Harvey 2008

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Lucifer in the City of Light: The Palladium Hoax and “Diabolical Causality” in Fin De Siècle France David Allen Harvey Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, Volume 1, Number 2, Winter 2006, pp. 177-206 (Article) Published by University of Pennsylvania Press DOI: 10.1353/mrw.0.0078 For additional information about this article Access provided by Washington University @ St. Louis (22 Aug 2013 11:13 GMT) http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mrw/summary/v001/1.2.harvey.html

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Transcript of Harvey 2008

  • Lucifer in the City of Light: The Palladium Hoax and DiabolicalCausality in Fin De Sicle France

    David Allen Harvey

    Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, Volume 1, Number 2, Winter 2006, pp.177-206 (Article)

    Published by University of Pennsylvania PressDOI: 10.1353/mrw.0.0078

    For additional information about this article

    Access provided by Washington University @ St. Louis (22 Aug 2013 11:13 GMT)

    http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mrw/summary/v001/1.2.harvey.html

    http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mrw/summary/v001/1.2.harvey.html
  • Lucifer in the City of LightThe Palladium Hoax and Diabolical Causality

    in Fin de Siecle France

    DAV I D A L L E N H A R V E YNew College of Florida

    The fin de siecle was a time of intense political conflict and recurrent publicscandal in France. After overcoming its monarchist foes at the ballot box andenjoying a brief period of stability in the early 1880s, the Third Republiclurched almost without interruption through a series of Affairs: Boulang-ism, Panama, and the Dreyfus controversy. The volatility of fin de siecleFrench politics reflected underlying social tensions, as rapid urbanization andindustrialization, the rise of mass political movements of the left and right,and rapidly changing cultural mores undermined many of the certainties onwhich bourgeois life rested. Among French Catholics, these fears were com-pounded by the rise of militantly secular regimes in both France and Italy;the end of the temporal authority of the pope; the collapse of hopes for amonarchist restoration with the death of the Count of Chambord, the lastLegitimist pretender, in 1883; and the experience of national decline, whichwas brought home painfully by humiliating defeat in the Franco-PrussianWar.1 The conflicts that Herman Lebovics, writing about a slightly later pe-

    I presented a preliminary version of this article at the Western Society for FrenchHistory annual meeting at Colorado Springs in October 2005. I would like to thankthe participants in that panelLynn Sharp, Naomi Andrews, Jonathan Beecher, andKathryn Edwardsfor their comments on the conference paper, and the editors andreviewers of Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft for their suggestions for its further develop-ment as an article. I would also like to thank my student, Erin Mahaney, for herwillingness to pursue what ultimately turned out to be a wild goose chase in lookingfor denials or other responses to the Palladium hoax in the libraries and archives ofCharleston, South Carolina.

    1. For antimodernism and the French Legitimist Right, see Steven Kale, Legiti-mism and the Reconstruction of French Society, 18521883 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana StateUniversity Press, 1992), and Marvin Brown, The Comte de Chambord: The Third Re-publics Uncompromising King (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1967).

    Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft (Winter 2006)Copyright 2006 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.

  • 178 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft Winter 2006

    riod, has described as the wars over cultural identity left many Frenchmenin both camps willing to believe the worst about their antagonists.2 A clevertrickster, the journalist Leo Taxil, was able to take advantage of this situationby means of a spectacular hoax that lasted over a decade.

    Almost forgotten today, the Palladium Affair captivated and frightenedthousands of French readers, mostly conservative Catholics, in the final yearsof the nineteenth century. The story of the Palladium, an alleged global sa-tanic conspiracy led by Freemasonry against legitimate civil and religiousorder, was revealed in a series of publications between 1885 and 1897, mostnotably in Taxils magnum opus, Le diable au XIXeme siecle, the principalsubject of this article. Lurid, sensationalistic, and nearly two thousand pageslong, Le diable au XIXeme siecle combined political polemic with pulp fictionadventure and exoticism, a formula that quickly made it a success and ulti-mately a cause celebre. Ultimately, however, the Palladium was revealed as afraud in April 1897 by the man who had done the most to publicize it.

    Taxils hoax or fumisterie, which we will examine shortly, was successful,I will maintain, because his inventions dovetailed perfectly with the preju-dices, fears, and modes of thought of his readers. The worldview presentedin Le diable au XIXeme siecle is starkly Manichean: good versus evil, darknessversus light, a world in which sinister forces guide human destinies throughmeans imperceptible to the casual observer. Leon Poliakov has coined theterm diabolical causality to describe a mentality in which the evils of thisworld are attributable to a malevolent entity or organization, the Jews, forexample.3 In one of the few scholarly articles on the Palladium Affair, W. R.Jones has noted that Taxils conservative Catholic audience to a large degreealready shared this mentality, writing that the sterile thought-world of latenineteenth century French Catholicism, insecure and uncertain of itself inthe face of the new science and the new politics, was prepared to believe theworst about the motives of its enemies and to suspect that the source of thechurchs discomforts might be found in some gigantic Satanic plot.4 Forreasons that will become apparent below, I will argue that Poliakovs conceptof diabolical causality is particularly relevant to understanding the courseand impact of the Palladium Affair.

    2. Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars Over Cultural Identity (Ithaca, N.Y.:Cornell University Press, 1992).

    3. Leon Poliakov, La causalite diabolique: Essai sur lorigine des persecutions (Paris:Calmann-Levy, 1980), 10.

    4. W. R. Jones, Palladism and the Papacy: An Episode of French Anticlericalismin the Nineteenth Century, Journal of Church and State 12, no. 3 (1970): 456.

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    Political anti-Semitism, Poliakovs primary concern, was certainly one re-sponse of the beleaguered right to the challenges of modernity. Edouard Dru-monts La France juive charged that two hundred Jewish families weremanipulating the French Republic and leading it to its ruin. Drumont con-tinued to publicize these charges in his successful newspaper, La Libre Parole,and was a virulent critic of Captain Dreyfus and other prominent FrenchJews. Nor was Drumont an isolated figure; the integral nationalist CharlesMaurras, another prominent anti-Dreyfusard, also condemned Jews, alongwith Protestants and Freemasons, as foreign and subversive elements withinan eternal, Catholic France. The most famous anti-Semitic screed of the pe-riod, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was drafted by Russian ultranationalists,but plagiarized to a large degree a French work, the Dialogue aux enfers ofMaurice Joly.5

    Frances rather tiny Jewish minority was not, however, the only scapegoatthat conspiracy theorists blamed for Frances woes. An equally popular, andin many ways more plausible enemy was Freemasonry. As Philip Nord hasdemonstrated, Freemasons were among the most devoted proponents of theRepublican cause in nineteenth-century France, and an estimated 40 percentof the civilian ministers of the Third Republic from 1877 to 1914 wereMasons.6 Anti-Masonic literature, a staple on the French right since the lateeighteenth century, grew even more vitriolic as the nineteenth century ad-vanced and Masonrys dastardly plans for the subversion of Catholicism metwith apparent success. In response to the 1884 papal encyclical, HumanumGenus, which we will discuss below, Mgr. Armand-Joseph Fava, bishop ofGrenoble, launched a monthly journal exclusively dedicated to the battleagainst the lodges, La Franc-Maconnerie demasquee.7 Mgr. Leon Meurins LaFranc-Maconnerie, Synagogue du Satan (1893), and Paul Rosens Satan et Cie

    5. For anti-Semitism and the new right, see Eugen Weber, France: Fin de Siecle(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986); Eugen Weber, Action Francaise:Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth Century France (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UniversityPress, 1962); William Irvine, The Boulanger Affair Reconsidered: Royalism, Boulangism,and the Origins of the Radical Right in France (New York: Oxford University Press,1989). For the French origins and subsequent development of the Protocols of the Eldersof Zion, see Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspir-acy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (New York: Harper & Row, 1967).

    6. Philip G. Nord, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 15.

    7. Michel Jarrige, LEglise et les Francs-macons dans la tourmente: Croisade de la revueLa Franc-maconnerie demasquee (18841899) (Paris: Editions Arguments, 1999),36.

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    (1888) both attacked Freemasonry as not simply misguided, but fundamen-tally evil and malevolent, setting the stage for Taxils polemical work.8

    Accompanying both anti-Semitism and anti-Masonry was a growing inter-est in the supernatural, magic, and the occult, and preoccupation with hiddensatanic forces. The 1880s witnessed a lively and multifaceted occult revival,as both the Theosophical Society of Helena P. Blavatsky, an import from theEnglish-speaking world, and a revived Ordre Martiniste, led by the youthfuloccultists Stanislas de Guaita and Gerard Encausse, competed for adherentsand attention, particularly among young bohemian intellectuals and avant-garde artists. The most influential work in this vein, however, was not aproduct of either esoteric school, but rather Joris-Karl Huysmanss novel La-bas, which posited the existence of satanic sects practicing sacrilegious blackmasses in the heart of Paris and casting spells and curses on the devout. Huys-mans was not alone, however; the journalist Jules Bois, a friend and admirerof the novelist, published a series of exposes on satanism and other heresiesin contemporary France, printed in book form as Les petites religions de Parisand Le Satanisme et la magie. Huysmans and Bois both went public with theiraccusations of satanism in 1893 following the mysterious death of JosephBoullan, an apostate priest who was the inspiration for Dr. Johannes of La-bas, whom Huysmans and Bois both accused Guaita of murdering throughthe use of black magic.9 These charges led first to an angry exchange ofletters, and ultimately to the clashing of swords in a duel, which ended with-out incident. A society in which charges of envoutement (murder at a distancethrough bewitchment) carried sufficient credibility that Guaita felt compelledto defend his honor was surely fertile ground for the satanic conspiracy leg-ends that Taxil would compose.

