In our last bulletin we showed how Washington D.C. was established by an alliance between Roman Catholics and Freemasons. While each group attached its own specific meaning to the symbolism, particularly of Virgo, both used the occult to further their goals.

The idea behind the astrological symbolism is the basic idea that “as in heaven, so in the earth.” By this maxim, they meant to bring heaven to earth by their own works. For example, by establishing Washington D.C. and its capitol on a day where Virgo was prominent, they believed that they could make the federal city (and the whole nation) into a manifestation of the heavenly constellation of Virgo. And since Jupiter was in Virgo at the time the foundation stone for D.C. was laid, they were actually dedicating the city to Jupiter, putting the city under the legal jurisdiction of Jupiter.

To the Jesuits, this meant that Washington D.C. would be subservient to Rome. To the Masons, who interpreted the constellations more in accordance with the Egyptian mystery religions, Jupiter was not specifically associated with Rome, but with power in general.

Both the Jesuits and the Masons worked to establish and increase their power and influence over the new nation. Yet each knew there was benefit in maintaining an alliance even in the midst of competition for power. Open warfare between them would expose and destroy both of them in the eyes of the people.

But before we move on with Napoleon’s capture of Rome and the pope himself in 1798, we must continue with the theme of the architecture in Washington D.C. The Capitol Dome was built a half-century later.

The Capitol Dome in Washington D.C.

On December 8, 1854 Pope Pius IX declared the Ineffabilis Deus, the decree defining the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary. It declared that Mary was conceived free of original sin and remained so throughout her life.

Within days the U.S. Congress enthusiastically rushed to put an addition on the top of the Capitol building as “the only authorized Symbol of American Heritage.” It turned out to be a statue of Persephone, one of the Roman goddesses, whose statues in the 4^th century A.D. were taken over by the Church and renamed the “Virgin Mary.” Few realize that Proclus, head of the Platonic Academy in Athens in the 5^th century, described Persephone as having had an Immaculate Conception. She was often known as Libera (“Liberty”), so the sculptor called his statue over the U.S. Capitol, “Freedom.”

She stands 19 feet 6 inches, which works out to 6 + 6 + 6 feet, and 6 + 6 + 6 inches. Persephone was placed on the Dome of the Capitol on December 2, 1863 in the middle of the Civil War. The event was marked by a salute of 47 gunshots as a tribute to John Carroll, the Jesuit bishop who had put Washington D.C. under Mary's protection. (John Carroll had died 47 years earlier on December 3, 1816.) The statue of Persephone (or Mary) was placed on the Dome 47 years after John Carroll's last day on earth.

President Lincoln did not attend the ceremony, claiming that he had “a fever.” He was well aware of what was going on, but could do nothing to stop it. He was in the middle of a civil war, and the Roman pope had backed the southern cause. And Jesuits were trying to assassinate him.

Meanwhile, Constantino Brumidi had arrived from Rome to do the artwork for the Dome of the Capitol. He painted what is called the “Apotheosis of Washington.” That means “the deification of Washington.” According to Webster's Dictionary, Apotheosis means “the act of placing a prince or other distinguished person among the heathen deities.”

Between the deified Washington and the earth flies the Virgin pursuing “evildoers” with the Roman Eagle at her side. Her position between heaven and earth was meant to identify her as the Mediatrix, the most prominent role of the Roman goddess, Minerva (or Venus). The eagle at her side is the mascot of Jupiter, the ruling god of Rome. It represents Roman justice.

In fact, the motto of our Justice Department is Qui Pro Domina Justitia Sequitur, “He who follows the Goddess Justicia.” Persephone, Minerva, or Venus (different names for the same goddess), when judging the dead in Hades, was called “Justicia.” The Justice Department's motto encircles the eagle, who was said to follow Justicia.

Other details of this painting are too many to describe here, but when we focus upon the one young man in the painting who is called “Young America,” we will see the real point of our entire discussion.

