“The mesh of the Universe is the Universe itself.”
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man
Empirical science ― the only kind of science which is deemed “respectable” in the eyes of the World ― is the fatuous endeavor to explain the Universe without God and without Man. From its origins in the Enlightenment, demonstrative science assigned to the Deity the marginal role of “first Cause”. At best He is the Master Craftsman who sets the clockwork mechanism of the Universe in motion, and then graciously cedes His dominion to the operation of immutable physical laws. Faring even worse under the rationalist dispensation, the Human Spirit has been condescendingly relegated to the class of “subjective” phenomena. The “subjective” realm is deemed peculiar to the “individual human being” and his/her interior experiences ― an atomized interior without definitive connection to the greater Universe or even, indeed, to the interior lives of other “individuals”.
While it claims to abjure a priori assumptions, empirical epistemology is in fact so laden with them that the effective ambit of genuine thought is all but obliterated. Among these is the unshakable faith in the absolute externality of the “real”. The true essence of things supposedly reveals itself exclusively in the praxis of their exterior interactions. Seen from this perspective, Man is just another thing ― a billiard ball best defined by the relative elasticity of its collisions with other human particles and with the cushions of social restraint. As for the immeasurable Interior ― apart from its undeniable presence as an embarrassing aberration unique to Man himself ― its reality is dismissed. Denied is all knowledge which comes to Man from within himself, all truth which does not manifest itself in a manner detectable by some non-human instrumentality. Vehemently denied, moreover, is the slightest possibility that the timeless Interior exists not only in Man, but lies also hidden in the deepest workings of Creation in its entirety.
Creation, like Man, is real only in its entirety. While the complete edifice of “analytical” science rests on the categorical rejection of this axiom, its validity nonetheless asserts itself ever more persistently as technologically-refined observation plumbs the abyss of subatomic matter. At some level a line seems to be crossed, beyond which experimental results contradict not only the known laws of physics, but the basic premises of rationalism itself. As the observer proceeds progressively downward in scale, supposedly discrete things at once appear to be present everywhere ... and yet nowhere at all. Ultimately, the continuity of Time and Space itself dissolves, uncovering the vista of an archipelago of finitude scattered across a dimensionless, ineffable Ocean more ancient than Time. Still more disconcerting, even the limited terra firma of this archipelago becomes submerged, Atlantis-like, beneath a swirling froth of statistical indeterminacy the moment the human observer averts his/her gaze.
The chaotic realm of ultimate Matter adheres to only one law, a principle which science calls “symmetry”. Symmetry demands that all Things be created in pairs having physical properties which cancel each other out. Thus, it is a law which follows directly from the premise that God fashioned the Universe out of nothing. So if we create a pair of particles, they must move away from each other at the same velocity in opposite directions, in order that their linear momentums may add up to zero. Likewise, their angular momentums ― i.e. their “spins” ― must also sum to zero, so that if one particle spins “up”, the other must spin “down”. But, under the bizarre ground rules of quantum mechanics, until somebody actually comes along to measure one of the particles, not only is it impossible to know which one spins up and which one down, but each particle is potentially spinning in both directions at the same time! Until the conscious Mind appears on the scene, therefore, it is as if each particle is a coin tossed in midair, not yet “committed” to either heads or tails. In theory, we may allow these two particles to travel across billions of light-years of space before we actually measure the spin of one of them to be ― let us say ― “up”. But symmetry then dictates that, at the exact instant we make such an observation, the other particle, albeit on the other side of the Universe, will immediately assume the “down” spin configuration. To put it another way, the knowledge of the first particle’s settling into the “up” mode is transmitted across the Universe instantaneously, as evidenced by the second particle simultaneously assuming the “down” orientation.
