The Leo Taxil Hoax

Leo Taxil was dedicated to tearing down Freemasonry and wrote several books on how Masons were devil worshippers. He convinced the Pope and the Catholic Church, as well as some other denominations, that Masons were involved in all sorts of evil. The September issue of U.S. News and World Report ran this article on the Lie that Taxil finally confessed was a his own invention.

Special Double Issue–The Art of Hoaxes
Devil in a red fez
The lie about the Freemasons lives on

BY DAN GILGOFF

When the ribald French journalist Gabriel Jogand-Pages walked into a Paris church in April 1885 and told a priest he'd been divinely moved to rediscover the Catholicism of his birth, you'd think he would have been laughed out of town. Jogand-Pages–better known by his pseudonym, Léo Taxil–was founder of France's Anti-Clerical League and Freethinkers Society. He'd edited popular church-bashing magazines like Down With the Clergy! and authored pornographic books such as The Pope's Mistresses. And Taxil had a personal ax to grind with Rome: He'd been successfully prosecuted by the church for libel, though he managed to avert a prison sentence. "Taxil had so many enemies," says William Harman, a religion professor at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, "that I'm amazed he was able to walk around freely."

His writings didn't affect Freemason membership numbers–many French freethinkers publicly denounced Taxil as a fraud. But he did inspire others to craft ever more sensational accounts of the Mason-Satan connection. Antisemitic contemporaries recalibrated his rhetoric for their own use. "It's obvious that whoever wrote the first version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was directly influenced by Taxil," says Bill Ellis, author of Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media.

Taxil's work informs today's extremist Christian literature as well. Chick Publications, which distributes Christian tracts, offers a short comic strip that calls Masonry witchcraft and fezzes (worn by the Shriners, a subset of Masonry) "idols dedicated to a false god." It even refers to Albert Pike, a real South Carolina Mason who was caricatured into a Satanist by Taxil. In his 1991 bestseller New World Order, evangelist Pat Robertson implicated Freemason "occultism" in a supposed international financial conspiracy. And a Mississippi group called Ex-Masons for Jesus brands the order a "pagan religion."

Taxil himself had no intention of aiding any Christian cause: He wanted to embarrass Rome. After promising to present Diana Vaughan to the public in April 1897, he instead used the occasion to reveal himself as a fake and to thank the church for its gullibility. "Palladism, my most beautiful creation, never existed except on paper and in thousands of minds," he told a crowd of 300. They were incensed, but Taxil had once more outwitted his audience: He had requested that all umbrellas and canes be checked at the door.