The credibility, in whole or in part, of Dr Bataille’s narrative will involve some extended criticism, and I purpose to postpone it till the remaining witnesses have been examined. We shall then be in a position to appreciate how far later revelations support his statements. Setting aside the miraculous element, which is tolerably separate from what most concerns our inquiry, namely, the existence of Palladian Masonry attached to the cultus of Lucifer, it may be stated that the most sober part of Dr Bataille’s memoirs is the account of his visit to Charleston; here the miraculous element is entirely absent. He confirms by alleged personal investigations the existence of the New and Reformed Palladium; he is the first witness who distinguishes clearly between the Luciferian Order and the Supreme Council of the Ancient and Accepted Scotch Rite of Charleston. That distinction is made, however, at one expense; it assumes that the Supreme Council preserved the Baphomet idol as well as the reputed skull of Molay for nearly seventy years, and then surrendered it to another order with which it had no official acquaintance. Under what circumstances and why did it do that? The Ancient and Accepted Scotch Rite is connected by its legend with the Templars, and for the Charleston Supreme Council to part with the trophies of the tradition seems no less unlikely than for a regiment to surrender its colours.
CHAPTER VIII
DEALINGS WITH DIANA
The philosophy of Horatius is supposed to represent incompletely the content of heaven and earth, but neither earth nor heaven, as at present constituted, would be capable of enclosing the entire content of Dr Bataille’s memoirs. Miss Diana Vaughan, with whose history we are next concerned, comes before us under a different aspect. I have failed to ascertain under what circumstances she first became known in France. Le Diable au XIXe Siècle may have constituted her earliest introduction; she was certainly unknown to Leo Taxil when he published the Palladian rituals, or she would not have escaped mention in the account he there gives of Miss Sophia Walder. However this may be, we have made her acquaintance in the course of the previous chapter, but I am constrained to state that she has, up to the present, shown herself exceedingly circumspect in substantiating the evidence of her precursor.
The whole world is aware, and I need not again repeat, that Miss Diana Vaughan was converted to the Catholic Church some time after Dr Bataille completed his astounding narrative. A Palladist of perfect initiation, comprehending the mysteries of the number 77, and doing reverence to the higher mystery of 666, Grand Mistress of the Temple, Grand Inspectress of the Palladium, and according to him who, in a sense, has prepared her way and made straight her paths, a sorceress and thaumaturge before whose daily performances the Black Sabbath turns white, Miss Vaughan quarrelled, as we have seen, with a sister initiate, Sophia Walder, and conceived for the Italian Grand Master, Adriano Lemmi, the charity of the evil angels, which is hatred. When the Supreme Dogmatic Directory of Universal Freemasonry was removed from Charleston to Rome and the pontificate passed over to Lemmi, as the revelations allege, Miss Vaughan closed her connection with the Triangles, carrying her colours to a vessel equipped by herself, and founded a new society under the title of the Free and Regenerated Palladium, incorporating the Anti-Lemmist groups, and soon after began a public propaganda by the issue of a monthly review, devoted to the elucidation of the doctrines of the Lucifer cultus and to the exposure of the Italian Grand Master. To hoist the black flag of diabolism, as Miss Vaughan would now term it, thus in the open day, naturally elicited a strong protestation from the Palladist Federation, so that she was in embroilment not only with Lemmi but also with the source of the initiation which she still appeared to prize. At the same time she exhibited no indications of going over to the cause of the Adonaïtes. Becoming known to the Anti-Masonic centres of the Roman Catholic Church only through her hostility to Lemmi, she was always a persona grata whose conversion was ardently desired, but on several public occasions she advised them that their cause and hers were in radical opposition, and that, in fact, she would have none of them, being outside any need of their support, sympathy, or interest. She would cleave to the good God Lucifer, and she aspired to be the bride of Asmodeus. At length the long-suffering editor of the Revue Mensuelle, weary of his refractory protégé, would also have none of her, though he surrendered her with evident regret to be dealt with by the prayers of the faithful. One month after, M. Leo Taxil, through the medium of the same organ, announced the conversion of Miss Vaughan, and in less than another month, namely, in July, 1895, she began the publication of her “Memoirs of an ex-Palladist,” which are still in progress, so that, limitations of space apart, my account of this lady will be unavoidably incomplete.
