I remember that in 1892 we began a mammoth work, a series in 240 installments to be published over about thirty months, titled Le diable au XIXe siècle. It had a great sneering Lucifer on the cover, with the wings of a bat and the tail of a dragon, and was subtitled The mysteries of modern Satanism, occult magnetism, Luciferian mediums, fin-de-siècle Kabbalah, Rosicrucian magic, possessions in the latent state, the precursors of the Antichrist—all attributed to a mysterious Doctor Bataille.
The work contained nothing that hadn’t been written elsewhere, as was intended: Taxil or Bataille had plundered all the previous literature and had built up a hodgepodge of subterranean cults, devilish apparitions, spine-chilling rituals, more Templar liturgies featuring the usual Baphomet, and so forth. The illustrations too had been copied from other books on occult science, which illustrations themselves had been copied. The only previously unpublished pictures were the portraits of Masonic grand masters, which were like those posters found in American prairie towns showing outlaws who had to be tracked down and handed over to the law, dead or alive.
… a mammoth work titled Le diable au XIXe siècle. It had a great sneering Lucifer on the cover, with the wings of a bat and the tail of a dragon.
Work progressed at a frenetic pace. Hacks-Bataille, after liberal doses of absinthe, described his inventions to Taxil, who wrote them up and embellished them; or Bataille busied himself over details concerning medical science, the art of poisoning and the description of cities and esoteric rites that he had actually seen. Meanwhile, Taxil embroidered upon Diana’s latest delusions.
Bataille, for example, began by depicting the rock of Gibraltar as a spongy mass crisscrossed with passageways, cavities and subterranean caves where some of the most blasphemous sects celebrated their rituals, describing the Masonic antics of the Indian sects and the apparitions of Asmodeus, while Taxil gave a profile of Sophia Sapho.
Having read the Dictionnaire infernal by Collin de Plancy, he suggested that Sophia had revealed that there were 6,666 legions, each legion consisting of 6,666 demons. Although he was drunk by this time, Bataille managed to work out that the total number of devils and she-devils was 44,435,556. We checked his calculation, admitting with surprise that he was right, and he banged his fist on the table and shouted, «You see then, I’m not drunk!» He was so pleased with himself that he slid under the table.
It was fascinating to imagine the Masonic toxicology laboratory in Naples, where poisons were prepared to be used on the enemies of the lodges. Bataille’s masterpiece was to invent what, for no chemical reason whatsoever, he called manna: a toad is placed in a jug filled with vipers and asps; there it is fed on poisonous toadstools, then digitalis and hemlock are added; the animals are left to starve, and their bodies are sprayed with a foam of powdered crystal and euphorbia; everything is placed in a still, the moisture is slowly distilled, and the ash from the bodies is separated from the incombustible powders, thus obtaining not one but two poisons, one liquid and the other powder, identical in their lethal effects.
«I can already imagine how many bishops these pages will send into ecstasy,» Taxil said, smirking and scratching his groin, as he did in moments of great satisfaction. And he said this with good reason, since with each new installment of Le diable came a letter from some prelate thanking him for his courageous revelations, which were opening the eyes of so many faithful followers.
Diana came in handy now and then. Only she could invent the arcula mystica of the Grand Master of Charleston, a small chest of which only seven examples existed in the world. Opening the lid you saw a silver megaphone, like the bell of a hunting horn but smaller; to the left a thin rope made of twisted silver threads fixed at one end to the apparatus and at the other to a contraption you put into your ear so as to hear the voice of a person talking from one of the other six chests.
To the right a vermilion toad emitted small flames from its open mouth, a signal that the communication had been activated, and seven golden statuettes represented the seven cardinal virtues of the Palladian ladder as well as the seven main Masonic directories. In this way the Grand Master, by pressing a statuette on the pedestal, could contact his correspondent in Berlin or Naples; if the correspondent was not at his arcula at that moment, he would feel a warm breeze on his face and whisper, for example, «I’ll be ready in an hour,» and on the table of the Grand Master the toad would say out loud, «In an hour.»
At first we wondered whether the story wasn’t rather preposterous, not least because some years earlier a certain Meucci had patented his telectrophone, or telephone, as it is now called. But such contrivances were only for rich people, and our readers were unlikely to know anything about them. In any event, such an extraordinary invention as the arcula was bound to be diabolically inspired.
