The Conspiracy Hypothesis*

THE JUDEO/CHRISTIAN CYCLES

THIRD END-TIME (c. A.D. 1132): The Time of Peter Abelard and Arnold of Brescia (continued)

| Pope Calixtus II: The Cup of MYSTERY BABYLON | “Crusades & Inquisition” | The “False Prophet”: St. Bernard

The Beast From the Bottomless Pit

The Third “Elisha”, Arnold of Brescia was actually killed by the Roman Catholic Church of his times. And it is even possible that Abelard -- the third “Elijah” -- was as well. He does say that his monks made repeated attempts on his life, including poisoning. Perhaps a final attempt was successful, he did in fact die less than two years after his condemnation. This seems unlikely, however, since he was then living as the guest and monk of a friend, Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny. We just do not know. He was not, however, like Arnold officially and openly executed as a heretic.

Thetime unit of 1,260 days (years)is repeated as “forty and two months” in Revelations Chapter Thirteen in which the “beast” is envisioned rising out of the sea "having seven heads and ten horns", and which is allowed to “make war with the saints, and to overcome them”. And in Chapter Seventeen, a woman is pictured riding upon a beast “having seven heads and ten horns”. Compare the passages below:

• "And when they shall have finished their testimony, the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and kill them."(Rev. 11:7)

• "And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy." (Rev. 13:1)

• "So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns.
  "And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication:
  "And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.
  "And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration." (Rev. 17:3-6)

In the way that one angel had elucidated the meaning of his own vision to Daniel, another (or possibly the same one -- it is, however, centuries later) explains John’s vision to him, making clear for us the earlier reference to the "beast from the bottomless pit", and thereby tying the three chapters (11, 13, and 17) together.

The “Beast” which is the enemy of the “two witnesses”, and who makes war against their followers is nothing other than the church during the papacies of the Gregorian Reform popes, which reigned “over the kings of the earth”, (Rev. 17:18) the Holy Roman Empire.

Pope Calixtus II: The “Cup” in the Hand of “MYSTERY BABYLON”

"Pope Calixtus II"

As may be told from the context, the internal “present” time within John’s vision (still in his future, far beyond the end of his mortal life) is the papacy of Calixtus II, whose self-chosen name means “chalice” or “cup” in Latin, and who was known as “the Golden Pope” because he used the Vatican treasures to buy the support of kings. He is, of course, the golden cup in the hands of the whore church represented in the vision (ref. Rev. 17:4). Pope Calixtus’ most remembered moment in history was the Concordat at Worms, a church/state agreement the first of many such, including one between Hitler and Pope Pius wherein the Church promised to ignore Hitler’s Holocaust against the Jews if he would leave Catholics alone:

"The ratification of the concordat was celebrated in Germany with a service of thanksgiving at St. Hedwig’s Cathedral in Berlin with papal nuncio Orsenigo [pictured with Hitler] presiding. Nazi flags mingled with traditional Catholic banners; at the culmination of the rousing service, the ’Horst Wessel song’ was sung inside the church and relayed by loudspeakers to the thousands outside.

Hitler Meets Papal Delegate

Who now could doubt that the Nazi regime had the blessing of the Holy See? … Hitler expressed the chilling opinion that the concordat had created an atmosphere of confidence that would be ’especially significant in the urgent struggle against international Jewry.’" (Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, by John Cornwell, Penguin Putnam Inc., 1999).

The Concordat at Worms (Worms, incidentally, had the distinction of being a quarter of a century earlier one of the few cities in which Crusaders had wiped out the Jewish population), by solving the “Investiture Controversy”, removed the final stumbling block which had theretofore prevented the implementation of the Gregorian Reform. It was signed in A.D. 1122 -- the exact date produced by the 1,290 day-years found in Daniel, Chapter twelve, to which the words “the abomination of desolation set up” are appended (Dan. 12:11). This “abomination of desolation” may prophetically represent concordats in general, as well as specifically the one signed at Worms. The URANTIA Book calls all involvement of the church in politics “a flagrant betrayal of the Master [Jesus]” (2085 C).

