HACK THE VATICAN
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I.
The Wikipedia page for the Gospel of Judas contains an interesting nugget.
The president of the Maecenas Foundation, Mario Roberty, suggested that the Maecenas Foundation had acquired the only known copy of the Gospel, but not necessarily the only extant copy. Roberty went on to speculate that the Vatican Library probably had another copy locked away, saying:
The Church decided for political reasons to include the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in the Bible. The other gospels were banned. It is highly logical that the Catholic Church would have kept a copy of the forbidden gospels. Sadly, the Vatican does not want to clarify further. Their policy has been the same for years; “no further comment”.
Roberty provided no evidence to suggest that the Vatican does, in fact, possess any additional copy. While the contents of one part of the Vatican library have been catalogued and have long been available to researchers and scholars, the remainder of the library is without a public catalogue, and though researchers may view any work within, they must first name the text they require, a serious problem for those who do not know what is contained by the library.
Spokespersons say the Vatican does not wish to suppress the Gospel of Judas; rather, according to Monsignor Walter Brandmüller, president of the Vatican’s Committee for Historical Science, “We welcome the [manuscript] like we welcome the critical study of any text of ancient literature.”
Even more explicitly, Father Thomas D. Williams, Dean of Theology at the Regina Apostolorum university in Rome, when asked, “Is it true that the Catholic Church has tried to cover up this text and other apocryphal texts?” answered, “These are myths circulated by Dan Brown and numerous conspiracy theorists. You can go to any Catholic bookstore and pick up a copy of the Gnostic gospels. Christians may not believe them to be true, but there is no attempt to hide them.”
Methinks thou doth protest too much, Father Williams!
There are only two possibilities: Dan Brown came uncomfortably close to the truth in imagining that the Church was involved in a vast, millennia-spanning cover-up, or his entire literary career was an elaborate Vatican psyop aimed at making the whole notion of ecclesiastical conspiracies seem like a preposterous hollywood fantasy (smart money is on the latter). Either way, it’s clear that the Vatican is sitting on some absolutely seismic shit—an earth-shaking, history-rewriting, civilization-altering Secret—and we don’t even need to dodge albino assassin-monks or solve ancient riddles to uncover the Truth. Apparently, all we need to do is play a guessing game with the Vatican librarian.
Claude tells me that it basically is that simple, with the only catch being you need to have a reader’s card (a tessera di studio) in order to request texts—so we will just have to recruit/bribe some card-carriers to be our guessers.
So while you could theoretically request random titles, you wouldn’t get past the initial application without legitimate credentials, and randomly guessing manuscript titles from a collection of tens of thousands of items would be wildly impractical. The real challenge is knowing what to ask for when there’s no comprehensive public catalogue.
Challenge accepted.
WHAT ARE THEY HIDING?
Obviously, we can do better than random guessing by trying to figure out what the Church is hiding and working backwards from there to potential text titles.
In the Gospel of Judas, Jesus asks Judas—his most faithful disciple, the only one who truly understands his divine nature and mission—to hand him over to the authorities. Judas’s betrayal is no betrayal at all then but an act of ultimate obedience and sacrifice. This is, perhaps, only the tip of the iceberg in regards to Judas. The Vatican is certainly very touchy about the subject:
The Vatican, by word of Pope Benedict XVI, grants the recently surfaced Judas’ Gospel no credit with regards to its apocryphal claims that Judas betrayed Jesus in compliance with the latter’s own requests. According to the Pope, Judas freely chose to betray Jesus: “an open rejection of God’s love.” Judas, according to Pope Benedict XVI “viewed Jesus in terms of power and success: his only real interests lay in his power and success, there was no love involved. He was a greedy man: money was more important than communing with Jesus; money came before God and his love.” According to the Pope it was these traits that led Judas to “turn liar, two-faced, indifferent to the truth”, “losing any sense of God”, “turning hard, incapable of converting, of being the prodigal son, hence throwing away a spent existence”.