This instantaneous dissemination of knowledge across the entire Universe is a phenomenon which physicists call “nonlocality”. What does nonlocality tell us, then, about the structure of the Universe? First of all, it tells us that knowledge is not transmitted via a physical medium, since Einstein’s relativity sets light-speed as the upper limit for such propagations. This in turn implies that the Universe contains a knowing Interior whose processes transcend Space and Time. Further, we may infer from nonlocality that the fabric of this Interior realm is not built up, like that of its exterior counterpart, from a network of interconnected units, since the transfer of information across such units would require a finite time. Hence, this Conscious infrastructure must be an indivisible entirety, the order of which appears only in the whole.
The surreal world which empirical science has discovered on the submicroscopic scale is mirrored, on the other end of the dimensional spectrum, by an equally paradoxical cosmology. As our instrumentation reaches the requisite degree of sophistication, we have become capable of detecting and measuring something astrophysics terms the “cosmic background radiation” ― the remnants of the original stuff out of which the Universe was created. Now, a very intriguing proposition has been gleaned from the observed distribution of this “background radiation” in the Universe: The prima materia of Creation underwent its initial genesis outside of Space/Time! In fact, science is compelled to acknowledge that the first moments of their theorized “Big Bang” (a hopelessly convoluted scenario in which the Universe generates itself) unfolded in a sort of netherworld which can be described as a “Hilbert Space”. But “Hilbert Space” is not Space at all, at least in any palpable sense, but is instead a pure mathematical abstraction comprising “points” of infinite dimension, each one of which is itself the center of the entire space. Thus, Hilbert Space is an apt mathematical rendering of St. Bonaventure’s mystical perception of the Mind of God: the Intelligible Sphere whose Center is everywhere and whose Circumference is nowhere.
And so a rigidly materialistic science sets about to paint the picture of a Universe external to Man and independent of God. Ironically, however, as the fine details of the painting begin to be filled in, the impersonal landscape transforms itself into a portrait with human features ― features which ultimately merge into the face of God. Indeed, the common observation that the Creator has left His imprint on Creation ― while true as far as it goes ― still falls far short of recognizing His living presence within Creation ― a Creation which continues to unfold from out of the bosom of that divine Immanence. In short, therefore, what we find at the heart of the material Universe is not just the fingerprint of God, but His vital Emanation, His supernal Light.
As the Universe has developed over the aeons, this luminous Immanence has acted as its internal gyroscope, directing its genesis toward a very specific goal: the eschatological uncovering of the glorious Interior Itself. This uncovering is a future event we know as the Apocalypse. Man represents a great milestone on the way to that goal, since in human Consciousness is realized the very first reflection of the divine Light. From within the human Mind, the heretofore hidden Interior of the Universe first announces its presence, first lays claim to a manifest domain of its own. Man thus becomes the true Microcosm of the greater Universe, containing within himself the immensity which is the Interior of the Macrocosm. When religious tradition speaks of the Body of Man as God’s Temple, therefore, it is not meant in the purely metaphorical-ethical sense in which it is commonly interpreted. The dwelling of the divine Emanation within us is not only real, it defines our Being.
Since the Indwelling Light is not divisible, neither is its Temple in the Body of Man. But with the Fall of Adam, that Temple was reduced to rubble, the sublime unity of the Body sundered. From the deluded perspective of the atomized human Mind, it appeared as if Man had been severed from his Body of Light, his infinite form atrophied to shriveled branches lopped off from the Tree of Life. These severed branches ― the dwarfish insular egos of the postlapsarian World ― would descend into a phantasmal subreality, an inside-out bubble from which the universal Interior appears distant, alien, and sinister. Out of this spectral abyss has emerged the entire host of Hell, all of them deformed projections of the Eternal images of the Indwelling Light.
If the Temple of the Light were truly destroyed, however, then wouldn’t Man have ceased to exist? The answer is yes, and hence Man’s survival is compelling evidence that the Temple yet abides somewhere. But where? Well, going back to our quantum physics primer, we know that the mathematical formulation of the Interior ― a.k.a. “Hilbert Space” ― stipulates that each point is the Center, i.e. every particle must contain the blueprint of the entire edifice. In this sense, it has been said that the Interior is like a hologram, into every part of which is indivisibly enfolded the full image. Consequently, even when the Temple walls are thrown down, the Interior as a whole can subsist in just one stone. And that stone, though it had been originally rejected by the builders, then becomes the cornerstone of the Temple. This imagery, of course, now begins to resonate with Scriptural themes which invite our exploration.
