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In my last article, The World’s Greatest Hoax, I exploded the myth that the Freemasons were at the center of a devil-worshiping conspiracy for world domination. As expected, this left some of the simpler minds out there thinking “If it’s not the Freemasons, he must be saying the whole thing is a lie!”

Not so, not even close.

Half the truth is often a great lie. – Benjamin Franklin

For those unfamiliar with the term ‘limited hangout’ I’ll explain. The best deceptions will always contain elements of the truth, and where these disclosures are bound to stir up public anger, they’re seeded with lies to scapegoat innocent parties. This is what Ben Franklin is talking about in the quote above, and it’s what Malcolm X was talking about in the quote used to kick off my last article.

Leo Taxil’s Jesuit education is an indication that he knows more than the average person about what is truly going on behind the scenes in the world. This may have served as a model for the hoax he ultimately created. In this report we’re going to explore what he said in detail, and ultimately coax out the identity of the god of the elites, and why they all appear to be engaged in the same depraved rituals.

Origins of Lucifer

Taxil’s hoax starts off with Doctor Bataille’s encounter on a boat with an Italian man named Gaetano Carbuccia, who recounts to Bataille his experiences with the Palladium Rite. Carbuccia explains the strange rituals they performed, and one in particular where they summoned Lucifer himself. The fictitious whistleblower assures the reader this is a real spiritual apparition, that even shook hands with one of the ritual’s attendees, and proceeds with giving us a general physical description:

I then looked at the spirit that appeared. In all the previous evocations, in which I had taken part, when the spirit evoked had wanted to appear, it was always a ghost with more or less vaporous forms, a fluidic being, essentially impalpable. This spirit, on the contrary, was indeed a being like you and me, in flesh and blood, but with a truly radiant body. In the theater, sometimes, a jet of oxyhydric light is accompanied by the main character on stage; nevertheless, the trick is easy to see, since the light, directed from any point on the artist, widens towards him in the form of a barely opened compass; the light falls on man and illuminates him. Far from there, the spirit which had just appeared to us was itself the center of the glow, the luminous focus illuminating the room. There was no doubt; we were indeed in the presence of Lucifer himself.

When he shows himself, is he always like I saw him?… That, I don’t know… That day, he had the features of a man between thirty-five and thirty-eight years; tall in stature; without beard or mustache; rather lean than fat, but by no means bony; the fine, distinguished physiognomy; I don’t know what melancholy in his eyes; a nervous smile tugging at the corners of his lips. He was naked, with white, slightly pink skin, wonderfully decoupaged, like a statue of Apollo. – Léo Taxil, Le Diable au XIXe Siècle, pp. 16-17

This sympathy for the Devil, so to speak, carries on throughout the book and is the reason why Taxil refers to this fake group of Masons as “Luciferians.” However, the real Albert Pike, who Taxil portrayed as the ringleader of the bogus group of Masons, has published a great deal of literature under his own name, the most famous being the much-maligned Morals and Dogma.

The subject of Lucifer is raised only FOUR times in this 860 page book. Quite amazing for a supposed Luciferian. Pike is hardly venerating the deity, either. Reproduced here for you are the only four parts, with a little truncation in places to compensate for Pike’s loquaciousness:

Hypocrisy is the homage that vice and wrong pay to virtue and justice. It is Satan attempting to clothe himself in the angelic vesture of light. It is equally detestable in morals, politics, and religion; in the man and in the nation. To do injustice under the pretence of equity and fairness; to reprove vice in public and commit it in private … and sell one’s vote for place and power, are hypocrisies as common as they are infamous and disgraceful. To steal the livery of the Court of God to serve the Devil withal; to pretend to believe in a God of mercy and a Redeemer of love, and persecute those of a different faith … to inculcate humility, and in pride surpass Lucifer … is indeed to be like unto whited sepulchres, which appear beautiful outward, but are within full of bones of the dead and of all uncleanness. – Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma, p. 73.