Her memoirs are, unfortunately, not a literary performance; and their method, if such it can be called, is not chronological. Beginning with an account of her first introduction to Lucifer, vis-à-vis in the Sanctum Regnum of Charleston, on April 8th 1889, they leap, in the second chapter, over all the years intervening to a minute analysis of the sentiments which led to her conversion, and of the raptures which followed it, above all on the occasion of her first communion. It is not till the third chapter that we get an account of her Luciferian education, or, more correctly, an introduction thereto, for the better part of five monthly numbers has not brought us nearer to her personality than the history of an ancestor in the seventeenth century. As the publisher is still soliciting annual subscriptions to the enterprise, and offering a variety of advantages after methods not unknown in England among the by-ways of periodical literature, the completion of the work is probably a distant satisfaction for those who take interest therein.
Now, having regard to the narrative of Dr Bataille, and having regard to the statements set forth in my second chapter, it is obvious that Miss Vaughan is a witness of the first importance as to whether there is a Masonry behind Masonry, which, more or less, manages, or attempts to manage, the entire society, unknown to the rank and file of its initiates, however high in grade; as to whether its seat is at Charleston, with Albert Pike for its founder, and as to whether its doctrine is anti-Christian, and its cultus that of Lucifer, supported by magical wonders, concerned with sacrilegious observances, and either a disguised Satanism, or drifting in that direction. As already hinted, the mythical and miraculous element,—in a word, that portion of Doctor Bataille’s narrative which does violence to sense and reason,—Miss Vaughan has not at present imperilled her position by substantiating, but as to the points I have enumerated, she has most distinctly come forth out of Palladism to tell us that these things are so, and to reinforce what was previously stated by unveiling her private life.
It is therefore my duty and desire to do her full justice, and with this purpose in view, I propose to recite briefly the chief heads of her memoir, so far as it has been published up to date. I must, however, premise at the beginning that she does not come before us with one trace of the uncertainty of accent which might have been expected to characterise the newly-acquired language, not merely of Christian faith, but of its Roman dialect. We find her speaking at once, and to the manner born. Could anything, by possibility, be narrower than certain perished sections of evangelical religion in England, it would be certain sections of ultramontane religion in France; but Miss Vaughan has acquired all the terminology of the latter, all the intellectual bitterness, all the fatuities, as one might say, in the space of five minutes. When she has wearied of her memoirs at the moment, or has reached, after the manner of the novelist, some crucial point in her narrative, she breaks off abruptly, brackets à suivre, and proceeds to an account of the latest wonder-working image, or a diatribe against spirit manifestations in the typical manner of the French clerical press. To be brief, Miss Vaughan has adopted, body and soul, precisely those abuses which Catholics of intelligence earnestly desire to see expunged from their great religion. She has probably never heard of the Forged Decretals, but she would defend their authenticity if she had; she has probably never heard of the corrupted, or any version of the Epistles of St Ignatius, but she would accept the corruptions bodily upon the smallest hint that they savoured better with the hierarchy, and she would do all this apparently in good faith on the authority of a purblind party within the Church, which exists to keep open its wounds. Now, I submit that a volte face is possible, especially in religious opinions, but that a pronounced habit of religious thought cannot be acquired in a day, so that, in the history of Miss Vaughan’s conversion, there is more than can be discerned on the surface. The precise nature of the element which eludes must be left to the judgment of my readers, but, personally, I reserve my own, out of fairness to an unfinished deposition.
There is a generic difference between Doctor Bataille and Miss Vaughan. He is an ordinary human being, and if we may trust the many pictures which represent him in his narrative, exceedingly unpretending at that. We have also some portraits of Miss Vaughan, who is aggressive and good to look at; but this is not the generic distinction. Doctor Bataille, poor man, is the scion of an ordinary ancestry within the narrow limits of flesh and blood. Miss Vaughan, on the contrary—I hope my readers will bear with me—has been taught from her childhood to believe that she was of the blood royal of the descending hierarchy, and I cannot gather from her vague mode of expression whether she has altogether rejected the legend of her descent, which is otherwise sufficiently startling.