In the Scriptures, the destruction of Solomon’s Temple furnishes a metaphor for the dissociation of human Consciousness caused by the Fall of Adam. The rebuilding of the Temple comes to symbolize the great historical task of cleansing and reintegrating the collective Mind of Man, so that it may again become the Sanctuary of the supernal Light. Quite appropriately, therefore, the great apocalyptic prophecies of Daniel and Zechariah use the chronology of the Second Temple as a sort of temporal grid onto which they project the events of the end-Time. Delimiting the overall boundaries of this grid are the four empires which Daniel foresaw ― each in its turn ― subjugating Judea: Assyria-Babylonia, Persia, Greece, and Rome.
We nowadays tend to view the Roman Empire as something which expired in ancient times. While the Empire broke up during the Middle Ages, however, active vestiges of it ― most notably the Holy Roman Empire ― actually surviving into the 19th Century. Ironically, as we have discussed earlier, the Church became heir, though quite illegitimately, to the sovereignty of Rome. As the Empire split along East-West lines, the imperial legacy was likewise divided along the lines of a parallel ecclesiastical schism. Thus, in the 21st Century, remnants of the Imperial Rome remain intact, if somewhat moribund. On one hand, the Roman Pontificate survives as claimant to the legacy of the Western Empire. On the other hand, Russia carries on as the center of Eastern Orthodoxy and successor to the Byzantine Empire.
The Eastern Empire, which ultimately succumbed to the Turks in the 15th Century, actually was a continuation of the previous Macedonian-Greek empire established by Alexander the Great. After Alexander’s sudden death at age 33 (oddly foreshadowing the life span attributed to Christ) his domains were divided four ways by competing generals. Daniel likened this scenario to the snapping of a great goat’s horn, with four lesser horns sprouting in its place.[1] Eventually, the rulership over the fragment which included Palestine devolved upon one Antiochus IV Epiphanes (175-164 BC). He forbid the daily sacrifice in the Temple and defiled its Sanctuary with a statue of Zeus ― the “abomination of desolation” against which Daniel declaimed. In this sense, Antiochus certainly prefigures Antichrist ― suggesting that the latter will also emerge as ruler of a piece of the disintegrated Eastern Empire.
Looking at our own times, the correspondences to this Scriptural chronology simply abound. Beginning in 1917 ― as announced by Our Lady of Fatima ― the Eastern Empire is reconstituted as the Soviet Union. Also starting in 1917 with the Balfour Declaration, the Jews begin to reclaim their homeland, exactly as they had done in the centuries before Alexander’s conquests. And just as suddenly as the “great horn” of Alexander’s empire snapped, so did the Soviet Union, likewise leaving four principal fragments ― Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and the Tartar states. Following the prophetic pattern, therefore, we can anticipate the new Antiochus as a leader of one of these four “horns”. If we project the actions of the historical Antiochus into our own future, moreover, they reveal another important insight. Perhaps the most execrable deed committed by Antiochus IV was the assassination of the High Priest of Jerusalem, whom he replaced with a puppet who acquiesced in the suppression of the traditional rites of the Jewish faith. Manifestly presaged for the end-Time, therefore, is the supplanting of the “High Priest”, i.e. the legitimate Pope, by a collaborator of Antichrist.
