by Umberto Eco
"It was her father," Diana said slowly, "who had put her to sleep, and passed a red-hot iron over her lips . . . He had to be sure her body was isolated from any snare that might come from outside. She had a pendant around her neck, a coiled snake . . . Here, her father removes it, opens a basket and takes out a live snake, placing it on her stomach . . . It is beautiful, it seems to dance as it slithers up toward Sophie's neck and wraps itself around her in place of the pendant . . . Now it slides up to her face, thrusting out its tongue, which flicks toward her lips and, hissing, it kisses her. How . . . splendidly . . . slimy it is . . . Sophie now wakes up, her mouth frothing. She gets up and remains standing, rigid as a statue. Her father unlaces her corset, revealing her naked breasts! And with a rod he traces out a question upon her breast, and the letters appear in red on her skin, and the snake, which appeared to be asleep, wakes up hissing and moves its tail to trace out the answer, once again on Sophie's naked flesh."
"How do you know these things, Diana?" I asked her.
"I know them from when I was in America . . . My father initiated me into Palladism. Then I came to Paris. Maybe they wanted to send me away . . . In Paris I met Sophia Sapho. She has always been my enemy. When I refused to do what she wanted, she sent me to Doctor Du Maurier. Telling him I was mad."
I go to Doctor Du Maurier to find out more about Diana: "You have to understand, Doctor, my confraternity cannot help this girl unless we know where she comes from, who her parents are."
Du Maurier looks at me blankly. "I don't know anything, I've told you. She was entrusted to me by a relative who is dead."
"And the address of this relative?"
"It may seem strange, but I no longer have it. There was a fire in my office a year ago and many papers were lost. I know nothing of her past."
"Did she come from America?"
"Maybe, but she speaks French without any accent. Tell your charitable ladies not to concern themselves too much, since it's quite impossible for the girl to escape her current condition and live a normal life. And they must treat her gently, allowing her to end her days peacefully — I tell you, she won't survive very long in such an advanced stage of hysteria. Before long she'll have a violent inflammation of the uterus and medical science will be powerless to do any more."
I am convinced he is lying. Perhaps he too is a Palladian (so much for the Grand Orient!) and had agreed to deal with an enemy of the sect, walling her up alive. But these are mere conjectures. It is a waste of time talking any longer to Du Maurier.
I question Diana, in both her first and her second state. She seems to recall nothing. Around her neck she wears a gold chain with a medallion that has the picture of a woman whom she greatly resembles. I notice that the medallion can be opened, and I repeatedly ask her to show me what is inside. But she emphatically refuses, with an expression of fear and wild determination. "My mother gave it to me" is all she says each time. It must now be four years since Taxil began his campaign against the Freemasons. The reaction from the Catholic world has gone far beyond our expectations: in 1887 Taxil is called by Cardinal Rampolla to a private audience with Pope Leo XIII. Official approval of his battle, and the start of a great publishing success. And economic success.
Around that time I received a curt but eloquent note: "Most reverend Abbé, it seems that matters are going well beyond what we intended. Please deal with the situation. Hébuterne."
There is no turning back. I'm not talking here about the author's earnings, which continue to flood in, but of the tensions and alliances that have been created with the Catholic world. Taxil is now a hero in the fight against Satanism, and would not want to relinquish that position.
Meanwhile, another short note arrived, from Father Bergamaschi: "All seems to be going well. But the Jews?"
Father Bergamaschi had already been urging that Taxil's scandalous revelations should be about not just Freemasonry but also the Jews. Yet both Diana and Taxil were silent on that score. I wasn't surprised about Diana. Perhaps there were fewer Jews in the America she came from than there were here, so the problem seemed irrelevant. But Freemasonry was full of Jews, and I pointed this out to Taxil.
"And how should I know?" he answered. "I've never come across Jewish Masons, or at least not knowingly. I've never seen a rabbi in a lodge."
"They don't go there dressed as rabbis. But I've been told by a certain well-informed Jesuit father that Monsignor Meurin, who's not just any priest but an archbishop, will prove in a forthcoming book that all the Masonic rituals have kabbalistic origins, and that it's the Jewish Kabbalah which leads Masons to demonolatry."
