In the early 1890s Leo Taxil purported to reveal the existence of "Palladium," the most secret masonic order, which practiced devil-worship. He recounted the story of its high priestess Diana Vaughan; and ended by publishing the Memoires d'une ex-Palladiste after her conversion to Catholicism. When doubts began to spread, Taxil realized the time had come to end the deceit. In a widely reported conference in Paris on April 19, 1897, he confessed that it had all been a hoax.1
After Taxil’s public confession, Abel Clarin de la Rive (1855-1914) expressed his disgust and recanted his writings on Diana Vaughan in the April 1897 issue of Freemasonry Revealed, a magazine devoted to the destruction of the Craft. As much as he hated Freemasonry, Claren de la Rive had the integrity to admit Taxil’s hoax in the following editorial:
"With frightening cynicism the miserable person we shall not name here [Taxil] declared before an assembly especially convened for him that for twelve years he had prepared and carried out to the end the most extraordinary and most sacrilegious of hoaxes. We have always been careful to publish special Articles concerning Palladism and Diana Vaughan. We are now giving in this issue a complete list of these articles, which can now be considered as not having existed."2
Possibly the inspiration for Taxil’s choice of name, but otherwise of little interest other than to masonic students, the Order of Palladium was a masonic society open to both men and women, founded in Paris in 1737. Termed a very moral society by Albert G. Mackey, it does not appear to have survived its founders.
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