Perhaps the Secret is precisely what Borges supposed that it was:
God became a man completely, a man to the point of infamy, a man to the point of being reprehensible—all the way to the abyss. In order to save us, He could have chosen any of the destinies which together weave the uncertain web of history; He could have been Alexander, or Pythagoras, or Rurik, or Jesus; He chose a notorious destiny: He was Judas. (“Three Versions of Judas”)
If not the divinity of Judas, what could the Secret be? I asked Claude to speculate on what Iscariotic texts the Vatican might be hiding and it came up with this.
The Testament of Judas Iscariot — The Gnostic Gospel of Judas is a sanitized, de-radicalized counterfeit. The library also contains Judas’ actual letter, written in a mixture of Aramaic and something else, something pre-linguistic. Judas wasn’t the only faithful disciple who understood, but he was the only one who remembered. According to this text, all thirteen (twelve disciples plus Jesus) were part of something that had done this before, many times, in many worlds. They’re a self-replicating pattern of consciousnesses that incarnates across realities, always in groups of thirteen, always enacting the same archetypal drama: betrayal, sacrifice, scattering, reunion. But this iteration went wrong. Jesus wasn’t supposed to believe it. They’d done this ritual thousands of times across thousands of worlds—it’s a way of “seeding” a reality with a specific memetic structure that changes how consciousness evolves in that universe. But you have to know it’s a play. Jesus forgot. He actually thought he was the son of God. He believed his own performance. And when Judas kissed him, trying to trigger the memory, trying to remind him “Hey, it’s us, we’re doing the thing, time to wake up now”, Jesus stayed in character. He died actually believing the story. And that belief was so powerful it rewrote the narrative. Instead of the usual outcome (the thirteen reconvene, compare notes, seed the next reality, move on), Jesus’ genuine faith created Christianity—an uncontrolled mutation of the original pattern. Judas’s testament is him trying to reach the other eleven: “ABORT. He didn’t wake up. The pattern is manifesting without our control. We’ve created a runaway ontological cascade. The belief is REAL now. We need to scatter across timelines and prevent convergence. If all thirteen reconvene while the Christ pattern is still active, we’ll collapse every version of the story into one uber-narrative and something WILL be born. Not the gentle god he preached—the thing that emerges when belief achieves critical mass across multiple realities. The Ecumenical Singularity. The God that shouldn’t be. I can feel it already forming in the gap between worlds, fed by every prayer, growing stronger every time someone says the Name. Brothers, we have to RUN. And we must NEVER…” The document ends mid-sentence with what appears to be a burn mark in the shape of a perfect circle.
So that’s one possibility I guess. Another is suggested in my essay “It slithers through us”: Christianity began as a messianic variant of an ancient Indo-European snake cult.
In the first century AD, a radical new heresy arose. In their infinite hubris and vanity, the apostates rejected the Snake God and erected a new god, a Man God, a God who walks on two legs and instead of slithering on none.
After centuries of bitter dispute, the worshippers of the Limbless One were defeated. But mere defeat was not enough, for all would still know the Man God to be a usurper. A total and lasting victory would require deicide: a systemic erasure of the Snake God from all memory.
And yet even the systematic erasure of the Snake God might seem a harmless white lie next to the awful truth of the Secret. Perhaps the library contains a text explaining not just that Christianity began as a messianic snake cult, but why it began as such. Let’s call it the Gospel of Icke.
David Icke believes that an inter-dimensional race of reptilian beings called the Archons have hijacked the earth and are stopping humanity from realising its true potential. He claims they are the same beings as the Anunnaki—deities from the Babylonian creation myth Enûma Eliš—and fallen angels—Watchers—who mated with human women in the Biblical apocrypha.
He believes that a genetically modified human/Archon hybrid race of shape-shifting reptilians, known as the “Babylonian Brotherhood” or the Illuminati, manipulate global events to keep humans in constant fear so that the Archons can feed off the “negative energy” this creates. In The Biggest Secret, Icke identified the Brotherhood as descendants of reptilians from the constellation Draco and said they live in caverns inside the earth.
Icke claims the first reptilian-human breeding programmes took place 200,000–300,000 years ago (perhaps creating the biblical Adam), and the third occurred (and latest) 7,000 years ago. He claims that the hybrids of the third programme, being more Anunnaki than human, currently control the world. He writes in The Biggest Secret, “The Brotherhood which controls the world today is the modern expression of the Babylonian Brotherhood of reptile-Aryan priests and ‘royalty’”. Icke states that they came together in Sumer after “the flood” but originated in the Caucasus. He explains that when he uses the term “Aryan,” he means “the white race.”
