George F. Dillon

Usually they're captured through education, incentives, cowardice, and sometimes the slow replacement of one kind of person with another.

So today we're going to be talking about the Carbonari, the Alta Vendita, the Permanent Instruction, Nubius, Piccolo Tigre, Vindex, Jacques Cretineau-Joly, Jacques Cretineau-Joly, George Dillon, and why a weird document from the 1800s still makes people argue about Freemasonry, the Papacy, Vatican, modern Catholicism, and whether history is moved by hidden hands or just regular human weakness.

Welcome to Idiot Mystic.

The phrase Alta Vendita, at least to me, sounds like it should be a boutique hotel with overpriced gummy bears.

Where exactly are the originals? Who sees them? Under what circumstances can we examine the handwriting, paper, ink, and archive trail? How much did Cretineau-Joly translate, arrange, summarize, or interpret? Are Nubius, Piccolo Tigre, and Vindex independently identifiable? Do police and diplomatic archives confirm the network in some form? Those questions don't prove that the documents are false.

They prevent us from pretending that the evidence is clear-cut.

Then, in 1885, an Irish priest named George Dillon brought the story to a wider English-speaking audience through a book called The War of the Antichrist with the Church and Christian Civilization.

It's a good title.