The learned Pope Sylvester II allegedly visits…

The learned Pope Sylvester II allegedly visits the Nine Unknown Men, a secret society supposedly founded by the Indian Emperor Asoka around 270 BCE.

According to the legend, upon his conversion to Buddhism after a massacre during one of his wars, the Emperor founded the society of the Nine to preserve and develop knowledge that would be dangerous to humanity if it fell into the wrong hands.

The Nine were also charged by Asoka with manipulating the culture of India to present an image of a backwards and mystically oriented people to the outside world in order to conceal the advanced scientific knowledge that was being accumulated within.

Occult writers such as nineteenth-century Frenchman Louis Jacolliot, British-born adventure writer Talbot Mundy, and later Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier in their Morning of the Magicians, propagated the story of the Nine claiming that the society occasionally revealed itself to wise outsiders such as Pope Sylvester II who was said to have received, among other things, training in supernatural powers and a robotic talking head from the group.

Sylvester II dies in early 1003.

The patricius (an aristocratic military leader) John Crescentius III, a Roman noble who holds power in the city in opposition to Emperor Otto III, nominates a Roman native named Sicco who, before entering the priesthood, had been married and had three sons who also became bishops.

Sicco becomes Pope John XVII on June 13.

The previous legitimate Pope John is generally considered to be John XV (985–996).

John XVI (997–998) was an antipope, according to conventional wisdom, and thus his regnal number XVI should have been reused.

But this does not occur, and the sequencing will never be corrected.

The new pope dies within the calendar year, however, and his successor Fasanius, the son of a Roman priest named Leo, is also nominated by Crescentius: he will take the regnal name of John XVIII.