Sibyl’s Cave, Templars and the Epicenter of World Occultism

Part 1: The Society of the Cincinnatus: Solving a 170 Year Murder Mystery
Part 2: Poe, Beethoven and Houdini VS the Cult of Artificial Intelligence
Part 3: Poe’s Tales of Ratiocination and the Real C. Auguste Dupin
Part 4: Culture Wars: Mazzini’s Minions Enter the Stage
Part 5: Poe’s Eureka vs Emerson’s Transcendentalism
Part 6: The Syncretic Revival of Paganism- Transcendentalists and Theosophists
Part 7: The Mormon Role in the the Purge of Republican Freemasonry
Part 8: Why Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Despised Edgar Allan Poe
Part 9: The Occult Underpinnings of Mary Rogers’ Murder: An Exercise in Ratiocination

In the previous installment, you were introduced to the ritual murder of Mary Rogers and her fiancee Daniel Payne near a strange place dubbed ‘Sibyl’s Cave’ in Hoboken New Jersey.

In this sequel, we will explore the darker meaning of the Sibyls as a center of world occultism and especially in regard to the subversion of America’s constitutional traditions which Edgar Allan Poe resisted with all his might prior to his own untimely assassination in 1849.

Introducing The Sibyls

In Ancient times, pagan oracles represented the bridges between the spirit realm where demons, gods, spirits and the dead lived, and the material realm of mortals. These oracles took the name Sibyls and according to Greek legend, there were ten such dominant Sibyls spread across the Roman Empire. [8]

It was the Cumaen Sibyl (aka: the seventh sibyl) who was reputed to have sold the famed Sibyline books, featuring symbolism-laced transcripts of the drugged up musings of the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi) to Rome’s last king Tarquin in 500 BC.

These Sibyline books, three in number, interpreted only by a high priest caste, were consulted for the Roman Senate’s every major policy decision for the ensuing centuries (at least until 86 BC when they were burned and replaced with new oracular prophecies also dubbed ‘The Sibyline Books’).

The Cumaen Sibyl was housed in a cave in Naples above thousands of subterranean tunnels built during the Roman empire which were also used for initiation rituals that haven’t been fully disclosed to this day.

In The Aenid, it was the Cumaen Sibyl that directed the hero Aeneas to the underworld to seek council with his dead father.

Although the Cumaen Sibyl is the most well-known of the ancient oracles, Sibyl’s Cave in Hoboken New Jersey was not built in homage of her, but rather to a stranger oracle dubbed ‘The Apennine Sibyl’ (aka: the 11th Sibyl of the Ancient world) located in the mountains of Nursia, Italia- which was the home town of a Roman patrician turned mystic Christian named Saint Benedict and his twin sister Scholastica in 480.

The relevance of St. Benedict’s connection to this location will become clearer later.

At the base of the Sibillini mountains, are found the Elysian Fields named after the section of the underworld reserved for the demigods and heroes.

The Apennine Sibyl: Epicenter of World Occultism

So I folded me in fears,
And DANTE searched the triple spheres,
Moulding Nature at his will,
So shaped, so colored, swift or still,
And, sculptor-like, his large design
Etched on Alp and Apennine.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

According to the ancient greek writings of Hesiod and Pindar, the domain of Hades dubbed ‘The Elysian fields’ was something of a hedonistic Garden of Eden which promised its tenants immortal pleasures without any limits.

Medieval legends spoke of the Apennine cave entrance near one of the peaks of the Sibillini Mountain in Nursia as an access point to the underground kingdom of Queen Sibilla- also known as ‘the Queen of the Faeries’.

This fabled kingdom was said to be fed by underground water from caverns which promised immortality and voluptuous pleasure forever. Knights would venture far and wide to find this Queen Sibilla whose countless fairies would take on the appearance of beautiful women in the daylight, yet who would turn into monsters at night. During the day, they would have to keep their legs hidden, or else their goat feet would be visible, and frighten young men before they could become addicted to the charm of the subterranean kingdom (from which few would ever return since both the seductions and horrors which an initiate was promised to experience were so powerful).

