Harvey 2008

Lucifer in the City of Light: The Palladium Hoax and Diabolical
Causality 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 Press
DOI: 10.1353/mrw.0.0078
For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mrw/summary/v001/1.2.harvey.html
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Lucifer in the City of Light

The Palladium Hoax and Diabolical Causality
in Fin de Sie`cle France
DAV I D A L L E N H A R V E Y
New College of Florida
The fin de sie`cle was a time of intense political conflict and recurrent public
scandal in France. After overcoming its monarchist foes at the ballot box and
enjoying a brief period of stability in the early 1880s, the Third Republic
lurched almost without interruption through a series of Affairs: Boulangism, Panama, and the Dreyfus controversy. The volatility of fin de sie`cle
French politics reflected underlying social tensions, as rapid urbanization and
industrialization, the rise of mass political movements of the left and right,
and rapidly changing cultural mores undermined many of the certainties on
which bourgeois life rested. Among French Catholics, these fears were compounded 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 a
monarchist restoration with the death of the Count of Chambord, the last
Legitimist pretender, in 1883; and the experience of national decline, which
was brought home painfully by humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian
War.1 The conflicts that Herman Lebovics, writing about a slightly later peI presented a preliminary version of this article at the Western Society for French
History annual meeting at Colorado Springs in October 2005. I would like to thank
the participants in that panelLynn Sharp, Naomi Andrews, Jonathan Beecher, and
Kathryn Edwardsfor their comments on the conference paper, and the editors and
reviewers of Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft for their suggestions for its further development as an article. I would also like to thank my student, Erin Mahaney, for her
willingness to pursue what ultimately turned out to be a wild goose chase in looking
for denials or other responses to the Palladium hoax in the libraries and archives of
Charleston, South Carolina.
1. For antimodernism and the French Legitimist Right, see Steven Kale, Legitimism and the Reconstruction of French Society, 18521883 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1992), and Marvin Brown, The Comte de Chambord: The Third Republics 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 Frenchmen
in both camps willing to believe the worst about their antagonists.2 A clever
trickster, the journalist Leo Taxil, was able to take advantage of this situation
by means of a spectacular hoax that lasted over a decade.
Almost forgotten today, the Palladium Affair captivated and frightened
thousands of French readers, mostly conservative Catholics, in the final years
of the nineteenth century. The story of the Palladium, an alleged global satanic conspiracy led by Freemasonry against legitimate civil and religious
order, was revealed in a series of publications between 1885 and 1897, most
notably in Taxils magnum opus, Le diable au XIXe`me sie`cle, the principal
subject of this article. Lurid, sensationalistic, and nearly two thousand pages
long, Le diable au XIXe`me sie`cle combined political polemic with pulp fiction
adventure and exoticism, a formula that quickly made it a success and ultimately a cause cele`bre. Ultimately, however, the Palladium was revealed as a
fraud 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 prejudices, fears, and modes of thought of his readers. The worldview presented
in Le diable au XIXe`me sie`cle is starkly Manichean: good versus evil, darkness
versus light, a world in which sinister forces guide human destinies through
means imperceptible to the casual observer. Leon Poliakov has coined the
term diabolical causality to describe a mentality in which the evils of this
world are attributable to a malevolent entity or organization, the Jews, for
example.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 degree
already shared this mentality, writing that the sterile thought-world of late
nineteenth century French Catholicism, insecure and uncertain of itself in
the face of the new science and the new politics, was prepared to believe the
worst about the motives of its enemies and to suspect that the source of the
churchs discomforts might be found in some gigantic Satanic plot.4 For
reasons that will become apparent below, I will argue that Poliakovs concept
of diabolical causality is particularly relevant to understanding the course
and 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 Anticlericalism
in the Nineteenth Century, Journal of Church and State 12, no. 3 (1970): 456.
Harvey Lucifer in the City of Light
Political anti-Semitism, Poliakovs primary concern, was certainly one response of the beleaguered right to the challenges of modernity. Edouard Drumonts La France juive charged that two hundred Jewish families were
manipulating the French Republic and leading it to its ruin. Drumont continued to publicize these charges in his successful newspaper, La Libre Parole,
and was a virulent critic of Captain Dreyfus and other prominent French
Jews. Nor was Drumont an isolated figure; the integral nationalist Charles
Maurras, another prominent anti-Dreyfusard, also condemned Jews, along
with Protestants and Freemasons, as foreign and subversive elements within
an eternal, Catholic France. The most famous anti-Semitic screed of the period, 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 of
Maurice Joly.5
Frances rather tiny Jewish minority was not, however, the only scapegoat
that conspiracy theorists blamed for Frances woes. An equally popular, and
in many ways more plausible enemy was Freemasonry. As Philip Nord has
demonstrated, Freemasons were among the most devoted proponents of the
Republican cause in nineteenth-century France, and an estimated 40 percent
of the civilian ministers of the Third Republic from 1877 to 1914 were
Masons.6 Anti-Masonic literature, a staple on the French right since the late
eighteenth century, grew even more vitriolic as the nineteenth century advanced and Masonrys dastardly plans for the subversion of Catholicism met
with apparent success. In response to the 1884 papal encyclical, Humanum
Genus, which we will discuss below, Mgr. Armand-Joseph Fava, bishop of
Grenoble, launched a monthly journal exclusively dedicated to the battle
against the lodges, La Franc-Maconnerie demasquee.7 Mgr. Leon Meurins La
Franc-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 Sie`cle
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986); Eugen Weber, Action Francaise:
Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth Century France (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 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 Elders
of Zion, see Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (New York: Harper & Row, 1967).
6. Philip G. Nord, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in NineteenthCentury France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 15.
7. Michel Jarrige, LEglise et les Francs-macons dans la tourmente: Croisade de la revue
La Franc-maconnerie demasquee (18841899) (Paris: Editions Arguments, 1999),
36.
179
180
(1888) both attacked Freemasonry as not simply misguided, but fundamentally evil and malevolent, setting the stage for Taxils polemical work.8
Accompanying both anti-Semitism and anti-Masonry was a growing interest in the supernatural, magic, and the occult, and preoccupation with hidden
satanic forces. The 1880s witnessed a lively and multifaceted occult revival,
as both the Theosophical Society of Helena P. Blavatsky, an import from the
English-speaking world, and a revived Ordre Martiniste, led by the youthful
occultists Stanislas de Guaita and Gerard Encausse, competed for adherents
and attention, particularly among young bohemian intellectuals and avantgarde artists. The most influential work in this vein, however, was not a
product of either esoteric school, but rather Joris-Karl Huysmanss novel La`bas, which posited the existence of satanic sects practicing sacrilegious black
masses in the heart of Paris and casting spells and curses on the devout. Huysmans was not alone, however; the journalist Jules Bois, a friend and admirer
of the novelist, published a series of exposes on satanism and other heresies
in contemporary France, printed in book form as Les petites religions de Paris
and Le Satanisme et la magie. Huysmans and Bois both went public with their
accusations of satanism in 1893 following the mysterious death of Joseph
Boullan, an apostate priest who was the inspiration for Dr. Johannes of La`bas, whom Huysmans and Bois both accused Guaita of murdering through
the use of black magic.9 These charges led first to an angry exchange of
letters, and ultimately to the clashing of swords in a duel, which ended without incident. A society in which charges of envoutement (murder at a distance
through bewitchment) carried sufficient credibility that Guaita felt compelled
to defend his honor was surely fertile ground for the satanic conspiracy legends that Taxil would compose.
Born Gabriel Jogand-Page`s in Marseilles in 1854, Leo Taxil was a latter-day

member of what Robert Darnton has described as the literary under8. 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 (Tournai: H. Castermann, 1888).
9. Joris-Karl Huysmans, La`-bas (Paris: Tresse et Stock, 1891); Jules Bois, Les petites
religions 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 feud
that Huysmans and Bois waged with Guaita, see Joanny Bricaud, Labbe Boullan (Docteur 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 (London: Faber & Faber, 1954); and David Allen Harvey, Beyond Enlightenment: Occultism
and Politics in Modern France (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005).
ground of scurrilous polemicists and Grub-Street hack writers,10 beginning

