On a February evening in 1884, something extraordinary supposedly happened in a secret temple. The Elect Magi and Templar Mistresses of the Order of the Palladium had finally succeeded in summoning Asmodeus, a demon prince who arrived in dramatic fashion—ripping through the temple roof, accompanied by mysterious slow music, wielding a great sword in one hand and the severed tail of St. Mark’s lion in the other. This grisly trophy, he claimed, was a prize from a cosmic battle between Lucifer and Adonaï, intended as a gift for his promised sacred virgin.
That virgin was Diana Vaughan, perhaps the most fantastical character ever invented in the long history of anti-Masonic conspiracy theories. Created by Léo Taxil as part of his elaborate hoax, Vaughan’s story reads like a supernatural thriller decades ahead of its time. According to Taxil’s wild narrative, the Palladians immediately initiated her into the 5° of their order after Asmodeus’s proposal. Yet Vaughan proved to be no ordinary initiate—she refused to complete the ceremony when asked to stab a communion wafer, dismissing the ritual as childish and an insult to her liberal intelligence.1
Despite her rebellion, Diana Vaughan allegedly received an array of miraculous powers that would make modern superheroes envious: levitation, bilocation, telekinesis, and the ability to break curses. When the Palladians finally presented her to Asmodeus in a massive underground cave in Kentucky, she performed her own miracle—walking across the surface of an underground lake to kiss the demon prince’s feet, causing him to vanish instantly.
The story only grows more outrageous from there. After her encounter with Asmodeus, Vaughan supposedly converted to Catholicism and began publishing exposés of the Palladian conspiracy in her “Memoirs of an ex-Palladist” starting in July 1895. In these memoirs, she claimed to have met Lucifer himself and achieved the highest degrees of Palladian initiation. As A.E. Waite colorfully described her supposed accomplishments, she had become “a Palladist of perfect initiation, comprehending the mysteries of the number 77, and doing reverence to the higher mystery of 666, Grand Mistress of the Temple, Grand Inspectress of the Palladium, and […] a sorceress and thaumaturge before whose daily performances the Black Sabbath turns white”.2
Superhero Origin Story
But Diana Vaughan’s origin story stretched back even further. According to Taxil, she descended from royal blood dating to the 17th-century Rosicrucian alchemist Thomas Vaughan. This genealogical claim connected the fictional Diana to a real historical figure, though the legends Taxil spun about Thomas Vaughan were entirely his own 19th-century invention. The choice of this particular ancestor was no accident—it linked Diana to the mysterious world of Rosicrucianism and, by extension, to the earliest days of speculative Freemasonry.
The Diana Vaughan hoax reveals how anti-Masonic fantasies often weave together real historical figures, genuine esoteric traditions, and pure fiction to create compelling narratives that blur the line between fact and fantasy. Understanding these connections requires careful study of both Masonic history and the broader Western esoteric tradition.
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