I asked Boullan why he accused his rivals Guaita and Péladan of Satanism and black magic when rumors I’d heard in Paris suggested that they themselves were accusing him of Satanism.
«Ah,» he said, «in this universe of occult sciences the boundaries between good and bad are extremely subtle, and what is good for one person is bad for others. Even in ancient times, the difference between an angel and a witch might simply be a question of age and physical charm.»
«How does this sorcery work?»
«They say that the Grand Master of Charleston fell out with a certain Gorgas from Baltimore, the head of a breakaway Scottish rite. He managed to obtain Gorgas’s handkerchief by bribing his laundress. He left it to soak in salt water, and each time he added salt he murmured, ‘Sagrapim melanchtebo rostromouk elias phitg.’ He left it to dry in front of a fire of magnolia branches, and every Saturday for three weeks he offered an invocation to Moloch, holding out his arms with the handkerchief spread over his open hands, as if in offering to the demon.
On the third Saturday, toward dusk, he burned the handkerchief in flaming alcohol, put the ashes on a bronze plate and left it out overnight, and the following morning he mixed the ash with wax and made it into a doll, a diabolical creation called a dagyde. He placed the dagyde under a glass dome attached to a pneumatic pump, which removed all the air, creating a vacuum in the dome. At that moment his rival began to feel a series of terrible pains and couldn’t understand what was causing them.»
«And did he die?»
«That’s not the point. Perhaps he didn’t want to go quite that far. The important thing is that magic works over a distance, and that is what Guaita and his friends are doing to me.»
He did not want to say any more, but Diana, who had been listening, followed him with an adoring gaze.
At the appropriate point Bataille had, at my insistence, devoted a substantial chapter to the Jews in Masonic sects, going back to the eighteenth-century occultists and revealing the existence of five hundred Jewish Freemasons who were secretly confederated alongside the official lodges, and their own lodges carried no name but only a number.
Our timing was excellent. It was more or less during that period that newspapers began to use a fine expression: anti-Semitism. We became part of an «official» current, and the spontaneous mistrust of Jews became a doctrine, like Christianity or idealism.
Diana was present during these sessions, and when we referred to the Jewish lodges she uttered the words «Melchizedek, Melchizedek» several times. What was she recalling? She continued: «During the Patriarchal Council, the emblem of the Jewish Masons…a silver chain around their neck holding a gold plaque…represents the Tablets of the Law…the Law of Moses.»
The idea was a good one, and here were our Jews, gathering in the temple of Melchizedek, exchanging signs of recognition, passwords, greetings and oaths that obviously had to look fairly Hebrew, such as Grazzin Gaizim, Javan Abbadon, Bamachec Bamearach, Adonai Bego Galchol.
The lodge, of course, was bent on undermining the Holy Roman Church and the ubiquitous Adonai.
In this way, Taxil (under the cover of Bataille) could ensure those he was working for in the Church were kept happy, without upsetting his Jewish creditors. By now, however, he could have paid them off—after all, during the first five years, Taxil had made three hundred thousand francs (net) in royalties—and another sixty thousand came to me.
Around 1894, I think it was, the newspapers talked of nothing but the case of an army captain, Alfred Dreyfus, who had sold military intelligence to the Prussian embassy. By sheer coincidence, the villain was Jewish. Drumont pounced on the Dreyfus case, and I thought that our periodical Le diable should also contribute a few sensational revelations. But Taxil said it was always better not to get mixed up in stories involving military espionage.
Only later did I realize what he had sensed—that it was one thing to talk about the Jewish involvement in Freemasonry, but the introduction of Dreyfus would mean suggesting (or revealing) that Dreyfus, as well as being a Jew, was also a Mason. That would have been unwise, given that (since Masonry thrived particularly well in the army) many of the senior officers who were prosecuting Dreyfus were probably Masons.
On the other hand, there was no shortage of other avenues to explore—and from the point of view of the readership we had built up, our cards were better than Drumont’s.