his career as a militant anticlerical. His outrageous statements (including the
charge that the clergy of Notre Dame were secretly repairing old torture
instruments in the catacombs beneath the cathedral for use following the
coming restoration of the monarchy) led him to be condemned for violations
of the press laws on several occasions by the 1870s Government of Moral
Order. 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. Jogand
assiduously frequented houses of ill repute and women of easy virtue. During this period, Taxil also apparently doubled as a police informant, as the
same report went on to note that it is very true that M. Jogand gave information to the Marseilles police regarding the republican circles he frequented.11 Taxil fled to Geneva in 1876 to escape a prison sentence in
France, but was later expelled from Switzerland following what the Genevan
police described as repeated allegations against him . . . of fraudulent advertising, with the goal of profiting from public credulity, notably through the
sale of supposed aphrodisiac pills called bonbons du serail (harem candies).12
Suddenly, in 1885, after nearly two decades as a militant anticlerical polemicist, Taxil underwent an apparent conversion, becoming an ultramontane
Catholic and waging an increasingly vitriolic campaign against the Masonic
organizations 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 woven
into Le diable au XIXe`me sie`cle. Beginning in 1885 with Les fre`res trois-points,
Taxil went on to publish such works as Les soeurs maconnes, Les myste`res 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 is
somewhat surprising that Leo Taxil was a Freemason for only a few months. He was
admitted to the Parisian lodge Temple des Amis de lHonneur Francais, an affiliate
of the Grand Orient, on February 21, 1881, only to be expelled by a disciplinary
tribunal of the lodge that October 17. Taxil presented his account of his brief Masonic
conspiracy and subsequent repentance in a deliberately deceptive autobiography, entitled Confessions dun ex-libre penseur (Paris: Letouzay et Ane, n.d.). A very different
account is presented in a recent publication sponsored by the Grand Orient, Bernard
Muracciole, Leo Taxil: Vrai fumiste et faux fre`re (Paris: Editions Maconniques de
France, 1998).
181
182
Franc-Maconnerie, and Le culte du Grand Architecte (all in 1886), La France

maconnique (1888), Les assassinats maconniques (1889), and Y a-t-il des femmes
dans la franc-maconnerie? (1891). The majority of these were printed by a single
publisher, Letouzay et Ane, in editions of around thirty thousand copies each.
Taxils new Catholic connections helped him in these ventures, first by providing him with a sinecure at the Librairie Saint-Paul, with a monthly salary
of three hundred francs, and also by advertising his works in sympathetic
Catholic newspapers and reviews. Michel Jarrige has noted that the editors
of Mgr. Favas La Franc-Maconnerie demasquee were completely taken in, falling into une taxilomanie chronique in which Taxil took on the semi-official
role of permanent consultant, gaining both credibility and free publicity
from the sponsorship of a prominent French bishop.14 The culmination of
these activities, Le diable au XIXe`me sie`cle, was launched in monthly serial
form beginning November 20, 1892, and concluding March 20, 1895.
Thereafter, Taxil turned briefly to a publication allegedly produced by the
Palladist conspiracy itself, Le Palladium regenere et libre, but abandoned this
after several months for the supposed memoirs of a repentant ex-Palladist
priestess, Diana Vaughan, about whom more will be said later. Le diable au
XIXe`me sie`cle, by far the largest and most comprehensive of these works, thus
forms the centerpiece of a massive enterprise of deception, which Taxil was
able to maintain for twelve years.15
Le diable au XIXe`me sie`cle presents numerous challenges of classification.
The text presents itself as a mixture of eyewitness testimony and learned
exposition; its central narrative discusses the protagonist Dr. Batailles investigations into Palladism from his initial discovery of the movement in
1880 through his encounters with Palladists in Asia and America over the
following years. The work also contains numerous asides, in which the firsthand narration is broken in order to discuss a particular theme or topic in
greater detail. These chapters, which are presented as learned treatises of topics such as hysteria, spiritualism, necromancy, and fortune-telling, are only
tangentially related to the principal narrative of Le diable au XIXe`me sie`cle, and
there is little effort to integrate them into a coherent framework. Le diable au
XIXe`me sie`cle was also a collectively authored text. Taxils most important
collaborators were Charles Hacks, a childhood friend who, like the fictitious
Doctor Bataille, was a medical doctor who had worked as a shipboard
physician for the Compagnie dExtre`me-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.
Sepulcher. Henry Charles Lea writes that the collaborators laughed loudly
to one another about the unlimited credulity of the public, and amused
themselves by seeking to outdo one another in the extravagance of their
inventions,16 and some of the phenomena described in Le diable au XIXe`me
sie`cle (such as the winged, piano-playing crocodile said to have appeared at a
spiritualist seance) are so patently absurd as only to make sense in the context
of this sort of one-upmanship among rival hoaxters. Taxil ultimately had a
falling out with his co-authors, who demanded more money and credit for
their share of the work, and Hacks and Margiotta subsequently withdrew
from the project.17
Le diable au XIXe`me sie`cle begins with a chance encounter aboard a French
merchant marine frigate off the coast of Ceylon. The ships physician, Dr.
Bataille, meets a repentant member of the Palladium, the Italian merchant
Gaetano Carbuccia, who told him of satanic ceremonies he had witnessed in
Calcutta, in which he had seen Lucifer appear. Believing Carbuccias story,
Bataille decided to dedicate himself to exploring and exposing this dangerous
sect. Bataille was able to obtain high Masonic titles from a Naples master
mason, Giambattista Peisina, and thus presented himself to the Palladist leaders of Asia and America as a foreign Masonic dignitary. Under this false identity, Dr. Bataille was able to gain admittance to Palladist temples and to attend
their rites, whose secrets he swore to reveal to an unsuspecting public.
The early chapters of Le diable au XIXe`me sie`cle, which are set primarily in
India and China, reflect a rather vulgar pulp Orientalism, in which Asian
religious beliefs and practices are distorted or simply falsified for dramatic
effect. Condemning Asia in general, and India in particular, as the centers
of the worst superstition, the worst idolatry, Taxil hypothesized that these
countries 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 mark
of opprobrium, given for their punishment to the dominion of Satan, who
tyrannizes the population . . . and reigns over them as the god of an infernal
religion.18 In this vein, Taxil presents a supposed equivalence of Indian deities with the chief figures of the Western demonological tradition: Brahma
becomes Lucifer, Vishnu is Beelzebub, while the destructive god Shiva is
16. Henry Charles Lea, Leo Taxil, Diana Vaughan, et lEglise romaine: Histoire dune
mystification (Paris: Societe Nouvelle de Librairie et dEdition, 1901), 14.
17. Lea, Leo Taxil, 22; Arthur Edward Waite, Devil-Worship in France, with Diana
Vaughan and the Question of Modern Palladism (Boston: Red Wheel, 2003), 24551.
18. Dr. Bataille (Leo Taxil et al.), Le diable au XIXe`me sie`cle, 2 vols. (Paris: Delhomme et Briguet, 1895), 1:5658.
183
184
presented as Adonai, the satanic name for the Judeo-Christian deity.19 Taxil
continues with lurid descriptions of supposed satanic ceremonies, including
one in which Dr. Bataille undergoes a trial of initiation, in which he is covered with serpents who follow the direction of an Indian snake charmer.
Bataille describes Indian fakirs who practice grotesque rituals of selfmortification, 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 complex called Mahatalawa, supposedly near the colonial metropolis of Calcutta.
Bataille describes in detail the ceremonies that occur in each of the seven
temples in this hidden location, culminating with a bizarre ritual in an extraordinarily grotesque setting. The plain of Dappah, Bataille is told by the
English mason Hobbs, is a vast field in which the bodies of the dead are left
unburied to decompose, where Satan, the ignominious angel of death,
mixes, moulds, cooks up the horrible and deadly maladies that allow him to
decimate, to harvest in dark vessels the human race which he so detests; from
Dappah, he unleashes all the scourges, through which he satisfies his hatred
of the creatures of God.20 Bataille then goes on to describe the satanic ritual
that occurs in this unhealthy setting:
Then an abominable scene occurred. All the Indians who were among us spread out
into the plain, and in a few instants, I saw them return, each dragging something
behind him. That something was a cadaver, still fresh and probably cast there in the
morning; there were some that the vultures and rats had already begun to dismember
and to devour, and whose hideous faces seemed to laugh grotesquely. These corpses
were placed in a circle around the hill, bending and even breaking them to sit them
on the ground, their backs turned to the great central stone, on which the great
Indian climbed, after having dressed in a goats head and long white robe that descended to his feet. In our turn, we arranged ourselves in the same manner as the
corpses, forming with them a chain alternating between the living and the dead. To
maintain our dead upright, we held them by the torso, our arms passing behind their
backs, the left hand seizing the shoulder of the cadaver to the left, the right hand
holding the waist of the cadaver on the right.21
The ritual described above, in all its grotesque horror, is clearly a parody
of the chane magnetique of Mesmerist Spiritualism, in which those in atten19. Ibid., 1:82.
20. Ibid., 1:148.
21. Ibid., 1:15354.
dance join hands in a circle in order to evoke the spirits of the dead.22 In
Dappah, however, the avowed purpose of this gruesome ritual was the mise
en circulation of a supernatural force emanated from Lucifer, which circulates like an electric fluid and produces the desired magical results, with more
or less success according to the greater or lesser intellectual cooperation of
the members of the chain. Taxil further asserted that if by chance a true,
believing Catholic, loving the only true God, finds himself accidentally in
such a society, and forms one of the links of this chain, the circulation cannot
take place, it is blocked, no diabolical magic can be performed. For this
reason, 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 au
XIXe`me sie`cle, and likely contributed to its appeal, the real villains of the work
lie elsewhere. Taxil observes that while the Indians are in good faith the
principal actors of these macabre rites, they are but the dupes and puppets
of the European Freemasons, the English colonists affiliated with various
occultist groups, who associate with them and participate in these lugubrious
horrors.24 There is, throughout Le diable au XIXe`me sie`cle, a profound Anglophobia and opposition to the transnational cultural community that the
French generally designate as les Anglo-Saxons. Dr. Batailles pursuit of
sinister, satanic, Anglo-Saxon Freemasons leads him from Asia to Gibraltar,
where, he reported, the Palladium had built a secret laboratory in a network
of underground caves, with the knowledge and permission of the British
monarchy, in which poisons, biological weapons such as cholera and bubonic
plague, and magic objects for use in satanic rituals were prepared by the
most violent and vicious of criminals. Bataille penetrates into the hidden
laboratories and encounters the worker-inmates who labor there, whom he
describes as appearing not to belong to humanity, and who crowd around
him, boasting of the crimes which had sent them to this strange asylum.25
English occultists may have been the intellectual masters of the Asian satanists 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 Spiritualisms indebtedness to Mesmerist theories of animal magnetism, see Nicole Edelman, Voyantes, guerisseuses, et visionnaires en France, 17851914 (Paris: Albin Michel,
1995).
23. Bataille, Le diable au XIXe`me sie`cle, 1:14950.
24. Ibid., 1:112.
25. Ibid., 1:532, 535.
185
186
Catholicism was, he discovered, being directed from across the Atlantic.

