Occult subversion of traditional Catholicism

By Thomas V. Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Jun 05, 2025

In his new book Mysticism, Magic, and Monasteries, Catholic philosopher Sebastian Morello promotes so-called “Hermetic magic”* as an important part of the spiritual revival of Western civilization.

How can a Catholic possibly promote magic as an integral part of the faith? Watch Morello try:

The Western world has always believed in magic. It has always held that curses exist and that they can be placed on people, animals, fungi, and inanimate objects. And the Western world has always held that such curses can be banished by special words, special objects, and special concentration, which in that order it has been content to call “blessings,” “sacramentals,” and “prayer.” In short, even the most orthodox in the West have always believed what the Hermeticist calls the opposing forces of “goetia,” or black magic, and “theurgy,” or sacred magic—though they generally would not put it in such terms.

But Catholics do not and have never believed that the “special words, special objects, and special concentration” involved in sacramentals and prayer have power simply as words, objects, and concentration. Rather, the power is God’s. Insofar as these things occasion the manifestation of a power beyond their own nature, it would be either from God or from an evil spirit—no in-between.

Thus Morello’s framing the Church’s sacred rites as a form of magical theurgy (the method by which Neoplatonists tried to summon demons), prayer as a set of magic words, sacramentals as talismans, and his placing the supernatural action of God on the same plane with the purportedly “opposing forces” of white and black magic, must be rejected as blasphemous. His argument that Christians already believed in magic all along is a transparent attempt to smuggle foreign elements into our faith. Michael Warren Davis (who sadly left the Church for Eastern Orthodoxy) has written an excellent critique of Morello’s book along these lines.

Sure, you might say, there are all sorts of aberrant views running loose on the fringes of the Church. Why write about this one? What makes this particularly troubling is that Morello’s book was published by Os Justi Press, a publisher founded by the ubiquitous traditionalist writer Peter Kwasniewski—without much noticeable alarm among the traditionalist Catholic community.

Indeed, those paying attention to such matters over the last few years may have noticed that the traditionalist scene seems to harbor not a few figures who advocate their occult interests under the guise of venerable, ancient tradition. Without attempting a thorough exposé, I will relate some details to give a sense of why this is a real problem that needs to be addressed.

For instance, Morello’s podcast, Gnostalgia (get it?) has featured a number of illustrious traditionalist guests, such as Joseph Shaw (head of the U.K. Latin Mass Society) and beloved monarchist author Charles Coulombe. Coulombe—whose biography of Bl. Karl of Austria is admittedly quite good—had a bit of a scandal a few years ago, when it became public knowledge that he made a habit of doing a yearly “Tarot Forecast for the U.S.A.” alongside his Gnostic bishop friend at a Theosophical Lodge. (In fairness, Coulombe pledged not to do further public tarot readings after a priest reprimanded him, but his longstanding fascination with the occult is attested by his own writings.)

Another guest making multiple appearances on Gnostalgia is Fr. Robert Nixon, an Australian Benedictine who, when not translating Catholic spiritual classics for TAN Books, moonlights translating more esoteric material for Hadean Press. If the name wasn’t enough to tip you off, Hadean describes itself as publishing “some of the most exciting titles in modern occultism”. That means spell books, one of which was translated by Fr. Nixon. Another of Fr. Nixon’s works for Hadean is Imperatrix Æterna: Magical Stories of the Queen of Heaven. It is worth quoting the publisher’s description as another example of how occultists re-interpret Catholic tradition for their own purposes:

The veneration of a divine or quasi-divine feminine figure is a virtually omnipresent phenomenon in the various spiritual traditions of humankind, deriving from the complex archetype of a mystical woman: a Magna Mater. She is vested with both power and compassion; she serves as the complement, refuge, and telos of masculinity, and the speculum, idealization, or apotheosis of femininity. This archetype is so primal as to transcend all the more particularized mythological systems and finds a multitude of different expressions within each of them.

