TAXIL, LÉO. - Writer and mystifier, whose name was Gabriel Antoine Jogand-Pagès, b. in Marseille on 20 March 1854, d. at Sceaux on 30 March 1907.
He first devoted himself to an unbridled anticlerical propaganda, launching books offensive, from their very title, against the Pope, the clergy and the best Catholic thinkers (La soutane grotesque [Paris 1879], La chasse aux corbeaux [ibid. 1887], Les bêtises sacrées [ibid. 1881], L'empoisonneur Léon XIII [ibid. 1883], Vie de Jésus [ibid. 1884], etc.) despite the several trials and convictions. In 1881 he joined Freemasonry, but he did not remain in it long. Suddenly, in 1885, he professed himself converted, renounced his past and began an anti-Masonic campaign under the pseudonym of L. T. and others, which aimed to reveal the Satanism of the sect and the worship of the devil professed by it (Révélations complètes sur la francmayonnerie [3 vols., Paris 1885], Confessions d'un ex-libre penseur [ibid. 1887], La France maçonnique [ibid. 1888], La corruption fin-de-siècle [ibid. 1891], etc.). He invented the existence of Diana Vaughan, a priestess of the sect, spouse of the demon Asmodeus and daughter of the demon Bitru and of Sofia Walter, ancestress of the Antichrist. The exaggeration, exacerbated by immorality, of all these revelations put some Catholics on their guard; the anti-Masonic Congress of Trent (1896), in which L. T. took part, did not conclude for the evidence of the mystification; this, however, was reached the following year in Paris at a public meeting, in which L. T. himself cynically revealed his imposture and the fable of Diana Vaughan. Many, taken by surprise, did not believe it, but time proved little by little how the alleged anti-Masonic revelations of L. T. were nothing but mystifications. Moreover, the author himself returned without further ado, clamorously, to his earlier anticlericalism and libeling.
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