Since the 1960s, the cave’s entrance has been inaccessible due to damage caused by violent earthquakes making modern exploration of the cave extremely difficult. However in the year 2000, a team of scientists from the Department of Earth Sciences at Camarino University carried out geo-radar surveys confirming the existence of a vast underground complex of tunnels and caverns 15 meters below ground level of the Sibillini Mountains with some cavities over 150 meters in length.

Amidst the Elysian fields is a lake called ‘The Lake of Pilato’ named after the burial site of Pontius Pilate who governed Judea from 26-36 CE and oversaw the execution of Jesus of Nazareth.

The Epicenter of World Occultism

Dr. M. Talamè, the Officer for Sustainable Tourism and Education for the Sibillini National Park describes the history of the Sibylline Caves of Naples and the Apennine Sibyl in the following manner:

“She [The Cumean Sibyl] lived in a cave near the summit of Mount Sibilla and since time immemorial she shaped the culture and in the imagination of the people of the Monti Sibillini, firstly as a pagan symbol of fertility, venerated within the tradition of earth worshiping, and then later she also became part of Christian iconography, which is evidenced by numerous paintings in some local churches. The ‘Apennine Sibyl’ is a controversial figure, whose fame as a witch and heretic enchantress was actually renowned in many parts of Europe in the fifteenth century, and the name of these mountains is a tribute to her importance.

In front of her cave opens the beautiful valley of ‘Lago di Pilato’, and legend relates that this lake is the tomb or resting place of the Roman consul who condemned Jesus Christ to death. Both Monte Sibilla and Lago di Pilato were frequented for centuries by necromancers, esoterics and by mysterious people. Throughout history these two sites repeatedly attracted the attention of the Pope who sought to physically prevent access to these locations in order to repress what was perceived as dangerous tendencies. There are reports that entire villages in the Sibillini, like that of Montemonaco, were excommunicated.  Pitchforks were placed on the high altitude mountain routes as a warning to travellers.

Certainly some people came with the intention of consecrating their magic books to the devil, but perhaps others were harmless herbalists who at the time were already fascinated by the biodiversity of these mountains.”

As Dr. M. Talamè alluded in her sales pitch to convince tourists to visit Monte Sibilla, the Lago Pilato (Lake of Pilate) held a sacred reverence for gnostics ever since the murder of Jesus of Nazareth which is why this particular cave represented such a sacred destination for Gnostic pilgrimage for centuries.

Domenico Aringoli and Gilberto Pambianchi of the University of Camarino describe the importance of the caverns within the Apennine mountain of Nursia for initiation rites and their still-existent influence for occult pilgrims today:

“The intrinsic mystery of the initiatory cults practised in caves, and in particular in the high hypogeal site of the Sibilla mountain (known in Europe back in the ancient times as the centre of the Apennine oracle), as well as having been transmitted from the Middle Age onward through “cult” narration, continued, and still continues, to be virtually alive for a large number of the pilgrims that have passed by here in time”. [9]

This site is likely second only to the Isle of Capri (off the coast of Amalfi, Italy) which was given over to the Benedictine Order in the 5th century and which housed both the vast caves of Mithra, and temples of Cybele where Emperor Tiberius (the uncle in law of Pilate) hosted his orgiastic rituals fusing the sexual frenzy of Dionysius and Bachus at night mixed with Apollonian rituals of the Solar Deity by day.

In The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Roman historian Suetonius records how Emperor Vitellius “celebrated a sacred vigil on the slopes of the Alpennines”. Another Roman historian recounted how in 268 CE, Emperor Claudius Gothicus sought a prophesy from the Apennine Sibyl.

The poet Fazio degli Uberti published an account of the Apennine Sibyl in his Dittamondo saying: “I don’t want to overlook the renown of the Mount of Pilatus, where a lake is… to which as described in Simon the Sorcerer, people used to ascend to consecrate their spellbooks according to what local people say”.

