Ontario Masonic Hall Vandalized With Anti-Masonic Graffiti

by Christopher Hodapp

Authorities in Burlington, Ontario are seeking information regarding an unknown tagger who vandalized the local Masonic hall Sunday early morning by spray painting a phony Albert Pike 'Luciferian' quotation on the side of the building.

From the BurlingtonToday.com website today:

On the wall of the building that faces Maria Street, an unknown tagger left a message for the group that some believe to have powerful connections.

“The doctrine of Freemasonry is to be maintained in the Luciferian doctrine at high degrees,” the graffiti reads, crediting the words to Albert Pike, a 19th century American poet and lawyer who was also a Mason. The graffiti also suggests that Pike predicted the World Wars. . .

These bogus lines are widely circulated on the Intertubz and falsely attributed to Pike. They are, in fact, taken directly from the infamous 'Taxil Hoax' perpetrated by 'Leo Taxil' (whose real name was Marie Joseph Gabriel Antoine Jogand-Pagès), a rabid French anti-Catholic and anti-Mason in the late 19th century. Taxil made a tidy profit peddling propaganda about the Masons for many years. 

Taxil singlehandedly invented the whole 'Luciferian Freemasonry' fable and gleefully went on to later admit it was all a hoax in a very public appearance on April 19, 1897. (For what it's worth, Albert Pike wrote precisely one passage in Morals & Dogma that explained the origin of the name 'Lucifer' and how it came to be attributed to 'Satan" over the centuries.) 

The truth about Taxil's hoax has been quite openly known for 130 years, but that hasn't stopped its wide dissemination on the web since the 1980s and 90s. Meanwhile, Pike's so-called 'world wars' prediction is a more relatively recent addition to the anti-Masonic repertoire and is a complete fabrication. It's not true, either. (For more details about Taxil and his hoax, see Tall Tales of Leo Taxil HERE)

The story continues:

Halton Regional Police told BurlingtonToday that the suspect was observed at 3:05 a.m. (July 5) with spray paint, and is described as a white man, medium build, wearing a straw cowboy hat, a dark jacket, white tee shirt, and shorts. He was also riding a bicycle.

VandenBerg said this is not the first time that the building has been tagged, but it is the first time to his knowledge that the Masons were specifically targeted in the message.

“We have been tagged before but that has been just generic graffiti that could have happened anywhere,” he said.

Documents and sacred texts have been dropped in the lodge mailbox, even being laminated at times, VanderBerg said, including an encyclopedia of Jewish texts that was left at the back door of the building. The building has been egged, and many more instances of vandalism came to mind for VandenBerg.

He added that the group added a stone marker to the outside of the building which has been urinated on previously, but he is unsure if that was related to the organization.

“Maybe it was the same person,” he said. “Maybe that was the first thing they did and now they are back to spray paint the building a few months later.”

Despite the long history of Burlington Masons' commitment to serving their community and contributing to local charities, this is the sort of idiotic attack that sometimes discourages lodges from being more public faced. And as we've seen in recent years, certain extremely unhinged anti-Masonic zealots are known to escalate their attacks on members and lodge halls. The McAllen Lodge incident in Texas is a horrifying example of what can happen when anti-Masons taken their paranoid hatred to the worst extremes.

If your lodge is vandalized in any way, especially if you suspect the motive was anti-Masonic in nature, you should report it immediately to local authorities. Attacks against Masons and lodges need to be on the radar screen for police and well documented because, as we've seen, the true nuts are sometimes fully capable and motivated to come back again.

The Tall Tales of Leo Taxil

"The public made me what I am, the arch-liar of the period, for when I first commenced to write against the Masons my object was amusement pure and simple. The crimes laid at their door were so grotesque, so impossible, so widely exaggerated, I thought everybody would see the joke and give me credit for originating a new line of humour. But my readers wouldn't have it so; they accepted my fables as gospel truth, and the more I lied for the purpose of showing that I lied, the more convinced became they that I was a paragon of veracity." 