    Born Gabriel Jogand-Pages in Marseilles in 1854, Leo Taxil was a latter-daymember of what Robert Darnton has described as the literary under-

    8. Leon Meurin, La franc-maconnerie: Synagogue de Satan (Paris: V. Retaux, 1893);Paul Rosen, Satan et Cie: Association universelle pour la destruction de lordre social (Tour-nai: H. Castermann, 1888).

    9. Joris-Karl Huysmans, La-bas (Paris: Tresse et Stock, 1891); Jules Bois, Les petitesreligions de Paris (Paris: Leon Chaillez, 1894); Jules Bois, Le Satanisme et la magie (Paris:Leon Chaillez, 1895). For the strange life and death of Joseph Boullan, and the feudthat Huysmans and Bois waged with Guaita, see Joanny Bricaud, Labbe Boullan (Doc-teur Johannes de La-bas): Sa vie, sa doctrine, et ses pratiques magiques (Paris: Chacornac,1927); James Laver, The First Decadent: Being the Strange Life of J. K. Huysmans (Lon-don: Faber & Faber, 1954); and David Allen Harvey, Beyond Enlightenment: Occultismand Politics in Modern France (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005).

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    ground of scurrilous polemicists and Grub-Street hack writers,10 beginninghis career as a militant anticlerical. His outrageous statements (including thecharge that the clergy of Notre Dame were secretly repairing old tortureinstruments in the catacombs beneath the cathedral for use following thecoming restoration of the monarchy) led him to be condemned for violationsof the press laws on several occasions by the 1870s Government of MoralOrder. The prefect of the Bouches-du-Rhone reported in a May 4, 1884,letter to his counterpart in Paris that, during his stay in Marseilles, M. Jogandassiduously frequented houses of ill repute and women of easy virtue. Dur-ing this period, Taxil also apparently doubled as a police informant, as thesame report went on to note that it is very true that M. Jogand gave infor-mation to the Marseilles police regarding the republican circles he fre-quented.11 Taxil fled to Geneva in 1876 to escape a prison sentence inFrance, but was later expelled from Switzerland following what the Genevanpolice described as repeated allegations against him . . . of fraudulent adver-tising, with the goal of profiting from public credulity, notably through thesale of supposed aphrodisiac pills called bonbons du serail (harem candies).12

    Suddenly, in 1885, after nearly two decades as a militant anticlerical polemi-cist, Taxil underwent an apparent conversion, becoming an ultramontaneCatholic and waging an increasingly vitriolic campaign against the Masonicorganizations to which he had briefly belonged.13

    Following this conversion, Taxil published a series of anti-Masonic tracts,in which he began to develop many of the ideas which would later be woveninto Le diable au XIXeme siecle. Beginning in 1885 with Les freres trois-points,Taxil went on to publish such works as Les soeurs maconnes, Les mysteres de la

    10. Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).

    11. Police report of May 4, 1884, excerpted in Eugen Weber, Satan franc-macon:La mystification de Leo Taxil (Paris: Julliard, 1964), 193.

    12. Ibid., 194.13. Given his prominence in the anti-Masonic movement, in which Taxils status

    as repentant sinner allowed him to speak with the authority of a former insider, it issomewhat surprising that Leo Taxil was a Freemason for only a few months. He wasadmitted to the Parisian lodge Temple des Amis de lHonneur Francais, an affiliateof the Grand Orient, on February 21, 1881, only to be expelled by a disciplinarytribunal of the lodge that October 17. Taxil presented his account of his brief Masonicconspiracy and subsequent repentance in a deliberately deceptive autobiography, enti-tled Confessions dun ex-libre penseur (Paris: Letouzay et Ane, n.d.). A very differentaccount is presented in a recent publication sponsored by the Grand Orient, BernardMuracciole, Leo Taxil: Vrai fumiste et faux frere (Paris: Editions Maconniques deFrance, 1998).

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    Franc-Maconnerie, and Le culte du Grand Architecte (all in 1886), La Francemaconnique (1888), Les assassinats maconniques (1889), and Y a-t-il des femmesdans la franc-maconnerie? (1891). The majority of these were printed by a singlepublisher, Letouzay et Ane, in editions of around thirty thousand copies each.Taxils new Catholic connections helped him in these ventures, first by pro-viding him with a sinecure at the Librairie Saint-Paul, with a monthly salaryof three hundred francs, and also by advertising his works in sympatheticCatholic newspapers and reviews. Michel Jarrige has noted that the editorsof Mgr. Favas La Franc-Maconnerie demasquee were completely taken in, fall-ing into une taxilomanie chronique in which Taxil took on the semi-officialrole of permanent consultant, gaining both credibility and free publicityfrom the sponsorship of a prominent French bishop.14 The culmination ofthese activities, Le diable au XIXeme siecle, was launched in monthly serialform beginning November 20, 1892, and concluding March 20, 1895.Thereafter, Taxil turned briefly to a publication allegedly produced by thePalladist conspiracy itself, Le Palladium regenere et libre, but abandoned thisafter several months for the supposed memoirs of a repentant ex-Palladistpriestess, Diana Vaughan, about whom more will be said later. Le diable auXIXeme siecle, by far the largest and most comprehensive of these works, thusforms the centerpiece of a massive enterprise of deception, which Taxil wasable to maintain for twelve years.15

    Le diable au XIXeme siecle presents numerous challenges of classification.The text presents itself as a mixture of eyewitness testimony and learnedexposition; its central narrative discusses the protagonist Dr. Batailles in-vestigations into Palladism from his initial discovery of the movement in1880 through his encounters with Palladists in Asia and America over thefollowing years. The work also contains numerous asides, in which the first-hand narration is broken in order to discuss a particular theme or topic ingreater detail. These chapters, which are presented as learned treatises of top-ics such as hysteria, spiritualism, necromancy, and fortune-telling, are onlytangentially related to the principal narrative of Le diable au XIXeme siecle, andthere is little effort to integrate them into a coherent framework. Le diable auXIXeme siecle was also a collectively authored text. Taxils most importantcollaborators were Charles Hacks, a childhood friend who, like the fictitiousDoctor Bataille, was a medical doctor who had worked as a shipboardphysician for the Compagnie dExtreme-Orient, and Domenico Margiotta,an Italian who was later rewarded by Leo XIII with the Order of the Holy

    14. Jarrige, LEglise et les Francs-macons, 44.15. Muracciole, Leo Taxil, 3843.

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    Sepulcher. Henry Charles Lea writes that the collaborators laughed loudlyto one another about the unlimited credulity of the public, and amusedthemselves by seeking to outdo one another in the extravagance of theirinventions,16 and some of the phenomena described in Le diable au XIXemesiecle (such as the winged, piano-playing crocodile said to have appeared at aspiritualist seance) are so patently absurd as only to make sense in the contextof this sort of one-upmanship among rival hoaxters. Taxil ultimately had afalling out with his co-authors, who demanded more money and credit fortheir share of the work, and Hacks and Margiotta subsequently withdrewfrom the project.17

    Le diable au XIXeme siecle begins with a chance encounter aboard a Frenchmerchant marine frigate off the coast of Ceylon. The ships physician, Dr.Bataille, meets a repentant member of the Palladium, the Italian merchantGaetano Carbuccia, who told him of satanic ceremonies he had witnessed inCalcutta, in which he had seen Lucifer appear. Believing Carbuccias story,Bataille decided to dedicate himself to exploring and exposing this dangeroussect. Bataille was able to obtain high Masonic titles from a Naples mastermason, Giambattista Peisina, and thus presented himself to the Palladist lead-ers of Asia and America as a foreign Masonic dignitary. Under this false iden-tity, Dr. Bataille was able to gain admittance to Palladist temples and to attendtheir rites, whose secrets he swore to reveal to an unsuspecting public.

    The early chapters of Le diable au XIXeme siecle, which are set primarily inIndia and China, reflect a rather vulgar pulp Orientalism, in which Asianreligious beliefs and practices are distorted or simply falsified for dramaticeffect. Condemning Asia in general, and India in particular, as the centersof the worst superstition, the worst idolatry, Taxil hypothesized that thesecountries have been the theater of a gigantic human revolt against God, and,the objects of an earthly curse from heaven, they still bear the striking markof opprobrium, given for their punishment to the dominion of Satan, whotyrannizes the population . . . and reigns over them as the god of an infernalreligion.18 In this vein, Taxil presents a supposed equivalence of Indian dei-ties with the chief figures of the Western demonological tradition: Brahmabecomes Lucifer, Vishnu is Beelzebub, while the destructive god Shiva is

    16. Henry Charles Lea, Leo Taxil, Diana Vaughan, et lEglise romaine: Histoire dunemystification (Paris: Societe Nouvelle de Librairie et dEdition, 1901), 14.