About a year after Le diable’s first appearance, Taxil said to us: «You know, when it comes down to it, everything that appears in Le diable is the work of Doctor Bataille. Why should anyone believe what he writes? We need a Palladian convert who reveals the sect’s innermost mysteries. What is more, has there ever been a good story without a female character? We presented Sophia Sapho in a negative light. She couldn’t stir the sympathies of Catholic readers, even if she were to convert. We need someone who is immediately likeable, though still a Satanist, as if her face shone with her imminent conversion, a naive Palladian ensnared by the sect of Freemasons, who gradually breaks free from that yoke and returns to the arms of the religion of her forebears.»
«Diana,» I said. «Diana is more or less the living image of what a converted sinner might be, given that she is either one or the other almost on command.»
And that is how Diana arrived on the scene in issue number 89 of Le diable.
Diana was introduced by Bataille, but to make her appearance more credible he immediately wrote a letter expressing dissatisfaction with the way in which she had been presented, even criticizing the picture that had been published, according to the style of the Le diable periodicals. I have to say that her portrait was rather mannish, and we offered a more feminine picture of Diana, claiming it was done by an artist who had been to visit her at her Paris hotel.
We offered a more feminine picture of Diana.
Diana also made her first appearance in the journal Le Palladium Régénéré et Libre, which presented itself as the voice of breakaway Palladians who had the courage to describe the cult of Lucifer down to the smallest detail and the blasphemous expressions used in their rituals. The horror people still felt about Palladism was so apparent that a certain Canon Mustel, in his Revue Catholique, spoke about Diana’s Palladian dissidence as the beginnings of a conversion. Diana contacted Mustel, sending him two one-hundred-franc notes for the poor. Mustel invited his readers to pray for Diana’s conversion.
I swear that Mustel was no invention of ours, nor did we bribe him, but he behaved exactly as we had hoped. And in addition to his magazine support came from La Semaine Réligieuse, inspired by Monsignor Fava, the bishop of Grenoble.
It was, I think, in June ’95 that Diana converted, and Mémoires d’une ex-Palladiste was published over the next six months, once again in installments. Those who subscribed to Palladium Régénéré (which of course stopped publication) could transfer their subscription to the Mémoires or get their money back. My impression is that, apart from a few fanatics, the readers accepted the change of position. Diana the convert, after all, was telling stories that were just as bizarre as those of Diana the sinner, and it was what the public wanted. This was Taxil’s basic idea—there was really no difference between describing the private love life of Pope Pius IX and the homosexual rituals of Masonic Satanists. People want what is forbidden to them, and that’s that.
And this was exactly what Diana promised: «I will be writing to reveal all that happened in the Triangles and which I did everything I could to prevent, all that I have always despised and all that I believed to be good. Let the public judge.»
Well done, Diana. We had created a myth. But she herself knew nothing about it. She lived under the effect of the drugs we administered to tranquilize her, and she responded only to our (my God, no, their) caresses.
I recall so vividly those times of great excitement. Diana, the angelic convert, received the love and admiration of priests and bishops, pious mothers and repentant sinners. Le Pèlerin recounted how a woman called Louise, who had been seriously ill, had been sent on a pilgrimage to Lourdes under the auspices of Diana and was miraculously cured. La Croix, the leading Catholic newspaper, wrote: «We have just read the draft of the first chapter of Mémoires d’une ex-Palladiste, shortly to be published by Miss Vaughan, and are overcome by an indescribable emotion. How wonderful is the grace of God in those souls who give themselves to Him.»
Monsignor Lazzareschi, the Holy See’s delegate to the Central Committee of the Anti-Masonic Union, authorized a three-day thanksgiving to be celebrated for Diana’s conversion at the Church of the Sacred Heart in Rome, and a «Hymn to Joan of Arc,» supposedly composed by Diana (though it was in fact an aria from an operetta composed by one of Taxil’s friends for a Muslim sultan or caliph), was performed at the Central Committee’s anti-Masonic feasts and sung in several basilicas.
And then, as if the whole thing had been invented by us, a