Simon the Sorcerer and the Gnostic Roots of Rosicrucianism

To make this point explicit, “Simon the Sorcerer” is a reference to “Simon the Magi” from the Bible– a Samaritan mystic who came to Rome during the reign of Claudius and who attempted to infiltrate the early Christian Church. According to the writings of 2nd century church leaders Justin Martyr, Irenaeus of Lyons and Eusibius, Simon the Sorcerer promoted sacred orgies, cannibalism and child sacrifice within a Christian framework.

Simon also promoted himself off as a god-man who had mastered and superceded the teachings of Jesus Christ, and like Jesus has hid ‘sacred prostitute’ Mary Magdalene (according to gnostic doctrine), had prostitute priestess named Helen, who was herself an incarnation of the gnostic archon Sophia. As long as his followers practiced the dark rites taught by Simon the Magi, they were promised physical immortality, forever cheating death and free to indulge in base hedonism for all eternity.

This would be a similar promise of the mythical kingdom of the Apennine Sibyl and became a foundation stone of all Rosicrucian pursuits in later years in the form the mythical ‘elixer of life’ and ‘philosopher stone’.

Despite being exposed as a fraud by the Apostle Peter (according to the book of Acts), Simon the Sorcerer’s disciples founded the syncretic movement of Gnosticism and continued his practices with the most influential among his followers being Meander, Marcion, Valentinius, Basilides and Saturnius. These gnostic leaders went to war with early Christianity and despite the 5th century defeat of their cults, merely went underground and formed a type of gnostic sainthood to witches covens and Rosicrucian sects across the ages.

Even the orders of Druids (which included Transcendentalist founder Ralph Waldo Emerson as a member) claim Simon the Magician as one of their spiritual leaders.

Christian Rosenkreutz and Sibyl’s Cave

Among the various carvings noted within the Grotto of the Apennine Sibyl was the marking of the year “1378” representing the supposed birthdate of Kristian Rosenkreuz (the mythic german occultist that authored the influential 1457 text The Chemical Wedding and founded Rosicrucianism) and dozens of symbols of roses and crosses.

Rosicrucian texts are heavily symbolic, with Kaballistic Hermetic meanings which offer the attraction of being ‘knowable only to inner elites’. From the Chemical Wedding (published in 1586), Rosicrucian texts tell the apocryphal story of a young boy born to a noble family in the 13th century. The boy had twelve tutors: seven adepts of the holy wisdom taught by the holy Rishis of India, four adepts in the wisdom of the four causal bodies (physical, energetic, emotional and mental) and one scientist.

As the tale goes, the boy was so super-humanly advanced that he mastered all of of the wisdom taught by his tutors, unifying eastern and western paths for the first time ever (which is not true since the earlier Christian gnostics banned by the early Church in the 4th century professed to have done this already). Sadly, since the strain of being so amazing wore his body out, the boy promptly died.

Luckily he was soon re-incarnated into the body of a German baby named Christian Rosenkreutz in 1378 who grew up, had a pilgrimage to Jerusalem via Italy, Cyprus, followed by Damcar (in today’s Yemen), then Egypt, Fez, and back to Germany via Spain… where he created a secret fraternity called the Order of the Rosy Cross.

The order of the Rosy Cross utilized a variety of occult rituals, and was heavily focused on “spiritual alchemy” via initiation rituals that featured a mixture of sex magic, Apollo-Dionysian “balance”. Like the character of Baphomet, or the gnostic ideals of the castrated priests of the Cult of Cybele, featured a heavy emphasis on androgeny, and the integration of opposites within an initiate.

Utilizing heavy visualization practices, theoretical kabbalism and practical witchcraft, the adept would find themselves able to both communicate with astral beings, and ideally ascend to a higher plane where they would become disembodied spirits liberated from the world of dualism (where such illusions as right/wrong, good/evil, or even male/female, resided).

In 1452, a parchment was discovered in the municipality of Montemonaco near the Sibila Mountain which revealed that the site had been frequented by knights from Spain and Naples who practiced Alchemy and consecrated magical books ‘ad lacum Sibylica’.

