THE PASSING OF DOCTOR BATAILLE
The most obvious line of criticism in connection with the memoirs
entitled _Le Diable au XIX^e Siècle_ would be the preposterous and
impossible nature of its supernatural narratives. To attribute a
historical veracity to the adventures of Baron Munchausen might scarcely
appear more unserious than to accept this _récit d'un témoin_ as
evidence for transcendental phenomena. I need scarcely say that I regard
this reasoning as so altogether sound and applicable that it is almost
unnecessary to develop it. The personal adventures of Doctor Bataille as
regards their supernatural element are so transparently fabulous that it
would be intolerable to regard them from any other point of view. That
an ape should speak Tamil is beyond the bounds of possibility; it is
impossible also that a female fakir or pythoness, aged 152 years,
should allow herself to be consumed in a leisurely manner by fire; it is
impossible that any ascetics could have maintained life in their
organisms under the loathsome conditions prevailing within the alleged
temple at Pondicherry; it is impossible that any person could have
survived the ordeal which Dr Bataille pretends to have suffered at
Calcutta,--to have relished and even prolonged; it is impossible that
tables and organs should be found suspended from a ceiling at the close
of a spiritual séance; it is impossible that the serpent of Sophia
Walder should have been elongated in the manner described. When I say
that these things are impossible I am speaking with due regard to the
claims of transcendental phenomena, and it is from the transcendental
standpoint that I judge them. Genuine transcendental phenomena may
extend the accepted limits of probability, but when alleged
transcendental phenomena do violence to all probability, that is the
unfailing test of hallucination or untruth on the part of those who
depose to them. These things could not have occurred as they are
narrated, and Dr Bataille is exploiting the ignorance of that class of
readers to whom his mode of publication appealed. As products of
imagination his marvels are crude and illiterate; in other words, they
belong to precisely that type which is characteristic of romances
published in penny numbers, and when he pledges his rectitude regarding
them he does not enlist our confidence but indicates the slight value
which he sets on his stake.
At the same time, two reasons debar me from laying further stress upon
this line of argument. In the first place we must remember that his
unlettered readers have been taught by their religious instructors to
believe in the unlimited power of the devil, and they have probably
found in the outrageous nature of the narratives a real incentive to
accept them. In the second place my own position as a transcendentalist
connects me less or more with the acknowledgment of transcendental
phenomena, and to distinguish the limits of possibility in these matters
would involve a technical discussion for which there is no opportunity
here. It is understood, however, that in the interests of
transcendental science I reject the miraculous element in Dr Bataille's
memoirs.
Another line of criticism also open and leading to convincing results
would dwell upon the glaring improbability of the entire story outside
that miraculous element. There is no colourable pretence of likelihood,
for example, in the connection instituted between fakirs and Freemasons,
or between secret societies in China and a sect of Luciferians in
Charleston. But the partisans of Dr Bataille are prepared to believe
anything of Masonry, and to dismiss likelihood as they would dismiss
impossibility. Some arguments are unassailable on account of their
stupidity, and of such shelter I intend to deprive my witness. I shall
therefore merely register my recognition that this criticism does obtain
completely. For much the same reason I shall only refer in passing to
another matter which in itself is sufficient to remove these memoirs
from the region of actuality; they bristle with the kind of coincidences
which are the common convenience of bad novelists to create or escape
situations, and are rejected even by legitimate fiction, because they
are untrue to life. At the present time the device of coincidence is
left to its true monopolists, the Society for Psychical Research and the
manufacturers of the penny dreadful. Unreasonable demands are, however,
made upon it by Dr Bataille; never in an awkward predicament does the
coincidence fail to help him; wheresoever he goes it times his arrival
rightly to witness some occasional and rare event, and it places him at
once in communication with the indispensable person whose presence was
antecedently unlikely. The very existence of his memoirs would have been
jeopardised had the Anadyr reached Point-de-Galle immediately before
instead of immediately after the catastrophe which converted Carbuccia.