Soon after his return from Asia, therefore, the good doctor traveled to the
United States, more specifically to Charleston, South Carolina, the Mecca of
modern satanism in his account. With regard to Charleston, Taxil noted that
the Rome of the Luciferians is also the holy metropole of slavery, and
further observed that, in the American Civil War, it was Charleston that
gave the signal of the revolt against the nation.26 Here the focus shifts from
Asian religion to Scottish Rite Freemasonry, and the Grand Commander of
the Scottish Rite, Albert Pike, is presented as the supreme pontiff of Lucifer.
The Palladium, Taxil further reported, had established temples not only in
Charleston, but also in Rome, Berlin, Washington, Montevideo, Naples, and
Calcutta, all of which were connected by a sort of diabolic telephone
called the Arcula Mystica. Albert Pike himself, who met personally with
Lucifer every Friday afternoon at three oclock, did not have to rely on the
Arcula Mystica, as he possessed a familiar demon in a cage who could instantly transport messages for him to any part of the world.27 Taxil also
claimed that Pikes Peak, the highest mountain in Colorado, had been named
for Albert Pike, and that one day, perhaps, it will be the place of pilgrimage
for the Luciferians of the New World.28
Global Freemasonry, Dr. Bataille soon discovered, had a hidden agenda, one
which was both spiritual and political. On the spiritual level, its mission was
to combat Catholicism, the only true form of Christianity, to celebrate a cult
of Lucifer, and to prepare the way for the coming of the Antichrist. Throughout the work, Taxil distinguishes between satanists and Luciferians, the
latter of whom were said to worship Lucifer as a benevolent deity while
rejecting Adonai, the Christian God, as the spirit of evil. Taxils work charges
that the Grand Architect of the Universe recognized by Freemasonry is in
fact Lucifer, and strongly suggests that the God of the Protestants is Lucifer
as well. The Luciferian creed which Taxil presents mocks and distorts Masonic 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 to
kill the heretical pontiff Joseph Boullan in 1893. Guaita denied possessing a familiar
demon in a cage, but apparently confided to Gaston Mery that he believed his apartment in the rue de Trudaine to be haunted, and that his critics likely mistook this
ghost for a demon. See Harvey, Beyond Enlightenment, 11415.

I believe in a generative God, the principle of Good, who for all eternity battles
against the destructive God, the principle of Evil. I believe in indestructible Humanity, renewing and multiplying itself through the centuries. I believe in the future and
irrevocable triumph of truth over lies, of virtue over vice, of justice over caprice, of
science over error, of liberty over despotism, of reason over superstition, of love over
sterility, of light over darkness, of good over evil, of the Great Architect of the Universe, our God, over Adonai, the God of the priests.29
In this regard, Taxil was building upon a century and a half of papal condemnations of Freemasonry; since Clement XII first condemned the movement in 1738, his successors Benedict XIV, Pius VII, Leo XII, Pius VIII,
Gregory XVI, and Pius IX had also issued escalating denunciations of Freemasonry as one of Catholicisms most dangerous foes. The 1884 papal encyclical Humanum Genus, which condemned the Masonic sect as the servants
of Satan, was therefore but the most extreme articulation of a position that
the Vatican had maintained since the origins of European Freemasonry.30 In
fact, Leo Taxil later revealed that Humanum Genus, issued by Leo XIII, was
the inspiration for the Palladium hoax. Although the encyclical does not go
quite so far as to accuse Freemasonry of actively worshipping Lucifer, it does
accuse Masons of demonstrating the contimacious pride, the untamed perfidy, the simulating shrewdness of Satan, and states that it was the real
supreme aim of the Free-Masons to persecute, with untamed hatred, Christianity, and that they will never rest until they see cast to the ground all
religious institutions established by the Pope.31 Nor was Humanum Genus an
isolated foray by Leo XIII, who devoted two encyclicals, two apostolic letters, and three other pronouncements to the struggle against Freemasonry
over the course of his pontificate. Jarrige argues that Leo XIIIs obsession
with this topic derived from a dualist vision of history that revives, in fact,
the Augustinian theory of two antagonistic camps . . . the Church of Jesus
Christ and its sworn enemy, the kingdom of Satan.32
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 les
Francs-macons. For an insightful discussion of Masonic ideology, particularly with regard to the Grand Architect of the Universe, see Margaret Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1991).
31. Leo XIII, The Letter Humanum Genus, 36, 26.
32. Jarrige, LEglise et les Francs-macons, 57, 61.
187
188
In addition to linking Freemasonry to the worship of Lucifer, Taxil also