With increasing evidence of occultism coming to light, a decision was made by Pope Pius II to excommunicate the entire municipality of Montemonaco for assisting the pagan rituals.

Piccolomini, Cusa and the war against Witchcraft

Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (1405-1464), a Platonic Christian who became Pope Pius II in 1458 referred to the rampant witchcraft at Nursia saying:

“At Norcia [Nursia], the home of St. Benedict in the upper Apennines, there was a perfect nest of witches and sorcerers, and no secret was made of it. It is spoken of in one of the most remarkable letters of Aeneas Sylvius, belonging to his earlier period. He writes to his brother: ‘The bearer of this came to me to ask if I knew of a Mount of Venus in Italy, for in such a place magical arts were taught, and his master, a Saxon and a great astronomer, was anxious to learn them. I told him that I knew of a Porto Venere not far from Carrara, on the rocky coast of Liguria, where I spent three nights on the way to Basle; I also found that there was a mountain called Eryx, in Sicily, which was dedicated to Venus, but I did not know whether magic was taught here. But it came into my mind while talking, that in Umbria, in the old Duchy (Spoleto)? near the town of Nursia, there is a cave beneath a steep rock, in which water flows. There, as I remember to have heard, are witches (striges), demons, and nightly shades, and he that has the courage can see and speak to ghosts (spiritus), and learn magical arts. I have not seen it, nor taken any trouble about it, for that which is learned with sin is better not learned at all.’” [10]

The fact that Piccolomini denounced this center of mystery cults during the 15th century is not disconnected to his directing role alongside Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa in establishing both the theoretical as well as practical framework of the Golden Renaissance. This period unleashed the densest period of discoveries in both scientific, architectural, medicinal and political domains based upon the concept that all human beings were 1) made in the living image of God and 2) could thus participate in the unfolding of God’s creation.

The first of those principles was developed as Imago Viva Dei, and the second was the principle of Capax Dei. Together this revolution unleashed by the work of Pius II and Cusa led directly into creation of the Modern Nation State, and even the founding of the US Republic in 1776.

In 1484, a Papal Bull was passed titled ‘The Summis desiderantes’, which mandated the German inquisition combat the plague of occultism that had spread across Europe. The Papal Bull read:

“It has recently come to our ears, not without great pain to us, that in some parts of upper Germany, […] Mainz, Koin, Trier, Salzburg, and Bremen, many persons of both sexes, heedless of their own salvation and forsaking the catholic faith, give themselves over to devils male and female, and by their incantations, charms, and conjurings, and by other abominable superstitions and sortileges, offences, crimes, and misdeeds, ruin and cause to perish the offspring of women…that they afflict and torture with dire pains and anguish, both internal and external, these men, women… and hinder men from begetting […]”

That’s right, the discovery of the infamous hub of witchcraft, necromancy and satanism at the Sibila Mountain catalyzed not only the excommunication of Montemonaco, but unleashed the anti-witchcraft crusade in 1484.

Now, it must not be presumed that atrocious abuses and religious fanaticism did not occur during satanic panic of the 15-18th centuries… BUT just like the “Satanic Panic” of the 1990s, an objective assessment of available evidence demonstrates that rampant satanism was a very real phenomenon during this period. Many of the rituals carried out by those practicing the dark arts involving human sacrifice, ritual murder, sacred orgies, paganism and necromancy.

With Dominican monks now in firm control of the Papal inquisitions across Europe, efforts to purge Europe’s satanic cults slowly turned into a bloody frenzy of superstitious hysterics and show trials. In the English colonies of 17th century New England, efforts to resist the very real spread of witches covens were made by republican forces associated with the figures of John Winthrop, Increase and Cotton Mather, but like the earlier case of the European inquisition, by 1680, those American efforts soon degraded into superstitious hysterics with dozens of women found guilty and punished (sometimes mortally) due to little more than gossip. [11]

Saint Benedict and the Apennine Sibyl

As Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (aka: Pope Pius II) observed in the citation above, the Sibillini Mountains of the Apennine Sibyl were located in Nursia… the town of Saint Benedict, founder of the order that bears his name. Again, another occult connection here arises.