Young America wears a little cap known as a “Phrygian cap.” Phrygia was a district in Pergamum, or Pergamos, which Revelation 2:13 calls “Satan's seat.” Phrygian caps were given to freed slaves to show the world their liberated status. However, Roman law stated that this freedom could be revoked at any time for any cause. In other words, their liberty was given as a privilege, not as an inherent right.

The most significant fact of all in this comes when we look at the famous Black Obelisk of Shalmanezer, King of Assyria, which stands today in the British Museum. It depicts King Jehu of Israel kneeling before the king of Assyria, paying tribute. In fact, this is the only ancient monument that portrays artistically a character in the Bible who actually was alive at the time of the portrait. Jehu is pictured wearing a Phrygian Cap in order to show that he is free only because the king of Assyria has given him the privilege of freedom in exchange for tribute.

It was most significant that the Jesuits were allied with the Freemasons, first in designing Washington D.C. itself, and later the Dome on the Capitol building. Symbolically, they put America’s government under the statue of Mary and in the guise of liberty put us into bondage.

While all this was happening, Lincoln was elected President, and the representatives of the southern states left the government in 1860 without setting a time for their return. This legally abolished the Constitution, and President Lincoln conducted the war thereafter by Executive Order—in essence, as a dictator. He intended to reinstate the Constitution after the war but was assassinated before he could do so.

Technically, we have not been under the Constitution since that time. Oh, yes, we still have some freedoms, but we have been given a Phrygian cap. Our freedoms are now privileges granted by government under Persephone-Mary, not rights under God, and the government can and does remove them at will. But we must get back to the 1790’s to see how the first beast was killed and then how it came back to life as prophesied in Revelation 13.

The Rise of Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleon was the best military general to come out of the French Revolution in France in the early 1790’s. Pope Pius VI was furious when the French overthrew the Church in that country. He retaliated by massacring as many French people in Italy as possible, along with many Italians who likewise wanted to be free of papal dominion.

When King Louis XVI attempted to protect papal power in France, he himself lost his head to the guillotine. The pope furiously excommunicated the entire nation and continued to kill French people in Italy. The French then prepared to invade Italy. In response the Pope issued a call to his Italian Catholic supporters, saying,

“Obey, all of you, it is your god, your pope who orders you. We promise plenary indulgences and eternal recompenses to the faithful who shall murder most of these ferocious French; we grant an entire amnesty to robbers, assassins, and parricides, who shall redeem their crimes by fighting for religion; we give, in advance, our absolution to courageous women, who, like Judith, shall abandon themselves to the Philistines, and cut off their heads.

“The Italians made no movement, and awaited the arrival of the French, not as enemies, but as liberators. Nay, more; the pope, having desired to double the taxes, they revolted against the fiscal agents, killed some of them at Rome, and even thought of burning the palace of the duke de Braschi, whose wealth and insolent luxury contrasted in so odious a manner with the general distress.” (Cormenin, History of the Popes, Vol. II, pp. 411, 412)

The duke de Braschi was one of the pope’s illegitimate sons that he had by his own sister. This son (or nephew—take your pick) had married the countess Falconieri, who was another of the pope’s daughters, born of an adulterous relationship while the pope was yet a cardinal. The Italians were used to papal corruption and their steady streams of mistresses, but this pope was hated more than most.

“The Vatican was the nightly theatre of disgusting saturnalias, at which met the father, the daughter, and the two brothers, and which recalled the orgies of the Borgias. Rome was daily informed by the indiscretions of the officers of the palace…It is certain that Pius the Sixth was extremely arrogant and rough, and that he preserved this violent character to his death. Finally, his turpitudes rendered him such an object of hatred and contempt to the Romans, that in the religious ceremonies in which he appeared, the faithful returned him only hisses in exchange for his blessings.” (Cormenin, Vol. II, p. 405)

The conquest of Rome was entrusted to a 27-year-old general, Napoleon Bonaparte. The frightened pope bought some time by asking for an armistice, but then used the time to call the Italians to arms. He offered the people 40,000 years of indulgences [i.e, less time in purgatory] for volunteers to fight the French army. They continued to kill French citizens wherever they could be found in Italy. The French army advanced, however, and the pope, fearful of losing everything, finally signed a treaty.