took care to stress its association with political radicalism and with the detested anticlerical regimes of France and Italy. In this regard, Taxil was treading on more familiar territory, for anti-Masonic commentators had associated
the lodges with plotting revolution and civil unrest for over a century. Beginning with Joseph de Maistre, who in 1796 declared that the Revolution had
a satanic character, and the abbe Augustin Barruel, who wrote the following year that the Revolution was planned, premeditated, conspired, resolved; everything was the effect of the most profound villainy, French
conservatives interpreted the Revolution of 1789 as an evil conspiracy, led
by the Masons, the philosophes, or even perhaps the Jews.33 After discussing
strange phenomena observed at the time of the execution of Gaston Cremieux, leader of the revolutionary government of Marseilles in 1871, Taxil
speculated that Lucifer or some other demon was lamenting the tragic
death of a communard leader, his friend and accomplice. Later in the work,
when Taxils narrator meets Adriano Lemmi, the current leader of the Palladist conspiracy, he remarks upon the striking resemblance that the Jewish
banker and master Mason bears to the fallen Communard leader. In a sacrilegious Palladist catechism, Lazarus is described as the emblem of the proletariat that will rise up one day at the call of Freemasonry.34
The political aspect of Taxils magnum opus, however, focuses less on
France than on Italy, a nation whose relevance for ultramontane Catholics
was obvious. The Palladium, Taxil declared, had been founded on September
20, 1870, the very day in which the Italian state incorporated the Papal States
into its territory, so that, High Masonry was thus constituted . . . with a
sovereign Luciferian pontiff the same day in which the Piedmontese usurper
seized Rome and proclaimed the abolition of the temporal power of the
popes . . . Here, most certainly, was the direct intervention of Satan . . .
Palladism was founded and put to work to prepare the reign of the Antichrist.35 Taxil offered a detailed history of the ruling house of Savoy, arguing
that Victor Emmanuel was a descendant of the antipope Felix V and that his
ancestor Amedee VIII had been an initiate of the Templars. According to
Taxil, the Italian nationalist leaders Mazzini and Garibaldi were close collaborators with the Palladium, and the grand master of Italian Freemasonry, Adri33. Maistre cited in Poliakov, La causalite diabolique, 177; Augustin Barruel, Memoires pour servir a` lhistoire du jacobinisme, 2 vols. (Chire en Montreuil: Diffusion de la
pensee francaise, 1975), 1:42.
34. Bataille, Le diable au XIXe`me sie`cle, 1:5152, 438, 203.
35. Bataille, Le diable au XIXe sie`cle, 1:34647; Weber, Satan franc-macon, 22.
ano Lemmi, a Livornese financier and longtime friend of Mazzini who had
been known as the banker of the Italian revolution, had assumed control
of the global organization following Pikes death in 1891. Taxil argued that
the Italian monarch was the puppet of Masonic organizations, and blamed
Lemmi in particular for fomenting hostility between Italy and France.36 In
an article in the Revue Mensuelle, Taxils collaborator Domenico Margiotta
elaborated this theme even further, quoting Lemmi as declaring that the two
things he most hated were God and France, and declaring his political goals
to be the strengthening of the Triple Alliance linking Italy to Germany and
Austria-Hungary and the recovery of Savoy, Nice, Corsica, and Tunisia from
French rule.37
The global satanic conspiracy had already carried out several assassinations,
including those of the Italian prime minister Camilo Cavour and the American president Abraham Lincoln, whose assassin, John Wilkes Booth, was said
to be revered as a martyr, with his remains secretly buried in the Palladiums
Charleston temple. The Charleston temple was also said to possess and revere
a collection of other singular relics, including the skull of the martyred Templar master Jacques Molay, supposedly brought to America by Isaac Long in
1801, and the severed tail of the lion of St. Mark, which was said to have
been seized in celestial combat by the demon Asmodee.38 (Dr. Bataille, however, somehow found the opportunity to examine these relics within the
Charleston temple itself, and through cranial measurements determined that
Molays supposed skull was not that of a European).39
Even those radicals who were not consciously participants in the Palladiums global scheme were made to serve its purposes. Taxil wrote that anarchists and nihilists while believing themselves atheists, are true servants of
the devil and the most blind instruments of his rage of destruction against
humanity.40 Anarchy, in killing bourgeois it does not hate personally, believes it slays bourgeois society; Freemasonry, in inspiring these murders, in
fomenting social revolution, seeks a general upheaval in the politics of nations, and we shall see to what it is intended to lead.41 Here he argued that
the anarchists of the fin de sie`cle were the direct heirs of the carbonari and
36. Bataille, Le diable au XIXe`me sie`cle, 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 XIXe`me sie`cle, 1:400, 71314.
39. Ibid., 1:400.
40. Ibid., 2:54243.
41. Ibid., 2:58283.
189
190
revolutionary nationalists of midcentury, and that both were the unknowing

instruments of the Palladist conspiracy, writing: The series of anarchist attacks that have multiplied over the past twenty years . . . is it not the exact
replica of the series of revolutionary attacks that, for twenty years, from 1850
to 1870, stupefied Europe? . . . Are we not in the presence of a criminal
political organization, at the end of the nineteenth century as in its third
quarter? At the same time, Taxil also charged the Palladists with inspiring
the Kulturkampf, the campaign of the predominantly Lutheran (and avowedly
anti-Socialist) Second Reich to reduce the political influence of Catholicism
in 1870s Germany, and identified the German-Jewish banker Gerson von
Bleichroder as one of the supreme directors of the Palladist order, with authority over its economic operations worldwide.42 While acknowledging that
he lacked proof of his assertions, Taxils narrator, Dr. Bataille, speculated that
I 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 International Brotherhood (of Freemasonry).43 He dismissed the obvious contradictions and conflicts among groups that, in his view, formed part of a common
satanic conspiracy, by declaring that all the principle articles of revolutionary
programs and all the so-called national or international demands are only
accessory means of the sects, and that the real and only article of the Revolutionary program, without distinction of parties or schools, is War on God
and on His Church! 44
Taxil wrote of the 1870s, the period in which the Palladium was said to
have launched its plans for world domination: In those days, in all the nations of the world, religious persecutions had taken on an increasingly sharp
tone. Germany was in the throes of the Kulturkampf, while in Italy and
France, the governments of these nations, poisoned by Freemasons and Satanists, worked feverishly to ruin gradually the institutions of the Church.
There was, everywhere, and no one knew why, a resurgence of hatred against
the papacy, against the Catholic clergy, against the religious orders. Taxil
argued that this was no mere coincidence, nor was it a reaction to the increasingly intransigent stance of the Vatican itself, but that it was rather evidence
of a global, diabolical conspiracy against the established order: In certain
circumstances that the devil believes more favorable than others, he, who is
in 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.
is to say to the Luciferian leaders of the various rites, and these orders, so
communicated by the secret messengers of the international sect, have for
their goal to multiply the vexations against Catholics and to prevent them,
by all possible means, from devoting themselves to the manifestations of their
faith and the practice of their religion.45
However important were the ongoing combats against the political influence of Catholicism, Taxil argued that the ultimate confrontation still lay in
the future. In its headquarters in Charleston, the Palladium was already preparing for the coming of the Antichrist, whose great-grandmother, Sophie
Walder, was a high priestess of the order. Taxils fictional protagonist, Dr.
Bataille, met Walder on several occasions, and describes his supposed conversations with this remarkable young woman.
Yes, it is so, the young miss told me with an air of absolute conviction; Father says
that I was chosen by our God. I am the predestined stem. I myself will be, at age
thirty-three, the mother of a girl who will herself, at age thirty-three, give birth to
another girl. There will thus be a succession of girls, born of me, who will be mothers
at thirty-three years of age. This is written, in an irrevocable manner, in the book of
destiny, and the last of these girls of my descent will be the mother of the AntiChrist. . . . Ah, doctor, what glory! How many women would envy me if they knew
that 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 of
Adonai is limited, and that there will not be many more generations to see the last of
them. . . . Then the maleachs will be powerless, and the reign of the Good God will
begin for the general happiness of humanity!46
The hero and protagonist of Le diable au XIXe`me sie`cle, Doctor Bataille,

