Soon after IvyGate published the extraordinary email exchange between Margherita Viggiano, a Yale graduate student and teaching fellow in Alexander Nemerov’s art history lecture, and Edward Barnaby, the Graduate School dean who dismissed her, Viggiano posted (on the same blog we found her correspondence with Barnaby) what appears to be her entire, 53,000-word doctoral thesis, entitled “Shakespeare and Dante: Demonic Agency as Literary Theory”.

Much like the conspiracy-laden handout she distributed to undergraduates on Tuesday, Viggiano’s thesis faults the Freemasons—the fraternal organization and subject of several airport thrillers—for various corruptions of power. This time is a little different, though. Viggiano, a dramatically devout Catholic, forcefully argues that something called “Satanic Freemasonry” has infiltrated the Roman Catholic Church and contrives to ruin its reputation by arranging for priests to sexually abuse children.

It’s unclear whether Yale has yet accepted Viggiano’s thesis; we’ve emailed Yale’s Department of Comparative Literature for comment, and will update if we hear back.

Referring to an Italian woman who had been “demonically possessed” and the Church’s efforts to save her, Viggiano writes:

Her case is so exceptional, and the reasons of her continuing sufferings so disturbing, that one wonders why the Church hierarchy in Rome did not publicly intervene to denounce the phenomenon of Satanism in the Catholic Church. The crime of her cursing happened in Italy, performed by Italian fallen priests: therefore, it would have been logical for the Vatican, in Rome, to start a formal investigation into Satanism, looking for the causes that drive ordained priests to renegade God, renounce eternal life, and embrace the cult of Satan instead. If the hierarchy had done so, other scandalous events such as the repeated cases of pedophilia would have been better understood – and perhaps avoided – in light of the infiltration of Freemasonic elements in the Church, with an aim to discrediting the Church in the eyes of the world. As we will see in the section Freemasonry and Satanism, the abuse of children is completely in line with the ‘requirements’ of the church of Satan for its adepts. The defilement and, possibly, the ultimate sacrifice of an innocent – and children of course represent The Innocent, par excellence – is Satan’s attempt to ape the Passion of Jesus, to repeat it for his own glory and the damnation of the priests performing it. [clxxiv]

The endnote to which “[clxxiv]” refers is, well, you’ll have to see for yourself, after the jump. (Warning: it’s disturbing.) Also: a PDF file of Viggiano’s thesis, in case she deletes it.

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The day before Yale’s Edward Barnaby fired Margherita Viggiano—the graduate student and art-history T.A. who criticized her classmate for discussing the Virgin Mary’s “boobs”—a number of undergraduates who were enrolled in the famous art history lecture discovered that she had uploaded to the course’s server a long, bizarre PDF file about Yale’s art collection.

One of those students provided IvyGate with a copy of the PDF file. He tells us:

[The PDF] was visible to all the students. From what I’ve heard, [Viggiano] also sent out threatening emails to many of the other TAs, mostly relating to her Catholic faith and how she felt oppressed by Yale College. The “handout” contains lots of strange things about mysticism, Satanism, Freemasons, and just general insults to the University, including calling on students to sue for being taught secular lies. She also asserts that Yale has some kind of mafia connections.

He’s not joking. In a series of bracketed comments sprinkled throughout five pages of a book excerpt (taken from a history of Yale’s Art Gallery), Viggiano accuses her employer of, among other things, colluding with a clandestine network of Freemasons; arranging art with “satanic symbolism” in order to corrupt undergraduate students; organizing slander against various individuals; and being, in Viggiano’s wording, “a new Leviathan, the New-England sea-monster.”

A fifth-year graduate student in comparative literature, Viggiano openly doubts Yale’s integrity, frequently intimating that sinister forces steer decisions supposedly made by its administration. A sampling:

“Pact with the Devil”

Jarves had expected to sell the pictures individually in order to raise the necessary funds, but the day before the auction [typical Yale style] he learned that the College would only permit the sale of the collection en bloc [they had no right to do so, but they wanted to buy the collection for nothing]. Jarves was devastated [see what happens when you enter a pact with the devil].

“Freemason secret-societies”

The College bid $22, 000, and no further bids being offered, the collection was sold to Yale [that’s how they do it.] There appear to have been several reasons why no one bid against Yale for the collection [Freemasonic secret-societies have an internal system to relay information].

We’ve reached out to Viggiano for comment, re: the handout, but haven’t yet received a response. So much more (plus a copy of the original PDF file) after the jump:

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Around noon on Wednesday, the Assistant Dean of Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences removed a fifth-year comparative literature graduate student named Margherita Viggiano (pictured) from her teaching duties in Professor Alexander Nemerov’s crazy-popular art history course. Apparently Viggiano wasn’t getting along with other teaching fellows, whom Viggiano told in an email on Monday that she “[has] been mobbed and discriminated against in spite of the paradoxical fact that [she] was the only critic to share the artists’ inner frame of reference: Catholicism.”

In response, Viggiano fired off several essay-length emails in which she calls Edward Barnaby, the Assistant Dean and English professor, a “corrupted hypocrite”; “the opposite of professionalism”; “an accomplice of academic dishonesty”; and accuses Barnaby of discriminating against her for being a Catholic woman. (Among many, many other things.)

Some time after sending her last email at 3:49 PM, Viggiano posted her exchange with Barnaby on one of her blogs. Around 9:30 PM, Viggiano mysteriously deleted it—but not before IvyGate saved the whole thing.

Called “A warning to future generations of students,” Viggiano’s exchange with Barnaby reveals the professional antagonism, bitter jealousy, and religious tension—real or imagined—between a devout Catholic and the rest of Yale University. Eat your heart out, William F. Buckley, Jr.

Full text of the emails, after the jump: Read the rest of this entry »