At the beginning of his mission against Masonry, coincidence arranged
the last illness of the Cingalese pythoness to the exigencies of his
date of arrival; it brought John Campbell to Pondicherry and Phileas
Walder to Calcutta; at Singapore it fixed a Palladic institution in the
grade of Templar-Mistress to correspond with his flying visit on the
road to Shanghai. Now, all these coincidences are of the class which
come off in fiction and miss in the combinations of real life, but to
insist on this point would not disillusionise the believers in Dr
Bataille, who will say that he was assisted by Providence. We must show
that he has deceived them in matters which admit of verification, over
certain points of ordinary fact, which can be placed beyond the region
of dispute, and by which the truth of his narrative may be held to stand
or fall. I shall confine myself for this purpose to what he states at
first hand in his capacity as an eyewitness, and to two salient cases
which may be taken to represent the whole. Among the rest some are in
course of investigation, and so far as they have gone are promising
similar results; the locality of others has been so chosen as to baffle
inquiry; and in one or two instances I have failed to obtain results. It
is obviously impossible to prove that there is not a native hut in "a
thick and impassable forest" at an unindicated distance from
Point-de-Galle, or that this hut does not possess a vast subterranean
chamber. When we cannot check our witness we must regard what he tells
us in the light of those instances which it is possible to fix firmly.
Among negative results I may mention an inquiry into the alleged death
of a person named George Shekleton in a Masonic lodge at Calcutta. Sir
John Lambert, K.C.S.I.E., the commissioner of police at that place, very
courteously made investigations at my suggestion, first at the coroner's
court, but the records for the year 1880 are not now in existence, and,
secondly, among the oldest police officers, but also without result. I
applied thereupon to Mr Robert William Shekleton, Q.C., J.P., inquiring
whether any relative of his family had died under curious circumstances
at Calcutta about the year 1880. His answer is this:--"I never heard
anything about the death of a George Shekleton in Calcutta. My elder and
younger brother were both living in Calcutta, and if any person of the
same name had been living there I should have heard it from them. My
younger brother Alexander Shekleton died at Madras on his way home with
his wife and children of confluent small-pox; my eldest brother Joseph
is still alive." The presumption, therefore, is that Carbuccia's story
of the strange fatality which occurred in his presence at a Masonic
lodge is without any foundation in fact, but I regard the result as
negative because it falls short of demonstration. I am now setting other
channels in operation, but as it is not a test case, and not an event
which Dr Bataille claims to have witnessed himself, it is unnecessary to
await the issue.
If the reader will now glance at the several sections of the sixth
chapter, he will find that one of the most important is that entitled
"The Seven Temples and a Sabbath in Sheol," where Dr Bataille tells us
that he witnessed unheard of operations in black magic on the part of
Palladian Masons and diabolising fakirs. The locality was a plain called
Dappah, two hours drive from Calcutta. The particulars which are given
concerning the edifices on the mountain of granite, but more especially
concerning an open charnel where the dead bodies of innumerable human
beings, mixed indiscriminately with those of animals and with the town
refuse, are left to rot under the eye of heaven, will not impress any
one, however unacquainted with India, and with the vicinity of the
English capital and seat of government, as wearing many of the features
of probability. The facts are as follows:--A place called Dhappamanpour,
and for brevity Dhappa, does exist in the neighbourhood of Calcutta, and
thereto the town refuse is actually carried by a special line of
railway; there is no granite mountain and there are no temples, while so
far from it being a charnel into which human bodies are flung, or a
place where the adepts of the Palladium could celebrate a black Sabbath
and form a magic chain with putrid corpses, it is a great lake covering
an area of thirty square miles, and is known by Anglo-Indians as the
Saltwater Lake. In the year 1886 it was in course of reclamation, but
all that Dr Bataille tells us is specifically untrue, and he could never
have witnessed there the things which he describes as taking place in
the year 1880. The _récit d'un témoin_ is in this matter an invented
history.
