Pax Orbis

Peter Kwasniewski’s espousal of a double persona, the orthodox Catholic one and the heterodox occultist one, is a worldview, not just a tactic. Valentin Tomberg, whose work Meditations on the Tarot initiated Kwasniewski, explains how this double life of ideas can be maintained without apparent self-harm.

Peter Kwasniewski’s endorsement of Tomberg’s Meditations

The book is seminal for him, a “spiritual reflection”:

“I read it back in college and it drew me closer not only to Our Lord, but also to Catholic Tradition. I know many others for whom it has exercised a similar apostolic function.”

Peter Kwasniewski, High Church Modernism and Occultism, Part I

This endorsement of Tomberg continues. He recently published a work overtly centred entirely on Tomberg’s teachings – Mysticism, Magic and Monasteries, by Sebastian Morello.

In an “exchange of letters”, Sebastian Morello asserts:

“ … in the decades to come, the works of [occultists and esotericists] Jean Hani, Valentin Tomberg, Jean Borella, Robert Bolton, Wolfgang Smith, and others will be of the utmost importance for the re-evangelisation of the world.”

Peter Kwasniewski responds:

“some of the best, most exciting, most promising work is taking place outside the borders of the [Church] institution… [after mention of unrelated material] I am fully in agreement with the rest of what you write in your missive”.

Catholics can only wonder how can a witch like Valentin Tomberg be urgently needed for ‘re-evangelisation’? Morello, replying, cheerfully declares, “I believe humans are directed by their nature towards priestly sacrifice of animal or even human victims [in “natural”, pagan religions]”.¹

These two decry the Church of the last millennium and seek to “reform it”; Tomberg’s works, their point of departure, is dangerous and noxious.

Tomberg’s key to Kwasniewski’s combination of light and darkness

Tomberg makes the devil the co-creator of the universe and even of mankind, by dividing “nature” into good and evil: the sun and the stars are of “light”, while the planets, including the earth, are of darkness, the serpent. Satan is involved in the “evolution” of men:

“The brain… is the work of the serpent… Human beings, as cerebral beings, are indeed “children of the serpent” or “children of darkness”.²

This raising of the devil to “co-creator” of mankind is an appalling attack on the Catholic Faith. For the faith, for St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas, rationality is what constitutes men being made in the image of God. This rationality is based on the soul and distinguishes men from animals. Instead, Tomberg (like false scientism) locates reason in brain cells evolved “by the serpent” from animals: Tomberg’s Yin Yang, thesis/counter thesis system makes the devil essential to creation, and salvation:

“… evolution consists on the one hand of the enfolding activity of the serpent, which has formed the brain and produced cerebral intellectuality, and on the other hand of the activity of the light from above, which opens the enfolded and illumines cerebral intellectuality…”

“… the work of salvation…[is] a gradual spiritualisation of the work of the serpent – including cerebral intellectuality.” ³

But Catholics know that man as created by God was endowed with reason to a very high degree. The result of original sin was a clouding of the intellect.

Satanists need to be more “inclusive” says Tomberg

Tomberg declared that his view on creation and nature was based on Madame Blavatski, the Kabbala, early Gnostic texts, the Indo-Tibetan tradition and “the biblical account”: the main problem with devil worshippers was that they cherished “only” the “serpent principle”.

For Tomberg, the ideal is to incorporate both the serpent and the dove:

“I am perplexed, I repeat, not because the interpretation of the serpent according to the above-mentioned occultist-authors is not true… but because the subject of the serpent is treated by them with a strange exclusiveness, even partiality …”

Those “partial” to the serpent are “not” wrong on that score (Tomberg names authors he has quoted enthusiastically scores of times), they only need to incorporate “light” in their worldview as well. ⁴

This “religious” schizophrenia is symbolised by the light/darkness of the Yin/Yang ideal: “complete evolution is the intersection of [serpentine] biological evolution and [intuitive/occultist] spiritual evolution…”

“If you were to ask me… if one has to choose and take the side of either the serpent or the dove, my reply would be… Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves”.

But Our Lord (quoted without shame here) was not talking about “inclusiveness” for the devil. As has been seen however (see High Church Modernism and Occultism, Part I) Tomberg declares that Satan is not an enemy of God and can be a “friend” of Christians.

For Tomberg, accessing the “complete cosmic knowledge” expressed by “magical formulae, gnostic symbols and mystic fires” is the “big picture” he cannot renounce, within which he locates the Church as a partial instrument:

“Monsieur Priest, pardon me concerning what you think to be human pride [instead of] accepting [revelation] with humility”.