"Then let us leave it to Monsignor Meurin to speak. We have enough irons in the fire."
Taxil's reluctance surprised me (is he Jewish? I wondered), until I discovered that in the course of his various journalistic and bookselling enterprises he was prosecuted on many occasions for defamation or obscenity and had had to pay some very harsh fines. He was therefore heavily in debt to several Jewish moneylenders, from whom he had been unable to release himself (not least because he freely spent the substantial earnings from his new anti-Masonic activity). He feared that these Jews, who were content for the moment, might send him off to debtors' prison if they felt they were under attack.
Was it just a question of money, though? Taxil was a scoundrel, but he did have feelings; for example, he was closely attached to his family. And for some reason he felt compassion toward Jews, the victims of many persecutions. He used to say that the popes had protected the Jews in the ghetto, if only as second-class citizens.
Success had gone to his head: believing himself to be the herald of Catholic monarchist and anti-Masonic thought, Taxil decided to turn to politics. I was unable to follow him through all his intrigues, but he stood as candidate for a district council in Paris and found himself in competition, and in dispute, with an important journalist called Drumont, who was involved in a violent campaign against Jews and Freemasons. Drumont had a considerable following among people in the Church, and began to insinuate that Taxil was a schemer — and perhaps the word "insinuate" is too weak.
In 1889, Taxil had written a pamphlet against Drumont, and, not knowing what accusations to make (both of them denouncing the Masons), he described Drumont's phobia of Jews as a form of mental alienation. And he got carried away with some recriminations about the Russian pogroms.
Drumont was a born polemicist and replied with an attack in which he spoke sarcastically about this self-appointed champion of the Church, a man who received embraces and congratulations from bishops and cardinals yet only a few years earlier had written outrageous filth about the pope and the clergy, not to mention Jesus and the Virgin Mary. But there was worse.
I had visited Taxil several times at his house, where on the ground floor he had once had his anticlerical bookshop, and we were often interrupted by his wife, who would come and whisper in his ear. As I later discovered, many unrepentant anticlericals still went to that address in search of anti-Catholic works, copies of which Taxil, though now a devout Catholic, still had in his storehouse in such vast quantities that he couldn't easily destroy them. And so, with great discretion, he continued to exploit this excellent line of business, always sending his wife out and never appearing in person. I never harbored illusions about the sincerity of his conversion: the only philosophical principle he adhered to was Pecunia non olet.
Except that Drumont had found out about this, and so attacked his Marseillais rival not only for being linked in some way with the Jews, but also for remaining an unrepentant anticlericalist. This was enough to raise grave doubts among our more God-fearing readers.
It was time to strike back.
"Taxil," I said, "I'm not interested in why you don't want to be personally involved against the Jews, but isn't it possible to bring in someone else who can deal with the matter?"
"Provided I'm not directly involved," Taxil replied. Then he added: "In fact my own revelations are no longer enough, nor even t
he nonsense our Diana tells us. We've created a readership that wants more. Perhaps they no longer read me to learn about conspiracies by the enemies of the Cross, but purely and simply out of love for a good story, as in those tales of intrigue where the reader is drawn to the side of the criminal."
And that is how Doctor Bataille was born.
Taxil had discovered, or refound, an old friend, a naval doctor who had traveled widely in exotic countries, nosing about here and there among the temples of various religious conventicles, but who above all had a boundless knowledge when it came to adventure stories, including the books of Boussenard and the fanciful accounts of Jacolliot, such as Le spiritisme dans le monde and Voyage aux pays mystérieux. I fully approved of the idea of looking for new subjects in the world of fiction (and from your diaries I notice that you yourself have been much influenced by Dumas and Sue). People are voracious readers of travel adventures and crime stories. They read for simple pleasure, then quickly forget what they have learned, and when they're told about something they have read in a novel as if it were true, they have just a vague recollection of having heard some mention of it, and their ideas are confirmed.