In 523 AD, Saint Benedict and his new monastic order were gifted the Isle of Capri– with its vast catacombs, and Cybele-Attis temples, by a mysterious Roman patrician devoted to St. Benedict named Patrizio Tertullo. The first official Benedictine Monestary was Monte Cassino Abbey built in 529 in the location of a shine to Apollo (a solar deity akin to Mithra and Lucifer). Like Tertullo, Benedict and his twin sister Scholastica were also from noble Roman Patrican families.

The bodies of St. Benedict and his twin sister Saint Scholastica (the founder of the order of sacred virgins called ‘nuns’) were discovered together in a massive urn which “was initially located underneath the primitive oratory of St. John the Baptist, built above the ancient acropolis’ pagan altar to Apollo.”

Like Mithra, Horus, Marduk and Lucifer, Apollo is a re-branded fallen solar deity dominant in ancient Rome and Greece.

Like Ignatius Loyola, who founded the Society of Jesus (aka: The Jesuits) in 1434, Saint Benedict (480-530) isolated himself in a ‘sacred cave’ in Nursia- overlooked by the Sibila Mountain. While having communion with spirits during his three year cave vigil, Benedict went through his mystical experience leading to the founding of new order.

In the year 1098 AD, (coinciding with both the first Crusade and founding of the Kingdom of Jerusalem), a new, more strict Benedictine order calling itself the Cistercians was created. As the age of Crusades took over European Christianity, and never ending religious wars became the norm of life, the Cistercian monastaries grew rampant.

Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153)- a grand strategist of his time, soon became a leader of this sect, and devoted himself to the cause of organizing another Crusade to take full control of the Holy Land, expel the Muslims, slaughter the Jews and reconstruct Solomon’s Temple.

Clairvaux was known as an Ultramontanist– who held the belief that the Pope was akin to an ineffable demigod beyond the reproach of any considerations of right or wrong. In this sense, Ultramontanists believe the papacy holds all the power enjoyed by the cult of the Roman Emperor and thus had a mandate to control both spiritual and material realms as a ‘god-man’.

Clairvaux soon acquired the support of the powerful Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204) and a network of powerful European noble families, installed his own Cistercian disciple as Pope (Eugene III) and created a new order of Christian mercenaries to become his instrument for managing the Crusades as well as the control of banking across Europe. This order was known as “The Order of the Poor Knights of Solomon’s Temple”.

In 1128, Clairvaux wrote the charter for the Templars and created the legal arguments justifying the notion that Christians killing non-Christians was a ticket into heaven. In the Templar charter, Clairvaux was quick to ignore Christ’s mandate to “turn the other cheek”, forgive and love your enemies by saying:

“The knight of Christ, I say, may strike with confidence and die yet more confidently, for he serves Christ when he strikes, and serves himself when he falls. Neither does he bear the sword in vain, for he is God’s minister, for the punishment of evildoers and for the praise of the good. If he kills an evildoer, he is not a mankiller, but, if I may so put it, a killer of evil. He is evidently the avenger of Christ towards evildoers and he is rightly considered a defender of Christians… When he inflicts death it is to Christ’s profit, and when he suffers death, it is for his own gain.“

The Templars were, not so much Christian, as a pagan order of gnostic Christian mercenaries who were devoted to the worship of an androgynous deity featuring a goat’s head and hooves named Baphomet popularized by french occultist (and lifelong Catholic) Eliphas Levi in later years.

Solomon’s Temple

Since the Templars were devoted to the restoration of Solomon’s Temple, and since the occult rituals practiced by the Templars found an incubator in the Sibilli Mountains of Nursia, and since all of this drove the occult takeover of the USA during Poe’s lifetime, it is worth saying a brief word on Solomon’s Temple now.

The sacred headquarters for the Templars in Jerusalem happened to be catacombs under the Temple Mount (also called ‘Mount Moria’) where Solomon’s Temple had stood before its destruction in 70 AD.