    17. Lea, Leo Taxil, 22; Arthur Edward Waite, Devil-Worship in France, with DianaVaughan and the Question of Modern Palladism (Boston: Red Wheel, 2003), 24551.

    18. Dr. Bataille (Leo Taxil et al.), Le diable au XIXeme siecle, 2 vols. (Paris: Del-homme et Briguet, 1895), 1:5658.

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    presented as Adonai, the satanic name for the Judeo-Christian deity.19 Taxilcontinues with lurid descriptions of supposed satanic ceremonies, includingone in which Dr. Bataille undergoes a trial of initiation, in which he is cov-ered with serpents who follow the direction of an Indian snake charmer.Bataille describes Indian fakirs who practice grotesque rituals of self-mortification, temple priestesses who allow themselves to be sacrificed alive,and other horrors clearly calculated by Taxil to shock and outrage his readers.

    This part of Batailles fantastic narrative takes place within a temple com-plex called Mahatalawa, supposedly near the colonial metropolis of Calcutta.Bataille describes in detail the ceremonies that occur in each of the seventemples in this hidden location, culminating with a bizarre ritual in an ex-traordinarily grotesque setting. The plain of Dappah, Bataille is told by theEnglish mason Hobbs, is a vast field in which the bodies of the dead are leftunburied to decompose, where Satan, the ignominious angel of death,mixes, moulds, cooks up the horrible and deadly maladies that allow him todecimate, to harvest in dark vessels the human race which he so detests; fromDappah, he unleashes all the scourges, through which he satisfies his hatredof the creatures of God.20 Bataille then goes on to describe the satanic ritualthat occurs in this unhealthy setting:

    Then an abominable scene occurred. All the Indians who were among us spread outinto the plain, and in a few instants, I saw them return, each dragging somethingbehind him. That something was a cadaver, still fresh and probably cast there in themorning; there were some that the vultures and rats had already begun to dismemberand to devour, and whose hideous faces seemed to laugh grotesquely. These corpseswere placed in a circle around the hill, bending and even breaking them to sit themon the ground, their backs turned to the great central stone, on which the greatIndian climbed, after having dressed in a goats head and long white robe that de-scended to his feet. In our turn, we arranged ourselves in the same manner as thecorpses, forming with them a chain alternating between the living and the dead. Tomaintain our dead upright, we held them by the torso, our arms passing behind theirbacks, the left hand seizing the shoulder of the cadaver to the left, the right handholding the waist of the cadaver on the right.21

    The ritual described above, in all its grotesque horror, is clearly a parodyof the chane magnetique of Mesmerist Spiritualism, in which those in atten-

    19. Ibid., 1:82.20. Ibid., 1:148.21. Ibid., 1:15354.

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    dance join hands in a circle in order to evoke the spirits of the dead.22 InDappah, however, the avowed purpose of this gruesome ritual was the miseen circulation of a supernatural force emanated from Lucifer, which circu-lates like an electric fluid and produces the desired magical results, with moreor less success according to the greater or lesser intellectual cooperation ofthe members of the chain. Taxil further asserted that if by chance a true,believing Catholic, loving the only true God, finds himself accidentally insuch a society, and forms one of the links of this chain, the circulation cannottake place, it is blocked, no diabolical magic can be performed. For thisreason, though he noted his repugnance at linking arms with two cadavers,Dr. Bataille declared that he felt no fear or guilt in joining the ceremony,knowing that his presence would prevent it from achieving any ill effects.23

    While pulp Orientalism figures largely in the early sections of Le diable auXIXeme siecle, and likely contributed to its appeal, the real villains of the worklie elsewhere. Taxil observes that while the Indians are in good faith theprincipal actors of these macabre rites, they are but the dupes and puppetsof the European Freemasons, the English colonists affiliated with variousoccultist groups, who associate with them and participate in these lugubrioushorrors.24 There is, throughout Le diable au XIXeme siecle, a profound Anglo-phobia and opposition to the transnational cultural community that theFrench generally designate as les Anglo-Saxons. Dr. Batailles pursuit ofsinister, satanic, Anglo-Saxon Freemasons leads him from Asia to Gibraltar,where, he reported, the Palladium had built a secret laboratory in a networkof underground caves, with the knowledge and permission of the Britishmonarchy, in which poisons, biological weapons such as cholera and bubonicplague, and magic objects for use in satanic rituals were prepared by themost violent and vicious of criminals. Bataille penetrates into the hiddenlaboratories and encounters the worker-inmates who labor there, whom hedescribes as appearing not to belong to humanity, and who crowd aroundhim, boasting of the crimes which had sent them to this strange asylum.25

    English occultists may have been the intellectual masters of the Asian satan-ists that Dr. Bataille met on his travels, but the global conspiracy against

    22. For the rituals of the Spiritualist seance, and a discussion of French Spiritual-isms indebtedness to Mesmerist theories of animal magnetism, see Nicole Edel-man, Voyantes, guerisseuses, et visionnaires en France, 17851914 (Paris: Albin Michel,1995).

    23. Bataille, Le diable au XIXeme siecle, 1:14950.24. Ibid., 1:112.25. Ibid., 1:532, 535.

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    Catholicism was, he discovered, being directed from across the Atlantic.Soon after his return from Asia, therefore, the good doctor traveled to theUnited States, more specifically to Charleston, South Carolina, the Mecca ofmodern satanism in his account. With regard to Charleston, Taxil noted thatthe Rome of the Luciferians is also the holy metropole of slavery, andfurther observed that, in the American Civil War, it was Charleston thatgave the signal of the revolt against the nation.26 Here the focus shifts fromAsian religion to Scottish Rite Freemasonry, and the Grand Commander ofthe Scottish Rite, Albert Pike, is presented as the supreme pontiff of Lucifer.The Palladium, Taxil further reported, had established temples not only inCharleston, but also in Rome, Berlin, Washington, Montevideo, Naples, andCalcutta, all of which were connected by a sort of diabolic telephonecalled the Arcula Mystica. Albert Pike himself, who met personally withLucifer every Friday afternoon at three oclock, did not have to rely on theArcula Mystica, as he possessed a familiar demon in a cage who could in-stantly transport messages for him to any part of the world.27 Taxil alsoclaimed that Pikes Peak, the highest mountain in Colorado, had been namedfor Albert Pike, and that one day, perhaps, it will be the place of pilgrimagefor the Luciferians of the New World.28

    Global Freemasonry, Dr. Bataille soon discovered, had a hidden agenda, onewhich was both spiritual and political. On the spiritual level, its mission wasto combat Catholicism, the only true form of Christianity, to celebrate a cultof Lucifer, and to prepare the way for the coming of the Antichrist. Through-out the work, Taxil distinguishes between satanists and Luciferians, thelatter of whom were said to worship Lucifer as a benevolent deity whilerejecting Adonai, the Christian God, as the spirit of evil. Taxils work chargesthat the Grand Architect of the Universe recognized by Freemasonry is infact Lucifer, and strongly suggests that the God of the Protestants is Luciferas well. The Luciferian creed which Taxil presents mocks and distorts Ma-sonic beliefs in order to make them conform to ultramontane prejudices:

    26. Ibid., 1:316.27. A similar legend surrounded the Parisian occultist Stanislas de Guaita, who, as

    we have seen, was suspected by Huysmans and Bois of having used black magic tokill the heretical pontiff Joseph Boullan in 1893. Guaita denied possessing a familiardemon in a cage, but apparently confided to Gaston Mery that he believed his apart-ment in the rue de Trudaine to be haunted, and that his critics likely mistook thisghost for a demon. See Harvey, Beyond Enlightenment, 11415.

    28. Bataille, Le diable au XIXeme siecle, 1:327.

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    I believe in a generative God, the principle of Good, who for all eternity battlesagainst the destructive God, the principle of Evil. I believe in indestructible Human-ity, renewing and multiplying itself through the centuries. I believe in the future andirrevocable triumph of truth over lies, of virtue over vice, of justice over caprice, ofscience over error, of liberty over despotism, of reason over superstition, of love oversterility, of light over darkness, of good over evil, of the Great Architect of the Uni-verse, our God, over Adonai, the God of the priests.29

    In this regard, Taxil was building upon a century and a half of papal con-demnations of Freemasonry; since Clement XII first condemned the move-ment in 1738, his successors Benedict XIV, Pius VII, Leo XII, Pius VIII,Gregory XVI, and Pius IX had also issued escalating denunciations of Free-masonry as one of Catholicisms most dangerous foes. The 1884 papal encyc-lical Humanum Genus, which condemned the Masonic sect as the servantsof Satan, was therefore but the most extreme articulation of a position thatthe Vatican had maintained since the origins of European Freemasonry.30 Infact, Leo Taxil later revealed that Humanum Genus, issued by Leo XIII, wasthe inspiration for the Palladium hoax. Although the encyclical does not goquite so far as to accuse Freemasonry of actively worshipping Lucifer, it doesaccuse Masons of demonstrating the contimacious pride, the untamed per-fidy, the simulating shrewdness of Satan, and states that it was the realsupreme aim of the Free-Masons to persecute, with untamed hatred, Chris-tianity, and that they will never rest until they see cast to the ground allreligious institutions established by the Pope.31 Nor was Humanum Genus anisolated foray by Leo XIII, who devoted two encyclicals, two apostolic let-ters, and three other pronouncements to the struggle against Freemasonryover the course of his pontificate. Jarrige argues that Leo XIIIs obsessionwith this topic derived from a dualist vision of history that revives, in fact,the Augustinian theory of two antagonistic camps . . . the Church of JesusChrist and its sworn enemy, the kingdom of Satan.32

    29. Bataille, Le diable au XIXeme siecle, 1:126.30. For papal condemnations of the Masonic movement, see Leo XIII, The Letter

    Humanum Genus of the Pope, Leo XIII, Against Free-Masonry and the Spirit of the Age(Charleston, S.C.: Grand Orient of Charleston, 1884), and also Jarrige, LEglise et lesFrancs-macons. For an insightful discussion of Masonic ideology, particularly with re-gard to the Grand Architect of the Universe, see Margaret Jacob, Living the Enlight-enment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1991).