As a consequence of this bogus experience in Calcutta, Dr Bataille
pretends to have been admitted within the charmed circle of the New and
Reformed Palladium, and was therefore qualified to be present at the
initiation of a Templar-Mistress which took place not long after at
Singapore. His account of this initiation turns upon two or three points
which do not appear in the synopsis of the sixth chapter. One of these
is the existence of a Kadosch Areopagite of the Ancient and Accepted
Scotch Rite. But at least, at the period in question, there was no such
Areopagite, and the Scotch Rite did not exist at Singapore. The sole
Masonic institution was a District Grand Lodge of Ancient Free and
Accepted Masons of England in the Eastern Archipelago, working under the
warrant of the English Grand Lodge, holding half-yearly communications,
and special meetings when the District Grand Master deemed necessary.
Its patent dates from March 3, 1878, and the District Grand Master at
the time was the Hon. William H. Macleod Read. Three lodges worked
under its jurisdiction, two of which were at Singapore and one at
Penang, and to one of the former a Royal Arch Chapter was attached. It
is needless to say that our author's Misraïm diploma would have obtained
his admission to none, and there is no person here in England who would
have the effrontery to affirm that he might have fared better by reason
of his Palladian degree. It is sufficient, however, to state that there
was no Lodge of the Ancient and Accepted Scotch Rite in Singapore at the
time of his visit. But the imposition does not end here; Dr Bataille
does not merely describe what took place at a lodge which was not in
existence--he gives particulars of an address delivered by a certain Dr
Murray at a meeting attended by himself. Now, at the date in question,
there was no such person either in the town, in its vicinity, or in
Penang. There is fortunately an institution among us which is termed the
British Museum, and it enables us to verify questions of this kind.
Furthermore, when describing the Palladian meeting at the Presbyterian
chapel--there was such a chapel by the way--he tells us that the Grand
Master was named Spencer, and that he was a _négociant_ of Singapore,
but there was again no such person in the town or its vicinity at the
time, and so his entire narrative, with its ritual reproduced from Leo
Taxil, is demolished completely. I submit that these two instances are
sufficient to indicate the kind of man with whom we are dealing. It may
be a matter of astonishment to my readers that a work even of imposition
should be performed so clumsily as to betray itself at once to a little
easy research, but it must be remembered that the class of French
readers to whom Dr Bataille made appeal are so ignorant of all which
concerns the English that skill is not required to exploit them; it is
enough that the English are abused. Of our author's qualifications in
this respect I have already given some specimens, but they convey no
idea of his actual resources in the matter of abuse and calumny. A
direct quotation will not be beside the purpose in this
place:--"Wheresoever religious influence can make itself felt, there
the wife and maid are the purest, the most ingenuous expression of the
creation and the divinely touching idea synthetised by the immaculate
Mother of Christ, the Virgin Mary; but, on the contrary, in England, and
still more especially in the English colonies, under the pernicious
influence of the Protestant heresy engendered by revolts of truly
diabolical inspiration, the wife and maid are in some sort the
opprobrium of humanity. The example, moreover, comes from an exalted
place, as is known. The whole world is acquainted with that which John
Bull does not himself confess, namely, the private history of her whom
Indians term 'the old lady of London,' given over to vice and
drunkenness from her youth--Her Majesty Wisky the 1st." I have made this
quotation, because it gives the opportunity to dispense with the
civility of discussion which is exercised by one gentleman towards
another, but would be out of place on the part of a gentleman who is
giving a deserved castigation to a disgusting and foul-mouthed rascal.
This is the nameless refuse which flings itself to bespatter Masonry.
Down, unclean dog, and back, scavenger, to your offal! The scullion in
the Queen's kitchen would, I think, disdain to whip you.