For years, the Templars excavated this sacred site with the intention of rebuilding it as part of an eschatological ritual following Kaballistic proportions. The Templar excavation was made possible by the Christian takeover of the site of the Dome of the Rock in 1099 AD, which was turned into a Christian church dubbed ‘The Templum Domini’. At the same time, the Al Aqsa Mosque was transformed into Templar horse stables.

Assisting the Templars in their excavations were a Sufi Order of mystics from Luxor Egypt purporting to have ancient knowledge of initiatory practices of the ancient Egyptian initiatory rites of the Priests of Melchizedek famously telling the Templars: “You may have the cross, but we have the meaning of the cross”. [12]

It was actually another order of Sufis that directed the construction of the Dome of the Rock on the specific location of Solomon’s Temple during the early Umayyid Dynasty creating a guaranteed basis for religious wars for many centuries.

The Dome (dubbed ‘The Holy of Holies’ by muslims) was built between 685-691 by Caliph Abd al-Malik as an octogonal structure atop a large foundation stone which is professed to be the site of the aborted child sacrifice of Ismail (dubbed ‘Isaac’ in Judeo-Christian theology) by Abraham. A curious hole exist within this large rock which descends into a small cave.

This small cave is referred to as ‘The Well of Souls’ by Muslims and Templars who promoted the story that it housed the souls of the dead who awaited Judgement Day. In this sense, it played a similar role to the Apennine Sibyl’s Cave in Nursia or the Cumean Sibyl’s cave in Naples which served as entry points to the land of the dead.

Within the vast network of tunnels and caverns underneath the Temple Mount, one particular chamber called ‘Zedekia’s Cave’ near Mount Moriah served as the location for the first modern masonic ceremony in Jerusalem overseen by Sir Charles Warren (Grand Master of the Quatuor Coronati Lodge) and Kentucky Grandmaster Robert Morras in 1868. Warren and Morras invented a new Royal Arch ceremony involving Hermetic ritual based upon a mysterious coded cipher manuscript.

Additionally, below the well of souls is another small cave, which 19th century occultist orientalist Sir Richard Francis Burton explored and professed to have secretly excavated having discovered a network of tunnels which he hypothesized served to transport the blood of the victims of mass sacrifices of early pagan periods. Burton hypothesized that this network of tunnels transported the blood of sacrifices into the soil of the region surrounding the Temple (giving surprisingly literal meaning to the term ‘blood and soil’ cults).

In 1870, Charles Warrend also studied these tunnels and came to a similar conclusion.

To this day, the sub-cavern and associated tunnels discussed by Burton and Warren haven’t been officially excavated which means their testimony has not been corroborated, although many Temple Mount cultists are convinced that the Ark of the Covenant (hosting the tablets containing the ten commandments) also exists within these caverns.

It is of additional interest that excavation of the location of Solomon’s Temple begun in earnest by the Quautro Coronati Lodge of Sir Charles Warren is assumed by Freemasonic scholars to have been built following geometrical proportions of the Vesica Pisces. This fact will become extremely relevant in a future installment on the ritual murders of Jack the Ripper.

The Purge of the Templars

The Poor Knights of Solomon’s Temple didn’t stay poor for long, and soon ended up controlling the majority of banking across all of Europe and wielded vast control over the administration of the Kingdom of Jerusalem until they were abolished in 1314, after having admitted to the worship of Baphomet.

In Eliphas Levi’s 1856 tome ‘Dogma and Ritual’, the modern rosicrucian writes of the supernatural powers wielded by the ancient mystery cultists, Kaballists and Templars: “The Gnostics represented it as the fiery body of the Holy Spirit, and it was the object of adoration in the secret rites of the Sabbath or the Temple, under the hieroglyphic figure of Baphomet or the Androgynous Goat of Mendes.”

