Diana Vaughan
The Taxil hoax was an 1890s hoax of exposure by Léo Taxil, intended to mock not only Freemasonry but also the Catholic Church's opposition to it.
Taxil, the author of an anti-papal tract, pretended to convert to Catholicism (circa 1884) and wrote several volumes, purportedly in the service to his new faith. These included the adventures of one Dr. Bataille, a surgeon serving in the French merchant navy who has infiltrated the Freemasons and observes their evil rituals as they occur all over the world. Buddhists, Hindus, and Spiritualists were alleged to join with Freemasons in conspiring against the Catholic Church, and Bataille uncovers an secret inner order within the Masons called the Palladists, who take their orders directly from demons. As Dr. Bataille's tale unfolds, he introduces Diana Vaughan, a former high priestess of Palladism who has converted to Catholicism and is in grave danger of assassination from vengeful Freemasons.
In 1897, Taxil called a press conference at which he promised to produce Vaughan. Instead he declared that his revelations about the Freemasons were invented. Nine years later he told an American magazine how he initially assumed readers would recognize his tales as "amusement pure and simple" and too outlandish to be true. But when he realized the stories were believed by many, Taxil decided there was "lots of money" to be made in publishing the stories and he continued to perpetrate the hoax.
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