“The whole spiritual history of mankind”, for Tomberg is to return to “Eden” (a mantra repeated incessantly by one of Peter Kwasniewski’s associates, Robert Lazu Kmita, who identifies Eden with “heaven” – see this One Peter Five article).

For Tomberg, Christ is prefigured by “the Buddhas… the Avatars, Rishis… Boddhisattvas”. ⁵ Unlike Our Lord, the “serpent” does not demand exclusive devotion, at least not initially; it only wants a part of human loyalty. Tomberg’s teaching does this officially and irrevocably, and by name. Peter Kwasniewski and Sebastian Morello must explain their espousal of Tomberg.

The hideous Lutheran-like image of Kwasniewski’s Tombergian Church

Tomberg’s teachings do not remain a dead letter in Peter Kwasniewski’s beliefs. He has now illustrated his view of the Church as “hexed” and cursed for up to a thousand years, recently directing his readers to an article promoting an image of the Mystical Body of Christ which is truly offensive. ⁶

Unfortunately, it needs to be published here. Kwasniewski had it placed on the Rorate Caeli site: “This is one of the finest essays I’ve read in a long while. I urge you to read it and ponder its message”. ⁷

Peter Kwasniewski insists we view the Church as depicted in the article, above:

“…. the dramatic relationship between the historical Church and the figure of the Great Harlot: ‘This would be the truth that Protestantism took captive and that we must free’. ” ⁸

Below, Luther’s very similar view of the Catholic Church.

Against this monstrous caricature of the Church is the true image taught by Pope Pius XII in Mystici Corporis: “the society established by the Redeemer of the human race resembles its divine Founder, who was persecuted, calumniated and tortured”.

As Archbishop Lefebvre often said (against those who claimed that the Church had succumbed to The Enemy), the Church on earth can be disfigured but it is still the Church and will always remain so; its institutions may contain many individuals influenced by the errors of the world but it will fully return to tradition.

The article falsely claims that the SSPX teaches that there are two institutionally different Churches, the traditional and the Conciliar Church. But the SSPX has always clarified that it understands the “Conciliar Church” to be a mass of individuals, in thrall to the “spirit of the Council”, not a separate institution. The dramatic crisis of the Church today is not entirely unprecedented. There have been periods in the past where for generations, many if not most bishops were once animated by the Arian spirit, or the Renaissance spirit. Indeed, Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais used to say to those worried about the length of the current turmoil that the great crises of the Church generally lasted for 70 years on average.

Kwasniewski’s image is the semi-Lutheran one of a Church that does not resemble the Redeemer, but is instead a “Roman Church” incorporating the “Serpent” as an integral part. It applies to the Church Tomberg’s Yin/Yang, Serpent/Dove view of “Salvation” as “spiritualising the work of the Serpent”; both light and darkness must be contained within the one body of the Church in this Hegelian dialectic.

But Catholics know that the Church, like Our Lord crucified, is spotless. What its members do does not change this because the Church is not the sum of its members on earth.

But Kwasniewski reduces the divine institution, the Church, to a mass of individuals engaging in a Hegelian dialectic. The same dialectic was employed in the Virgilius/Kwasniewski manifesto for ecclesiastical reform which declared it was based on Hegelianism. (See The High Church Modernist Synodal Way to “complete” Vatican II). As part of this dialectic, Kwasniewski proposes that Luther’s “Whore of Babylon” caricature of the Church is a “Truth” that has been “taken captive” by Protestantism since the Council of Trent!

Even worse is that Kwasniewski presents this Jekyll and Hyde image of the Mystical Body as the norm, not “the end times”: “I do not see a sharp division in essence between pre-conciliar and post-conciliar churches”; as with Morello, he views the Church as “hexed” for 700 years.

The Church on earth fights not to be not of the world, but Kwasniewski’s ecclesiology makes the world the Church’s alter ego
instead. His Tombergian model of the Church cannot be the Mystical Body of Christ for he views it as a cycle of darkness and light, comparing it to mankind before the Flood or the Old Testament Synagogue, both of which succumbed and were superseded. But this can never happen to the Church. The half woman/half devil image is not a mystical vision of the Church but a very distorted and very human one, whatever Hildegard of Bingen’s artists intended to depict.

But Kwasniewski’s doctrine of the Church’s alter ego faithfully reiterates Tomberg’s view of the “antichrist” being “generated” by “the Church”: “Bel, Moloch and Astarte. These gods were only egregores – creatures of the collective human imagination and will” and “The antichrist… is the phantom of the whole of mankind, the being engendered through the whole historical evolution of humanity”.

