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Updated: May 9, 2025
If he had not himself beheld Lucifer in all his lurid glory, he had at least seen his messengers; he was an initiate of most secret societies which remotely or approximately are supposed to connect with Masonry; he had visited Charleston; he had examined the genuine Baphomet and the skull of Jacques de Molay; he was personally acquainted with Albert Pike, Phileas Walder, and Gallatin Mackey; he was, moreover, an initiate of the Palladium.
To shorten a long and peculiarly noisome story, the astounded doctor ultimately beheld the dying woman revive suddenly, and crawl to the end of the chamber, where there was an elaborate altar surmounted by a figure of Baphomet; the fakirs crowded round her; the ape, the bat, the snake, the cat, all appeared on the scene; a brilliant illumination was produced by means of eleven lamps suspended from the ceiling; the woman drew herself into an erect position; the fakirs piled resinous branches round her; amidst invocations, mysterious chants, and yells, she permitted herself to be burned to death, her body slowly blackening, her face turning scarlet in the flames, her eyes starting from her head, and so she passed into ashes.
Yet observe! With that he whipped the cassock from his arm where he was carrying it and threw it all over the lamb, covering his head and body; and the lamb began plunging and kicking and bucking and rolling and heaving and sliding and rearing and pawing and most vigorously wrestling with the clerical and hierarchically constraining garment of darkness, and bleating all the while more and more angrily and loudly, for all the world like the great goat Baphomet himself when the witches dance about him on All-hallowe'en.
However this may be, the description and summary of the ritual given by Leo Taxil place it outside the possibility of a connection with Templar Masonry, and also with the Baphomet Palladium in spite of what is alleged to the contrary. Accepting the worst construction which is placed on its intention, it could have offered no point of contact with the alleged project of Albert Pike.
In the first temple, which was provided with the inevitable statue of Baphomet, but was withal bare and meagrely illuminated, the doctor was destined to pass through his promised ordeal, for which he was stripped to the skin, placed in the centre of the assembly, and at a given signal one thousand odd venomous cobra de capellos were produced from holes in the wall and encouraged to fold him in their embraces, while the music of flute-playing fakirs alone intervened to prevent his instant death.
That the serpents were undoubtedly venomous was afterwards proved upon the person of one of the natives present, who, delivered to their fury, fell, covered with apparently mortal bites, but was subsequently treated by native remedies and carried before the altar of Baphomet to be cured by the special intervention of the good God Lucifer.
There is no foundation for the legend of the Charleston Templar relics, namely, the skull of Jacques de Molay and the Baphomet, beyond the fact that one of the grades, the 23° of the old Rite of Perfection and the 30° of the modern Rite, uses a representation of the Papal tiara in its ceremonies and also of the crown of France, in allusion to Pope Clement V. and Philip le Bel.
The New and Reformed Palladium connects with the Order of the Temple by its supposed possession of the original Baphomet idol, but in 1882 this was entirely unknown to Mgr. Fava, who denies all the reputed connection between Templars and Masons, and traces the latter to Faustus Socinus as founder, following Abbé Lefranc in his "Veil raised for the Curious."
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