“Pius the Sixth again endeavoured to appease the storm; but these shocks, this incessant disquietude, and above all his debauchery with the beautiful dutchess de Braschi, his daughter, had given a fatal blow to his health, and a few days after the conclusion of the treaty of Tolentino, he fell so sick that they began to think of giving him a successor.

“His two bastards, Romuald and the duke de Braschi, hastened to lay hands on the treasures collected in the Vatican, and [which treasures were] destined to pay the ransom of Rome.

“Unfortunately, the pope recovered, and things were restored to their former footing; only his holiness dared not increase the taxes to satisfy the exigencies of the treaty of Tolentino, and turned towards the clergy to replace the sums stolen by his nephews.

“The priests, threatened in their property, turned immediately against the pope, cried out tyranny, called the people to revolt, accused Pius the Sixth of all the calamities which had fallen on Rome, and dared, in their sermons, to designate the holy pontiff by the names of stupid, incestuous, sodomite, and robber.” (Cormenin, Vol. II, p. 414)

Then Napoleon’s brother, Joseph Bonaparte, arrived in Rome at the head of the French army. The citizens hailed him as a liberator. The pope was exasperated by this.

“The soldiers of the execrable Pius fall on the citizens, massacre women, children, and old men, beat down the flying with their balls, cover the streets with dead bodies, pursue the unfortunate who had taken refuge in the palace of the French embassy, and transform that inviolable asylum into a field of carnage. Joseph Bonaparte, General Duphot, and the officers of the embassy immediately rushed forward to stop the massacres.” (p. 414)

“The people of Italy at last opened their eyes to the crimes of Pius the Sixth, and commenced joining the republic…Everywhere were heard cries of ‘Death to the pontiff assassin, vengeance for the French, our liberators.’ An Italian patriot even pronounced a public discourse, in which he expressed the wish ‘That the Tiber would soon roll its majestic waves amidst a free people, and that the blood of a pope would purify the earth from eighteen centuries of crime, shame, and servitude’.” (p. 415)

Napoleon had captured Rome and had fully overthrown the Pope’s rule. The citizens formed a constitutional government based upon that in France.

“As for the pope and his two bastard sons, the people, always great, always merciful, pardoned their lives and contented themselves with taking from them their rich domains, the palaces, and the treasures stolen from the nation, or acquired with the public funds.

“The dutchess de Braschi, that shameless courtesan, doubly incestuous with her brother and her father, the wife of one, and the mistress of the other, was treated with still more indulgence; the consuls left with her a part of the ornaments and precious stones given her by the pope, and exiled her to Tivoli, where she consoled herself in the arms of another lover for the ruin of her family. (p. 415, 416)

All these catastrophes had cast the pope into a despondency, which amounted almost to idiocy. At last the governor of Rome, General Cervoni, inflicted the last blow on him by informing him officially that the people had reconquered their rights, and that he was no longer anything in the government.” (p. 416)

The pope was taken captive and driven to Tuscany. He remained three months in the convent of St. Augustine in Sienna. Then an earthquake destroyed the convent, and he was moved again.

“They placed at once at his disposal a country house called ‘The Lower Regions,’ which induced sarcasms of the irreligious, and made them say that the holy father was at last in his place.” (p. 416)

Even so, the Pope continued to intrigue against France to regain his power. For a time he succeeded, but the French later prevailed, and the Pope was sent into exile at Valens, in Dauphiny. There Pope Pius VI died in exile on August 29, 1799 after being robbed one last time by his illegitimate son, the duke de Braschi.

Papal Resurrection

Once Napoleon had conquered Rome and reduced the Pope to a prisoner of war, he decided that he still needed a Pope to crown him Emperor. Even as the first such Emperor (Charlemagne) had been crowned on Dec. 25, 800 by Pope Leo III, so also Napoleon wanted to be crowned a thousand years later in the year 1800.