    31. Leo XIII, The Letter Humanum Genus, 36, 26.32. Jarrige, LEglise et les Francs-macons, 57, 61.

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    In addition to linking Freemasonry to the worship of Lucifer, Taxil alsotook care to stress its association with political radicalism and with the de-tested anticlerical regimes of France and Italy. In this regard, Taxil was tread-ing on more familiar territory, for anti-Masonic commentators had associatedthe lodges with plotting revolution and civil unrest for over a century. Begin-ning with Joseph de Maistre, who in 1796 declared that the Revolution hada satanic character, and the abbe Augustin Barruel, who wrote the follow-ing year that the Revolution was planned, premeditated, conspired, re-solved; everything was the effect of the most profound villainy, Frenchconservatives interpreted the Revolution of 1789 as an evil conspiracy, ledby the Masons, the philosophes, or even perhaps the Jews.33 After discussingstrange phenomena observed at the time of the execution of Gaston Crem-ieux, leader of the revolutionary government of Marseilles in 1871, Taxilspeculated that Lucifer or some other demon was lamenting the tragicdeath of a communard leader, his friend and accomplice. Later in the work,when Taxils narrator meets Adriano Lemmi, the current leader of the Pallad-ist conspiracy, he remarks upon the striking resemblance that the Jewishbanker and master Mason bears to the fallen Communard leader. In a sacrile-gious Palladist catechism, Lazarus is described as the emblem of the proletar-iat that will rise up one day at the call of Freemasonry.34

    The political aspect of Taxils magnum opus, however, focuses less onFrance than on Italy, a nation whose relevance for ultramontane Catholicswas obvious. The Palladium, Taxil declared, had been founded on September20, 1870, the very day in which the Italian state incorporated the Papal Statesinto its territory, so that, High Masonry was thus constituted . . . with asovereign Luciferian pontiff the same day in which the Piedmontese usurperseized Rome and proclaimed the abolition of the temporal power of thepopes . . . Here, most certainly, was the direct intervention of Satan . . .Palladism was founded and put to work to prepare the reign of the Anti-christ.35 Taxil offered a detailed history of the ruling house of Savoy, arguingthat Victor Emmanuel was a descendant of the antipope Felix V and that hisancestor Amedee VIII had been an initiate of the Templars. According toTaxil, the Italian nationalist leaders Mazzini and Garibaldi were close collabo-rators with the Palladium, and the grand master of Italian Freemasonry, Adri-

    33. Maistre cited in Poliakov, La causalite diabolique, 177; Augustin Barruel, Mem-oires pour servir a lhistoire du jacobinisme, 2 vols. (Chire en Montreuil: Diffusion de lapensee francaise, 1975), 1:42.

    34. Bataille, Le diable au XIXeme siecle, 1:5152, 438, 203.35. Bataille, Le diable au XIXe siecle, 1:34647; Weber, Satan franc-macon, 22.

  • 189Harvey Lucifer in the City of Light

    ano Lemmi, a Livornese financier and longtime friend of Mazzini who hadbeen known as the banker of the Italian revolution, had assumed controlof the global organization following Pikes death in 1891. Taxil argued thatthe Italian monarch was the puppet of Masonic organizations, and blamedLemmi in particular for fomenting hostility between Italy and France.36 Inan article in the Revue Mensuelle, Taxils collaborator Domenico Margiottaelaborated this theme even further, quoting Lemmi as declaring that the twothings he most hated were God and France, and declaring his political goalsto be the strengthening of the Triple Alliance linking Italy to Germany andAustria-Hungary and the recovery of Savoy, Nice, Corsica, and Tunisia fromFrench rule.37

    The global satanic conspiracy had already carried out several assassinations,including those of the Italian prime minister Camilo Cavour and the Ameri-can president Abraham Lincoln, whose assassin, John Wilkes Booth, was saidto be revered as a martyr, with his remains secretly buried in the PalladiumsCharleston temple. The Charleston temple was also said to possess and reverea collection of other singular relics, including the skull of the martyred Tem-plar master Jacques Molay, supposedly brought to America by Isaac Long in1801, and the severed tail of the lion of St. Mark, which was said to havebeen seized in celestial combat by the demon Asmodee.38 (Dr. Bataille, how-ever, somehow found the opportunity to examine these relics within theCharleston temple itself, and through cranial measurements determined thatMolays supposed skull was not that of a European).39

    Even those radicals who were not consciously participants in the Palladi-ums global scheme were made to serve its purposes. Taxil wrote that anar-chists and nihilists while believing themselves atheists, are true servants ofthe devil and the most blind instruments of his rage of destruction againsthumanity.40 Anarchy, in killing bourgeois it does not hate personally, be-lieves it slays bourgeois society; Freemasonry, in inspiring these murders, infomenting social revolution, seeks a general upheaval in the politics of na-tions, and we shall see to what it is intended to lead.41 Here he argued thatthe anarchists of the fin de siecle were the direct heirs of the carbonari and

    36. Bataille, Le diable au XIXeme siecle, 1:439, 45556.37. Quoted in Hermann Gruber, Leo Taxils Palladismus-Roman, 3 vols. (Berlin:

    Verlag der Germania, 1898), 2:96, 99.38. Bataille, Le diable au XIXeme siecle, 1:400, 71314.39. Ibid., 1:400.40. Ibid., 2:54243.41. Ibid., 2:58283.

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    revolutionary nationalists of midcentury, and that both were the unknowinginstruments of the Palladist conspiracy, writing: The series of anarchist at-tacks that have multiplied over the past twenty years . . . is it not the exactreplica of the series of revolutionary attacks that, for twenty years, from 1850to 1870, stupefied Europe? . . . Are we not in the presence of a criminalpolitical organization, at the end of the nineteenth century as in its thirdquarter? At the same time, Taxil also charged the Palladists with inspiringthe Kulturkampf, the campaign of the predominantly Lutheran (and avowedlyanti-Socialist) Second Reich to reduce the political influence of Catholicismin 1870s Germany, and identified the German-Jewish banker Gerson vonBleichroder as one of the supreme directors of the Palladist order, with au-thority over its economic operations worldwide.42 While acknowledging thathe lacked proof of his assertions, Taxils narrator, Dr. Bataille, speculated thatI have a secret presentiment that one day I will lay hands on a material,indisputable proof of the direction of the Central Committee of the Interna-tional Brotherhood (of Freemasonry).43 He dismissed the obvious contradic-tions and conflicts among groups that, in his view, formed part of a commonsatanic conspiracy, by declaring that all the principle articles of revolutionaryprograms and all the so-called national or international demands are onlyaccessory means of the sects, and that the real and only article of the Revolu-tionary program, without distinction of parties or schools, is War on Godand on His Church! 44

    Taxil wrote of the 1870s, the period in which the Palladium was said tohave launched its plans for world domination: In those days, in all the na-tions of the world, religious persecutions had taken on an increasingly sharptone. Germany was in the throes of the Kulturkampf, while in Italy andFrance, the governments of these nations, poisoned by Freemasons and Sa-tanists, worked feverishly to ruin gradually the institutions of the Church.There was, everywhere, and no one knew why, a resurgence of hatred againstthe papacy, against the Catholic clergy, against the religious orders. Taxilargued that this was no mere coincidence, nor was it a reaction to the increas-ingly intransigent stance of the Vatican itself, but that it was rather evidenceof a global, diabolical conspiracy against the established order: In certaincircumstances that the devil believes more favorable than others, he, who isin direct communication with his vicar of the Directorate of Charleston,gives him orders, which are communicated to Universal Freemasonry, that

    42. Ibid., 1:730, 367.43. Ibid., 2:583.44. Ibid., 2:563.

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    is to say to the Luciferian leaders of the various rites, and these orders, socommunicated by the secret messengers of the international sect, have fortheir goal to multiply the vexations against Catholics and to prevent them,by all possible means, from devoting themselves to the manifestations of theirfaith and the practice of their religion.45

    However important were the ongoing combats against the political influ-ence of Catholicism, Taxil argued that the ultimate confrontation still lay inthe future. In its headquarters in Charleston, the Palladium was already pre-paring for the coming of the Antichrist, whose great-grandmother, SophieWalder, was a high priestess of the order. Taxils fictional protagonist, Dr.Bataille, met Walder on several occasions, and describes his supposed conver-sations with this remarkable young woman.