— Marie Joseph Gabriel Antoine Jogand-Pagès, aka Leo Taxil

At some point in your Masonic life, you'll hear anti-Masons prattling about Freemasonry being linked to Lucifer or Satanism, and they'll quickly get around to hauling out Albert Pike quotes—both real and completely imaginary ones, as well as contorted re-wording of authentic ones. Here's a favorite phony:

Utter crap that was never ever said by Pike. I promise.

And more than likely they'll finally drag out the hoary old figure of Baphomet.

The late religious tract cartoonist Jack Chick made this stupidity into a cottage industry, as you can see from this little rogue's gallery of favorites. But he was, and is, far from alone. He's had plenty of company.

So as a Mason, you've gone and joined every possible obscure appendant organization imaginable, from the Royal Order of Scotland, the Holy Royal Arch Knight Templar Priests, and the Commemorative Order of St. Thomas of Acon, right down to Ye Antiente Order of Corks. You've witnessed every single degree you've ever heard of, and scores more that you hadn't known of before. You've even been coroneted with the so-called "highest" degree of all, the 33° of the Scottish Rite (yes, I know, that "high ranking" Mason nonsense dazzles the non-Masons every time, when we all know it's nothing of the kind). And you've gone so far as to read all of the old degrees of the Allied Masonic Degrees, and all of the decades of back copies of the Grand College of Rites' collections of defunct degrees from the past. 

Yet try as you might, there's nary a Satanic, Luciferian, 'Baphometian' image, symbol, reference, utterance, hint, suggestion, or lapel pin to be found anywhere. So where the hell did this stupidity come from?

Blame it on the French. At least one Frenchman, in particular.

If you've never heard of Leo Taxil and The Taxil Hoax, you need to. Masons really should have at least a passing knowledge of the episode, if only to calm the occasional aunt or pastor who gets the jitters in the presence of your Masonic ring. 

The elevator explanation is that Leo Taxil (born as Marie Joseph Gabriel Antoine Jogand-Pagès) was a 19th century French practical joker and con artist who couldn't stand Catholics or Masons. After dabbling in anti-Catholic porn for a few years, he started pumping out out lurid and increasingly ridiculous stories about the bizarre goings on in Masonic lodges, hoping to dig at Masons (who mostly wouldn't respond publicly, at least in Europe at the time) and to make incredulous Catholics look foolish. To his good fortune, he came to the attention of anti-Masonic Catholic Church leaders who didn't get the joke and swallowed the whole gag as serious, including Pope Leo XIII. The pontiff had just issued his anti-Masonic encyclical, Humanum Genus, in 1884, and Taxil had started madly writing the next year. With this Pope, he had an enthusiastic fan and promoter, who never even seemed to notice that this new author's nom de plume looked astonishingly similar to his own name (Leo TaXiI vs. Leo XIII).

Every succeeding book got sillier and more outrageous. Masons made tables float in the air, slaughtered animals, transformed into liquids and passed through walls. As the gags got more elaborate and preposterous, Taxil created an imaginary female Masonic wing and a fictitious heroine named Diana Vaughan (who was his typist in real life), so that he could then introduce lascivious details about sexual initiations into a non-existant type of sexual-satanic-magickal Masonry called the Palladian Rite. Can't sell a really juicy scandal without sex, you know. And of course there was the Satanic stuff, so he could invent Black Masses and sex orgies going on in "Satan's Synagogue" (thereby using Masonry to take a swipe at Judaism). And as a cherry on top, he headquartered the whole affair in Charleston, South Carolina with "General" Albert Pike named as the "Supreme Pontiff of Universal Freemasonry of the 23 Supreme Councils of the World." It was easy to do because Pike died in 1891, so Taxil could eventually allege anything he liked without fear of direct rebuttal from the old, dead lawyer.

Don't think these were just broadsheets and pamplets, either. Just one of Taxil's many anti-Masonic tomes ran to 2,000 pages. In 1886, the Bishop of Charleston had written directly to Leo XIII to say he was acquainted with Albert Pike and and that Taxil's stories were fables, but by then the pontiff was so deeply committed to the anti-Masonic cause that nothing would dissuade his support—the Bishop was officially reprimanded for being a doubter. Taxil, meanwhile, was invited in 1887 to an audience with the Pope.

