudolf I of Burgundy King of Italy in 922—supporting him in a
struggle to remove Berengar and then attempting to restore the Imperial Crown
to the line of Provence
by anointing Hugh of Provence Emperor in 926. This culminated in an
attempted uprising by John C and his brother, Peter, Count of Orte, in
928. It failed, and Marozia—who had taken power from her mother Theodora
by this time—had Peter executed in front of John X, and then had John
smothered.
Marozia had
been married to a man named Alberic, and he, her mother and her father all
disappeared suddenly in 924. Marozia seems to have murdered all of
them. Shortly afterwards, Marozia moved into the tomb of the Emperor
Hadrian –now the Vatican castle
of St Angelo—and
re-opened its prison cells for business. Declaring herself to be the
Senator of Rome, she infiltrated the line of Provence, seducing, first, Guido
of Tuscany in 926—who disappeared, likely into Marozia’s torture dungeon,
before 932—and then his brother, the Emperor Hugo. Marozia then appointed John
X’s successor, Leo VI, who disappeared after a few months, and his successor
Stephen VII(I), whom she had assassinated three years later in favor of her
bastard child with Sergius, who became John XI.
It was
Marozia’s legitimate child with Alberic, Alberic II, who undid the
bitch. As Marozia has done twelve years earlier, Alberic II rose up in 936
and murdered his mother. Alberic had been acting as a page at some dark
banquet when he spilled a cup of wine on Hugo. Hugo struck him, and
Alberic II fled the castle, shouting out to the people of the dark rites being
practiced inside. A mob formed and stormed the palace. Hugo himself
escaped. Alberic locked Marozia in a cell in Hadrian’s tomb, bricked it
up, and flooded it with water. Hugo’s daughter, Alberic’s wife, also
disappeared. Alberic then declared himself Duke of Rome and took control
of the Papacy. his half brother, John XI, died of “natural” causes three
years later, no older than his early 30s. Alberic then made Popes Leo
VII, Stephen VIII (IX), Marinus II (Martin III), and Agapitus II, before
elevating his own bastard son, Octavian, to the Papacy as John XII. After
Alberic II’s death in 955, John XII would also take power as the Duke of Rome.
All of this
had been able to occur because the two nations who had a truly legitimate claim
to the Imperial throne, France
and Germany,
had spent the entire first half of the 10th century divided. France had seen
a struggle for the throne between the Carolingians and Robertians, while its
territory had been carved into the independent duchies described above. Germany had
been at civil war from the rebellion against Charles the Fat in 888 until the
reuniting of the Empire under Henry I the Fowler in the war of 919 to
925. Even afterwards, Henry I, and, from 936, his son, Otto I the Great,
were too busy battling the invasions of the Slavs and the Magyars to turn their
attentions to Italy.
It wasn’t
until Otto defeated the Magyars in 955, destroying their capital and seizing
their treasury, that he was able to establish the peace necessary to plan for a
war against Rome. The
Liudolfings made it clear early on in their dynasty that they brooked no
commerce with the Marozians, Henry I having refused an offer of anointment from
Marozia herself, not deigning to be subject to a rule as corrupt as hers.
Otto I later laid the concept of the Reichskirche concept—a national German
church—by refusing to allow the Marozians to appoint bishops over his
territories, preferring instead his own candidates, to whom he granted large
territories as part of his campaign to take power away from his vassals.
It was in 962 that Otto was given a casus
belli that allowed him to clean out the “Satanic” Papacy and its allies in
northern Italy. Fearing
that Berengar was plotting to seize Rome,
John XII begged Otto to intervene, and Otto agreed. First attacking Berengar,
Otto seized the kingdom of Italy before proceeding south to Rome, where he deposed John XII and installed
Leo VIII in John's stead. This move began a century long struggle in
which the Papacy would vacillate between Imperial and Marozians factions, until
it all came to a head in 1045.
In removing
John XII, Otto made a number of specific charges. First, he claimed that
John XII worshipped the devil—a practice John had learned from his father and
his grandmother. Secondly, Otto also claimed that John had revived the
worship of Jupiter and Venus, really, a specification of the allegations of
devil-worship. Third, Otto claimed that John had engaged in the ritual
castration of cardinals who had resisted his rule. Fourth, John was said to
have operated a brothel in his palace.
From these
allegations, and the history of the period, a few conclusions can be
drawn. An occult current already present in the Church seems to have used
the anarchy of the late Carolingian period in France
and Germany
to emerge and seize power. Theophylact and even Theodora may have begun
as simple power seekers, but Popes Stephen VI(I) and Sergius III were clearly
initiates into the mysteries of this dark religion. Marozia was clearly
drawn into the movement at a young age through her affair with Sergius, and her
mother was just as clearly drawn in as well. The horror with which John X
reacted to the Marozians indicated he learned—perhaps suddenly—the true nature
of those who had elevated him and had reacted to it, perhaps too
foolishly. Leo VI and Stephen VII(I) met similar fates. The
Berengars, the Dukes of Tuscany, and the house of Provence all seem to have been corrupted by
this spiritual poison, and there is no question that Alberic II practiced this
dark philosophy and passed it down to John XII, who continued it within the
Church and passed it on to future generations.
What was
the nature of this occult current? The statement that Jupiter and Venus
had been revived suggests that it was pagan—not
mere Solomonic or neo-Platonic “devil” worship. The murder, the
sex, and the links to France
suggest that it was, specifically, the cult of Attis-Cybele, the faith of the
Great Mother, whose absorption into Catholicism we have detailed above.
Only six hundred years had passed since men were last castrated in sacrifice at
the rock of Cybele beneath St Peters’
no later than 960, John XII and Marozians seem to have returned the hill to its
ancient purpose.