The man Taxil had rediscovered was Dr. Charles Hacks, who had been a specialist in cesarean birth and had published several books on the merchant navy, but had never exploited his talent as a storyteller. He seemed to suffer from serious bouts of alcoholism and was clearly penniless. From what he'd told Taxil, he was about to publish an important attack on religions and Christianity, which he described as "crucifixion hysteria." But when presented with Taxil's offer, he was ready to write a thousand pages against devil worshipers, to the glory and defense of the Church.
I remember that in 1892 we began a mammoth work, a series in 240 installments to be published over about thirty months, titled Le diable au XIXe siècle. It had a great sneering Lucifer on the cover, with the wings of a bat and the tail of a dragon, and was subtitled The mysteries of modern Satanism, occult magnetism, Luciferian mediums, fin-de-siècle Kabbalah, Rosicrucian magic, possessions in the latent state, the precursors of the Antichrist — all attributed to a mysterious Doctor Bataille.
The work contained nothing that hadn't been written elsewhere, as was intended: Taxil or Bataille had plundered all the previous literature and had built up a hodgepodge of subterranean cults, devilish apparitions, spine-chilling rituals, more Templar liturgies featuring the usual Baphomet, and so forth. The illustrations too had been copied from other books on occult science, which illustrations themselves had been copied. The only previously unpublished pictures were the portraits of Masonic grand masters, which were like those posters found in American prairie towns showing outlaws who had to be tracked down and handed over to the law, dead or alive.
Work progressed at a frenetic pace. Hacks-Bataille, after liberal doses of absinthe, described his inventions to Taxil, who wrote them up and embellished them; or Bataille busied himself over details concerning medical science, the art of poisoning and the description of cities and esoteric rites that he had actually seen. Meanwhile, Taxil embroidered upon Diana's latest delusions.
Bataille, for example, began by depicting the rock of Gibraltar as a spongy mass crisscrossed with passageways, cavities and subterranean caves where some of the most blasphemous sects celebrated their rituals, describing the Masonic antics of the Indian sects and the apparitions of Asmodeus, while Taxil gave a profile of Sophia Sapho. Having read the Dictionnaire infernal by Collin de Plancy, he suggested that Sophia had revealed that there were 6,666 legions, each legion consisting of 6,666 demons. Although he was drunk by this time, Bataille managed to work out that the total number of devils and she-devils was 44,435,556. We checked his calculation, admitting with surprise that he was right, and he banged his fist on the table and shouted, "You see then, I'm not drunk!" He was so pleased with himself that he slid under the table.
* * *
. . . a mammoth work titled Le diable au XIXe siècle. It had
a great sneering Lucifer on the cover, with the wings of a
bat and the tail of a dragon.
* * *
It was fascinating to imagine the Masonic toxicology laboratory in Naples, where poisons were prepared to be used on the enemies of the lodges. Bataille's masterpiece was to invent what, for no chemical reason whatsoever, he called manna: a toad is placed in a jug filled with vipers and asps; there it is fed on poisonous toadstools, then digitalis and hemlock are added; the animals are left to starve, and their bodies are sprayed with a foam of powdered crystal and euphorbia; everything is placed in a still, the moisture is slowly distilled, and the ash from the bodies is separated from the incombustible powders, thus obtaining not one but two poisons, one liquid and the other powder, identical in their lethal effects.
"I can already imagine how many bishops these pages will send into ecstasy," Taxil said, smirking and scratching his groin, as he did in moments of great satisfaction. And he said this with good reason, since with each new installment of Le diable came a letter from some prelate thanking him for his courageous revelations, which were opening the eyes of so many faithful followers.
Diana came in handy now and then. Only she could invent the arcula mystica of the Grand Master of Charleston, a small chest of which only seven examples existed in the world. Opening the lid you saw a silver megaphone, like the bell of a hunting horn but smaller; to the left a thin rope made of twisted silver threads fixed at one end to the apparatus and at the other to a contraption you put into your ear so as to hear the voice of a person talking from one of the other six chests. To the right a vermilion toad emitted small flames from its open mouth, a signal that the communication had been activated, and seven golden statuettes represented the seven cardinal virtues of the Palladian ladder as well as the seven main Masonic directories. In this way the Grand Master, by pressing a statuette on the pedestal, could contact his correspondent in Berlin or Naples; if the correspondent was not at his arcula at that moment, he would feel a warm breeze on his face and whisper, for example, "I'll be ready in an hour," and on the table of the Grand Master the toad would say out loud, "In an hour."