The true name of Satan, the Kabalists say, is that of Yahveh reversed; for Satan is not a black god, but the negation of God. The Devil is the personification of Atheism or Idolatry. For the Initiates, this is not a Person, but a Force, created for good, but which may serve for evil. It is the instrument of Liberty or Free Will. They represent this Force, which presides over the physical generation, under the mythologic and horned form of the God PAN; thence came the he-goat of the Sabbat, brother of the Ancient Serpent, and the Light-bearer or Phosphor, of which the poets have made the false Lucifer of the legend. – Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma, p. 102.

The Apocalypse is, to those who receive the nineteenth Degree, the Apotheosis of that Sublime Faith which aspires to God alone, and despises all the pomps and works of Lucifer. LUCIFER, the Light-bearer! Strange and mysterious name to give to the Spirit of Darkness! Lucifer, the Son of the Morning! Is it he who bears the Light, and with its splendors intolerable blinds feeble, sensual, or selfish Souls? Doubt it not! for traditions are full of Divine Revelations and Inspirations: and Inspiration is not of one Age nor of one Creed. Plato and Philo, also, were inspired. – Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma, p. 321.

It is by His uttered Word that God reveals Himself to us; not alone in the visible and invisible but intellectual creation, but also in our convictions, consciousness, and instincts. Hence it is that certain beliefs are universal. The conviction of all men that God is good led to a belief in a Devil, the fallen Lucifer or Lightbearer, Shaitan the Adversary, Ahriman and Tuphon, as an attempt to explain the existence of Evil, and make it consistent with the Infinite Power, Wisdom, and Benevolence of God. – Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma, p. 324.

It’s obvious that Pike’s (and that of the world at large) conception of Lucifer is heavily influenced by Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Milton’s Paradise Lost. It was in these fictional works that Lucifer was cast as an angel who rebelled against God’s “plan” for humanity, in favor of his own and, after a war, was cast out of heaven along with the rest of his followers.

The canonical reality is that “Lucifer” appears only once in the KJV Bible, in Isaiah 14:12, and that is the result of King James’ translator working from a copy of the Vulgate. The translator was less than adept at Latin and he had no idea what the word meant, and so left it untranslated. Isaiah was written during the Babylonian captivity and is a litany against the King of Babylon. The word ‘Lucifer’ is used in a list of epithets for the King. Working from the original Hebrew version of Isaiah we see the word is actually correctly rendered in English as “Day Star,” or “Morning Star,” a reference to the planet Venus when it appears just prior to sunrise in the east, of which Pike is clearly aware. This planet, the brightest object in the sky after the Sun and Moon was worshipped as a goddess in Rome, and in Greece she was known as Aphrodite, and Phosphorus.

And so there you have it, Lucifer is Aphrodite. Not a fallen angel who rebelled against God, but the godDESS of lust and sexual pleasure!

Need more evidence? Venus orbits the sun thirteen times for every eight orbits of the Earth. By following the orbit of Venus from our geocentric perspective, we see that its course through the heavens traces out a pentagram – the symbol ostensibly used to summon!

Divine Lovers

It’s no controversy to say that the patriarchal Abrahamic faiths eliminated the entire female aspect of God, and now we can see the original template they worked from. You shouldn’t be surprised at this, because many early Christian apologists outright admit their dogma was borrowed heavily from the earlier pagan mythologies.

And when we say also that the Word, who is the first-birth of God, was produced without sexual union, and that He, Jesus Christ, our Teacher, was crucified and died, and rose again, and ascended into heaven, we propound nothing different from what you believe regarding those whom you esteem sons of Jupiter. – St. Justin Martyr, The First Apology, Chapter 21.

Let’s now go back to the quotes from the Taxil hoax, because they clearly convey a very different conception of Lucifer than Pike did.

Therefore, when the autocratic Empire of Russia will become the citadel of papist adonaism, we shall unleash the revolutionary nihilists and atheists, and provoke a formidable social cataclysm, which will demonstrate clearly to the nations, in all its horror, the effect of absolute unbelief, mother of savagery and of the bloodiest disorder. Then everywhere, the citizens, obliged to defend themselves against the mad minority of revolutionaries, will exterminate these destroyers of civilization; and the countless disillusioned adonaites, whose deist soul have up until that time remained without a compass, thirsting for an ideal, but not knowing which God is worthy of tribute, will receive the True Light, by the universal manifestation of the pure Luciferian doctrine, at last made public, an event that will arise from a reactionary movement following the destruction of atheism and adonaism, together at the same time vanquished and exterminated. – Léo Taxil, Le Diable au XIXe Siècle, Vol. II, p. 605.

