THE “BLACK MASS.”

Gisborne Times, Volume XXV, Issue 2094, 31 May 1907, Page 1

THE “BLACK MASS.”

CHAMPION LIAR PASSES AWAY

|Loo Taxil is dead. He was tho champion liar of the ago. He invented “Dianna 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 Psalmanzar and his Formosan hoax and the forgeries of Chatterton. Leo Taxil was not his real name. In fact, there was nothing real about this champion “faker” of tho age. He was Gabriel Antoine Joyaud-Pages, and he was horn in Marseilles. Educated by the Jesuits, ho 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 jat Montmartre. - He began exposing with bis customary violence his okl allies the Freemasons and Freethinkers, and In the course of his eam-

paign 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 priest’ess of the Lueifqrian sect, and went so far as to supply her portrait to American newspapers. Interviews with her appeared, and he actually fixed a clay for her public recantation and reception in the Church. His most impudent imposture 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 “blade masses” hold by the Satanists in Masonic lodges. This tail turned out to lie 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 subterannean galleries where tho Freemasons met Satan at fixed times to hold their impious worship. At last the nonappearance 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. Ho died at last rejected by all parties, in obscurity and poverty.