is, as we have seen, a fictional character, a narrator created by Taxil to recount
and give credibility to his inventions. Other major characters, such as Sophie
Walder and Diana Vaughan, are similarly fictional. The arch-villain of the
piece, by contrast, was a real historical figure, with regard to whom a substantial body of evidence exists. The alleged Luciferian pontiff, Albert Pike, was
indeed elected grand master of the southern branch of the Scottish Rite in
Charleston just before the Civil War, and held this rank until his death in
1891. Born in Massachusetts in 1809, Pike was a highly talented autodidact
and linguist, who was accepted at Harvard but could not afford to study
there. Pike moved to Arkansas to seek his fortune, where he gained both
45. Ibid., 1:272.
46. Ibid., 1:382.
191
192
wealth and fame as a journalist, lawyer, and power broker in the Whig Party
in the 1840s and 1850s. When the Civil War came, Pike was commissioned
as a general in an Arkansas regiment and was given responsibility over the
Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) with the mission of securing Native
American support for the Confederacy. Following a scandal after the Battle
of Pea Ridge on March 8, 1862, in which Cherokee warriors under his
authority were accused of scalping Union soldiers, Pike was relieved of his
command. He spent the period from May 1863 to April 1864 on a farm in
rural Arkansas, compiling and rewriting the rituals for the various grades of
the Scottish Rite, certainly an odd occupation for a Confederate general
during wartime, but a pursuit apparently more fitting to his interests and
abilities.47 The product of Pikes wartime labors, Morals and Dogma of the
Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, was published in 1871 and
reissued 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 are
indicative of a broadly tolerant and ecumenical deism, which celebrated the
deity in Masonic terms as the Grand Architect of the Universe and discerned 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 was
one of the foreign Masonic dignitaries who broke relations with Frances
Grand Orient in 1877 when the latter removed belief in a supreme being as
a criterion for membership.48
The primary reason why Taxil chose Pike as his chief villain, rather than
any of the other Masonic dignitaries of Europe and America, would appear
to have been a stinging reply that Pike wrote in response to Humanum Genus
on behalf of the Scottish Rite. Pike condemned what he saw as the cowardice
of the Grand Lodge of England in seeking to disassociate itself from the
Continental Masons, declaring I did not propose to stand upon the defensive . . . nor was I inclined to apologize for the audacity of Free-Masonry in
daring to exist and to be on the side of the great principles of free government.49 He turned the tables on Leo XIII, arguing that it was not Freema47. Biographical information on Albert Pike is taken from Walter Lee Brown, A
Life of Albert Pike (Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 1997).
48. Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (Richmond, Va.: L. H. Jenkins, 1958), 102, 208.
49. Albert Pike, A Reply for the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Free-Masonry to
the Letter Humanum Genus of Pope Leo XIII (Charleston, S.C.: Grand Orient of
Charleston, 1884), 45.
sonry, but rather the pretensions of the Vatican, that posed the greatest threat
to world peace and stability, calling Humanum Genus a declaration of war
against the Human Race.50 Pike wrote:
Nowhere in the world has Free-Masonry ever conspired against any Government
entitled to its obedience or to mens respect. Wherever now there is a Constitutional
Government which respects the rights of men and of the people and the public opinion of the world, it is the loyal supporter of that Government. It has never taken pay
from armed Despotism, or abetted persecution. It has fostered no Borgias; no stranglers or starvers to death of other Popes, like Boniface VII; no poisoners, like Alexander VI and Paul III. It has no roll of beatified Inquisitors or other murderers; and it
has never, in any country, been the enemy of the people, the suppresser of scientific
truth, 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 the
rack, the burner of women and of the exhumed bodies of the dead. It has never been
the 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 the
Spanish Inquisition, accusing Leo XIII of wishing to open a new age of
persecution of heresy, claiming that if it still had the power, the Church of
Rome would today sentence Darwin and his disciples even to march in procession in an Auto da Fe grotesquely clad as heretics [and] burn them alive, as
it would with great rejoicing have done three centuries ago.52 Given the
polemical character of Pikes response to Humanum Genus, it would be fair
to describe him as a staunch opponent of the Vatican. Certainly many ultramontane Catholics saw him as their enemy, and, as the Palladium Affair
would demonstrate, were willing to believe the wild accusations that Taxil
would 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 the
way that Taxil framed Le Diable au XIXe`me sie`cle. For example, Pike stressed
that Freemasonry welcomed all those who believed in a supreme being, declaring that it receives into its Lodges the Christian of every sect, the Hebrew, the Moslem, and the Parsee, and unites them in the holy bonds of
Brotherhood. We have seen above that Taxil presented the peoples of India
and China as the willing dupes of the Western occultists, and that his attacks
50. Pike, Reply, 28.
51. Ibid., 67.
52. Ibid., 25.
193
194
on the master Mason Adriano Lemmi drew upon traditional anti-Semitic

stereotypes. On another occasion, Pike stated that if its principles were what
the Pope alleges them to be, there would not be thousands of clergymen,
Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and of other denominations, members of Masonic Lodges in all the English-speaking countries, and very many of them
members of the higher Bodies of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite.53
A number of Anglo-Saxon clergymen appear as secret followers of Lucifer in
Taxils work, which comes close to asserting that Protestantism in its entirety
is satanic. Pike also told the story of an eighteenth-century inquisitor, Joseph
Torrubia, who infiltrated the lodges of Spain under false pretenses and collected information that led to the suppression of the order and the arrest and
execution of many of its members, remarking that undoubtedly Pope Leo
XIII would consider it laudable for any good Catholic now, if need were, to
imitate the example of the Father Joseph Torrubia . . . although all honest
men ought to regard such a service as base and infamous, and consider perjury
and betrayal of confidence to be virtues only in the eyes of the Church and
not in those of God.54 Dr. Bataille, Taxils fictional narrator, sets out to do
more or less exactly what Pike condemns Torrubia for having done. Clearly,
Pikes response to Leo XIII was instructive to Taxil, and not only in providing him with a plausible Luciferian anti-pope.

Taxils charges that international Freemasonry was engaged in a global satanic
conspiracy, not surprisingly, drew indignant responses from the lodges themselves. The Bulletin Maconnique, the journal of Frances principal Masonic
federation, the Grand Orient, issued a disclaimer of Taxils charges in its June
1894 issue, writing that:
The late Albert Pike was simply the leader of one of many Masonic organizations
which 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 members
of other groups. As for Brother Lemmi, he is neither more nor less than the Grand
Master of the Grand Orient of Italy. . . . And with regard to the devil, whose presence
in our lodges you affirm, I can assure you that it does not exist; we leave to the
Church the monopoly over this bogeyman, who has been and still remains so profitable to it.55
53. Ibid., 22, 31.
54. Ibid., 1213.
55. Quoted in Weber, Satan franc-macon, 967.
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 century
of scientific discovery, that anyone could believe that an assembly of intelligent men, educated in science and art and of sound mind, would pray to
Satan, defile the crucifix, or mutilate the consecrated host.56
Taxil, however, had already anticipated Masonic denials of his charges, and
had built into his text an ingenious way around this dilemma. Freemasonry,
he claimed, had a secret doctrine and hidden rites, which were revealed only
to those who were recognized by the initiates to be capable of receiving
them. In Taxils account, those unsuited for the secret wisdom of the Masons
were awarded a ring, which they wore with pride as the supposed symbol of
their status as master Masons, but which in fact marked them to the true
initiates as simpletons with whom it was best not to discuss serious matters.
(The source for this revelation would appear to be the Masonic historian
Jean-Marie Ragon, whose commentary on the ritual for the thirty-second
degree remarks that, If in conferring this degree, one sees it only as a step
toward Hermetic masonry, one does not give a ring to the recipient, who
receives it only in obtaining a new grade.)57 In this way, even Freemasons
of the highest rank could in good faith deny the charges of satanism that Taxil
made against their organization, denials that simply proved that they had been
deemed unworthy of initiation to the secret mysteries of the order.
Freemasons, however, were not the only critics to cast doubts upon the
veracity of Taxils claims. The French occultist Gerard Encausse, alias Papus,
responded to Taxils charges in a pamphlet entitled Le diable et loccultisme, in
which he asserted that Satanism and Magic are opposite poles, and went
on to remark, I do not know if there exist on earth beings capable of rendering a conscious cult to the principle of evil, concluding that Taxils work
could only harm the cause of enlightened Catholicism.58 The English occultist Arthur Edward Waite was an early critic of Taxils work, which he sought
to debunk in his 1895 book Devil-Worship in France. Waite remarked that
the source of all our knowledge concerning Modern Diabolism exists within
the pale of the Catholic Church; the entire literature is written from the
standpoint 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 31e`me et 32e`me 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.
195
196
Already skeptical, Waite observed that the supposed Palladist conspiracy