That which we must say to the world is that we worship a god, but it is the god that one adores without superstition. To you, Sovereign Grand Inspectors General, we say this, that you may repeat it to the brethren of the 32nd, 31st and 30th degrees: The masonic Religion should be, by all of us initiates of the higher degrees, maintained in the Purity of the Luciferian doctrine. If Lucifer were not God, would Adonay and his priests calumniate him? Yes, Lucifer is God, and unfortunately Adonay is also god. For the eternal law is that there is no light without shade, no beauty without ugliness, no white without black, for the absolute can only exist as two gods; darkness being necessary for light to serve as its foil as the pedestal is necessary to the statue, and the brake to the locomotive. Thus, the doctrine of Satanism is a heresy, and the true and pure philosophical religion is the belief in Lucifer, the equal of Adonay; but Lucifer, God of Light and God of Good, is struggling for humanity against Adonay, the God of Darkness and Evil. – A. C. de la Rive, La Femme et l’Enfant Dans la Franc-Maçonnerie Universelle, pp. 588-589.

Here these hucksters are setting up a form of dualism in the form of Lucifer and Adonai, which is indeed one of the names of God according to the Hebrews. Adonai is associated with the Greek god Adonis, and now, suddenly everything fits together.

Because Adonis and Aphrodite were lovers, not adversaries!

The worship of Adonis in Greece and Phoenicia includes a great many rituals and themes you may find familiar. The Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible is an authoritative resource on this and the entry for Adonai is quite interesting.

Whereas Aphrodite self-formed from the castrated genitals of Ouranos, Adonis was born to mortals. He’s the son of Princess Myrrha, who was cursed by Aphrodite with insatiable lust for her own father after her mother bragged that Myrrha’s beauty surpassed that of the goddess. Children being punished for the transgressions of their parents is a common theme in ancient myths and this one carries on that tradition. Myrrha conceals her identity, and she manages to sleep with her father several times without being recognized, becoming pregnant. When the truth of her deeds is discovered, her father exiles her from his kingdom. She eventually is changed into a myrrh tree, but nevertheless gives birth to a child, Adonis.

This child is taken by Aphrodite to Persephone, who raises him in the underworld. After reaching adulthood, Aphrodite returns to find he has grown into a stunningly handsome man. The two goddesses quarrel over who gets to be with him and a resolution is reached where he will spend one-third of the year each with Persephone and Aphrodite, as their lover. The remaining third was his choice, and he went with Aphrodite.

Adonis, being beautiful, but ultimately useless as anything other than a boy toy, is mortally injured by a wild boar one day and dies in the arms of Aphrodite. Deemed a paragon of anti-heroic behavior, he represented the opposite of the positive sides of matrimony and manliness. An annual festival was instituted to commemorate his death by cultures throughout the Mediterranean. As recounted by many historians, these festivals usually take place over the course of three days. The first day the death of Adonis is mourned, and on the third day he is resurrected so they can repeat it all again next year.

Sound familiar?

In the Phoenician city of Byblos this event was celebrated in the temple of Astarte, the Canaanite equivalent of Aphrodite. Adonis also had an equivalent known as Baal-Adon. In Greece the women would celebrate this time in an atmosphere of frolic and licentiousness. They would also conduct orgies in honor of Aphrodite, but this was about as extreme as they got. In Byblos they would engage in sacral prostitution and much, much more.

As you shall see in the next part, coming next week, the Canaanites and other cultures further east took their worship of the divine lovers to the heights of depravity.

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It should come as no surprise to anyone following my work when I say that both mainstream and alternative media are, to a very large extent, part of the controlled dialectic put forth by the ruling class. It helps to maintain a division of society, promulgated by useful idiots and true believers of either side’s dogma.

Malcolm X’s famous quote applies:

It behooves everyone to have a healthy skepticism of whatever they hear no matter the outlet. But even more concerning to you is when they all begin to push the same narrative. In this report you’re going to see just how much effort some are willing to exert in the maintenance of a popular scapegoat – the Freemasons.