    Yes, it is so, the young miss told me with an air of absolute conviction; Father saysthat I was chosen by our God. I am the predestined stem. I myself will be, at agethirty-three, the mother of a girl who will herself, at age thirty-three, give birth toanother girl. There will thus be a succession of girls, born of me, who will be mothersat thirty-three years of age. This is written, in an irrevocable manner, in the book ofdestiny, and the last of these girls of my descent will be the mother of the Anti-Christ. . . . Ah, doctor, what glory! How many women would envy me if they knewthat in my direct line will be born he who will forever change the face of the world!Father assures me, and he is not wrong on these matters, that the number of popes ofAdonai is limited, and that there will not be many more generations to see the last ofthem. . . . Then the maleachs will be powerless, and the reign of the Good God willbegin for the general happiness of humanity!46

    The hero and protagonist of Le diable au XIXeme siecle, Doctor Bataille,is, as we have seen, a fictional character, a narrator created by Taxil to recountand give credibility to his inventions. Other major characters, such as SophieWalder and Diana Vaughan, are similarly fictional. The arch-villain of thepiece, by contrast, was a real historical figure, with regard to whom a substan-tial body of evidence exists. The alleged Luciferian pontiff, Albert Pike, wasindeed elected grand master of the southern branch of the Scottish Rite inCharleston just before the Civil War, and held this rank until his death in1891. Born in Massachusetts in 1809, Pike was a highly talented autodidactand linguist, who was accepted at Harvard but could not afford to studythere. Pike moved to Arkansas to seek his fortune, where he gained both

    45. Ibid., 1:272.46. Ibid., 1:382.

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    wealth and fame as a journalist, lawyer, and power broker in the Whig Partyin the 1840s and 1850s. When the Civil War came, Pike was commissionedas a general in an Arkansas regiment and was given responsibility over theIndian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) with the mission of securing NativeAmerican support for the Confederacy. Following a scandal after the Battleof Pea Ridge on March 8, 1862, in which Cherokee warriors under hisauthority were accused of scalping Union soldiers, Pike was relieved of hiscommand. He spent the period from May 1863 to April 1864 on a farm inrural Arkansas, compiling and rewriting the rituals for the various grades ofthe Scottish Rite, certainly an odd occupation for a Confederate generalduring wartime, but a pursuit apparently more fitting to his interests andabilities.47 The product of Pikes wartime labors, Morals and Dogma of theAncient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, was published in 1871 andreissued repeatedly thereafter as an authoritative text by the Scottish Rite.Pikes religious and philosophical views, as expressed in Morals and Dogma,could hardly have been pleasing to Taxils ultramontane readers, as they areindicative of a broadly tolerant and ecumenical deism, which celebrated thedeity in Masonic terms as the Grand Architect of the Universe and dis-cerned elements of a pure natural faith in all of the worlds major religions.Pike was not, however, a satanist; in fact, he denied the existence of the devil,calling him merely the personification of Atheism or Idolatry, and he wasone of the foreign Masonic dignitaries who broke relations with FrancesGrand Orient in 1877 when the latter removed belief in a supreme being asa criterion for membership.48

    The primary reason why Taxil chose Pike as his chief villain, rather thanany of the other Masonic dignitaries of Europe and America, would appearto have been a stinging reply that Pike wrote in response to Humanum Genuson behalf of the Scottish Rite. Pike condemned what he saw as the cowardiceof the Grand Lodge of England in seeking to disassociate itself from theContinental Masons, declaring I did not propose to stand upon the defen-sive . . . nor was I inclined to apologize for the audacity of Free-Masonry indaring to exist and to be on the side of the great principles of free govern-ment.49 He turned the tables on Leo XIII, arguing that it was not Freema-

    47. Biographical information on Albert Pike is taken from Walter Lee Brown, ALife of Albert Pike (Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 1997).

    48. Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freema-sonry (Richmond, Va.: L. H. Jenkins, 1958), 102, 208.

    49. Albert Pike, A Reply for the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Free-Masonry tothe Letter Humanum Genus of Pope Leo XIII (Charleston, S.C.: Grand Orient ofCharleston, 1884), 45.

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    sonry, but rather the pretensions of the Vatican, that posed the greatest threatto world peace and stability, calling Humanum Genus a declaration of waragainst the Human Race.50 Pike wrote:

    Nowhere in the world has Free-Masonry ever conspired against any Governmententitled to its obedience or to mens respect. Wherever now there is a ConstitutionalGovernment which respects the rights of men and of the people and the public opin-ion of the world, it is the loyal supporter of that Government. It has never taken payfrom armed Despotism, or abetted persecution. It has fostered no Borgias; no stran-glers or starvers to death of other Popes, like Boniface VII; no poisoners, like Alexan-der VI and Paul III. It has no roll of beatified Inquisitors or other murderers; and ithas never, in any country, been the enemy of the people, the suppresser of scientifictruth, the stifler of the God-given right of free inquiry as to the great problems,intellectual and spiritual, presented by the Universe, the extorter of confession by therack, the burner of women and of the exhumed bodies of the dead. It has never beenthe enemy of the human race and the curse and dread of Christendom.51

    To drive his points home, Pike chronicled at length the crimes of theSpanish Inquisition, accusing Leo XIII of wishing to open a new age ofpersecution of heresy, claiming that if it still had the power, the Church ofRome would today sentence Darwin and his disciples even to march in pro-cession in an Auto da Fe grotesquely clad as heretics [and] burn them alive, asit would with great rejoicing have done three centuries ago.52 Given thepolemical character of Pikes response to Humanum Genus, it would be fairto describe him as a staunch opponent of the Vatican. Certainly many ultra-montane Catholics saw him as their enemy, and, as the Palladium Affairwould demonstrate, were willing to believe the wild accusations that Taxilwould make in his regard.

    Although Taxil did not cite Pikes response to Humanum Genus directly,some of the more specific statements from Pikes text clearly informed theway that Taxil framed Le Diable au XIXeme siecle. For example, Pike stressedthat Freemasonry welcomed all those who believed in a supreme being, de-claring that it receives into its Lodges the Christian of every sect, the He-brew, the Moslem, and the Parsee, and unites them in the holy bonds ofBrotherhood. We have seen above that Taxil presented the peoples of Indiaand China as the willing dupes of the Western occultists, and that his attacks

    50. Pike, Reply, 28.51. Ibid., 67.52. Ibid., 25.

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    on the master Mason Adriano Lemmi drew upon traditional anti-Semiticstereotypes. On another occasion, Pike stated that if its principles were whatthe Pope alleges them to be, there would not be thousands of clergymen,Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and of other denominations, members of Ma-sonic Lodges in all the English-speaking countries, and very many of themmembers of the higher Bodies of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite.53

    A number of Anglo-Saxon clergymen appear as secret followers of Lucifer inTaxils work, which comes close to asserting that Protestantism in its entiretyis satanic. Pike also told the story of an eighteenth-century inquisitor, JosephTorrubia, who infiltrated the lodges of Spain under false pretenses and col-lected information that led to the suppression of the order and the arrest andexecution of many of its members, remarking that undoubtedly Pope LeoXIII would consider it laudable for any good Catholic now, if need were, toimitate the example of the Father Joseph Torrubia . . . although all honestmen ought to regard such a service as base and infamous, and consider perjuryand betrayal of confidence to be virtues only in the eyes of the Church andnot in those of God.54 Dr. Bataille, Taxils fictional narrator, sets out to domore or less exactly what Pike condemns Torrubia for having done. Clearly,Pikes response to Leo XIII was instructive to Taxil, and not only in provid-ing him with a plausible Luciferian anti-pope.

    Taxils charges that international Freemasonry was engaged in a global satanicconspiracy, not surprisingly, drew indignant responses from the lodges them-selves. The Bulletin Maconnique, the journal of Frances principal Masonicfederation, the Grand Orient, issued a disclaimer of Taxils charges in its June1894 issue, writing that:

    The late Albert Pike was simply the leader of one of many Masonic organizationswhich exist in the United States of America; beyond that group, he had no power,no authority, no preeminence, he was never the subject of an election by membersof other groups. As for Brother Lemmi, he is neither more nor less than the GrandMaster of the Grand Orient of Italy. . . . And with regard to the devil, whose presencein our lodges you affirm, I can assure you that it does not exist; we leave to theChurch the monopoly over this bogeyman, who has been and still remains so profit-able to it.55

    53. Ibid., 22, 31.54. Ibid., 1213.55. Quoted in Weber, Satan franc-macon, 967.

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    The Rivista della Massoneria Italiana dismissed Taxils claims in similar fashion,as an 1895 editorial remarked that it was incredible, at the close of a centuryof scientific discovery, that anyone could believe that an assembly of intel-ligent men, educated in science and art and of sound mind, would pray toSatan, defile the crucifix, or mutilate the consecrated host.56

    Taxil, however, had already anticipated Masonic denials of his charges, andhad built into his text an ingenious way around this dilemma. Freemasonry,he claimed, had a secret doctrine and hidden rites, which were revealed onlyto those who were recognized by the initiates to be capable of receivingthem. In Taxils account, those unsuited for the secret wisdom of the Masonswere awarded a ring, which they wore with pride as the supposed symbol oftheir status as master Masons, but which in fact marked them to the trueinitiates as simpletons with whom it was best not to discuss serious matters.(The source for this revelation would appear to be the Masonic historianJean-Marie Ragon, whose commentary on the ritual for the thirty-seconddegree remarks that, If in conferring this degree, one sees it only as a steptoward Hermetic masonry, one does not give a ring to the recipient, whoreceives it only in obtaining a new grade.)57 In this way, even Freemasonsof the highest rank could in good faith deny the charges of satanism that Taxilmade against their organization, denials that simply proved that they had beendeemed unworthy of initiation to the secret mysteries of the order.