Thus, Pope Innocent II (see Number 8 in table below), whose papacy spans the millennial transition date, and who condemned both Abelard and Arnold at the at the Council of Sens (A.D. 1140/41) was able at the same time to declare himself to be “Master of all Christendom”, meaning that he reigned over the Emperors of the Holy Roman Empire. It is he whom the chronological order of the popes before and after the see of Calixtus (the internal “present” of John’s vision), reveals to be the "beast that was, and is not, even he is the eighth , and is of the seven, and goeth into perdition" (Rev. 17:11), that is, “the Beast from the Bottomless Pit” condemned the Elijah and Elisha of the age.

GREGORIAN REFORM
ORDER OF THE POPES IN JOHN’S VISION Revelations 10 through 12
“There are seven kings”
“Five are fallen”	“one is” (Indicating the vision’s “present” time)	“the other is not yet come”
GREGORY VII (Gregory the Great) - from Savona - Ildebrando (“Hildebrand”) Aldobrandeschi 1073 - 1085 VICTOR III - Benevento - Dauferio (Desiderio) Epifani 1086 - 1087 URBAN II - from Reims - Ottone di Lagery 1088 - 1099 PASCHAL II - from Bieda - Raniero 1099 - 1118 GELASIUS II - from Gaeta - Giovanni Gaetani 1118 - 1119	CALLIXTUS II - Guido di Borgogna 1119 - 1124 “Calixtus” is derived from the Latin word meaning “chalice” or “cup”. “And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abomin- ations and filthiness of her fornication”	HONORIUS II - from Bologna - Lamberto Fagnani 1124 - 1130
"And the beast that was, and is not, even he is the eighth, and is of the seven, and goeth into perdition." INNOCENT II - Romano - Gregorio Papareschi 1130 - 1143 Notice that the papal reign of Pope Innocent II spans the millennial transition date, A.D. 1132.

There is no reason not to believe that Abelard’s life was not shortened -- if he was not actually murdered -- by the stress resulting from his condemnation and the repeated attempts to murder him. Castration, on the other hand, by reducing stress, is reported to have longevity-giving effects, and in lessening his aggression it might have saved him from an end like Arnold’s. To a certain extent Elijah (who was almost killed), John the Baptist, and Arnold (perhaps) bring these problems on themselves with their aggressiveness in non-spiritual areas. This lesson should be kept in mind by all future teachers of truth.

It was Pope Adrian IV (who took his papal name from Hadrian), who made sure that Arnold was executed and his body burned (presumably after death, although again who knows?) and his ashes dumped into the Tiber purportedly to thwart relic collectors. This does tend to throw light on the high admiration in which the Elisha of the Middle Ages millennial transition period was held by the people. Relics are “souvenirs” of the saints! As such, they were believed to possess magical powers.

The period represented by the first beast from the sea, upon which the whore church sat astride, her golden cup, Calixtus II, held aloft -- that is, the period during which various popes crowned various Holy Roman emperors in Rome -- ended after the discovery of the New World, at the time of the death of Frederick III in A.D. 1493, the last Holy Roman emperor to be crowned by a Pope in Rome. This was one year before the Italian Wars broke out, during which the Great Powers of Europe attempted to rule Italy, and which ended with the sacking of Rome by the army of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1527 ["these shall hate the whore, and shall make her naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire"(Rev. 17:16)]. This event was possibly the worst disaster to ever befall Christian Rome. The rapine, pillage and burning was followed by widespread disease.

Interestingly and ironically, during the Italian Wars the pope would take

Hadrian’s Tomb became the Castel St. Angelo

refuge from attackers in the Castel Sant’ Angelo, which was what the church had renamed Hadrian’s Tomb. After the wars it served as the pope’s prison.

"War with the Saints": The Crusades and Inquisition

Aside from the Gregorian Reform itself, the two most striking and powerful historical religious movements instituted during the reign of the “Beast” were the Crusades and the so-called “Holy” Inquisition. The first was soon turned away from badly attempted, aborted, and relatively short-lived Saracen conquests; and then turned toward the end of eliminating the major Christian competition of

"Holy" torture

the Roman Catholic Church. Then after the Albigensian Crusade met with only limited success, the second was begun to do the job properly. The “Holy” Inquisition completely eliminated the Cathari, burning all of their writings, but preserving purported knowledge of their doctrines extracted from “confessions” made by them under torture. Most so-called “historians” bought the Catholic view of the Cathari “heretics” (even Durant continues to use the pejorative term for the various sects of truthbearers persecuted through these centuries of violence) and repeated the “official” version and one another as fact throughout the centuries. My personal opinion is that the Church’s linking of them with Manichaean dualism is nothing but invented propaganda. The Inquisitors likely found it expedient to tar them with the brush of a “heresy” which it had previously refuted, not knowing how to refute doctrines based on a more up-to-date truth than their own! Only recently have some of the Cathari’s reputed actual writings been discovered.