In the days following the breakout of violence in Israel and Gaza Greg Reese, producer of the popular Reese Report, published a video outlining the contents of a letter allegedly written by Freemason Albert Pike on August 15, 1871. The very same letter was reported on in rapid succession by mainstream outlets The Daily Star, Daily Mail, News.com.au, and Express.co.uk in 2016. A South African newspaper also reported on it in 2013.

All these reports make mention that this letter “allegedly” exists, but none went so far as to even attempt to confirm this. They didn’t investigate the sources, and merely uncritically repeated something that appeared too good to be true.

The Devil in the Nineteenth Century

We must go back over 130 years to get to the bottom of this story, and it all begins in France with a man named Marie Joseph Gabriel Antoine Jogand-Pagès, better known as Léo Taxil. Born in 1854 he was placed in Jesuit seminary school, where he came to be disillusioned with the Catholic faith and religion in general.

Eventually becoming a writer, he targeted Christianity with scathing critiques such as The Holy Pornographers: Confession and Confessors and The Pope’s Mistresses. He even ventured into satirical pieces like The Life of Jesus, making a mockery of the immaculate conception, and The Amusing Bible. In 1884 he wrote The Secret Loves of Pope Pius IX, which is exactly what the salacious title suggests and eventually led to accusations of libel.

Also in 1884, Pope Leo XIII published an encyclical on Freemasonry where he declared:

Perhaps swayed by this polemic, Taxil announced he had converted back to Catholicism in 1885 and set to work on an entirely different literary endeavor with a new target, the Freemasons. Over the next several years he published Les Mystères de la Franc-Maçonnerie, a four-volume history of Freemasonry containing curious-but-unsourced accounts of eyewitness’s participation in strange rites. The books were sensational and Taxil even had an audience with Pope Leo XIII himself to congratulate him on all his good works exposing the dastardly plans of the Freemasons.

The best was yet to come, however, when he teamed up with Dr. Karl Hacks to write the two-volume Le Diable au XIXe Siècle, published in 1892 and 1894, telling the insider tale of one Diana Vaughan in the words of Doctor Bataille. The lurid details of her account boggle the mind. She was a member of the Palladium Rite, under the command of Albert Pike, where she was involved in ritual orgies and blood sacrifices. They would summon demons in physical form, and she was even betrothed to one of them.

Chapter 25 of the second volume is entitled “Plan of the Secret Chiefs,” and it purportedly contains the text of a plan written on August 15, 1871, by Albert Pike and the leadership of the Palladium Rite, detailing their plan for the destruction of Roman Catholicism. The description of the final coup-de-grace contains a paragraph that has gone on to be legend:

Catholics fell in love with Taxil’s work, and a Catholic journalist by the name of Abel Clarin de la Rive became friends with Taxil, believing unreservedly in his revelations about the Masonic threat the Church faced. Taxil authorized de la Rive to publish a quote by Albert Pike alleged by Diana Vaughan, Taxil’s whistleblower, in his 1894 book La Femme et l’Enfant Dans la Franc-Maçonnerie Universelle:

The assault upon Freemasonry drew intense criticism from their ranks, as well as from other esoteric societies. In 1896 Arthur Edward Waite, a British poet and mystic who wrote extensively on the occult, published Devil Worship in France, a comprehensive refutation of Taxil’s allegations.

By 1897 everyone was becoming impatient with Taxil, whose stories had been growing ever more radical and grotesque. They wanted to meet Diana Vaughan, in person, and Taxil eventually obliged.

The Confession

On the evening of April 19, 1897, Taxil held a press conference at the Hall of the Geographic Society in Paris. Many reporters, Catholic priests, Freemasons, monks, and other illustrious figures from around the world were in attendance. After raffling off a typewriter used by Diana Vaughan (the winner being M. Ali Kental, Editor of Ikdam, at Constantinople), Léo Taxil finally addresses his audience.

He reveals there is no Dr. Karl Hacks, there is no Dr. Bataille, there is no Diana Vaughan, there is no Palladium Rite.