Collected here are several stories of her manifested miracles in the Catholic tradition originally written by Pope Celestine V…The collection continues with tales by Ippolito Marracci of the ‘Noble Daughters of Mary’, those queens, princesses, and saints who devoted themselves to the Blessed Mother. Interspersed throughout are quotes that show how widespread the adoration of this figure is, by whatever name She is known.

What are the sources of these interspersed quotes about this ambiguous “Queen of Heaven”? The book’s cover advertises the names of the infamous Satanist Aleister Crowley and the poet Charles Baudelaire (some of whose poems are explicitly Satanic).

Perennialism, one religion in many skinsuits

But usually, the problem is more subtle than quoting Satanists. To understand how the occult could ever find a foothold in traditionalist Catholicism, one must be familiar with a philosophy called “perennialism”. Perennialists hold that all the major ancient religious traditions share the same fundamental truths in different guises. A subset of perennialism is the Traditionalist School (distinct from Catholic traditionalism) associated with René Guénon, a convert from Catholicism to Islam. Traditionalists believe that the reason for the commonalities among the great religions is that they actually come down from a single ancient source, whose wisdom was disseminated and hidden in the various traditions.

Although perennialism is in principle a form of religious indifferentism, perennialists hold that rather than dabbling in multiple religions, one should commit oneself to a single religious tradition, in its most “orthodox” form. Thus a perennialist may appear at first to be a highly traditional Muslim, Catholic, Orthodox, or Hindu…

The existence of perennialism within Catholic traditionalism is not new. One of the more famous examples is Rama Coomaraswamy, son of the famous Hindu perennialist Ananda Coomaraswamy. Rama became a traditionalist Catholic but remained a proponent of perennialism. He became a professor at the Society of St. Pius X seminary of St. Thomas Aquinas in Connecticut, where he was associated with the nine priests who ended up becoming sedevacantists, breaking from the SSPX, and forming the Society of St. Pius V. Coomaraswamy himself also became a sedevacantist and was “ordained” by a sedevacantist “bishop”.

A much more mainstream example of perennialism in the traditionalist world is Angelico Press, which published Sebastian Morello’s first book. Angelico is well-respected for its republication of traditionalist classics, as well as new Catholic fiction and poetry, and I myself have reviewed several of their books positively. But Angelico was founded by John Riess and James Wetmore in part to publish works by Catholic perennialists. Angelico had a publishing imprint called Sophia Perennis, with some kind of connection (at the very least sharing a name and the same founder, Wetmore) with the larger Traditionalist publisher Sophia Perennis, whose website (now defunct) described its mission thus: “We have tried to remain faithful to Traditionalist core principles—notably the Transcendent Unity of Religions—while exploring new applications of these principles, as well as returning to the great Revelations themselves for fresh insight.”

Angelico is also a major publisher of the works of the occultist-turned-heterodox-Catholic Valentin Tomberg, whose best-known book Meditations on the Tarot repeatedly asserts the reality of reincarnation (interestingly, the book has an afterword by Hans Urs von Balthasar, showing that this problem is far from exclusive to traditionalists).

Since all this was thoroughly exposed a few years ago by a traditionalist blogger**, Angelico has removed some troubling material from its website—the listing of “Christian Esotericism” as a category of their books is gone, some troubling blog posts on the site are gone, and both the Sophia Perennis imprint page on Angelico’s site and the larger Sophia Perennis press website have disappeared—but Angelico continues to publish the same books, including some heterodox contemporary authors such as Michael Martin.

But as I said, perennialism is not a problem unique to the traditionalist Catholic scene. From my observation, across various Christian “denominations” there is an increasing number of people dabbling in a set of ideas which tend to go together—perennialism being frequently associated with Hermeticism, Neoplatonist mysticism, Gnosticism, Origenism, sophiology, and heresies such as universalism, apokatastasis, and emanationism. (Once you’ve noticed how many universalists are mixed up in aberrant esoteric spirituality, you can’t unsee it.)