After its initial success, the Inquisition lingered on for many hundreds of years persecuting a long string of reformers and truth bearers whom it continued to dehumanize as “heretics”, including the Protestant sects which arose following Martin Luther’s initial protest. The “war”, and indeed the Albigensian Crusade Inquisition was a war, was mostly one-sided. But the later Protestants fought back pretty fiercely.

Sometimes the persecuting Church even harmed its own

"Saint" Joan of Arc: Later burned at the stake!

children -- individuals active within its organization whom it would later recognize as being “saints” -- during its holocaust of torture, terror and death by flames at the stake. These included such probable Reserve Corps of Destiny member as Joan of Arc! It did not officially end until the office of the “Holy Inquisition” was abolished in the 1960s. Even before it did end, however, the Protestants -- especially the New World’s Puritans -- began to similarly persecute their own religious competition: Quakers, Baptists, Antinomians, and even Catholics! Christian bloodthirstiness during these events surely outdid that of the Jewish Sanhedren during the era of Jesus and his Apostles.

But the Inquisition itself was effectively finished with the unstoppable rise of the Protestants. That was when the “lamb” was finally able to “overcome” the “Beast” (ref. Rev. 17:14). The URANTIA Book says:

"The rehabilitation of Christianity, following the dark ages, resulted in bringing into existence numerous sects of the Christian teachings, beliefs suited to the special intellectual, emotional, and spiritual types of human personality. And many of these special Christian groups, or religious families, still persist at the time of the making of this presentation" (2075A).

… many others having been wiped off of the face of the planet in the war against the “saints” first!

We who are neither Catholics nor Protestants should also remain aware that modern Catholics and Protestants played no part in making those bad choices throughout much of this millennium.

Recently Pope John-Paul II issued an official apology for the horrors committed during that multi-century, competition-eliminating war. But he has been faulted for holding only the individual church leadership but not the church itself responsible for the atrocities committed under its auspice, that is, he made no apology for the church itself, which he holds blameless. The URANTIA Book says:

"The genuine lovers of truth will be slow to forget that this powerful institutionalized church has often dared to smother newborn faith and persecute truth bearers who chanced to appear in unorthodox raiment." (2085 D)

The Puritan family of believers no longer exists as such, and its very name has become a byword for “hostility to social pleasures”.

The Puritans:Only a memory now. They believed their light would brighten the world, but they became persecutors and it went out.

It was especially intolerant of its religious competition, silencing, driving away some from its Colony, and murdering those with whom it disagreed.

Today many fundamentalist denomination preachers routinely denounce their “liberal” Christian competition from the pulpit in the strongest terms. Currently these denominations seek legal sanctions to accomplish otherwise worthy spiritual goals and ideals. By seeking the support of Caesar they admit to their own failure to act as a spiritual leaven for society, and they deny the power of God to work through the Most Highs in the affairs of society.

The URANTIA Foundation and at least one other “cult” organization, as well, have recently been using commercial law against their religious competition -- those who wish to disseminate their respective revelations in a different manner or without their neo-ecclesiastical approval. In this way, copyright and trademark protection has begun to function as religious censorship, and to help empower the organizations which “own” them, giving them legal authority over those who merely use and/or believe in them. The courts have yet to recognize this as a violation of the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, but the issue has not been brought before the Supreme Court for adjudication.

The URANTIA Brotherhood’s (now Fellowship’s) “major purpose” for becoming a legal organization, according to its most influential founder, Bill Sadler, the son of Doctor William Sadler, was the pre-emptive prevention of similar, but competitive, legal/religious organizations.

Such suppressive legalistic activities certainly do not compare with killing one’s fellow religionists, however atrocities seldom begin fully blown but grow little by little over time. The Christian Bishops’ first century condemnation of the Gnostics and expulsion of the Montanists slowly evolved into the Crusades and Inquisition against heresy; also the silencing and banishment of Antinomian, Anne Hutchinson, by the Puritans only culminated in the whipping and hanging of Baptists! Wholesale religious persecution always begins small, but has a habit of snowballing if not stopped.