    Freemasons, however, were not the only critics to cast doubts upon theveracity of Taxils claims. The French occultist Gerard Encausse, alias Papus,responded to Taxils charges in a pamphlet entitled Le diable et loccultisme, inwhich he asserted that Satanism and Magic are opposite poles, and wenton to remark, I do not know if there exist on earth beings capable of render-ing a conscious cult to the principle of evil, concluding that Taxils workcould only harm the cause of enlightened Catholicism.58 The English occult-ist Arthur Edward Waite was an early critic of Taxils work, which he soughtto debunk in his 1895 book Devil-Worship in France. Waite remarked thatthe source of all our knowledge concerning Modern Diabolism exists withinthe pale of the Catholic Church; the entire literature is written from thestandpoint of that church and has been created solely in its interests.59

    56. Quoted in Gruber, Leo Taxils Palladismus-Roman, 2: 178.57. Jean-Marie Ragon, Rituels du 31eme et 32eme degree, quoted in Meurin, La

    franc-maconnerie, 424.58. Gerard Encausse (alias Papus), Le diable et loccultisme: Reponse aux publications

    satanistes (Nmes: Lacour, 1996), 15.59. Waite, Devil-Worship in France, 21.

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    Already skeptical, Waite observed that the supposed Palladist conspiracyconflicts with all that we know or believe concerning the Masonic constitu-tion.60 In particular, Waite was skeptical of Taxil/Batailles allegation thatthe Palladist lodge of Charleston functioned as a secret world shadow govern-ment, noting that it is difficult to conceive that an institution diffused sowidely should have remained so profound a secret, when the many enemiesof the Fraternity, who in their way are sleepless, would have seized eagerlyupon the slightest hint of a directing centre of Masonry.61 Waite also com-pared Taxils allegations at length with those of the former occultist andMason Jules Doinel, who returned to the Catholic fold and subsequentlypublished an extensive denunciation of his erstwhile colleagues under thepseudonym Jean Kostka. Waite wrote of Doinel/Kostka, Neither in Parisnor elsewhere, neither in Masonry nor in other secret associations, concern-ing which he has had every opportunity to judge, has he come personallyinto contact with a cultus of Satan or Lucifer. . . . It is a highly significant factthat a man who has mixed among mystics of all grades for probably thirtyyears, who is affiliated to innumerable orders, and in his present mood wouldbe glad to expose everything, has nothing to tell us of the Palladium.62

    Dismissing the Palladium as a fraud, Waite concluded by stating that Le diableau XIXeme siecle deserves to rank among the most extraordinary literaryswindles of the present, perhaps of any, century.63

    By contrast, Taxils charges found a receptive audience among reactionaryCatholics who were only too eager to believe the worst about the Masonicmovement. La Franc-Maconnerie demasquee devoted a special edition in March1893 to analyze and promote Le diable au XIXeme siecle, and Michel Jarrigewrites that its editors, the abbe Gabriel Bessonies and Abel Clarin de la Rive,never had the slightest suspicion with regard to Taxil, never the slightestdoubt of the reality of revelations concerning Palladism.64 The Echo de Romerepeated many of Taxils charges, with a January 1, 1894, article declaringthat Freemasonry is Satanic in all aspects . . . it is, in effect, the principalforce and the indispensable arm by which Judaism seeks to expel from thisworld the reign of Jesus Christ and to substitute for it the reign of Satan. . . .In the hidden lodges, the cult of Satan is already organized, having its rites,its ceremonies, its prayers, its sacraments, all of which take place amid fright-

    60. Ibid., 25.61. Ibid., 73.62. Ibid., 14041.63. Ibid., 21314.64. Jarrige, LEglise et les Francs-macons, 168.

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    ening sacrileges.65 Taxil was received in Rome by Cardinals Mariano Ram-polla and Lucido Parocchi, who praised his work, and was granted anaudience with Leo XIII himself, who told Taxil that he had read his books.66

    Taxils work also resonated with some members of the French literary estab-lishment. The prominent novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, who had exploredsatanic themes in his novel La-bas, reproduced Taxils claims in his introduc-tion to journalist Jules Boiss 1895 book Le Satanisme et la magie, declaringthat Palladism was Catholicism reversed . . . with an anti-pope, a curate, acollege of cardinals that is, in a sense, a parody of the Vatican court. Huys-mans also followed Taxil in distinguishing between satanists properly speak-ing, who consciously worshipped a demonic personage, and Luciferians, whoworshipped Lucifer as a god of light, while rejecting the Christian GodAdonai as the god of darkness.67

    Much of the public controversy surrounding the Palladium focused onTaxils supposed informant, a young, repentant priestess of the Palladiumnamed Diana Vaughan. She has been raised, according to Taxil, in Louisville,Kentucky, by an American father and French mother who shared a commonhatred for Catholicism, and who raised her to revere Lucifer as a benevolentdeity. As a compatriot, collaborator, and rival of the Luciferian priestess So-phie Walder, Vaughan had direct access to the inner sanctum of the Palla-dium, and could speak with a degree of authority that Dr. Bataille, as anoutsider, could not. After realizing that Lucifer and Satan were one and thesame, Diana Vaughan was said to have converted to Catholicism through thedirect intervention of Joan of Arc, and was now committed to the destructionof the evil organization in which she had spent the formative years of herlife. Much of the French Catholic press eagerly followed the unfolding storyof Dianas redemption. La Croix reported on June 12, 1895, that we havelearned, from an absolutely reliable source (!) that Miss Diana Vaughan . . .definitively renounces Palladism, and remarked in a subsequent note onJune 21, How admirable is the grace of God in the souls that deliver them-selves to Him! A provincial edition, La Croix des Ardennes, went even fur-ther in its June 23 issue, declaring, It is a tremendous event in the order ofgrace, which many will call a miracle.68 The papal secretary, MonsignorVincenzo Sardi, even wrote a letter of congratulations to Vaughan, conclud-

    65. Echo de Rome, January 1, 1894, quoted in Weber, Satan franc-macon, 9899.66. Weber, Satan franc-macon, 166, 168.67. Joris-Karl Huysmans, introduction to Bois, Le Satanisme et la magie, xvxvii.68. La Croix, June 12 and 21, 1895; La Croix des Ardennes, June 23, 1895, ex-

    cerpted in Weber, Satan franc-macon, 21.

  • 198 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft Winter 2006

    ing, Continue, Mademoiselle, continue to write and to unmask the evilsect! Providence for this reason has allowed you to remain within it for solong.69 Diana Vaughan, of course, did not exist, but Taxil initially sought topersuade his critics of her existence, even publishing a supposed photo of herin one of his works.

    Other Catholic scholars and officials, however, were less convinced byTaxils charges. The Catholic bishop of Charleston, Monsignor Henry Pinck-ney Northrop, traveled to Rome to refute the charges against his native city,declaring to an interviewer that it is false, absolutely false, that the Freema-sons of Charleston are the leaders of a supreme Luciferian rite. I know all oftheir leaders personally; they are Protestants with good intentions; none ofthem would dream of engaging in practices of occultism. A few prominentFrench clerics also doubted Taxils claims. The Jesuit scholar Eugene Portaliecompared Taxils claims to those of a swindler who had recently sold theBerlin Museum a collection of supposed Moabite statues that turned out tobe of modern production, while the abbe Leon Garnier declared in Le peuplefrancais on October 25, 1896, that Diana Vaughan was an invention createdto sell books and discredit Catholicism.70

    Taxils most outspoken critic within the Catholic Church was the GermanJesuit scholar Fr. Hermann Gruber, who already in August 1896 had declaredin the Kolnische Volkszeitung that the Palladium was a fraud. After the Palla-dium Affair had run its course, Gruber published a massive, three-volumestudy entitled Leo Taxils Palladismus-Roman, which, he declared, was in-tended to sharpen the critical sense of Catholic readers and writers . . .which unfortunately, as the course of events has shown . . . leaves much tobe desired. Gruber noted that Taxil was an unreliable source, observing thathe had already been involved in repeated great literary hoaxes, notably apornographic text from the 1870s entitled Les amours secretes de Pie IX. Gruberalso argued for the internal improbability of a satanic cult within Freema-sonry, declaring that the latter, with its principally materialist and anti-super-naturalist tendencies, is clearly no appropriate foundation on which to builda formal and systematic cult of the Devil. Though Gruber made clear thathe considered the Masonic movement an enemy of the Church, he warnedthat successful action against Freemasonry is only possible when one standsfirmly on the ground of the facts.71

    The issue of the veracity of Taxils charges was a central topic on the

    69. Quoted in Weber, Satan franc-macon, 180.70. Quoted in Weber, Satan franc-macon, 178, 123, 116.71. Gruber, Leo Taxils Palladismus-Roman, 1:4, 7, 13; 2:17980.