For Tomberg, the Church also has its “egregore”, which is its “double”, “just as every man, every nation, every religion, etc., have their ‘doubles’”.

We would suggest that Kwasniewski and Morello are less worried about the end of the world and the antichrist than taking advantage of the lack of teaching authority in the Church today to advocate a new occultist “Reformation” attacking orthodox belief and the divine constitution of the Church.

Papalism; the “antichrist” for Kwasniewski?

The “hex” over the Church of the last 700 years is obsessively identified with the papacy’s growing ability to fully realise the divine constitution of the Church whereby Peter is the Rock on which the Church is built, its first teacher and the embodiment of all jurisdiction.

He has mistaken this ability to effectively govern and teach universally which became possible at last in early modernity (but was only prevented before by civil turmoil, persecution and interfering political leaders), with the “antichrist”. In this his image of the Church resembles more that of Luther’s Bible than the obscene image he ascribes to Hildegard of Bingen.

Not only does he reject the ordinary infallible teaching of the papacy ⁹ (see High Church Modernist Synodal Way); he quibbles with the definitions of papal jurisdiction of Vatican I as an application of Cartesianism and Hobbes’ political absolutism to the Church, a view that is pushed hard in the book he recently published, Mysticism, Magic and Monasteries. But it was political absolutism that tried to treat civil society as if it were a divine society like the Church.

This view can be seen in Kwasniewski’s endorsement of a “Vigilius” manifesto.¹⁰ This article denies papal infallibility, but Kwasniewski contents himself with saying he doesn’t agree with the manifesto’s “interpretation” of “details” of Vatican I, but agrees wholeheartedly that the papacy has embodied the errors of modernity, even creating them by “pre-empting” Hobbes and Descartes.

In this way Kwasniewski’s transforms the pre-Vatican II Church of the last 700 years into the “antichrist” emerging from the woman representing the Church. Like Luther, Kwasniewski says the attitude within the Church for hundreds of years has been “blind obedience” to the Pope, creating the cursed monster of his image.

The Occultist network endorses Kwasniewski

Kwasniewski recommended the occultist blogger Ross Tieken as a valiant defender of himself and Morello:

“Those who have been confused or scandalized by some of what has been foolishly asserted about Sebastian Morello will find this piece particularly helpful. Looking forward to more from this author”. ¹¹

Tieken was a witch. Kwasniewski says he “converted to Christ and the Catholic Church because he came to see in them the fulfillment of all the partial truths he had glimpsed before”.

Here again, Kwasniewski applies Tomberg’s teaching of “salvation” as the “spiritualising the work of the serpent”, “completing” the lie that is witchcraft. Like Tomberg, Kwasniewski argues that such people (with their ideological baggage) need to inhabit the shell of the Catholic Church rather than stay out in the cold.

In the article raised by Kwasniewski, Tieken declares that he does not accept all the canons of the Council of Trent. All is overlooked. He endorses the occultist image of the serpentine Church of the last millennium:

“Morello, Buck, Coulombe, Kwasniewski, and others… are attempting to recover the Catholic synthesis [Tombergian occultism, which] has never been rejected by the Church – only eclipsed by a half-millennium of spiritual crisis and reaction”;¹²

Tieken identifies the traditional Church with the diabolical monster being born in Kwasniewski’s image of the Church.

Not all Tombergians agree that it’s so easy to make normal Catholics mistake a Tombergian occultist cult for the Catholic Church. Michael Martin, an occultist writer promoted by Angelico Press (the occultist publisher of Tomberg’s writings praised by Kwasniewski as the “empire” of “orthodox Catholic” works) ridicules those who think they can reconcile their Tombergian beliefs with traditional Catholicism.

While acknowledging Tomberg’s typically occultist capacity to profess orthodox doctrines along with others that aren’t, Martin laughs at “Tombergian traddies”:

“Tomberg… explode[s] complacent notions of what it means to be ‘Catholic’… He did this through his ‘Our Mother’ prayer [“Our Mother, Thou who art in the darkness of the underworld etc”], as well as through his introduction of the Luminous Holy Trinity: The Mother, the Daughter, and the Holy Soul. So maybe he wasn’t as traditional as all that”. ¹³

Nevertheless, Michael Martin, Peter Kwasniewski, Sebastian Morello, Angelico Press and the rest can and do reside within the Church structure alongside the German Synodal Way.