As to the details of this ecclesiastical coup, the prophecy of Zechariah picks up where Daniel’s leaves off. In a series of visions, Zechariah sees Yahweh judging the “four horns” ― which now symbolize the Gentile Nations as a whole ― and restoring “Jerusalem” as the object of His loving favor. I place quotation marks around the city’s name, because it is essential to understand that the prophet is referring to the New Jerusalem, not the mundane metropolis in modern Israel. Indeed, Zechariah speaks of a City without walls, a City in which the divine Glory visibly dwells. It will be the heavenly Jerusalem of a new people of God, drawn from among all of the Nations:
And on that day many nations will be converted to Yahweh. Yes, they will become his people, and they will live among you.[2]
The prophet next envisions the investiture of “Joshua” as High Priest. By design, we may assume, the name invokes the type of the sacred king, the Messianic figure who leads the people of God into the Promised Land. On one level, this Joshua is surely Christ ― the Son of Man both in his past human incarnation and in his looked-for Parousia at the end of Time. But here we should recognize that Jesus of Nazareth, himself a Jewish rabbi, did not come to save the Jews, but rather to bring the Gentiles into the great tabernacle of Redemption. Thus, it is not true that the Jews have rejected their Messiah, for their Messiah has not yet come. He will come, however, on the Day of the Lord, and he is the Anointed One who the prophet calls Joshua. Joshua will be both a priest and a king, and through him the Jews will return to Yahweh. He will also be the Son of Man who will come for the Gentiles, because the faithful remnant of the Gentile Nations, as we shall see, will have grafted itself to the Olive Tree of Israel.
In the prophet’s vision, Joshua appears before the Most High wearing dirty clothing and a soiled turban. He stands before the Father almost as a defendant would before a court, and at his right side stands Sitan ― the Accuser. After listening to Sitan’s most artful calumnies, Yahweh commands that Joshua be washed and anointed, dressed in the finest robes, with a clean turban to be placed upon his head.[3] This scene will be enacted on earth when the Angelic Pope is denounced by Antichrist and flees for his life, a wretched fugitive. Having lost his “dirty turban”, which is the soiled miter of the Bishop of Rome, he will receive a clean new miter, as the first among the great Episcopate which will reunite the Churches of East and West. Pope Peter II will not be Joshua, but he will be one of two prophets who will precede Him ― the two Witnesses of the end-Time whom Zechariah represents as two Olive Trees. The prophet depicts these Olive Trees producing a continual, unending flow of oil to the seven-branched candelabra which light the Sanctuary of the Temple.
What are we to make of this strange image of the endlessly flowing lamp oil? Understanding it requires of us a shift in cultural perspective. While we nowadays think of olives primarily as a dietary item, to the peoples of the ancient Mediterranean, they were first and foremost the source of oil to burn for illumination. As such, the Olive Tree came to symbolize Light, from the ordinary table-lamp variety to the Most Sublime ― the Limitless Light which, according to the Hebrew Zohar, shines above the highest branch of the Tree of Life. What better metaphor could there be for this Ain Soph, this Limitless Light, than the never-ceasing flow of oil from the Olive Trees? “Granted,” my reader is doubtless thinking, “but why two Trees?” It’s because the source of the Light is ― incredibly ― material Creation itself, the realm of duality. When the grapes are pressed, they become the wine which is the blood of the Lamb of God, and when the olives are pressed, they become the Infinite Glory which will come to dwell in His Temple.
This Glory is not Christ the Bridegroom, but it is Redeemed Man, the Bride of Christ, whom the Hebrews called Shekinah. She is the very same as the Blessed Mother, the only human who has not shared in the Sin of Adam. She is also Mary the wife of Joseph, a Jewess, because it is in the Jews, and in their return to God’s Love, that all of humanity will be blessed. On the plane of manifestation, the Shekinah will, in the end-Time, act through two of her Angels, who Zechariah calls the two Olives Trees. According to Revelation, these two will be martyred ― in other words, they will be capable of suffering death. Therefore, we know that they are mortal Angels, i.e. they are Angels with incarnate bodies. Scriptural tradition recognizes only four inhabitants of Heaven who have carnal bodies: Jesus, Mary, and the two Old Testament prophets who were translated into Heaven ― Enoch and Elijah. Ipso facto, then, the two Olive Trees are Enoch and Elijah. With respect to the latter, the Hebrew prophet Malachi wrote that Elijah would return at the end of history to preach the advent of the Messiah to the Jews.[4]
As for Enoch, he was the seventh Patriarch after Adam, which reminds us of the seven-branched candelabra which is fed by the Olive Trees in Zechariah’s vision. Seven is the number of the sublunary World, swayed as it is by the seven-day phases of the Moon. Because of its tidal pull on the oceans, the Moon actually reshapes the Earth from one lunar phase to the next. Hence, it is no accident that the sea-faring peoples of the Mediterranean built the seven-day tidal cycle right into their calendar. To the extent that these peoples retained a notion of the limitless Interior of the material Universe, they associated it with the Ocean ― boundless and timeless. Consequently the Moon, the shaper of the tides, was identified with the source of the movement, and hence the Life, of the universal Interior. In the depth psychology of Carl Jung, this lunar archetype corresponds to the feminine Anima. She is the aspect of the Mind that imparts Life by furnishing the umbilical link between the barren individual psyche and the nourishment of the “Collective Unconscious” ― another name for the Microcosm, the Infinity that dwells within Man.