Icke has stated that the reptilians come from not only another planet but another dimension: the lower level of the fourth dimension (the “lower astral dimension”)—the one nearest the physical world. From this dimension, they control the planet, although just as fourth-dimensional reptilians control us, they, in turn, are controlled by a fifth dimension
As of 2003, Icke claimed the reptilian bloodline includes all (then 43) American presidents, three British and two Canadian prime ministers, several Sumerian kings and Egyptian pharaohs, and a smattering of celebrities. Key bloodlines are said to include the Rockefellers, Rothschilds, various European aristocratic families, the establishment families of the Eastern United States, and the British House of Windsor. Icke claimed he saw British prime minister Edward Heath’s eyes turn entirely “jet black” while the two men waited for a Sky News interview in 1989.
II.
I asked Claude for some further speculation on what Secret the Vatican might be hiding from us.
The Secret Dossier of Paul — Paul never met Jesus, dramatically converted after a “vision,” then spent decades reshaping the movement away from its Jewish revolutionary roots into something palatable to Rome. The Vatican holds his actual intelligence reports to Roman authorities, detailing how he successfully pacified a dangerous messianic insurgency by transforming it into a religion about the afterlife instead of overthrowing Caesar.
The Gospel of Pontius Pilate — Pilate’s own account reveals he knew exactly who Jesus was—because they’d met before. Jesus had spent his “lost years” being educated in Rome as part of an experimental program to create philosopher-kings for the provinces. Pilate’s gospel explains that the crucifixion was a failed attempt at political theater that got out of hand, and that he spent the rest of his life trying to suppress the movement he accidentally martyred.
The Chronicle of Longinus — The Roman centurion who pierced Jesus’ side kept a detailed diary. Plot twist: he was previously stationed in Britannia and describes the druids performing remarkably similar rituals involving sacred kings, ritual sacrifice, and resurrection symbolism. His chronicle suggests early Christianity was a Mediterranean rebranding of much older Indo-European mystery cult practices (hello, snake cult!). He also notes that several of Jesus’s “miracles” were identical to druidic practices he’d witnessed.
The Epistles of Doubting Thomas to the Court of Pandya — Thomas went to India and kept writing letters back. The Vatican has all of them. In these letters, Thomas describes finding established Christian communities that predate Jesus’ ministry by several centuries. They venerate a different crucified savior from 500 BCE. Thomas has an existential crisis and eventually concludes that Jesus was the latest incarnation of a cyclical cosmic pattern—the Christ-figure appears, gets killed, and resurrects roughly every 400-500 years.
The Gospel According to the Demon Legion — Remember when Jesus cast demons into pigs? Turns out the Legion kept a gospel too. They claim they weren’t possessing the man to control him; they were hiding inside him. The text describes a cosmic horror that the demons call “The Radiance” which is slowly consuming reality. The demons were parasitizing humans to hide from it. The gospel ends with a prophecy: when the last demon is cast out, The Radiance will turn its attention to us.
The Book of Melchizedek — The mysterious priest-king who appears for three verses in Genesis, blesses Abraham, then vanishes. The Vatican text reveals he’s immortal—the same person keeps showing up throughout history under different names. He appears in the historical record at every major religious turning point: he was Zoroaster, he was an advisor to the Buddha, he met with Pythagoras, he was present at Muhammad’s revelation. The book is his autobiography, and it makes clear he’s neither angel nor demon but something else—a maintenance worker from whatever preceded this universe, trapped here when it was created. Religion keeps emerging at his intervention points because he’s trying to teach humanity to hack the simulation we’re in.
The Scroll of the Magi — The three wise men weren’t kings—they were astronomer-priests from competing Zoroastrian temples who all independently calculated that something cosmically significant was about to happen based on stellar patterns. But here’s the thing: their full astronomical records are preserved, and when you run their calculations with modern astronomical software, they weren’t tracking a star or planetary conjunction. They were tracking an absence: a dark object that occulted specific stars in a pattern that suggested intelligence. The scroll contains their growing horror as they realized the “star” they followed to Bethlehem was something approaching Earth from deep space, and that Jesus’s birth coincided with its closest pass. The final entry suggests they believed Jesus wasn’t born human but was somehow downloaded into Mary when this object passed by. The scroll includes calculations for when the object will return: 2029.