The Antichrist (666), the name and number associated with the role of "Beast" in our own end-time period, is prophesied to carry out even more stringent religious persecutions, including beheadings. Fundamentalist Christians are already beginning to experience a low-level of persecution from increasingly entrenched secular humanists who oppose their traditional teachings, especially -- currently -- in areas such as homosexuality. The URANTIA Book says that:

"the complete secularism of science, education, industry, and society can only lead to disaster" (2082 B)

The revelation calls secularism a blight on the “spiritual experience of millions of unsuspecting souls” (2081 A). All of these things can be put into their proper perspective with a verse quoted by the Cathari (called "Albigensians" in part of Southern France) while they were being led by their enemies to fiery deaths at the stake:

"The false church persecutes. 
The true church is persecuted."

This is true even when the “church” is an anti-church. When it comes to secularism, the words might best be viewed in the light of other similar ones in the prophecies of Daniel:

“The wicked shall do wickedly: and none of the wicked shall understand; but the wise shall understand.” (Dan. 12:10)

Thus it has been at each millennial transition! But always the bearers of new or renewed truth eventually overcome!

The “False Prophet”: St. Bernard

If Pope Innocent II performed the role of the “Beast” in the Middle Ages reenactment of our end-time drama, then the role of “False Prophet” was assuredly played by Bernard of Clairvieux (otherwise known as “Saint Bernard”). It was he who condemned both Abelard and Arnold, that is, Innocent did it at Bernard’s instigation.

"Saint" Bernard: False Prophet of the Middle Ages. He caused Abelard and Arnold to be condemned, and he recruited for (“preached;”) an abortive Crusade from which few would ever return.

Bernard was known as “Doctor Honey-Flow” ("Melifluus") because his sweet-talk could convince anyone of anything. In fact in a darkly prophetic incident, Bernard once jokingly called the women of one city “widows” of husbands who still lived. He was boasting because he had talked all the men into joining the war effort (Second Crusade), and was referring to the fact that they had all left their households. He was unaware that none of them would ever return, that all of them would be killed or captured by the Saracen without ever having achieved even one significant victory! Of the thousands of people who went on the Second Crusade the only people to make it safely home again were its two royal leaders with their retinues, along with Queen Eleanor of Aquitane, her entourage of ladies, and their baggage. All the rest were either dead or enslaved.

It was this incident which ruined Bernard’s reputation among ordinary people, such as those who held Abelard and Arnold in high repute. It is doubtful in light of the outcome -- the fruits -- of the Second Crusade, that Bernard really had been instructed by God to preach his recruitment sermons, as he had boldly claimed. Also, the cold, hard facts of massive loss of life and absolute failure prove better than anything else that the “signs” and “miracles” which he claimed accompanied his preaching/recruitment tours were not genuine, nor was such a conclusion overlooked by the man in the street. Bernard’s other “miracles” may most likely be attributed to something like “urban myth”, mass hysteria and/or the placebo effect of a strong personality on minds crippled by fear and superstition. Miracles were the rule rather than the exception to the people of that age -- they saw them everywhere, and even occasionally apologized for their absence. Bernard refused to accept any personal responsibility for having turned those wives into actual widows, and blamed the horrid outcome on the supposed sins of the Crusaders themselves.

Bernard is accredited with having gained the papacy for Innocent II (the pope envisioned in Revelations as the Beast from the bottomless pit). And he was in many ways the recognized power behind the papal throne. But his power extended even further than that. The Durants say that his sermons “moved all who heard them; through his letters -- masterpieces of passionate pleading -- he influenced councils, bishops, popes, kings; through personal contacts he molded the policies of church and state.”

So when he advised the condemnation of both Abelard and Arnold, condemned they were. In short order! Bernard particularly found Abelard galling because the popular teacher of religious matters had never served a proper apprenticeship under an authorized master. This was in fact one of the charges he brought against Abelard. Another factor was that Abelard’s rational mind made utter garbage of the mysteries which Bernard held so dear, and Bernard demurred that he felt completely inadequate to deal with Abelard in the area of logic and reason. That is why he chose to destroy his adversary with secret church politics instead of facing him man-to-man.