At first we wondered whether the story wasn't rather preposterous, not least because some years earlier a certain Meucci had patented his telectrophone, or telephone, as it is now called. But such contrivances were only for rich people, and our readers were unlikely to know anything about them. In any event, such an extraordinary invention as the arcula was bound to be diabolically inspired.
We met sometimes at Taxil's house, sometimes at Auteuil. We occasionally tried to work in Bataille's rat hole, but the general stench that reigned there (of cheap alcohol, unwashed clothes and food left to rot for weeks) persuaded us to avoid the premises.
One of the problems we had was describing General Pike, the Grand Master of Universal Freemasonry, who directed the destiny of the world from Charleston. But nothing is more original than what has already been published.
We had just started publishing our issues of Le diable when La Franc- Maçonnerie synagogue de Satan appeared, the long-awaited book by Monsignor Meurin, archbishop of Port-Louis. (Where the devil was that?) Doctor Bataille, who had a smattering of English, had also picked up on his travels a book called The Secret Societies, published in Chicago in 1873 by General John Phelps, an avowed enemy of the Masonic lodges. All we had to do was reuse what we found in those books to build a fuller picture of this Grand Old Man, high priest of Universal Palladism, perhaps founder of the Ku Klux Klan and participant in the conspiracy that led to the killing of Abraham Lincoln. We decided that the Grand Master of the Supreme Council of Charleston also bore the titles of Brother General, Sovereign Commander, Master Adept of the Grand Symbolic Lodge, Secret Master, Perfect Master, Intimate Secretary, Provost and Judge, Master Elect of the Nine, Illustrious Elect of the Fifteen, Sublime Knight Elect, Chief of the Twelve Tribes, Grand Master Architect, Scottish Grand Elect of the Sacred Visage, Perfect and Sublime Mason, Knight of the East or of t
he Sword, Prince of Jerusalem, Knight of the East and West, Sovereign Prince of the Rose Croix, Grand Pontiff, Venerable Master ad vitam of All Symbolic Lodges, Noachite or Prussian Knight, Grand Master of the Key, Prince of Libanus and of the Tabernacle, Knight of the Brazen Serpent, Knight Commander of the Temple, Knight of the Sun, Prince Adept, Scottish Knight of Saint Andrew, Grand Elect Knight Kadosh, Perfect Initiate, Grand Inspector Inquisitor, Clear and Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret, Thirty-three, Most Powerful Sovereign Commander General Grand Master Conservator of the Sacred Palladium, Sovereign Pontiff of Universal Freemasonry.
We quoted a letter of his that condemned the excesses of certain brethren in Italy and Spain who, "moved by a legitimate hatred toward the God of priests," glorified his adversary under the name of Satan — a being invented by priestly deception, whose name should never be pronounced in a lodge. Thus it condemned the practices of a Genoese lodge that had paraded a flag in a public procession on which was written "Gloria a Satana!" But then it was discovered that this condemnation was against Satanism (a Christian superstition), whereas the Masonic religion had to maintain its purity by following the principles of Luciferian doctrine. It was the priests, with their faith in the devil, who created Satan, Satanists, witches, sorcerers, magicians and black magic, whereas the Luciferians were disciples of an enlightened magic, like that of the Templars, their ancient masters. Black magic was performed by the followers of Adonai, the evil God worshiped by Christians, who had transformed hypocrisy into sanctity, vice into virtue, falsehood into truth, faith in the absurd into theological science, and whose every act testifies to his cruelty, perfidy, hatred toward mankind, barbarity and rejection of science. Lucifer, on the other hand, is the good God who opposes Adonai, as light opposes darkness.