conflicts with all that we know or believe concerning the Masonic constitution.60 In particular, Waite was skeptical of Taxil/Batailles allegation that
the Palladist lodge of Charleston functioned as a secret world shadow government, noting that it is difficult to conceive that an institution diffused so
widely should have remained so profound a secret, when the many enemies
of the Fraternity, who in their way are sleepless, would have seized eagerly
upon the slightest hint of a directing centre of Masonry.61 Waite also compared Taxils allegations at length with those of the former occultist and
Mason Jules Doinel, who returned to the Catholic fold and subsequently
published an extensive denunciation of his erstwhile colleagues under the
pseudonym Jean Kostka. Waite wrote of Doinel/Kostka, Neither in Paris
nor elsewhere, neither in Masonry nor in other secret associations, concerning which he has had every opportunity to judge, has he come personally
into contact with a cultus of Satan or Lucifer. . . . It is a highly significant fact
that a man who has mixed among mystics of all grades for probably thirty
years, who is affiliated to innumerable orders, and in his present mood would
be 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 diable
au XIXe`me sie`cle deserves to rank among the most extraordinary literary
swindles of the present, perhaps of any, century.63
By contrast, Taxils charges found a receptive audience among reactionary
Catholics who were only too eager to believe the worst about the Masonic
movement. La Franc-Maconnerie demasquee devoted a special edition in March
1893 to analyze and promote Le diable au XIXe`me siecle, and Michel Jarrige
writes that its editors, the abbe Gabriel Bessonies and Abel Clarin de la Rive,
never had the slightest suspicion with regard to Taxil, never the slightest
doubt of the reality of revelations concerning Palladism.64 The Echo de Rome
repeated many of Taxils charges, with a January 1, 1894, article declaring
that Freemasonry is Satanic in all aspects . . . it is, in effect, the principal
force and the indispensable arm by which Judaism seeks to expel from this
world 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 fright60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
Ibid., 25.
Ibid., 73.
Ibid., 14041.
Ibid., 21314.
Jarrige, LEglise et les Francs-macons, 168.
ening sacrileges.65 Taxil was received in Rome by Cardinals Mariano Rampolla and Lucido Parocchi, who praised his work, and was granted an
audience 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 establishment. The prominent novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, who had explored
satanic themes in his novel La`-bas, reproduced Taxils claims in his introduction to journalist Jules Boiss 1895 book Le Satanisme et la magie, declaring
that Palladism was Catholicism reversed . . . with an anti-pope, a curate, a
college of cardinals that is, in a sense, a parody of the Vatican court. Huysmans also followed Taxil in distinguishing between satanists properly speaking, who consciously worshipped a demonic personage, and Luciferians, who
worshipped Lucifer as a god of light, while rejecting the Christian God
Adonai as the god of darkness.67
Much of the public controversy surrounding the Palladium focused on
Taxils supposed informant, a young, repentant priestess of the Palladium
named Diana Vaughan. She has been raised, according to Taxil, in Louisville,
Kentucky, by an American father and French mother who shared a common
hatred for Catholicism, and who raised her to revere Lucifer as a benevolent
deity. As a compatriot, collaborator, and rival of the Luciferian priestess Sophie Walder, Vaughan had direct access to the inner sanctum of the Palladium, and could speak with a degree of authority that Dr. Bataille, as an
outsider, could not. After realizing that Lucifer and Satan were one and the
same, Diana Vaughan was said to have converted to Catholicism through the
direct intervention of Joan of Arc, and was now committed to the destruction
of the evil organization in which she had spent the formative years of her
life. Much of the French Catholic press eagerly followed the unfolding story
of Dianas redemption. La Croix reported on June 12, 1895, that we have
learned, from an absolutely reliable source (!) that Miss Diana Vaughan . . .
definitively renounces Palladism, and remarked in a subsequent note on
June 21, How admirable is the grace of God in the souls that deliver themselves to Him! A provincial edition, La Croix des Ardennes, went even further in its June 23 issue, declaring, It is a tremendous event in the order of
grace, which many will call a miracle.68 The papal secretary, Monsignor
Vincenzo Sardi, even wrote a letter of congratulations to Vaughan, conclud65. 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, excerpted in Weber, Satan franc-macon, 21.
197
198
ing, Continue, Mademoiselle, continue to write and to unmask the evil

sect! Providence for this reason has allowed you to remain within it for so
long.69 Diana Vaughan, of course, did not exist, but Taxil initially sought to
persuade his critics of her existence, even publishing a supposed photo of her
in one of his works.
Other Catholic scholars and officials, however, were less convinced by
Taxils charges. The Catholic bishop of Charleston, Monsignor Henry Pinckney Northrop, traveled to Rome to refute the charges against his native city,
declaring to an interviewer that it is false, absolutely false, that the Freemasons of Charleston are the leaders of a supreme Luciferian rite. I know all of
their leaders personally; they are Protestants with good intentions; none of
them would dream of engaging in practices of occultism. A few prominent
French clerics also doubted Taxils claims. The Jesuit scholar Euge`ne Portalie
compared Taxils claims to those of a swindler who had recently sold the
Berlin Museum a collection of supposed Moabite statues that turned out to
be of modern production, while the abbe Leon Garnier declared in Le peuple
francais on October 25, 1896, that Diana Vaughan was an invention created
to sell books and discredit Catholicism.70
Taxils most outspoken critic within the Catholic Church was the German
Jesuit scholar Fr. Hermann Gruber, who already in August 1896 had declared
in the Kolnische Volkszeitung that the Palladium was a fraud. After the Palladium Affair had run its course, Gruber published a massive, three-volume
study entitled Leo Taxils Palladismus-Roman, which, he declared, was intended to sharpen the critical sense of Catholic readers and writers . . .
which unfortunately, as the course of events has shown . . . leaves much to
be desired. Gruber noted that Taxil was an unreliable source, observing that
he had already been involved in repeated great literary hoaxes, notably a
pornographic text from the 1870s entitled Les amours secre`tes de Pie IX. Gruber
also argued for the internal improbability of a satanic cult within Freemasonry, declaring that the latter, with its principally materialist and anti-supernaturalist tendencies, is clearly no appropriate foundation on which to build
a formal and systematic cult of the Devil. Though Gruber made clear that
he considered the Masonic movement an enemy of the Church, he warned
that successful action against Freemasonry is only possible when one stands
firmly on the ground of the facts.71
The issue of the veracity of Taxils charges was a central topic on the
70. Quoted in Weber, Satan franc-macon, 178, 123, 116.
71. Gruber, Leo Taxils Palladismus-Roman, 1:4, 7, 13; 2:17980.
agenda of an Anti-Masonic Congress held in Trent in September and October of 1896, an assembly that condemned Freemasonry and called for unity
among its opponents.72 The Congress devoted a special session to the Palladium Affair on September 29, at which another German cleric, M. Baumgartner, requested proof of Diana Vaughans existence, such as her birth
certificate or an affidavit from the priest who had supervised her conversion
and first communion. Taxil later took the rostrum to defend his accounts
against his skeptics, declaring that Dianas life would be in danger were he to
provide the requested information. Taxil did, however, promise to meet in
Rome with a papal representative, Bishop Luigi Lazzareschi, and reveal the
name of the cleric in question, who could then be summoned secretly to the
Vatican to meet with Leo XIII. These assurances momentarily satisfied Taxils
critics, 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 critics, particularly Waite, Gruber, and an anonymous Frenchman who wrote
under the name Count H. C., had begun to assemble and publish the evidence against his claims. H. C., for example, released his correspondence
with British scholars of the Royal Asiatic Society in Calcutta, who had assured him that the supposed temple complex of Mahatalawa and the openair graveyard of Dappah did not exist, and who also criticized the sloppy
erudition of Le diable au XIXe`me sie`cle, which, they noted, misidentified a
prominent Hindu temple as a Buddhist one.74 Numerous prominent figures
whom Taxil had accused of satanism, including Adriano Lemmi, Juliette
Lamber Adam, and Lilian Pike (Alberts daughter), had issued angry public
denials in the press. Bishop Lazzareschi, whom Taxil put off with a series of
excuses, became increasingly suspicious of the affair, and in January 1897
issued a statement that declared that there was no compelling evidence either
for or against the existence of Diana Vaughan.75 Even Taxils former collaborators began to turn against him. Charles Hacks suggested in an interview
with La Verite that the whole affair had been his idea and that he had decided
to be the Jules Verne who could make money out of the known credulity
and unfounded stupidity of Catholics,76 while Domenico Margiotta told the
right-wing journalist Gaston Mery in November that the Palladium was a
72.
73.
74.
75.
76.
Weber, Satan franc-macon, 12226.