“There wasn’t the least masonic plot in this story,” he says, and denies that his conversion to Catholicism was in earnest – all part of the prank, to win the Church’s trust and approbation. Diana Vaughan was a real person, but she was only his typist and collaborator in this colossal fraud designed to deeply embarrass the Catholic Church and become the crown jewel of his anti-clerical work.

After explaining in immense detail how everything he published on Freemasonry over the last 12 years was a monumental hoax, Taxil concludes his press conference saying, “You were told that Palladism would be knocked down today, better still, it is annihilated, it is no more,” and that “Palladism is now dead for good. Its father just murdered it.” The audience erupts calumniously, with Catholics hissing and screaming, a priest mounts a chair to try and maintain order, and it becomes obvious why Taxil had the attendees check their walking sticks at the door – some would certainly have beaten him to death on the spot.

They ought to have known better, though, as Taxil’s extensive use of the Baphomet throughout the entirety of his hoax was a dead giveaway that not all was as it seemed. Created several decades prior by another Frenchman, Éliphas Lévi, it was clearly stated in the book in which it first appeared that it was not a representation of a demon or the devil, but something far more complex and esoteric. Ultimately, it was Lévi’s attempt at rehabilitating the image of the extinct Knights Templar, who were massacred by the Catholic Church in the year 1312 after a campaign of blood libel, and false confessions obtained by gruesome tortures. Nevertheless, it found great use being circulated by others like Taxil and de la Rive as a demonic idol.

The shock of Taxil’s confession, the entirety of which was published in Parisian newspaper Le Frondeur on April 25, 1897, rocked the world. The same day Le Père Peinard, a weekly Parisian journal for anarchists, published a detailed recounting of the event.

Here is but a sampling of other stories published about Taxil’s infamous confession:

• “Personal,” The New York Times, April 30, 1897, Page 6.
• “The Hoax of the Century,” Dunstan Times, Issue 1819, 18 June 1897, Page 3.
• “The Hoax of the Century,” Evening Star, Issue 10332, 4 June 1897, Page 1.
• “The Finest Hoax of the Century,” New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXIV, Issue 10461, 5 June 1897, Page 2 (Supplement).
• “The Hoax of the Century,” Oamaru Mail, Volume XXII, Issue 6909, 7 June 1897, Page 1.
• “The Hoax of the Century,” Hawke’s Bay Herald, Volume XXXII, Issue 10630, 8 June 1897, Page 2.
• “Freemasons and the Devil,” Auckland Star, Volume XXVIII, Issue 136, 12 June 1897, Page 1 (Supplement).
• “A Great Scandal Exploded,” North Otago Times, Volume XXVI, Issue 8918, 15 June 1897, Page 1.
• “The Diana Vaughan Case,” Grey River Argus, Volume LVII, Issue 9733, 26 July 1897, Page 4.
• “Curious Fraud in France,” Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XXXI, Issue 178, 29 July 1897, Page 4.

Taxil further elaborated on the intentions behind his grand hoax in a 1906 interview in Volume XXIV of The National Magazine:

Taxil would die ten months later in March 1907. In November of the same year the Sydney-based Catholic Press published an anonymous letter eulogizing Taxil as “The World’s Worst Liar,” and that he had “died despised by those who had known him and by the great world he had cheated,” while calling him a “horrible buffoon,” whose “thrilling fairy tale under the guise of fact took the Catholic world by storm.” More accurately, however, they also called his hoax “the most successful fraud of the nineteenth century,” something Taxil certainly would have taken as a compliment.

It was Taxil’s intent to exploit people’s tendency towards confirmation bias in his hoax, which had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. However, what he didn’t foresee was that the egos of his victims were so big that they would carry on pushing his fabrications as if nothing had happened. Confession or not, it had to be true.

The World in Chaos

With World War I kicking off in 1914, followed by the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, people were scrambling for a coherent explanation of why so much chaos was being sown around the world. In 1920 a book called The Cause of World Unrest emerged attempting to explain it all. It was an anonymous compilation of essays originally published in the London Morning Post in July of the same year.

