THIS "BLACK MASS."

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIV, Issue 13497, 25 May 1907, Page 2 (Supplement)

THIS "BLACK MASS."

CHAMPION LIAR OF THE AGE : PASSES AWAY.

Leo Taxtl is dead. He was the champion liar of the age. He invented " Diana Vaughan"," the supposed prophetess of Black Masonry, and hoaxed all Europe with it. It will go down in the list of great hoaxes with .George Psalmanazar . and his) Formosan j hoax and the forgeries" of Chatterton. Leo Ta.xil.was not his real'hame.. In fact, . there wjas nothing real about this champion "faker" of the age.... He was Gabriel Antoine Joyaud-Pages, and he was born in Marseilles. Educated- by the Jesuits, he very early developed - faults, which resulted in his going to a house of correction. He came to Paris filled, he said, with hatred of the Jesuits, and started an anti-clerical bookshop. Having become a Freemason, he was expelled from the order and then turned clerical. He made a public retraction/with great pomp. and so imposed on the clergy that they held a special thanksgiving service at Montmartre. He began exposing with his customary violence his old allies the Freemasons and Freethinkers, and in the cause: of 'his campaign alleged that the. "black mass" was still being celebrated by the Satanists among the French Freemasons. The clerical party snatched at this with joy as a means of discrediting their opponents, and Leo Taxil's books were translated into every European language. He invented the celebrated Diana Vaughan, who was a high priestess of the Luciferin sect, and went so far as to supply her portrait to American newspapers. Interviews with her appeared, and he actually fixed a day for her public recantation and reception .in the Church. His most impudent imposure was the sending of the devil's tail to the Jesuits as a present. He declared that it had been secured at one of the "black masses" held, by the Satanists in Masonic lodges. This tail turned out to be a portion of a rug made out of a lion's skin with the tail attached.-. Another of his stories was that the rock of Gibraltar is undermined by subterranean galleries where : the Freemasons met Satan at fixed times to hold their impious worship. ? At last the non-appearance of Diana Vaughan made his dupes uneasy, and it ended by this fluent liar making another recantation, in which he admitted that his Luciferian prophetess was a myth, and that "Satanism" did : not exist. He died at last, rejected by all parties, in obscurity and poverty. '* •'>■;.•