Lea, Leo Taxil, 23; Weber, Satan franc-macon, 11920.
Quoted in Gruber, Leo Taxils Palladismus-Roman, 1:10910.
Gruber, Leo Taxils Palladismus-Roman, 1:17071.
Quoted in Gruber, Leo Taxils Palladismus-Roman, 1:59, 87.
199
200
fraud.77 Henry Charles Lea speculates that the Vatican had discovered by this
point that Taxils story was fiction, but that the infallible clairvoyance of
Rome 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 assertions, particularly that he submit his alleged informant, Diana Vaughan, to
public scrutiny. Taxil finally scheduled for April 19, 1897, a public conference
in which he promised to present Diana Vaughan and respond to his critics.
Instead, however, Taxil took the opportunity to reveal the scope of his deception, calling himself a freethinker who, for his personal edification, and
not for hostility, strolled into your camp, and concluding with the declaration, Palladism, my finest creation, existed only on paper and in a few thousand minds. The woman whom he had presented as Diana Vaughan was in
fact a typist who had collaborated with him on the manuscripts, who was
more freethinker than Protestant, and who was also stupefied to find that,
in this century of progress, there are still people who seriously believe in all
of 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 on
April 20, 1897:
To mount a mystification in all its parts, to mock the Church for twelve years, fool
the priests, the bishops, laugh at the cardinals, and have this trickery blessed by the
Holy Father himself, this is the regrettable work with which Leo Taxil has amused
himself. . . . Naturally, this conference was interrupted by many protests. Two or
three people left at the beginning, including one of our colleagues in the Catholic
press, who told the priests that they should not remain a moment longer. Let us
have 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, Canaille! immonde fripouille! And to think that we left our canes at the door!80
Taxils devoted supporter, the abbe Bessonies, who presided over the session in which he had expected to hear directly from Diana Vaughan for the
first time, was left, according to Jarrige, in a humiliation without limits.81
Other former supporters quickly distanced themselves. Gaston Mery hotly
denied ever having been fooled, declaring that he knew from the start that
77.
78.
79.
80.
81.
Lea, Leo Taxil, 23; Waite, Devil-Worship in France, 253.

Lea, Leo Taxil, 24.
Weber, Satan franc-macon, 156, 171, 173, 183.
Le Matin, April 20, 1897, quoted in Weber, Satan franc-macon, 1534.
Taxils publications were not historical work, but fiction. It would be easy
to put it together with some travel books, knowledge of Freemasonry, and
imagination and daring. Mery declared, correctly, that the goal of the hoax
was to fool as much as possible Catholic laymen and to compromise a good
number of clergy, first simple priests, later bishops, and finally, little by little,
to arrive at mystifying the Holy Father himself. Mery further argued that
the silence of Freemasonry during the affair was proof that it had been in on
the fraud, writing How else can we explain that the Freemasons, if they felt
themselves aggrieved by the attacks of militant converts, did not display any
indignation, they who, normally, show themselves so combative at the slightest hint of provocation?82 Another prominent journalist, Euge`ne Veuillot,
editor of LUnivers, called his fellow French Catholics to introspection, declaring in an April 30 editorial that the mystification would not have succeeded, had it not found well-prepared soil in the unhealthy spiritual
composition of a misdirected public.83 The abbe Garnier, for his part, defended himself by saying, I was able to believe this extraordinary story because the Pope believed in it.84
If Taxils former supporters were embarrassed by his revelations of April
19, his critics, by contrast, felt vindicated. Arthur E. Waite wrote that Taxil
is not a splendid impostor but a mercenary adventurer who has been actuated throughout by the basest motive and has made use of the sorriest means
and that the impostor was compelled to unmask, not as the master-stroke
of a gorgeous deception but as the last refuge and valedictory audacity of an
exposed culprit.85 The novelist Alphonse Daudet dismissed Taxil as a vulgar
charlatan whose plans had backfired, declaring, He sought to slay the clerical
Hydra. What has he slain? His own dignity.86
Interestingly, some of Taxils followers refused to accept that the Palladium
was a fraud, believing instead that the satanic conspiracy had somehow forced
Taxil to recant and to cover up the truth.87 La Franc-Maconnerie demasquee
drifted for two years, finally letting go of the Palladium myth in 1899 under
a new editor, the abbe Joseph, dit Tourmentin. Huysmans was still asserting
the existence of the Palladium four years after Taxils dramatic confession,
82. Gaston Mery, La Verite sur Diana Vaughan: Un Complot maconnique (Paris: Bleriot, 1896), 7678.
83. Quoted in Gruber, Leo Taxils Palladismus-Roman, 3:270.
85. Waite, Devil-Worship in France, 231.
86. Quoted in Gruber, Leo Taxils Palladismus-Roman, 3:215.
87. Jones, Palladism and the Papacy, 472.
201
202
writing in 1901 that it is nevertheless true, undeniable, absolute, sure, despite the self-interested denials, that the Luciferian cult exists, it governs Freemasonry and silently pulls the strings of the sinister puppets that rule over
us.88 The British anti-Masonic author Leslie Fry claimed in 1934 that it is
incontestable that Leo Taxil had authentic documents emanating from the
very interior of Satanic lodges, while the Catholic author Georges Bernanos
remarked that a few brave souls that will let go of nothing . . . still take
seriously, forty years later, one or two episodes of an imposture.89 Even
today, Taxils legend of a Masonic satanic conspiracy still finds currency, at
least on the lunatic fringes of cyberspace. A 2002 article in U.S. News and
World 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 a
popular American magazine is testament to its unusual durability. Jim Tresner,
an American Mason, author, and journalist, recently declared, I wish it were
true that Taxil had murdered the hoax of Masonic devil worship which he
created, but that corpse revives with frequency. . . . He fooled the ignorant
in the late 1800she fools the ignorant today.90

Although Remy de Gourmont once quipped that Leo Taxil has but a single
readerthe imbecile, Le diable au XIXe`me sie`cle was widely read and discussed in the final decade of the nineteenth century. While some of Taxils
readers may have perceived his work, which Michel Berchmans in 1973
called the most stunning popular fantastic novel of the previous century,
simply as an entertaining work of fiction, Le diable au XIXe`me sie`cle was widely
believed, at least within the subcultures of integral Catholicism and the antiMasonic movement.91 As we have seen, much of the French Catholic press,
particularly La Franc-Maconerie demasquee, the Revue Catholique of Taxils
staunch advocate, the canon Ludovic-Martial Mustel of Avranches-Coutances,
and the Semaine Religieuse, edited by another longtime supporter, Monseigneur Armand-Joseph Fava, archbishop of Grenoble, believed in the exis88. Quoted in Weber, Satan franc-macon, 218.
89. Quoted in Michel Berchmans, Le Diable au XIXe`me sie`cle, 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 Lives
on, U.S. News and World Report, August 26, 2002, 46. My own Google search of
the name Leo Taxil netted nearly 24,000 hits.
91. Berchmans, Le Diable au XIXe`me sie`cle, 19, 9.
tence of the Palladium and reported frequently on new developments in the