In mythology, the Anima ― which roughly corresponds to what we call the Soul ― was commonly represented by a tree. In the earliest calendar systems, each lunar month took the name of a tree, because each portion of the Sacred Year was thought to confer something essential to the Life of Man. Out of the Olive Tree came Wisdom, just as Logos was born out of the womb of the Heavenly Virgin. Greeks fables tell of a time when civil Chaos threatened to submerge the budding civilization of Attica ― a dilemma allegorically depicted by the Sea-god Poseidon thrusting his Trident into the Acropolis. To prevent this calamity, Athena, the goddess of Wisdom, planted her sacred olive tree on the Acropolis. The grateful city named itself in her honor and raised a temple to her where her tree stood. A similar Biblical story tells of Judith saving Israel from disaster by beheading the Assyrian general Holofernes. In her triumphal procession, she was crowned with a wreath of olive leaves.[5]
In the foregoing tales, the heroines represent Shekinah, who Zechariah describes as “seven eyes of Yahweh which run to and fro throughout the earth”. Like her mythical counterparts, she alone can avert the shipwreck looming before humanity today. She is the Glory of the Olive Tree, the Indwelling Glory which appeared first in the Tabernacle of Moses and then in the Holy-of-Holies of King Solomon’s Temple. In those days, She manifested herself between the two covering Cherubs which enclosed the Ark of the Covenant ― Cherubs whose figures were carved of the wood of the wild olive tree.[6] Similarly in the end-Time, She will appear in the unity of God’s people to be accomplished between Her two Olive Trees, the prophets Elijah and Enoch. It bears emphasis that this spiritual unity of mankind ― which Christ demands as a precondition to his return ― will not be achieved by the conversion of the Jews to Christianity. The Jews remain the people of the Covenant emblemized by Noah’s olive branch, and Yahweh does not breach His Covenants. The conversion of the Jews is their return to Him, whereupon they ― mankind’s “first-fruits” ― will bring His blessing upon all of God’s people:
When the first-fruits are made holy, so is the whole batch; and when the root is holy, so are the branches. Now suppose that some branches were broken off, and you [the Gentile] are wild olive, grafted among the rest [the Jews] to share with them the root and the rich sap of the olive tree; then it is not for you to consider yourself superior to the other branches, for it is not you that sustain the root, but the root that sustains you.[7]
St. Paul, who had been Saul the Pharisee, could not have been more unequivocal in his choice of words: The children of Israel are the Lord’s first-fruits, now and forever. It is to their root ― the root of the Olive Tree of Israel ― that the Gentile branches must attach themselves. Please bear in mind that the author of this book is himself a Gentile, and so I am not making these interpretations based upon any ethnic chauvinism.[8] Our salvation as Gentiles depends inseparably upon the people of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob turning back to the I AM whom Moses encountered in the Sinai desert. This is the “conversion” of the Jews about which St. Paul writes.
