More about Taxil

...the religious public in France had, by the 1880s, a thoroughly jaundiced view of the Craft which rendered them easy prey for the literary hoaxer Leo Taxil (the pseudonym of Gabriel Jogand-Pages).

Taxil claimed to have uncovered, with the aid of a renegade lady member, a monstrous plot by the Palladium, an Order of satanic freemasons presided over by Albert Pike, to subvert religion and both the moral and social order. His fantastic tales, in Le Diable aux XIXe Siecle (1892-1895) and in Memoires d'une Ex-Palladiste (1895-1897), of human sacrifice, orgiastic devil-worship and meetings of Palladian lodges at which demons in the form of crocodiles would obligingly play the piano, were eagerly lapped up by an almost unbelievably credulous public. When the hoax was exposed, in 1897, many of his dupes refused to believe that it was all fiction and insisted, in the face of all reason, that this was the real face of Freemasonry. In is an unfortunate image of the Craft that has persisted among religious fundamentalists to the present day.

Excerpted from the 1997 Prestonian Lecture "Popular Fictions; The Image of Freemasonry in Popular Literature" by W.Bro. R.A. Gilbert, B.A. P.M. Tyndall Lodge No. 1363 and Quatuor Coronati Lodge No. 2076. (Given 24 June '97)

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