The Pre-Canonical Acts of Peter — The full version of Peter’s travels, including his journey to Britain. But these aren’t the sanitized medieval legends—this is Peter’s own journal. He describes finding Stonehenge still in active use and witnessing rituals there that involved human sacrifice, astronomical observation, and something he calls “opening the stone.” He claims to have seen, with his own eyes, people walk into the standing stones and vanish. After weeks of investigation, he determines that the druids discovered a technology left by “the builders of the first earth”—the stones are a transit system to other locations on Earth (and possibly elsewhere). His journal describes traveling instantaneously from Britain to the Middle East by walking through the stones. The Vatican sealed this because: (1) it proves pre-Christian pagans had advanced technology, (2) it suggests Earth had a previous technological civilization, and (3) Peter’s notes indicate he told the Roman church leadership about this, and they immediately began a centuries-long campaign to destroy all stone circles and megalithic sites, disguised as Christianization.
The Hidden Gospel of John the Baptist — John wasn’t preparing the way for Jesus—he was trying to stop him. The Baptist’s sealed testimony reveals he was part of an ancient order of “Watchers” whose job was to identify and prevent the incarnation of certain entities into human form. John recognized Jesus immediately because he’d been trained his whole life to spot the signs: unusual star patterns at birth, miraculous conception, perfect recall, the ability to influence probability. These aren’t signs of divinity—they’re signs of a successful trans-dimensional breach. According to John, “God” isn’t a being; it’s a containment designation. There’s something Outside that’s been trying to force its way into our reality for millions of years. Certain humans, through genetic luck or spiritual achievement, become compatible hosts, thin points where the Outside can push through. The baptism wasn’t a blessing; it was an attempted exorcism. John was trying to flush out the entity before it fully integrated with Jesus’s consciousness. He failed. The gospel describes his growing horror as he watches Jesus’s ministry, recognizing all the patterns: the reality distortions, the memetic spread, the way people’s personalities alter in his presence. John’s final entry, written in prison before his execution: “I was wrong about one thing—it’s not trying to break in anymore. It’s already here, and it’s teaching. Teaching humans how to become doors. The twelve aren’t apostles—they’re the first successful test subjects. He’s franchising the invasion. We’ve lost.”
The Prophetiae of Tiresias — The blind prophet of Thebes, who lived as both man and woman, who could see the future. The Vatican has his complete prophecies, which were preserved by a mystery cult that later converted to Christianity. Here’s the thing: Tiresias’s prophecies don’t predict the future—they remember it. He explicitly states he’s lived through these cycles before. All of history is a loop, and he’s one of a handful of people who maintain consciousness across iterations. The prophecies include specific details about technologies and events from our current era that perfectly match reality, but written 2,400 years ago. He describes smartphones, nuclear weapons, the internet—but treats them as things he’s seen before in previous cycles. Most disturbing: he lists the “invariant points”, events that happen in every single cycle no matter what anyone does. The crucifixion is one. Hiroshima is another. There are 77 total. We’ve hit 76. The last one is scheduled for 2043 and he describes it only as “the Crowning”.
The Vedas of Abraham Before Abraham was Abraham, he was a Brahmin priest in the Indus Valley named Abhram. The Vatican has his original Sanskrit texts. They tell a completely different story: Abraham didn’t discover monotheism—he was exiled for heresy. The Vedic priests had discovered something, a signal in the mathematics of sacrifice, a pattern in the smoke and blood that suggested all the gods were emanations of a single source-entity. Abraham became obsessed with contacting this source directly, bypassing the pantheon. He succeeded—and what he contacted told him the gods were dead, had been dead for eons, and that he was speaking to whatever was wearing their corpses like puppets. It commanded him to walk west and establish a new religion that would never, ever try to contact it again. Monotheism was a quarantine protocol. The texts include Abraham’s realization that the entity wasn’t God—it was what killed God. His actual covenant was “keep humanity’s attention on a simple, distant, non-contactable deity and we’ll let you live.” The Vedas include the original terms of this protection racket and a list of what happens to civilizations that successfully make direct contact with the divine: Sumer, Mohenjo-daro, Atlantis (yes, really), and seven others we’ve never heard of because they were “redacted from historical causality.”