Yet it is remarkable ― disturbingly remarkable ― that the prevalent view in modern “Christianity” teaches the Gentile flock that they should expect the progeny of Abraham to come meekly one day to worship in their tent! Does a plain reading of Saint Paul even remotely support this position? My reader may be the judge:
For if thou [the Gentile] wert cut out of the olive tree which is wild by nature, and wert grafted contrary to nature into a good olive tree: how much more shall these [the Jews], which be the natural branches, be grafted into their own olive tree? [9]
Nota bene: It is to “their own olive tree”, the Olive Tree of Judea, that the “converted” Jew needs to be reattached. And it is to that same tree trunk, to that same root, that the Gentile branches must be ingrafted. Mankind cannot be redeemed the other way around, because the “root” ― the umbilicus which leads us back to our primordial unity in Adam ― is the people of Israel. But neither can the Jewish roots and trunk produce the fruit for the enjoyment of the Bridegroom without the Gentile branches, just as the cultivated tree cannot be bear olives unless its branches are engrafted onto the wild olive, or oleander tree.[10]
When we consider how obsessively throughout history mankind’s Great Enemy has sought to destroy the root of our salvation, we now come to comprehend why. The extirpation of the Jew would simultaneously assure the damnation of the Gentile. And let’s be clear about this: the mass conversion of the Jews to Christianity in indistinguishable from their physical annihilation for the purposes we are discussing here. Actually, over the past two thousand years, the forced baptism of Jews in Europe has reduced their numbers there vastly more than the periodic pogroms (excluding the Holocaust, of course). In its traditional form, Christian baptism is a ceremony by which an individual is integrated into the body of a church. Baptism’s connection with the metaphoric “ingrafting” of which St. Paul wrote is evident from the anointment of the head of the baptized with the sacred Chrism of olive oil. Consequently, the coerced baptism of a Jew is in fact the diabolical inversion of the “conversion” on which our salvation depends.
This brings us, at long last, squarely to face with the central theme of this chapter.
Having pored over the preceding background, we are now, God willing, prepared to penetrate the secret of St. Malachy’s perhaps most enigmatic papal insignia ― the “Glory of the Olive Tree”. That motto must describe the Pontiff to follow John Paul II, who Malachy dubbed the “Eclipse of the Sun” (he was actually born during one). As we’ve learned, the Olive Tree ― as distinguished from its branches ― unquestionably represents the people of Israel. That being so, nonetheless, how could a Jew conceivably become Pope? Obviously, no Jew who remained a Jew could ever be elected to the Chair of St. Peter ... but a Jewish convert might.
Today, for the first time in the history of the Church, a converted Jew has risen to the rank of Cardinal and is among the candidates in the papal succession. Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger, the Archbishop of Paris, was born Aaron Lustiger to Jewish parents who had emigrated from a Polish ghetto. Sensing the onset of the Nazi Holocaust in Eastern Europe, his parents believed that France would remain a safe refuge, that its refined culture could never descend into the barbarism of the storm troopers. But their trust was tragically misplaced. Soon after the German occupation of Paris, the Lustigers’ property was seized and his mother was deported to Auschwitz, where she would later die. In the midst of this cataclysm, the young Aaron, at age 14, elected to be baptized into the Roman Catholic Church. Lustiger claims to have experienced a “spiritual awakening”, and perhaps his later pursuit of the cloth does indeed attest to this. But for many, particularly in the Jewish community, his conversion to Catholicism smacks of moral cowardice of the sort associated with the noncommittal stance of Pope Pius XII during World War II.
It is entirely unfair to require Cardinal Lustiger to account for his conversion, which ― absent any evidence to the contrary ― we must presume to be sincere. After all, the Apostles were all Jews who were selected from among their people by the Son of Man, and I believe that the Son of Man has similarly chosen Aaron Lustiger to play a certain role ― an absolutely indispensable one ― in the lead-up to his return. Unfortunately, however, the part which the French Cardinal is to play is that of the second Beast, the Beast who will arise from out of the Earth ― that is, from out of the succession which claims to have been granted, by the hand of Christ himself, “power on Earth”.
By what authority do I say this?