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    agenda of an Anti-Masonic Congress held in Trent in September and Octo-ber of 1896, an assembly that condemned Freemasonry and called for unityamong its opponents.72 The Congress devoted a special session to the Palla-dium Affair on September 29, at which another German cleric, M. Baum-gartner, requested proof of Diana Vaughans existence, such as her birthcertificate or an affidavit from the priest who had supervised her conversionand first communion. Taxil later took the rostrum to defend his accountsagainst his skeptics, declaring that Dianas life would be in danger were he toprovide the requested information. Taxil did, however, promise to meet inRome with a papal representative, Bishop Luigi Lazzareschi, and reveal thename of the cleric in question, who could then be summoned secretly to theVatican to meet with Leo XIII. These assurances momentarily satisfied Taxilscritics, and the presiding officer of the session, the Prince of Loewenstein,closed debate with a resolution calling for further information on the affair.73

    By the end of 1896, Taxils deception was beginning to crumble. His crit-ics, particularly Waite, Gruber, and an anonymous Frenchman who wroteunder the name Count H. C., had begun to assemble and publish the evi-dence against his claims. H. C., for example, released his correspondencewith British scholars of the Royal Asiatic Society in Calcutta, who had as-sured him that the supposed temple complex of Mahatalawa and the open-air graveyard of Dappah did not exist, and who also criticized the sloppyerudition of Le diable au XIXeme siecle, which, they noted, misidentified aprominent Hindu temple as a Buddhist one.74 Numerous prominent figureswhom Taxil had accused of satanism, including Adriano Lemmi, JulietteLamber Adam, and Lilian Pike (Alberts daughter), had issued angry publicdenials in the press. Bishop Lazzareschi, whom Taxil put off with a series ofexcuses, became increasingly suspicious of the affair, and in January 1897issued a statement that declared that there was no compelling evidence eitherfor or against the existence of Diana Vaughan.75 Even Taxils former collabo-rators began to turn against him. Charles Hacks suggested in an interviewwith La Verite that the whole affair had been his idea and that he had decidedto be the Jules Verne who could make money out of the known credulityand unfounded stupidity of Catholics,76 while Domenico Margiotta told theright-wing journalist Gaston Mery in November that the Palladium was a

    72. Weber, Satan franc-macon, 12226.73. Lea, Leo Taxil, 23; Weber, Satan franc-macon, 11920.74. Quoted in Gruber, Leo Taxils Palladismus-Roman, 1:10910.75. Gruber, Leo Taxils Palladismus-Roman, 1:17071.76. Quoted in Gruber, Leo Taxils Palladismus-Roman, 1:59, 87.

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    fraud.77 Henry Charles Lea speculates that the Vatican had discovered by thispoint that Taxils story was fiction, but that the infallible clairvoyance ofRome was at stake and the Vatican could not admit that it had been duped.78

    Skeptics of Taxils claims increasingly began to demand proof of his asser-tions, particularly that he submit his alleged informant, Diana Vaughan, topublic scrutiny. Taxil finally scheduled for April 19, 1897, a public conferencein which he promised to present Diana Vaughan and respond to his critics.Instead, however, Taxil took the opportunity to reveal the scope of his de-ception, calling himself a freethinker who, for his personal edification, andnot for hostility, strolled into your camp, and concluding with the declara-tion, Palladism, my finest creation, existed only on paper and in a few thou-sand minds. The woman whom he had presented as Diana Vaughan was infact a typist who had collaborated with him on the manuscripts, who wasmore freethinker than Protestant, and who was also stupefied to find that,in this century of progress, there are still people who seriously believe in allof the follies of the Middle Ages. Taxil finally concluded, Palladism, now,is dead and well dead. Its father has just killed it.79 Le Matin reported onApril 20, 1897:

    To mount a mystification in all its parts, to mock the Church for twelve years, foolthe priests, the bishops, laugh at the cardinals, and have this trickery blessed by theHoly Father himself, this is the regrettable work with which Leo Taxil has amusedhimself. . . . Naturally, this conference was interrupted by many protests. Two orthree people left at the beginning, including one of our colleagues in the Catholicpress, who told the priests that they should not remain a moment longer. Let ushave the courage to remain! shouted the abbe Garnier. All of the priests remained,drinking the bitter chalice to the lees. But the abbe Garnier constantly shouted, Ca-naille! immonde fripouille! And to think that we left our canes at the door!80

    Taxils devoted supporter, the abbe Bessonies, who presided over the ses-sion in which he had expected to hear directly from Diana Vaughan for thefirst time, was left, according to Jarrige, in a humiliation without limits.81

    Other former supporters quickly distanced themselves. Gaston Mery hotlydenied ever having been fooled, declaring that he knew from the start that

    77. Lea, Leo Taxil, 23; Waite, Devil-Worship in France, 253.78. Lea, Leo Taxil, 24.79. Weber, Satan franc-macon, 156, 171, 173, 183.80. Le Matin, April 20, 1897, quoted in Weber, Satan franc-macon, 1534.81. Jarrige, LEglise et les Francs-macons, 235.

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    Taxils publications were not historical work, but fiction. It would be easyto put it together with some travel books, knowledge of Freemasonry, andimagination and daring. Mery declared, correctly, that the goal of the hoaxwas to fool as much as possible Catholic laymen and to compromise a goodnumber of clergy, first simple priests, later bishops, and finally, little by little,to arrive at mystifying the Holy Father himself. Mery further argued thatthe silence of Freemasonry during the affair was proof that it had been in onthe fraud, writing How else can we explain that the Freemasons, if they feltthemselves aggrieved by the attacks of militant converts, did not display anyindignation, they who, normally, show themselves so combative at the slight-est hint of provocation?82 Another prominent journalist, Eugene Veuillot,editor of LUnivers, called his fellow French Catholics to introspection, de-claring in an April 30 editorial that the mystification would not have suc-ceeded, had it not found well-prepared soil in the unhealthy spiritualcomposition of a misdirected public.83 The abbe Garnier, for his part, de-fended himself by saying, I was able to believe this extraordinary story be-cause the Pope believed in it.84

    If Taxils former supporters were embarrassed by his revelations of April19, his critics, by contrast, felt vindicated. Arthur E. Waite wrote that Taxilis not a splendid impostor but a mercenary adventurer who has been actu-ated throughout by the basest motive and has made use of the sorriest meansand that the impostor was compelled to unmask, not as the master-strokeof a gorgeous deception but as the last refuge and valedictory audacity of anexposed culprit.85 The novelist Alphonse Daudet dismissed Taxil as a vulgarcharlatan whose plans had backfired, declaring, He sought to slay the clericalHydra. What has he slain? His own dignity.86

    Interestingly, some of Taxils followers refused to accept that the Palladiumwas a fraud, believing instead that the satanic conspiracy had somehow forcedTaxil to recant and to cover up the truth.87 La Franc-Maconnerie demasqueedrifted for two years, finally letting go of the Palladium myth in 1899 undera new editor, the abbe Joseph, dit Tourmentin. Huysmans was still assertingthe existence of the Palladium four years after Taxils dramatic confession,

    82. Gaston Mery, La Verite sur Diana Vaughan: Un Complot maconnique (Paris: Bler-iot, 1896), 7678.

    83. Quoted in Gruber, Leo Taxils Palladismus-Roman, 3:270.84. Quoted in Weber, Satan franc-macon, 15455.85. Waite, Devil-Worship in France, 231.86. Quoted in Gruber, Leo Taxils Palladismus-Roman, 3:215.87. Jones, Palladism and the Papacy, 472.

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    writing in 1901 that it is nevertheless true, undeniable, absolute, sure, de-spite the self-interested denials, that the Luciferian cult exists, it governs Free-masonry and silently pulls the strings of the sinister puppets that rule overus.88 The British anti-Masonic author Leslie Fry claimed in 1934 that it isincontestable that Leo Taxil had authentic documents emanating from thevery interior of Satanic lodges, while the Catholic author Georges Bernanosremarked that a few brave souls that will let go of nothing . . . still takeseriously, forty years later, one or two episodes of an imposture.89 Eventoday, Taxils legend of a Masonic satanic conspiracy still finds currency, atleast on the lunatic fringes of cyberspace. A 2002 article in U.S. News andWorld Report ranked the Palladium as one of the top ten hoaxes of all time;while certainly subjective, the appearance of an obscure French legend in apopular American magazine is testament to its unusual durability. Jim Tresner,an American Mason, author, and journalist, recently declared, I wish it weretrue that Taxil had murdered the hoax of Masonic devil worship which hecreated, but that corpse revives with frequency. . . . He fooled the ignorantin the late 1800she fools the ignorant today.90

    Although Remy de Gourmont once quipped that Leo Taxil has but a singlereaderthe imbecile, Le diable au XIXeme siecle was widely read and dis-cussed in the final decade of the nineteenth century. While some of Taxilsreaders may have perceived his work, which Michel Berchmans in 1973called the most stunning popular fantastic novel of the previous century,simply as an entertaining work of fiction, Le diable au XIXeme siecle was widelybelieved, at least within the subcultures of integral Catholicism and the anti-Masonic movement.91 As we have seen, much of the French Catholic press,particularly La Franc-Maconerie demasquee, the Revue Catholique of Taxilsstaunch advocate, the canon Ludovic-Martial Mustel of Avranches-Coutances,and the Semaine Religieuse, edited by another longtime supporter, Monsei-gneur Armand-Joseph Fava, archbishop of Grenoble, believed in the exis-

    88. Quoted in Weber, Satan franc-macon, 218.89. Quoted in Michel Berchmans, Le Diable au XIXeme siecle, ou la mystification

    transcendante (Verviers, Belgium: Editions Marabout, 1973), 73, 10.90. Quoted on http://www.masonicinfo.com/taxil.htm, consulted February 15,

    2006. See also Dan Gilgoff, Devil in a Red Fez: The Lie about the Freemasons Liveson, U.S. News and World Report, August 26, 2002, 46. My own Google search ofthe name Leo Taxil netted nearly 24,000 hits.