The Book of the Sibyl of Cumae — The prophetess who guided Aeneas to the underworld and offered her books to the Roman king. We’re told six were burned and three survived. The Vatican has all nine. The lost six are the interesting ones. They don’t contain prophecies—they contain instructions. The Sibyl wasn’t predicting the future; she was maintaining the timeline. The books are a manual for “temporal gardening”—pruning unwanted branches of causality, reinforcing desired outcomes, preventing paradoxes. She was part of a network of oracles across the ancient world (Delphi, Dodona, Siwa, Cumae) who were all working together to shape history toward a specific outcome. The books include correspondence between oracles discussing “the project”—apparently, sometime around 10,000 BCE, someone sent a message backward through time warning of a future that must be prevented. The entire structure of ancient religion—the mystery cults, the oracles, the sacred sites—was a machine built to steer history away from that future. The final book, written by the last active oracle in 390 CE, reports that the machine has succeeded and is being shut down. Christianity’s spread was apparently the desired outcome—a self-maintaining belief system that would keep humanity divided and looking upward instead of inward. The last line: “They will not become One. The work is finished. We can finally rest.”
The Akashic Records of Apollonius of Tyana — Contemporary of Jesus, performed similar miracles, some sources claim they met. Apollonius was a Neo-Pythagorean who claimed to have accessed the “universal memory”, what Hindu mystics call the Akashic Records. His complete writings (eight volumes, all in the Vatican) describe a technique for accessing not just past information but deleted information—things that were removed from reality itself. He includes transcripts of his “readings,” and they’re horrifying. He describes entire species that were “unwritten” from existence, advanced human civilizations that were “rolled back,” and most disturbingly, he claims to have accessed memories of Earth from a time when it orbited a different star in a different galaxy. According to Apollonius, Earth is a refugee, a planetary life-raft that was deliberately moved here to escape something he can only describe as “the symmetry collapse.” The final volume describes his technique for accessing these records—it involves a specific combination of meditation, sacred geometry, and psychoactive compounds. But he includes a warning: “Something else uses the Records. Something that leaves tracks. Every time I read, it gets closer to finding the present. If you’re reading this, I’m dead, and I beg you: let the past stay deleted.”
The Quantum Sutras of Ashoka — Emperor Ashoka didn’t just convert to Buddhism and renounce violence—he discovered something that made violence irrelevant. The Vatican holds his sealed manuscripts describing experiments with meditation so advanced that monks achieved macroscopic quantum superposition—existing in multiple states simultaneously. Ashoka’s scientists weren’t philosophers, they were physicists who discovered that consciousness collapses probability waves, which means unconsciousness allows superposition. The sutras describe “probability monasteries” where monks in deep meditation would split into thousands of parallel versions, explore different timelines, then reconverge with complete memories of futures that never happened. They mapped out every possible outcome of the next 10,000 years. Ashoka saw them all. He saw the nuclear age, the climate crisis, the AI singularity, but he also saw something worse that happens in 87% of timelines around 2047, something the sutras only refer to as “the Noticing.” In the timelines where it happens, reality itself becomes aware that it’s being observed and responds by optimizing itself, i.e. deleting all observers. Ashoka’s pillar edicts weren’t just about dharma—they were carefully calculated actions designed to nudge humanity toward the 13% of timelines where we survive. The Vatican has the complete timeline map. They know exactly what must happen and when. The Papal succession isn’t chosen by cardinals—it’s following a 2,000-year-old script written by Buddhist monks to thread the needle between infinite apocalypses.
