Taxil hoax
These included the adventures of one Dr. Bataille, a surgeon serving in the French merchant navy who has infiltrated the Freemasons and observes their evil rituals as they occur all over the world.
[2] As Dr. Bataille's tale unfolds, he introduces Diana Vaughan, a former high priestess of Palladism who has converted to Catholicism and is in grave danger of assassination from vengeful Freemasons.
[3] Nine years later he told an American magazine that he at first thought readers would recognize his tales as "amusement pure and simple"—too outlandish to be true—but when he realized they believed them and that there was "lots of money" to be made in publishing them, he continued to perpetrate the hoax.
[2] Léo Taxil was the pen name of Marie Joseph Gabriel Antoine Jogand-Pagès, who had been accused earlier of libel regarding a book he wrote called The Secret Loves of Pope Pius IX.
The other is the kingdom of Satan... At this period, however, the partisans of evil seems to be combining together, and to be struggling with united vehemence, led on or assisted by that strongly organized and widespread association called the Freemasons.
The book contained many tales about her encounters with incarnate demons, one of whom, a devil snake, was supposed to have written prophecies on her back with its tail, and another who played the piano while in the shape of a crocodile.
[6] Diana was supposedly involved in Satanic Freemasonry but was redeemed when one day she professed admiration for Joan of Arc, at whose name the demons were put to flight.
[7] An 1892 French book Le Diable au XIXe siècle (The Devil in the 19th Century", 1892), written by "Dr. Bataille" (actually Jogand-Pagès himself)[8] alleged that Palladists were Satanists based in Charleston, South Carolina, headed by the American Freemason Albert Pike and created by the Italian liberal patriot and author Giuseppe Mazzini.
[3] Taxil's confession was printed, in its entirety, in the Parisian newspaper Le Frondeur, on April 25, 1897, titled: Twelve Years Under the Banner of the Church, The Prank Of Palladism.
The confession of Taxil, the French Free-thinker, who first exposed Catholics and then Masons, makes interesting reading bearing on the present situation today.
The crimes I laid at their door were so grotesque, so impossible, so widely exaggerated, I thought everybody would see the joke and give me credit for originating a new line of humor.
"Ah, the jolly evenings I spent with my fellow authors hatching out new plots, new, unheard of perversions of truth and logic, each trying to outdo the other in organized mystification.