I say it based on St. Malachy’s motto, “De Gloriae Olivae”. The olive branch is found in the coat of arms of Pius XII, the pontiff who not only failed to anathematize the Nazi regime, but stood by mutely as Germany’s Catholic clerics actually urged “patriotic duty to the Fatherland” upon their flocks. St. Benedict predicted that the penultimate Pope would lead the Church in the hour of its confrontation with Evil, and so he shall. But Benedict did not foresee how the Olivetan Pontiff would fare in that confrontation. Just as the first Beast will blasphemously presume to create a temporal version of the City of God ― the unity of humanity imposed by the Moloch-State ― so the second Beast will be seduced into endorsing a temporal version of the Temple of the Lord ― the false temple of a Universal Faith into which the Jews are to be “absorbed”.
A tree which “absorbs” its root dies. St. Paul instructs us that the Jews are the root of the Olive Tree. Zechariah tells us that the Olive Tree will produce the oil which will anoint the Messiah, the oil which will illuminate the Temple. The “glory” of the Olive Tree is the fruit which the consecrated Tree will bring forth: the Redeemed Man, the New Adam, the Mystical Body of Christ. But that glory cannot be attributed only, or even primarily, to the branches which bear the fruit, because ultimately the fruit is nourished by the root. When we speak of the root of Israel, we speak of the only link which mankind has preserved back to its Collective Consciousness, the Indwelling Light.[11]
This explains why, in the Book of Exodus, Yahweh Himself prescribes the sacred Chrism of olive oil to Moses[12] for the sole purpose of consecrating the Tabernacle and the Ark of the Covenant. Yahweh specifically forbids that the Chrism be applied to the body of any person save only His priesthood:
And thou shalt anoint Aaron and his sons, and consecrate them, that they may minister unto me in the priest’s office. And thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel, saying, This shall be a holy anointing oil unto me throughout your generations. Upon man’s flesh shall it not be poured ... whosoever putteth any of it upon a stranger [i.e. one who is not a priest] shall be cut off from his people.[13]
Yahweh’s injunction in this regard is part of the Law, the Law which Jesus came to fulfill, not to abrogate. Yet we find the successors of St. Peter, from the 7th Century onward, applying the Chrism to “anoint” the various Gentile kings and emperors who allegedly derived their sovereign powers from the Papacy through the “Donation of Constantine”. Consequently, it is inevitable that this sacrilegious use of the sacred olive oil to invest Gentile rulers will ultimately be the snare by which the Gentile Nations will be ― in the words of Yahweh ― cut off from the people of God. All of the falsely consecrated monarchs of history are patterned after the “anointed Cherub” Satan and prefigure of his eschatological agent ― the Man of Sin to be anointed Monarch over the ultimate World Empire.
And who may anoint Antichrist but one who is himself “cut off from his people”? Under the Law, for a Jew to submit to a ceremony in which his head is anointed with the Chrism ― as in Catholic baptism ― is to be cut off from the people of Israel, from the root of the Olive Tree. How bitterly ironic it is, therefore, that the Antipope who is destined to invest Antichrist should be called by St. Malachy “The Glory of the Olive Tree”. It’s even more ironic that the likely candidate for this role should be a Jew given the name Aaron ― a name forsaken during his baptism with the olive oil reserved by Yahweh for “Aaron and his sons”!
In the preceding chapter, we demonstrated that Man’s collective body of Falsehood is mythically linked to the Greco-Roman hero Hercules. In ancient Greek religion, the Indwelling Glory, which the Hebrews called Shekinah, was associated with the nine Muses ― female deities whose earthly abode was atop Mt. Helicon. Consistent with the pagan practice of representing the Anima as a tree, there was said to be a particular olive tree on Mt. Helicon which was sacred to the Muses. The legend goes on to tell that Hercules, seeking a weapon with which to subdue the Nemean Lion, desecrated the blessed precinct of the Muses by ripping their olive tree up by the roots and converting it into his bludgeon. Could there be a more felicitous metaphor for the Beast who will strive to overcome the Lion of Judah? Could there be a more evocative rendering of the destined perversion of the Olive Tree into an instrument of that vile campaign? Or of the Tree’s unearthed roots as a symbol of the diabolical design to extirpate God’s people?