By 1318, the Templar leaders were burned at the stake, the order’s assets were confiscated and redistributed to a rival gnostic order dubbed ‘The Knights Hospitaller’ (aka: The Knights of the St John of Jerusalem). The surviving members of the group went underground, and re-emerged in new wineskins over the ensuing centuries. [13]

Interestingly, the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem (also founded by a Benedictine priest in 1098 to co-manage the Crusades) derived their name and ideology upon the gnostic text called ‘The Secret Book of John’ written by the followers of Simon Magus in the 2nd century AD. In his 1855 ‘Kabalistic Origins of Christianity’ Eliphas Levi described the ‘pure’ occult secret teachings of Jesus given to John which he believed formed the basis of the gnostic order and ultimately the only authentic Christianity which Levi himself wished to see on earth. Levi wrote:

“The Christians of Saint John concealed themselves and adopted a series of signs taken from the Kabbalah to recognize each other. So began the occult initiations which attracted the whole Order of the Temple to the light, by revealing to it its veritable destination.”

Like the earlier abolishment of the Cults of Mithra, Isis or Cybele during the 4th century, the Templars didn’t really disappear, but turned up again in various other forms across the centuries which will be discussed shortly.

According to Domenico Aringoli and Gilberto Pambianchi of the University of Camarino, many of the Templars, Alchemists, Spiritualists, Cathars, Patareni etc who survived the Church’s crackdown in the 14th century “had found shelter in the land of the Sibilla”.

The Apennine Colossus

A word must now be spoken of the Apennine Colossus just seven miles north of Florence Italy.

Built by the artist Giovani Bologna on a commission from Francesco di Medici, and his Venetian mistress Bianca Capello in 1580, this 35 foot statue served as a center of occult ritual, and debauchery for centuries.

The Colossus was designed to convey the rigid shards of the Apennine mountains and features one hand of a giant man holding a serpent dragon which itself hovers over one of two entrances to grottos, tunnels and a subterranean river.

Another entrance to the grottos is found behind the Colossus and a dragon howling like a wolf to the moon is found sitting atop that back entrance.

The Apennine Colossus was a fixture within the vast Cilla di Pratolino complex in Tuscany and served the neo-Platonist elite of Europe as a safe haven for pagan revivalism and debauchery for generations, setting the stage for the creation of the Hellfire Club in early 18th century England.

Footnotes

[8] The other ten Sibyls described by Varro were: Primam (the Persian), Secundam (the Libyan), Tertiam (the Delphic), Quartam (The Cimmerian), Quintum (the Erythraean), Sextam (of the Isle of Samos), Septimam (the Cumaean), Octavam (from Hellspontus, near Troy), Nonam (the Phrygian) and Decimam (the Tiburtine)

[9] The contribution of the ‘Sibilla Appenninica’ legend to karst knowledge in the Sibilli Mountains (Central Apennines, Italy), February 2007, Geological Society London Special Publications 273(1): 329-340

[10] Quote cited in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy by Jacob Burckhardt February, 2000

[11] Lowry writes in How the Nation Was Won: “Through the interventions by both Increase and Cotton Mather, the witchcraft hysteria was brought to an end; but nearly a score of its victims had been put to death. The manipulators were outflanked by the elder Mather’s arguments, that while charges of crimes by witchcraft had standing in the courts, the rule of law required that no “spectral evidence” be used to determine whether such acts had been committed. This left the promoters of the trials in the position of having to prove acts of witchcraft scientifically. That dilemma easily overmatched them, since they could hardly argue that they were themselves experts in the black arts.” Lowry, How the Nation was Won, p. 46

[12] The later creation of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor (which included Madame Blavatsky as an initiate) in Egypt and its American counterpart created 1870 represent a direct continuation of the Templars, Rosicrucians and the mystic order of Sufis descended from the pagan priesthood of Melchizedek.

[13] In his Morals and Dogma (1871) Scottish Rite Grand Master Albert Pike astutely noted: “The Templars were unintelligent and therefore unsuccessful Jesuits. Their watchword was, to become wealthy, in order to buy the world. They became so, and in 1312 they possessed in Europe alone more than nine thousand seignories. Riches were the shoal on which they were wrecked. They became insolent, and unwisely showed their contempt for the religious and social institutions which they aimed to overthrow. Their ambition was fatal to them.”