    91. Berchmans, Le Diable au XIXeme siecle, 19, 9.

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    tence of the Palladium and reported frequently on new developments in theDiana Vaughan case. Many prominent clerics abroad were also taken in, no-tably the cardinals Rampolla and Parocchi and the French archbishop ofMauritius, Monseigneur Leon Meurin, whose own book, La franc-maconnerie:Synagogue de Satan, is based almost entirely on earlier works by Taxil, whomhe cites repeatedly throughout the text and praises as one of the most valiantchampions of Christianity.92 Taxils German critic, the Jesuit HermannGruber, found it incredible that the atheist Dr. Bataille managed to be takenas an authority in theological matters by the general secretary of the FrenchAnti-Masonic Union and the editor of France Chretienne.93

    Taxils writings engaged in an ongoing dialogue with other exponents ofintegral Catholicism in 1890s France, an open conversation that both shapedthe broader discourse on Catholicism, satanism, and antimodernism inFrance, and also, I would argue, modified the direction of Taxils unfoldingcharges. The most prominent example of the effects of this dialogue concernsthe relationship of satanism and Judaism, a trope of reactionary Catholicismsince the Middle Ages. The Jews are notable for their absence in the earlychapters of Le diable au XIXeme siecle, in which the chief villains are Englishand American Protestants. Mgr. Meurins text on the same subject, thoughrelying heavily on Taxils work, is stridently anti-Semitic, reviving medievalcharges of ritual murder and adding the modern charge, popularized by theProtocols of the Elders of Zion, of a Jewish quest for world domination, declar-ing, To crown the Jew with a royal diadem and to place the kingdoms ofthe world at his feet, that is the true goal of Freemasonry.94 Diana Vaughanssupposed memoirs, written by Taxil himself, criticized Gaston Merys anti-Semitic campaigns and attributed Merys hostility to Taxil to their differenceson this issue.95 Ultimately, Taxil bowed to the prejudices of his readers, per-haps also stung by the persistent criticism of Paul Rosen, a former masterMason and Jewish convert to Catholicism who denounced Taxil as a liar.96

    While the Anglo-American Palladium remains the arch-villain of Le diable auXIXeme siecle, the Jewish Italian grand master Adriano Lemmi takes on anincreasingly prominent role as the work progresses. In an odd, almost schizo-phrenic passage, whose character results from Taxils multiple layers of decep-tion, the narrator of Le diable au XIXeme siecle, Doctor Bataille, criticizes LeoTaxil for failing to pay sufficient attention to the Jewish question:

    92. Meurin, La franc-maconnerie, 58.93. Gruber, Leo Taxils Palladismus-Roman, 2:51.94. Meurin, La franc-maconnerie, 11.95. Quoted in Weber, Satan franc-macon, 141.96. Jarrige, LEglise et les Francs-macons, 230.

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    A great error of M. Leo Taxil, which I am far from sharing, is not to have pursued

    his investigations in the direction of Masonic Jewry; he would have found great things

    about Lemmi, Bleichroder, Cornelius Herz and other Israelite Freemasons who knew

    how to take a leading role in the direction of the sect. M. Drumont, for his part, was

    more perceptive, and a false convert, in whom he would have sensed the Jew, would

    not have fooled him. Whats more, the secret agents of Lemmi are easy to recognize,

    in whatever country, they have a distinctive sign that denounces them . . . there is

    not one who is not a Jew.97

    The fusion of anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic narratives into a commondiscourse, which presents both Jews and Freemasons as agents of Lucifer him-self, illustrates in particularly striking fashion the diabolical causality thatLeon Poliakov saw as an increasingly central characteristic of fin de siecleEuropean thought. For Poliakov, whose primary concern is to document theroots of modern anti-Semitism in European culture, the devil and the Jews,often linked in the medieval mind, are the scapegoats par excellence of theWestern mind. It could hardly be otherwise, Poliakov argues, stating thatWestern historical consciousness has its roots in Judeo-Christian eschatology. . . the Devil or the Antichrist is almost as omnipresent in western conscious-ness as the idea of cause, an idea inseparable from any action and any event.98

    Similarly, Richard Hofstadter, writing of the McCarthy era in American poli-tics, has discussed at length what he describes as the paranoid style ofthought, in which the central image is that of a vast and sinister conspiracy,a gigantic and yet subtle machinery of influence set in motion to undermineand destroy a way of life. Hofstadter further writes that this enemy is clearlydelineated; he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman; sinis-ter, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. . . . The paranoidsinterpretation of history is in this sense distinctly personal: decisive events arenot taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequence of some-ones will. . . . The enemy seems to be on many counts a projection of theself: both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed tohim. A fundamental paradox of the paranoid style is the imitation of theenemy.99 This imitation, as the events of the twentieth century would tragi-cally demonstrate, has dangerous implications for the alleged conspirators; as

    97. Bataille, Le Diable au XIXeme Siecle, 1:475.98. Poliakov, La causalite diabolique, 92.99. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays

    (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 29, 32.

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    they are imagined as ruthless and cruel, they must be suppressed with ruth-lessness and cruelty.

    Poliakov suggests that the idea of diabolical causality, of attributing mis-fortunes to evil conspiracies, is as old as Western civilization itself. Otherscholars have noted, however, that this view of the world seems to havebeen particularly prevalent during the long nineteenth century, the periodstretching from the French Revolution until the outbreak of the First WorldWar. J. M. Roberts has speculated that more believed such nonsense, proba-bly, between 1815 and 1914 than at any other time.100 Roberts representsthe resurgence of conspiracy belief in the nineteenth century as an antimod-ern reaction to the disorienting changes of modernization, writing, Between1789 and 1848 there was almost everywhere in Europe a great general accel-eration of social and political change. . . . Educated and conservative menraised in the tradition of Christianity, with its stress on individual responsibil-ity and the independence of the will, found conspiracy theories plausible as anexplanation of such change: it must have come about, they thought, becausesomebody planned it so.101

    Le diable au XIXeme siecle carried this tendency toward diabolical causal-ity to its logical extreme, not only charging that a secret conspiracy wasleading the world toward its ruin (as the anticlerical, anti-Masonic, and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that were widespread in fin de siecle France allasserted, in one way or another), but also providing supposed proof that thisconspiracy was indeed literally diabolic in nature, directed by Lucifer himselfand striving to bring about the destruction of Christian civilization and toprepare the way for the coming of the Antichrist. It is true, of course, that Lediable au XIXeme siecle, the Palladium, and most of the protagonists that Taxilpresented were fictional. What is ultimately significant, however, is that manyreaders believed these fictions to be true, and were ready to be convincedthat many of the leaders, institutions, and values of the modern world werethe willing or unwilling tools of the devil. The radical journalist and politi-cian Camille Pelletan worried that, even after Taxils confession, his chargeswould continue to poison French public discourse, writing, Once a fraudhas been accepted, it remains in the spirit, the majority forget its origin. Themajority of the devout who believed these guilty lies will take from theevents of recent days that M. Taxil is a rascal and that Diana Vaughan doesnot exist. However, they will nevertheless retain in their memories, as articles

    100. J. M. Roberts, The Mythology of the Secret Societies (New York: Charles Scrib-ners Sons, 1972), 12.

    101. Roberts, Mythology of the Secret Societies, 910.

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    of faith, the lies that entered their minds with the signatures of DianaVaughan and of Taxil.102

    How, then, should we today assess the meaning and legacy of the Palla-dium hoax and the mammoth literary work that was at its core? The Palla-dium hoax was contemporaneous and ideologically intertwined with suchevents as the Dreyfus Affair, the forgery of the Protocols of the Elders ofZion, and the growing pseudo-scholarly discourse of scientific racism. Likethese other harbingers of doom, it offered a terrifying, chiliastic vision of aworld on the brink of catastrophe, threatened by truly diabolical forces thatwould stop at nothing to destroy Christian civilization, and conversely,against whom all means of resistance were legitimate. For readers today, Lediable au XIXeme siecle serves as a sort of ideological barometer of the age inwhich it was created, an indicator of the depths of antimodernism and politi-cal paranoia among a certain segment of the population of France and otherparts of Catholic Europe. The fact that even a limited number of readerswere willing to swallow Taxils lies and legends wholesale was an ominoussign for European society on the threshold of the twentieth century.

    102. Camille Pelletan, Le Rappel, April 24, 1897, quoted in Weber, Satan franc-macon, 217.