Robert Spaemann (a friend of Cardinal Ratzinger) wrote the introduction to the German edition of Meditations stating that Tomberg’s purpose it to draw all “Hermeticists, Theosophists, and Anthroposophists” to the Church “as their true spiritual living-space”.

The idea is colonisation, not conversion; there is never a hint that the occultist will abandon his heresy, only that he will inhabit the institution and interpret it according to his ideas. Kwasniewski’s reinvention of the Church according to his personal beliefs tells occultists of all kinds: “you can take up residence in the Catholic Church without losing your identity”. Our criticism of his actions advertises the fact.

Peter Kwasniewski recently provided an egregious example of his talent for combining light and darkness. Praising the re-edition of the book, From Evangelical to Catholic by Way of the East, by Willam Wallace, he commented on Facebook, “Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in Far Eastern religion/philosophy and how Christianity can confirm its partial truths while delivering souls from its errors”.

The book was written by an Anglican missionary in India who became
obsessed with Hinduism. Recognising the inadequacy of Anglicanism to convert that country, his turn towards Catholicism began by noting the Church’s use of visible means to reinforce faith, and the authority of its teaching magisterium. He eventually became a Jesuit and published this work after several years as a Catholic.

But the book is deeply flawed and radically incapable of “delivering souls from [Hnduism’s] errors” because it promotes the worst of them, and a good dose of Modernism as well. Wallace declares that Hinduism’s Nirvana is Heaven, and that its yogis have the means of salvation; Hinduism proposes the same end as Christianity, and even the means to obtain it, but this means (“what is the path of
Yoga… but an image of the mystery of Christ”, writes Wallace) was difficult for most.¹⁴

He claimed that Catholic asceticism was the same thing.¹⁵ The author adopted a complete cultural cringe before the pretensions of Hindu “enlightenment”, declaring that the Indians converted to Anglicanism were “rubbish”, a contempt he said he imbibed from the Hindus he esteemed, “seeing clearly that among the Hindus there was a true religion”. ¹⁶

Fatima’s Promise

Instead of wild interpretations of some twelfth-century illustrations (von Bingen has been exploited to death by Modernists and false mysticism; Catholics should wait for future magisterium to decide on it rather than take her purported writings as dogma), the contemporary Church has been given a symbol and a message for these times which the Church never failed to recommend urgently. Fatima addresses itself precisely to the crisis of the Church and the world such as it is, not the end of the world. It promises the restoration of the Church and a rebuilding of Christian society more radiant than ever.

We ought to commend ourselves, and also those within the
Church who are confused (as discussed in this article) to the example and protection of Saint Pius V, as in the collect for his feast day. ¹⁷

This article has been updated.

---

By Vinicius. Vinicius is a Melbourne-based historian-researcher  focussing on early modernity as the Christian Western alternative to ideological, Enlightenment modernity. 

---

1. Friends Seeking a Common Understanding: Letters on Grace, Vocations, and the Modern Church, 11/6/24, One Peter Five. ↩︎
2. Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, Shaftesbury, Dorset 1993, p. 246. ↩︎
3. Tomberg, Meditations, p. 251. ↩︎
4. Tomberg, Meditations, p. 244, 250. ↩︎
5. Tomberg, Meditations, p. 253. ↩︎
6. Saint Hildegard of Bingen and the Ecclesiology of the FSSPX, Rorate Caeli ↩︎
7. Peter Kwasniewski, Facebook 9/7/26 ↩︎
8. Saint Hildegard of Bingen and the Ecclesiology of the FSSPX, Rorate Caeli  ↩︎
9. Clear ideas on the pope’s infallible magisterium, SSPX.org website ↩︎
10. Vigilius, Vatican I and the Specter, Tradition and Sanity ↩︎
11. Peter Kwasniewski, X post, June 16, 2025 ↩︎
12. Ross Arlen Tieken, Against Sorcery, For Re-Enchantment, Part III: Against the New Puritanism ↩︎
13. The Irreducible Gap: The Paradox of Valentin Tomberg, The Center for Sophiological Studies ↩︎
14. William Wallace S. J. De l’évangélisme au catholicisme par la route des Indes, Albert Dewit, Brusselles 1921, p. 190. ↩︎
15. Wallace, 174. ↩︎
16. Wallace, 188-9 ↩︎
17. God, who to the destruction of the enemies of Thy Church, and to the restoration of Thy holy worship, didst vouchsafe to elect blessed Pius to be Thy high-Priest; grant us so to be defended by his protection, and so to remain steadfast in Thy service, that overcoming the snares of all our enemies, we may enjoy perpetual peace. Through our Lord Jesus Christ Thy Son. ↩︎