Of the several Catholic scholars I know of who are involved in a number of these ideas, only some are in the traditionalist camp (for one thing, trads tend to frown on universalism). There are a number of Eastern “Orthodox” thinkers in this spectrum, most notably David Bentley Hart. In the Anglican world, there is John Milbank, the influential founder of the so-called “radical orthodoxy” movement; Milbank is basically a liberal Gnostic. Because of their penchant for ancientry, you will find more perennialists in “high-church” liturgical Christianity than in, say, Evangelical Protestantism. What those who have gone deeply into these spiritual currents share in common is that spiritual pride which has made esoteric dabblers throughout history such ready dupes of Satan.

But Catholic traditionalism, we are told, is a safe harbor from demonic deception, utterly unlike those liberal nuns of the 1970s who embraced the Enneagram and the New Age. So there is a sad irony in arch-traditionalist Peter Kwasniewski publishing a book advocating Hermetic magic, when he isn’t busy inventing a novel ecclesiology by which priests are morally obligated to disobey their bishops, or referring to the Novus Ordo as a “gangrenous wound”. Chalk it up to horseshoe theory, I guess.

Lest anyone misinterpret this article as an anti-traditionalist polemic, let me be clear that I don’t believe the traditionalist community is permeated by occultism, despite the startling number of prominent figures who countenance these things. Few ordinary trads are even aware that there is such a thing as Hermeticism or perennialism. The problem has, however, gotten to a point where we all need to be on our guard against such influences, either within the traditionalist scene or in the wider Church.

The truth is that any worldview can be twisted into sinful and heretical distortions. The more we pride ourselves on being immune to deception, the more easily fooled we will be. Satan is not going to tempt us with things that we hate, but with our own personal and ideological tendencies.

Thus, people who are (rightly!) very concerned about external forms of ritual may fall into a kind of magical mindset if they forget that it is God’s grace, and not the external forms, that has spiritual efficacy. People already tempted to think they have some kind of special knowledge that other Catholics lack may fall into the spiritual pride of esotericism. People who hate modern rationalism and technocracy may fall for occult “re-enchantment”. People who like what is traditional or merely pre-modern can be tempted to perennialism. And, even without sharing in these faults, people in an embattled subculture may turn a blind eye to the problems within their own group.

But before God there are no “traditionalist”, “conservative”, or “liberal” Catholics—there are only those who justify their sins and those who repent of them. All Catholics of the latter kind will agree una voce that magic cannot be tolerated, be it presented as ever so traditional. For it is indeed a perennial tradition: the wisdom of the ancient serpent, who was a liar and a murderer from the beginning.

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*Michael Warren Davis helpfully summarizes Hermeticism as “a pre-Christian mystery religion (i.e., magical cult) blending Greek and Egyptian polytheism within a Neoplatonic framework”. This “wisdom” was supposedly passed down from the ancient Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus, who originated in legend as a syncretistic blending of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth. (Later it turned out that the “Hermetic” writings were not ancient but actually postdated Christianity.) A couple of Church Fathers referred to the legend of Hermes having been a wise natural philosopher, but they disapproved of him as an idolater. It was only in the decadence of the Renaissance that some Catholic scholars began to practice the magical aspects of the Hermetic tradition. This revival of ancient “knowledge falsely so-called” laid the foundations for modern occultism. Thus we see Renaissance figures like Pico della Mirandola cited as proof that Hermetic magic has a legitimate Catholic pedigree—despite Pico having repented later in life.

**I do not agree with every detail of this essay (whose pseudonymous author has since become a sedevacantist), and unfortunately some of his links are now defunct since pages were removed from the Angelico Press website. But at the time of its publication in 2021 I followed up on much of the author’s research and found it generally accurate. It is still essential reading for those who wish to be aware of the influence of occultism and false mysticism within a certain scene of traditionalist or conservative Catholic intellectuals. It was met with extreme defensiveness by many prominent traditionalist figures at the time of its publication.