We now arrive at a juncture at which our Scriptural symbolism dovetails into that of the Provençal seer Nostradamus ― whose own parents were Jews forced to convert to Catholicism. It is not surprising, then, that his anticipations of the “Olive Tree” Antipope are especially intense and prescient. Let us examine some of them in detail.
Through the
wild and open desert place,
Will come to
roam the nephew of the great Pontiff:
Wearying the
seven with his heavy root,
Through those who afterwards will occupy the vacant See.[14]
For those with even a superficial familiarity with Vatican history, the word “nephew” has very specific connotations. Of the assorted corrupt and decadent practices which have disfigured the Holy See over the centuries, perhaps none has been more notorious than nepotism ― a term actually derived from the Latin for “nephew”. From medieval times right through to our own century, many a Pope has used his office to advance the career of his “nephew” ― often a euphemism for a bastard son ― and to assure that the “nephew” would succeed him in wearing the tiara. In this context, therefore, we must consider the “nephew of the great Pontiff”, as used in the foregoing Quatrain, to denote the Pope’s close personal protégé and hand-picked successor.
If we are speaking in terms of the pontificate of John Paul II, this is a description which literally fits Jean-Marie Lustiger to a tee. A relatively obscure cleric until the election of his fellow Pole Karol Wojtyla to the papal throne, his subsequent rise, first to Bishop of Orléans and then to Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, has been nothing short of meteoric. And Nostradamus’ reference to the nephew’s “heavy root” emphatically harks back to the ancestry of Aaron Lustiger and the Scriptural metaphor for the Jews as the “root” of the Olive Tree. Another intriguing aspect of this phrase is found in the French word for “heavy”, lourde ― from which is derived the name of the village of Lourdes, famed for the healing waters which flow from the Blessed Virgin’s grotto. Like his mentor, Cardinal Lustiger is noted for his Marian piety, and we shall see that Lourdes promises to figure in the “miraculous” resurrection of the first Beast as prophesied in Revelation.
Continuing along in our interpretation of this Quatrain, we connect “the seven”, who are wearied by the nephew’s “heavy root”, with the imagery of the seven hills of Rome, and the seven heads of the Beast of Revelation:
The seven heads are the seven hills, on which the woman [the harlot Babylon] is sitting. The seven heads are also seven emperors. Five of them have already gone, one is here now, and one is yet to come; once here, he must stay for a short while. The beast, who was alive and is alive no longer, is at the same time the eighth and one of the seven ... [15]
St. John is believed to have written the foregoing lines in 70 AD, during the reign of the Roman Emperor Vespasian, who was the sixth in the line of Caesars which began with Augustus. Under his reign, Jerusalem was sacked by the Roman legions under the command of his son and successor Titus. Titus wantonly destroyed the great Temple of Jerusalem which had been rebuilt by the Jews after their return from exile in Babylon. The razing of the Temple fulfilled the prophecy uttered by Christ just days before his death, when he sat on the Mount of Olives and pointed over to the adjoining promontory of Mount Moriah, saying:
There shall not
be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.
After making this startling prediction, Jesus went on to speak of the Last Things and to caution his disciples that his return would be preceded by the appearance of a False Christ and a False Prophet ― those whom John the Divine later depicted as the two Beasts. It was as if Jesus had intentionally prefaced his apocalyptic warnings with the prophecy about the Temple, so that the contemporaneous fulfillment of the latter would give cause for belief in the former.
Let us return now to our passage from Revelation, which informs us that the Beast will be one of the first seven Roman Emperors. Already dead when John wrote these words, this Emperor would be “miraculously” restored to life. Thus, Antichrist would have to be among the five Caesars who were “already gone” in 70 AD. Not coincidentally, the fifth Emperor, who died by his own hand two years before the Evangelist penned these lines, was none other than the odious Nero. As we discussed at length in the preceding chapter, a resurrected Nero ― Nero redivivus ― is a recurring theme in prophecy concerning the Beast. This theme is not ignored by Nostradamus: