Born in Marseille, France, March 21, 1854 and schooled by the Jesuits, his real name was Marie-Joseph Gabriel Antoine Jogand-Pages. He tried the shortcut of financial fraud, and when he was discovered he fled from France to Geneva. There, Gabriel Pages adopted the name of Leo Taxil. Expeled from Switzerland for fraud, he returned, under amnesty, to France in 1879
In the strongly anti-church climate existing throughout France, Leo Taxil believed that he would find a ready market for anticlerical publications. He wrote anti-Catholic satires, poking fun at church leaders. In hopes of gathering anti-Church material, Taxil joined the lodge Le Temple de L'Honneur Francais in Paris in 1881. His true character quickly surfaced, and he was expelled from the lodge before going beyond the first degree. Over the succeeding years, his anti-Catholic writing brought him very little income but earned him a great deal of criticism and condemnation from the clergy. He needed another target for his literary talents.
Leo Taxil confessed on April 23, 1885 to the sins he had committed in writing and publishing anti-Catholic pamphlets. He then began writing a series condemning the freemasons. Titles include: The Three-point Brothers; The Anti-Christ and the Origin of masonry; The Cult of the Great Architect; Pius IX, Freemason? and The masonic Assassins.
Taxil honed the simple declaration, "Lucifer is God," and attributed it to Albert Pike, supposedly delivered to Freemasons on Bastille Day, July 14, 1889. (See Section VI Subsection 2)
He also coined the non-existent title, "Sovereign Pontiff of Universal Freemasonry", for Pike. Of the hundreds of masonic bodies in the world at that time, Pike was the leader of just one, the Southern Jurisdiction of the Scottish Rite. A blatant fraud, Taxil’s forgery was a huge success.
On April 19,1897, Taxil used his celebrity status to attract a large audience to a meeting in Paris. Journalists came, along with members of the Catholic hierarchy. There Taxil announced that every word written about masonic devil worship was the product of his own fertile imagination. A Paris newspaper published the thirty-three page text of his speech the following week. The incorrigible opportunist moved away from Paris to a stately home in the country, where he enjoyed a comfortable life until his death at the age of fifty-three, in 1907.
An English Translation of Taxil’s published Confession appeared in in Volume 5 for 1996 of the Scottish Rite Southern Jurisdiction’s education journal, Heredom, edited by S. Brent Morris.
Downloadable books (free):
Mama San Ra Ab Rampa - Flor SilvestreSamuel Liddell Macgregor Mathers - The Tarot
Nathaniel Harris - Liber Satangelica
Aleister Crowley - White Stains