Pope Leo and the Church as a whole were so alarmed by it all that in 1896, an anti-Masonic Congress was assembled in Trent, Austria with over 1,000 attendees and 36 bishops. But after twelve years of this, along with increasing catcalls from America, some in the Catholic press finally caught on that they were being duped and called Taxil out on it. He assembled an audience together in Paris in 1897 at the Geographical Society to speak of his latest "revelation," and then gleefully admitted onstage to the audience that it had all been a fabulous lie. The crowd went nuts, newspapers all over France published his confession, and Taxil ducked out and retired to Switzerland. Since then, Taxil has vanished as the source of the story from most who peddle it today, but the lunatic Satanic accusations have remained.

One of Taxil's early book is fairly typical of his style and substance. Here's the way he described a Masonic initiation into those mysterious "higher degrees" you've never managed to be invited to join:

"Before a man is admitted to the higher degrees he is blindfolded & taken into a room where a live sheep is lying on the floor. The animal's mouth and feet are secured and it is clean shaven, so that its skin feels to the touch like that of a human being.

"Next to the animal a man is placed, who breathes heavily, feigning to struggle against imaginary enemies. The candidate is given to understand that the sheep's body is that of a disloyal Mason who gave away the secrets of the order and must die according to some ancient law, the candidate being made executioner, as a warning to him.

"Then he is given a big knife, and after some ceremonial is persuaded to 'kill the traitor,' that is, plunge the knife repeatedly into the body of the sheep, which he imagines to be that of an unknown human being, his brother.

"Thus every Mason is a murderer in spirit at least, if not actually, for sometimes treacherous Masons take the place of the animal."

Taxil was able to keep his gag going for so long because of Freemasonry's very structure: it seems at first that there's always another appendant body to join, always another degree to experience. Maybe you piddling proles in the Blue Lodges just never saw the HIGHEST ones, the sooper secret ones that the really high, HIGH degree Masons practice. Of course, modern believers in this bilge allege the very same thing even today.

Of course, the Roman Catholic Church was licking a serious chest wound at that point in history. Bear in mind that the Vatican had just lost control of Italy and the last of the Papal States in 1870. From 800 until 1808, the Vatican controlled central and a eventually a chunk of northern Italy as a sovereign possession. Napoleon's exploits severely altered the map, but the eventual unification of Italy finally stripped the Church of all but the few square blocks in Rome known today as Vatican City. 

Pope Leo was desperate to regain the sort of widespread cultural and political influence the Church had largely enjoyed for over 1,000 years, and Freemasons and other "free-thinkers" represented a major threat to that influence. In the previous hundred years or so, high-profile Freemasons had been identified with revolutions in both North and South America, France, and Italy that had all sought to separate the state from the Church, to offer public education instead of religiously controlled schools, democratically electing leaders instead of relying on Divine Rights of Kings (or popes), "freedom of religion," and more. As a result, Pope Leo saw Masons as fighting against all the Church represented. It's almost unbelievable that the current pontiff, Pope Francis apparently thinks the very same thing today.

The reason I'm posting this today is that an excellent look at Taxil's actual writings and contemporary reactions has appeared in the unlikeliest spot you could imagine. The Cannibis Connection website Tuesday posted a long article by Chris Bennett: The Devil’s Weed and The Luciferian Freemasonry Hoax of Leo Taxil. It is truly a terrific article that is worth your time, especially if you've only had a superficial acquaintance with the story. It includes excerpts from A.E. Waite (who should have known better—but then again, maybe not) actually attempting to take the whole Palladian business seriously, at least briefly.

If you're fortunate enough to belong to the Bristol Masonic Society, S. Brent Morris also presented an outstanding talk of his own, The Pope and the Pornographer in March 2016, and it is published in their 2015-2016 volume of Corona Gladiorum. And the entire text of The Confession of Leo Taxil in which he exposed his hoax, was translated for the 1996 Volume 5 of the Scottish Rite Research Society's Heredom by Alain Bernheim, A. William Samii, and Eric Serejski. It is available online HERE.

H/T to Luke Stark