In one of the essays we find Taxil’s magisterial hoax cited as truth, describing the chapter already mentioned above from Le Diable au XIXe Siècle about the written plan drawn up on August 15, 1871 by the fictitious Palladian Rite for global destruction. A familiar paragraph from the so-called plan is reproduced in The Cause:

There is no mention of Taxil’s sensational confession in the pages preceding or following the reproduction of this part of the hoax. It does say in The Cause that this quote and the document it allegedly comes from could be a hoax, but that it nevertheless is quite prophetic.

But was it really? The rising tide of revolutionary socialism in the late 19^th century was surely no stranger to Taxil. Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto had been in circulation for decades prior to Taxil creating the hoax, and bloody revolution was already being openly discussed. It was only a matter of where it would first emerge, and popular locations for that had already been determined to be Russia or Germany.

The Cause would go on to be used in the 1925 book called The Mystery of Freemasonry Unveiled, published by Cardinal Caro y Rodriguez of Chile. In it, the Cardinal uncritically repeats what he found in The Cause, reproducing verbatim the same paragraph from Taxil’s hoax. How a Catholic Cardinal would not know this was a fabrication is surprising seeing that he would have been nearly thirty years old at the time of Taxil’s confession and by then already an ordained priest.

Three World Wars

In 1955 retired Canadian naval officer William Guy Carr published the first edition of Pawns in the Game, which was his interpretation of the Communist New World Order conspiracy theory. In 1958 a revised and expanded edition of the book was released where he includes a discussion about Albert Pike and a plan that he made about an upcoming three world wars:

It is quite amazing that Pike would discuss things like Nazis and Fascists decades before they emerged on the world stage. On the next page we find Carr attributing this to the same plan made on August 15, 1871, from Taxil’s Le Diable au XIXe Siècle – though nothing of the sort appears there.

Carr later quotes the exact same paragraph that does actually appear in Le Diable au XIXe Siècle, previously reproduced in The Cause and The Mystery of Freemasonry Unveiled by Cardinal Rodriguez. Carr asserts that Pike’s document is held at the British Museum Library in London, however this seems to be due to his misreading of The Cause, which stated that Taxil’s work is what was stored there, not the August 15, 1871, plan by Albert Pike that Taxil invented.

In another book Carr published in 1959 called Satan: Prince of This World, Carr again brings up the letter that he seems blithely unaware was part of a hoax. He qualifies it, however, this time with a footnote:

Not strange at all, the Cardinal was simply resurrecting a hoax that had been dead for decades, and Carr was less of a researcher than he deigned himself to be.

Fast forward to 2003, and an Englishman by the name of Michael Haupt registers the website ThreeWorldWars.com. He quickly publishes a page about Albert Pike containing a paraphrased version of Carr’s discussion about three world wars from Pawns in the Game. In this iteration Haupt added quotation marks to make it seem as though these were Pike’s actual words from the plan written in 1871, and not the fabrication of Carr, who Carr ultimately attributed to the fabrications of Taxil, though it doesn’t even appear there.

Conclusion

The Taxil hoax remains a centerpiece, knowingly or unknowingly, of the anti-Masonic diatribes you presently hear. Not just Catholics, but people of all stripes are repeating it, or inventing their own extensions of it as Carr and Haupt did. Even the mainstream media is not immune to repeating this hoax. Every time you hear the word “Luciferian,” you have Taxil to thank.

All this continues in spite of the fact that the hoax is well-known to historians and other members of academia. For instance a 1970 paper in the Journal of Church and State covers the hoax. Italian attorney and professor of sociology Massimo Introvigne has published research and delivered presentations discussing Taxil’s hoax. He devotes an entire chapter to it in his 2016 book Satanism: A Social History.

More interesting is the fact that we already have a real-life case of Masonic subterfuge in the case of the Italian Propaganda Due (P2) lodge, led by Licio Gelli. This, however, was a group of fierce anti-communists drawn from the ranks of a broad spectrum of political ideologies, who managed to collapse a mob bank that was also doing significant business with the Vatican. Their activities do not fit the New World Order conspiracy model, and so perhaps that is why they are ignored.

Why is Taxil’s hoax regaining circulation in the present day? We must ask whom that serves. Recall the quote at the beginning by Malcolm X and what you’ve observed in recent times where this hoax is being resurrected. Something is afoot, perhaps the third world war, and the misdirection campaign appears to have already begun.

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