Cardinal Barnabas Louis Chiaramonti became the next Pope on March 4, 1800, taking the name Pius VII. In his earlier years he had been a strong advocate of absolute papal power; but later he. . .

“had pronounced a superb homily, in which he proved, by relying on the texts of scripture, that in order to be a good Christian, one must be a democrat. The wary cardinal had foreseen that, by affecting liberal sentiments, he assured himself of the protection of France and prepared the way to the pontifical throne.” (Cormenin, Vol. II, p. 418)

Napoleon allowed the new pope to return to Rome and signed a concordat with him in 1801. In this concordat, the pope gave the French government rights to make the priests take an oath of loyalty to the Emperor, but it also gave the Pope the right to appoint bishops in France. This latter clause was used to resurrect the papacy and overthrow France once again.

The Pope instigated French bishops then to weaken the restrictions of the concordat, and even reasserting the rights of the Bourbon line to return to the throne of France. Napoleon responded simply by asking the Pope to come to France to consecrate him as Emperor. The Pope did not dare to refuse. The coronation took place in 1804 in Paris at the Church of Notre Dame. When all was ready, Napoleon came in and kneeled with Josephine, the Empress, before the Pope.

“He then arose, and without waiting for Pius the Seventh to crown him, took the diadem from his hands, placed it on his head, and then crowned Josephine.” (Cormenin, Vol. II, p. 420)

On August 6, 1806 the Holy Roman Empire, begun by Charlemagne’s coronation in 800, officially came to an end after existing 1,000 years. The last emperor, however, became simply the emperor of Austria.

In 1809 Napoleon divorced Josephine because she was barren and could not provide him with an heir to the throne. He then married Maria Louisa, daughter of the emperor of Austria, Francis I. She was of Merovingian descent. The Merovingians claimed descent from Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and Napoleon wanted his heirs to be able to claim messianic descent.

According to Laurence Gardner’s Bloodline of the Holy Grail, p. 171,

“The Merovingian kings were noted sorcerers in the manner of the Samaritan Magi, and they firmly believed in the hidden powers of the honeycomb. . . To the Merovingians, the bee was a most hallowed creature. A sacred emblem of Egyptian royalty, it became a symbol of Wisdom. Some 300 small bees were found stitched to the cloak of Childeric I (the son of Meroveus) when his grave was unearthed in 1653. Napoleon had these attached to his coronation robe in 1804.”

In 1810 the Pope began to transfer the Papal home from Rome to Paris. About 3000 boxes from the Vatican archives were moved to Paris and carefully cataloged by the occultic Mason, Charles Nodier. On June 20, 1812 the Pope himself was moved from Rome to Fontainbleau in France, the papal residence which Napoleon had selected.

One of Napoleon’s primary motives in this was not merely to gain power over the papacy, but to find records of the whereabouts of the treasure that the Goths had plundered from Rome in 410 A.D. This included the treasure that Rome had taken from Jerusalem in 70 A.D. Some even mistakenly thought this treasure included the Ark of the Covenant. The Goths had taken the treasure to the southern part of France near the Pyrenees Mountains, where it had been concealed somewhere in the silver mines of the region. Napoleon wanted that treasure, even as Nazi Germany wanted it 140 years later during World War II. But only a portion of it has surfaced over the years. (See Web of Gold, by Guy Patton and Robin Mackness.)

Then Napoleon invaded Russia, where his army was destroyed. In 1814 he fell from power. The Papacy, traumatized by their near-death experience, reinstated the Jesuits as their papal army. Then the Congress of Vienna met to redraw the map of Europe. In 1815 they restored the crown to the French kings (Louis XVIII) and the Italian Papal States to the Pope. The Pope again assumed civil power. The papacy with its Jesuit army came back to life. Thus, the “fatal wound” was healed (Rev. 13:3).