While it is true that after Abelard’s castration and his condemnation he retired to a monastery as Abbot (he was first jailed in one by Innocent II), he nevertheless continued to engage in public teaching. There was a very significant and symbolic incident during this period in which he, at the behest of former students who desired his instruction, left his monastery and set up a camp “in the wilderness”, a regular Succoth (Feast of Tabernacles) habitation, which he called

Abelard gives the “Paraclete” to Heloise.

the “Paraclete” (“Spirit of Truth”), and to which students again flocked from the far reaches of Europe. They shared his primitive life, planting, harvesting and building -- likely accompanied by much laughter, arguing of points of logic, talk about current events, and discussion of spiritual matters to which, following Abelard’s lead, they applied individual reason -- until they had replaced his reed huts with edifices of board and brick. He would eventually turn this place of learning over to his formerly-beloved, Heloise, who was by then a respected Abbess and an intellectual in her own right as well. He continued to oversee the wellbeing of Heloise and her nuns until his death.

Bernard, by contrast, had been assigned to open the second Cistercian Abbey (A.D. 1115). He was committed to the monastic way of life and led many members of his own family into it. He actively pushed “monastic reform” with such a high degree of success that by A.D. 1300 the momentum he began had produced an estimated 60,000 Cistercians, who resided in 693 monasteries! And the Cistercians represented just one of the new orders which came into existence during that time.

Historian Philip Schaff (The History of the Christian Church), who holds with the traditional Catholic Church view of Bernard as a saint and Abelard and Arnold as heretics or failures, writes that “Bernard figured with almost equal prominence, in the Crusades, mysticism [and] monasticism”. He says that, “in the annals of monasticism … [Bernard] easily occupies a place in the front rank.”

The URANTIA Book says that during the “intellectual and spiritual decline” of the European dark ages:

“religion became more and more monasticized, asceticized, and legalized … In a spiritual sense Christianity was hibernating. (2074)”

“I am looking upon a race of fools!”

Shaff says that to Bernard “monastic seclusion was the highest ideal of Christian life”, and that more than any other he “stands forth as the churchman who saw only evil in views which did not conform strictly [legalistically] to the doctrinal system of the Church.” That is, he championed the exact faults indicated by The URANTIA Book!

William of St. Therry, who personally visited Bernard’s Clairvaux draws a bleak picture of the submergence of personality and lack of dynamic fellowship there:

"The silence of the noon was like the silence of midnight, broken only by the chants of the choral service, and the sound of garden and field implements. No one was idle. In the hours not devoted to sleep or prayer, the brethren kept busy with the hoe, scythe, and axe, taming the wild land and clearing the forest. And although there was such a number in the valley, yet each seemed to be a solitary" (quoted by Schaff).

Peter de Roya wrote the following while staying at Bernard’s monastery:

"It seems to me I am hardly looking upon men when I see them in the gardens with hoe, in the fields with forks and rakes and sickles, in the woods with axe, clad in disordered garments -- but that I am looking on a race of fools without speech and sense, the reproach of mankind. However my reason assures me that their life is with Christ in the heavens"(quoted by Schaff).

Many would call the refusal to believe ones own eyes rationalizing rather than reasoning, and would see his conclusions as being mystical unreality. People’s lives are not “with Christ in the heavens” until after they have died, or occasionally, have been translated. It is easy to see why Abelard represented such a threat to Bernard.

"There are types of unstable and poorly disciplined souls who would use the sentimental ideas of religion as an avenue of escape from the irritating demands of living. When certain vacillating and timid mortals attempt to escape from the incessant pressure of evolutionary life, religion, as they conceive it, seems to present the nearest refuge, the best avenue of escape. But is in the mission of religion to prepare man for bravely, even heroically, facing the vicissitudes of life. … Mysticism, however is often something of retreat from life which is embraced by those humans who do not relish the more robust activities of living a religious life in the open arena of human society and commerce" (1121 A).

To Bernard, his monks were “perfect followers of Christ … a little less than the angels”. That is, they seemed so while he was still alive. After Bernard’s death they bought Saracen slaves to do all of the manual labor, added meat and "plenty of wine" to their diets, and -- exempt from taxes for religious reasons, and with plenty of slave labor -- they competed unfairly against the guilds, underpricing them with the Abbeys’ marketable products. They augmented their profits with gifts and donations and grew quite rich. No longer under Bernard’s influence, his monks had come out of their hypnotic funk and begun to act like the ordinary, unregenerate men that they actually were all along:

"Many of the religious systems of man came from the formulations of the human intellect, but God-consciousness is not necessarily a part of those grotesque systems of religious slavery." (2095 D)

(NEXT: ) “FOURTH END-TIME (c. A.D. 2132): Secularism”