We met sometimes at Taxil’s house, sometimes at Auteuil. We occasionally tried to work in Bataille’s rat hole, but the general stench that reigned there (of cheap alcohol, unwashed clothes and food left to rot for weeks) persuaded us to avoid the premises.
One of the problems we had was describing General Pike, the Grand Master of Universal Freemasonry, who directed the destiny of the world from Charleston. But nothing is more original than what has already been published.
We had just started publishing our issues of Le diable when La Franc-Maçonnerie synagogue de Satan appeared, the long-awaited book by Monsignor Meurin, archbishop of Port-Louis. (Where the devil was that?) Doctor Bataille, who had a smattering of English, had also picked up on his travels a book called The Secret Societies, published in Chicago in 1873 by General John Phelps, an avowed enemy of the Masonic lodges. All we had to do was reuse what we found in those books to build a fuller picture of this Grand Old Man, high priest of Universal Palladism, perhaps founder of the Ku Klux Klan and participant in the conspiracy that led to the killing of Abraham Lincoln.
We decided that the Grand Master of the Supreme Council of Charleston also bore the titles of Brother General, Sovereign Commander, Master Adept of the Grand Symbolic Lodge, Secret Master, Perfect Master, Intimate Secretary, Provost and Judge, Master Elect of the Nine, Illustrious Elect of the Fifteen, Sublime Knight Elect, Chief of the Twelve Tribes, Grand Master Architect, Scottish Grand Elect of the Sacred Visage, Perfect and Sublime Mason, Knight of the East or of the Sword, Prince of Jerusalem, Knight of the East and West, Sovereign Prince of the Rose Croix, Grand Pontiff, Venerable Master ad vitam of All Symbolic Lodges, Noachite or Prussian Knight, Grand Master of the Key, Prince of Libanus and of the Tabernacle, Knight of the Brazen Serpent, Knight Commander of the Temple, Knight of the Sun, Prince Adept, Scottish Knight of Saint Andrew, Grand Elect Knight Kadosh, Perfect Initiate, Grand Inspector Inquisitor, Clear and Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret, Thirty-three, Most Powerful Sovereign Commander General Grand Master Conservator of the Sacred Palladium, Sovereign Pontiff of Universal Freemasonry.
We quoted a letter of his that condemned the excesses of certain brethren in Italy and Spain who, «moved by a legitimate hatred toward the God of priests,» glorified his adversary under the name of Satan—a being invented by priestly deception, whose name should never be pronounced in a lodge. Thus it condemned the practices of a Genoese lodge that had paraded a flag in a public procession on which was written «Gloria a Satana!» But then it was discovered that this condemnation was against Satanism (a Christian superstition), whereas the Masonic religion had to maintain its purity by following the principles of Luciferian doctrine.
It was the priests, with their faith in the devil, who created Satan, Satanists, witches, sorcerers, magicians and black magic, whereas the Luciferians were disciples of an enlightened magic, like that of the Templars, their ancient masters. Black magic was performed by the followers of Adonai, the evil God worshiped by Christians, who had transformed hypocrisy into sanctity, vice into virtue, falsehood into truth, faith in the absurd into theological science, and whose every act testifies to his cruelty, perfidy, hatred toward mankind, barbarity and rejection of science. Lucifer, on the other hand, is the good God who opposes Adonai, as light opposes darkness.
Boullan tried to explain the differences between the various cults of what, as far as we were concerned, was simply the devil: «For some people Lucifer is the fallen angel who has now repented and could become the future messiah. There are sects, composed entirely of women, that regard Lucifer as a good female being, opposed to the wicked male God. Others see him as Satan cursed by God, but believe that Christ hasn’t done enough for humanity, and therefore devote themselves to adoring the enemy of God—and these are the real Satanists, those who celebrate the black masses and so forth.
There are worshipers of Satan who pursue only their taste for witchcraft, envoûtement, fortunetelling; and there are others who practice Satanism as an actual religion. Among them are people who seem to be organizers of cultural gatherings, such as Joséphin Péladan, or, worse still, Stanislas de Guaita, who cultivates the art of poisoning. And then there is Palladism, a rite for few initiates in which even
