The Universal Language of Freemasonry - ArchiMeD - Johannes ...

Chapter 9 - Masonic and Anti-Masonic Literature 751
Many wrong conceptions of Freemasonry found their way into the public
belief by anti-Masons (often former Masons who published ritual exposés),
charlatans and degree inventors. One of the latter was Cagliostro, an Italian who
lived 1743 - 1795 and traveled Europe garnering considerable sums by means of
chemical mixtures, tricks, and cheats. He invented the Egyptian Rite and called
himself the Great Kophta, hence Goethe's Großkophta. The Masons condemned
him for erecting bodies that were not Masonic, and the Vatican confined him for
having formed societies and conventicles of Freemasons, and sentenced him to
life imprisonment, under which he died.
Another charlatan living a century later was a French writer, appearing under
the pen name Leo Taxil (1854-1907), who deceived the Masons into thinking
that he was anti-Catholic and the Catholics into thinking him anti-Masonic. He
began his anti-Masonic crusade in 1886 when publishing his book Brothers
Three Points, of which a German translation appeared under Jesuit auspices and
those of the German Roman Catholic Church: "Taking his cue from the Pope's
Encyclical, Taxil depicted Freemasonry as a sect of Devil-Worshipers, drawing
on his lively imagination in the most abandoned manner to relate all sorts of
weird and revolting Masonic procedures, even declaring that the candidates were
instructed in the commission of murder." 1873 With extreme sang froid, Taxil
invented a character called Diana Vaughan, allegedly a daughter of a director of
a school for Satanism in Louisville, Kentucky. He even gained a special
audience with Pope Leo XIII in 1887, who was just about to publish a series of
Bulls and Encyclicals against Freemasonry (Humanum Genus in 1884, Ab
Apostolici in 1890, and Praeclara in 1894). Taxil promised to present his Miss
Vaughan in a Roman Catholic Congress in 1896 at Trente.
On this Congress, however, Taxil suddenly declared that all he had written in
the past twelve years was a fraud, and thanked the Roman Catholic Church for
1873 CME, p. 647.