Diana Vaughan case. Many prominent clerics abroad were also taken in, notably the cardinals Rampolla and Parocchi and the French archbishop of
Mauritius, Monseigneur Leon Meurin, whose own book, La franc-maconnerie:
Synagogue de Satan, is based almost entirely on earlier works by Taxil, whom
he cites repeatedly throughout the text and praises as one of the most valiant
champions of Christianity.92 Taxils German critic, the Jesuit Hermann
Gruber, found it incredible that the atheist Dr. Bataille managed to be taken
as an authority in theological matters by the general secretary of the French
Anti-Masonic Union and the editor of France Chretienne.93
Taxils writings engaged in an ongoing dialogue with other exponents of
integral Catholicism in 1890s France, an open conversation that both shaped
the broader discourse on Catholicism, satanism, and antimodernism in
France, and also, I would argue, modified the direction of Taxils unfolding
charges. The most prominent example of the effects of this dialogue concerns
the relationship of satanism and Judaism, a trope of reactionary Catholicism
since the Middle Ages. The Jews are notable for their absence in the early
chapters of Le diable au XIXe`me sie`cle, in which the chief villains are English
and American Protestants. Mgr. Meurins text on the same subject, though
relying heavily on Taxils work, is stridently anti-Semitic, reviving medieval
charges of ritual murder and adding the modern charge, popularized by the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion, of a Jewish quest for world domination, declaring, To crown the Jew with a royal diadem and to place the kingdoms of
the world at his feet, that is the true goal of Freemasonry.94 Diana Vaughans
supposed memoirs, written by Taxil himself, criticized Gaston Merys antiSemitic campaigns and attributed Merys hostility to Taxil to their differences
on this issue.95 Ultimately, Taxil bowed to the prejudices of his readers, perhaps also stung by the persistent criticism of Paul Rosen, a former master
Mason and Jewish convert to Catholicism who denounced Taxil as a liar.96
While the Anglo-American Palladium remains the arch-villain of Le diable au
XIXe`me sie`cle, the Jewish Italian grand master Adriano Lemmi takes on an
increasingly prominent role as the work progresses. In an odd, almost schizophrenic passage, whose character results from Taxils multiple layers of deception, the narrator of Le diable au XIXe`me sie`cle, Doctor Bataille, criticizes Leo
Taxil for failing to pay sufficient attention to the Jewish question:
92.
93.
94.
95.
96.
Meurin, La franc-maconnerie, 58.

Gruber, Leo Taxils Palladismus-Roman, 2:51.
Meurin, La franc-maconnerie, 11.
Quoted in Weber, Satan franc-macon, 141.
203
204

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 common

discourse, which presents both Jews and Freemasons as agents of Lucifer himself, illustrates in particularly striking fashion the diabolical causality that
Leon Poliakov saw as an increasingly central characteristic of fin de sie`cle
European thought. For Poliakov, whose primary concern is to document the
roots of modern anti-Semitism in European culture, the devil and the Jews,
often linked in the medieval mind, are the scapegoats par excellence of the
Western mind. It could hardly be otherwise, Poliakov argues, stating that
Western historical consciousness has its roots in Judeo-Christian eschatology
. . . the Devil or the Antichrist is almost as omnipresent in western consciousness 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 politics, has discussed at length what he describes as the paranoid style of
thought, 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 undermine
and destroy a way of life. Hofstadter further writes that this enemy is clearly
delineated; he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman; sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. . . . The paranoids
interpretation of history is in this sense distinctly personal: decisive events are
not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequence of someones will. . . . The enemy seems to be on many counts a projection of the
self: both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to
him. A fundamental paradox of the paranoid style is the imitation of the
enemy.99 This imitation, as the events of the twentieth century would tragically demonstrate, has dangerous implications for the alleged conspirators; as
97. Bataille, Le Diable au XIXe`me Sie`cle, 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.
they are imagined as ruthless and cruel, they must be suppressed with ruthlessness and cruelty.
Poliakov suggests that the idea of diabolical causality, of attributing misfortunes to evil conspiracies, is as old as Western civilization itself. Other
scholars have noted, however, that this view of the world seems to have
been particularly prevalent during the long nineteenth century, the period
stretching from the French Revolution until the outbreak of the First World
War. J. M. Roberts has speculated that more believed such nonsense, probably, between 1815 and 1914 than at any other time.100 Roberts represents
the resurgence of conspiracy belief in the nineteenth century as an antimodern reaction to the disorienting changes of modernization, writing, Between
1789 and 1848 there was almost everywhere in Europe a great general acceleration of social and political change. . . . Educated and conservative men
raised in the tradition of Christianity, with its stress on individual responsibility and the independence of the will, found conspiracy theories plausible as an
explanation of such change: it must have come about, they thought, because
somebody planned it so.101
Le diable au XIXe`me sie`cle carried this tendency toward diabolical causality to its logical extreme, not only charging that a secret conspiracy was
leading the world toward its ruin (as the anticlerical, anti-Masonic, and antiSemitic conspiracy theories that were widespread in fin de sie`cle France all
asserted, in one way or another), but also providing supposed proof that this
conspiracy was indeed literally diabolic in nature, directed by Lucifer himself
and striving to bring about the destruction of Christian civilization and to
prepare the way for the coming of the Antichrist. It is true, of course, that Le
diable au XIXe`me sie`cle, the Palladium, and most of the protagonists that Taxil
presented were fictional. What is ultimately significant, however, is that many
readers believed these fictions to be true, and were ready to be convinced
that many of the leaders, institutions, and values of the modern world were
the willing or unwilling tools of the devil. The radical journalist and politician Camille Pelletan worried that, even after Taxils confession, his charges
would continue to poison French public discourse, writing, Once a fraud
has been accepted, it remains in the spirit, the majority forget its origin. The
majority of the devout who believed these guilty lies will take from the
events of recent days that M. Taxil is a rascal and that Diana Vaughan does
not exist. However, they will nevertheless retain in their memories, as articles
100. J. M. Roberts, The Mythology of the Secret Societies (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1972), 12.
101. Roberts, Mythology of the Secret Societies, 910.
205
206
of faith, the lies that entered their minds with the signatures of Diana
Vaughan and of Taxil.102
How, then, should we today assess the meaning and legacy of the Palladium hoax and the mammoth literary work that was at its core? The Palladium hoax was contemporaneous and ideologically intertwined with such
events as the Dreyfus Affair, the forgery of the Protocols of the Elders of
Zion, and the growing pseudo-scholarly discourse of scientific racism. Like
these other harbingers of doom, it offered a terrifying, chiliastic vision of a
world on the brink of catastrophe, threatened by truly diabolical forces that
would stop at nothing to destroy Christian civilization, and conversely,
against whom all means of resistance were legitimate. For readers today, Le
diable au XIXe`me sie`cle serves as a sort of ideological barometer of the age in
which it was created, an indicator of the depths of antimodernism and political paranoia among a certain segment of the population of France and other
parts of Catholic Europe. The fact that even a limited number of readers
were willing to swallow Taxils lies and legends wholesale was an ominous
sign for European society on the threshold of the twentieth century.
102. Camille Pelletan, Le Rappel, April 24, 1897, quoted in Weber, Satan francmacon, 217.

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Lucifer in the City of Light: The Palladium Hoax and Diabolical

Causality in Fin De Sicle France

Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, Volume 1, Number 2, Winter 2006, pp.

For additional information about this article

Lucifer in the City of Light

Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft Winter 2006

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Born Gabriel Jogand-Page`s in Marseilles in 1854, Leo Taxil was a latter-day

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ground of scurrilous polemicists and Grub-Street hack writers,10 beginning

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Franc-Maconnerie, and Le culte du Grand Architecte (all in 1886), La France

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Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft Winter 2006

Harvey Lucifer in the City of Light

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Catholicism was, he discovered, being directed from across the Atlantic.

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Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft Winter 2006

In addition to linking Freemasonry to the worship of Lucifer, Taxil also

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Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft Winter 2006

revolutionary nationalists of midcentury, and that both were the unknowing

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The hero and protagonist of Le diable au XIXe`me sie`cle, Doctor Bataille,

Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft Winter 2006

Harvey Lucifer in the City of Light

Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft Winter 2006

on the master Mason Adriano Lemmi drew upon traditional anti-Semitic

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Already skeptical, Waite observed that the supposed Palladist conspiracy

Harvey Lucifer in the City of Light

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ing, Continue, Mademoiselle, continue to write and to unmask the evil

Harvey Lucifer in the City of Light

Weber, Satan franc-macon, 12226.

Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft Winter 2006

Lea, Leo Taxil, 23; Waite, Devil-Worship in France, 253.

Harvey Lucifer in the City of Light

Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft Winter 2006

Harvey Lucifer in the City of Light

tence of the Palladium and reported frequently on new developments in the

Meurin, La franc-maconnerie, 58.

Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft Winter 2006

The fusion of anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic narratives into a common

Harvey Lucifer in the City of Light

Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft Winter 2006

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