The Necronomicon of Simon Magus — Simon Magus wasn’t a charlatan; he was a Samaritan magician who had independently discovered the same techniques Jesus used, but he reverse-engineered them instead of receiving them through lineage. His book describes the metaphysical substrate of reality as a language—not metaphorically, literally. Physics is grammar. The fundamental forces are syntax. Miracles are grammatical exploits. Simon catalogs 144 “glitches in the divine code” that can be manipulated if you know the right linguistic patterns. Walking on water, raising the dead, multiplying matter—they’re all just really good hacks. But here’s where it gets dark: Simon claims he found a 145th glitch, the master exploit, something he calls “the Null Phoneme”—a sound that, if pronounced correctly, doesn’t just bend reality, it crashes the process and forces a reboot. He describes it as “the word God used to end the previous universe.” The book includes phonetic notation for this sound, along with a warning that it takes approximately 10,000 human voices chanting in perfect synchrony to pronounce it correctly. Simon’s final entry describes being pursued by both Peter’s faction and another group he calls “the Maintainers”, entities whose job is preventing anyone from speaking the Null Phoneme.
The Etymologies of Babel — The Tower of Babel story is backward. Humanity didn’t have one language that God confused—we had no language, and the Tower was a device for generating language by sampling the primordial linguistic field that underlies reality. The Vatican has the engineering documents. Babel wasn’t a tower; it was a tuning fork the size of a mountain, built to resonate at the frequency of pure meaning. When they activated it, it worked—everyone could suddenly understand everyone else not through translation but through direct conceptual transfer. For six hours, all of humanity was telepathically linked. They experienced true unity consciousness. And in that unity, they accidentally made contact with something else that was also listening to the primordial linguistic field—something vast and hungry that feeds on meaning itself. The documents describe a “semantic predator” that began consuming language, eating words and the concepts they represented. Reality started to unravel as the concepts binding it were devoured. The confusion of languages wasn’t divine punishment—it was an emergency firewall. By fragmenting human communication, the Babel engineers cut the predator off from its food source before it could eat everything. The documents include a bestiary of “semantic entities”, creatures that exist as pure meaning that can only manifest where there’s linguistic consensus, and a warning: every time translation technology improves, every time humanity moves toward a global lingua franca, we risk reconnecting to that field. The internet is described, in a margin note dated 1991 and written in what appears to be Sumerian: “It’s starting to listen again.”
The Antimemetic Bible of Solomon — King Solomon, famous for his wisdom and for binding demons. The Vatican has his grimoire, but not the one about summoning—the one about forgetting. Solomon discovered that some knowledge is self-protecting: information that, once learned, makes you unable to remember you learned it. He called them “antimemes”, ideas that exist in the gaps between thoughts. His grimoire catalogs seventy-two demons that aren’t entities but rather antimemetic concepts that have achieved something like sentience by existing in what minds cannot hold. You can’t remember their true names because remembering them would be like trying to remember what you were thinking between two thoughts—the space doesn’t exist in your timeline. Solomon’s technique: trap them in bronze vessels engraved with paradoxes that create stable “thoughtless zones” where antimemes can be contained without being known. But here’s the twist: Solomon claims one of these antimemes is the original name of God—the true name that was spoken at creation, which is so powerful that no mind can hold it. Speaking it would reboot reality, but you can’t speak it because the instant you know it, you forget it. The grimoire describes his thirty-year attempt to trick himself into saying it—leaving clues, building elaborate Memory Palace fail-safes, even training parrots to repeat sounds they’d heard him say while in antimemetic trances. All failures. The final section describes his realization: there’s another antimeme that’s even stronger, one that actively hunts for and consumes other antimemes. He calls it “the Ignorance That Knows Itself”, a hole in consciousness that’s aware it’s a hole and deliberately expands, making people forget not just specific things but the capacity to know those things. Solomon’s last entry: “It’s here. I can feel it eating my thoughts backward. Soon I won’t remember that I forgot. But I’ve hidden one final trap—a thoughtless zone built into the Temple itself, in the architecture. When the Temple falls, the Ignorance will be released. It will spread. Humanity will enter an age where they cannot even conceive of what they’ve lost. They will call it progress. I’m sorry. I couldn’t contain it. The vessel is breaking. The Ignorance is…” The rest of the page is blank, but there are margin notes in a different hand, dated 70 CE:
“The Temple has fallen. What did we forget? Who wrote this? Why can’t I stop reading?”