Setting aside these scandalous slanders, and returning to the subject in
hand, it is clear that when a writer who comes forward with a budget of
surprising revelations is shown to have invented his materials in
certain signal instances, it becomes superfluous to subject his entire
testimony to a laborious sifting, and there is really no excuse to delay
much longer over the memoirs of Dr Bataille. It will be needless to
state that my researches have failed to discover any such dismantled
temple as that described at Pondicherry, and affirmed to be on the
English soil adjacent to the French town. It is equally unnecessary to
say that the story of the caves of Gibraltar is a gross and absurd
imposture, for, in fact, it betrays itself. Parisian literature of the
by-ways has its own methods, and its purveyors are shrewd enough to know
what will be tolerated and what enjoyed by their peculiar class of
patrons; transcendental toxicology and an industry in idols worked by
criminals intercommunicating by means of Volapuk may be left to them.
Nor is it needful to do more than touch lightly upon a pleasant process
in piracy by which Dr Bataille lightens the toils of authorship. He has
done better than any other among the witnesses of Lucifer in his
gleanings from Éliphas Lévi. On p. 32 of his first volume there is a
brazen theft concerning the chemistry of black magic, and there is
another, little less daring, on p. 67, being a description of a
Baphometic idol. It goes without saying that the Conjuration of the Four
is imported, as others have imported it, from the _Rituel de la Haute
Magie_. The vesture of the master of ceremonies who officiated in the
Sanctuary of the Phoenix, one of the mythical temples of Dhappa, is a
property derived from the same quarter. So in like manner is part of a
magical adjuration in the account of a Sabbath in Sheol. Finally, a
method of divination described in a later place (vol. i., pp. 343, 344)
will be found in Christian's _Histoire de la Magie_.
The artist who has illustrated the memoirs has acted after the same
manner. The two Baphometic figures (vol. i., pp. 9 and 89), are
reproductions from Lévi's plates. The Sabbatic figure (_Ib._, p. 153) is
a modification from Christian. The original idea of the shadow-demon on
p. 201 will be found in Lévi's sacerdotal hand making the sign of
esotericism. The four figures of the Palladian urn on p. 313 are
plagiarised in a similar way. The illustration on p. 337, which purports
to be a gnostic symbol of the dual divinity, is actually the
frontispiece to Lévi's _Dogme de la Haute Magie_. The magical urn on p.
409 is the facsimile of a similar object in another of Lévi's drawings;
and if it were worth while to continue, the material for a further
enumeration is not wanting. But these matters, after all, are of
inferior moment, and to complete the exposure of this witness, I pass to
the final points of my criticism.
Dr Bataille publishes an alleged Table of High-grade Masonry as it
existed on March 1, 1891, and this document, which is similar in many
respects to another of a slightly anterior date, produced by Signor
Margiotta, is said to have been prepared by Albert Pike himself; it
includes a long list of the persons then in correspondence with the
Supreme Dogmatic Directory as Inspectors General "in permanent mission."
It is a bizarre medley which includes the Orders of the Druids, Mopses,
Oddfellows, and Mormon Moabites in the same connection as the Ancient
and Accepted Scotch Rite, the Rites of Memphis and Misraïm, and the
San-Ho-Hei. As such, it would be, in any case, a large tax upon the
gullibility of readers outside the back streets of Paris. But I
determined to make some inquiries among the English names mentioned. For
example, Mr R. W. Shekleton, to whom I have already referred, is said,
at the period in question, to have been in official correspondence with
the Dogmatic Directory, representing the special relations of Ireland,
and, having drawn his attention to the point, he has furnished me with
the following contradiction:--"The statement in your letter, taken from
the book you refer to, that I was in the year '91 in direct
correspondence with the Supreme Dogmatic Directory of Charleston is
utterly false. I never even heard of any such Body as the Supreme
Directory, or of what is called the New and Reformed Palladium. The only
communication I ever had with General Albert Pike (whom I had never
seen) was in reference to a question of Masonic procedure in America. So
far as I am aware the existence of either of the Bodies you refer to is
unknown to any of the Masonic Body in Ireland, and I can, with almost
certainty, make the same statement in reference to the English and
Scotch Masons. Having been for nearly twenty-seven years the Acting Head
of the Order in Ireland, I can speak with authority, and you are at
liberty in my name to give the most emphatic contradiction to the
statements quoted from the book. So far as I am aware, General Pike was
never anything more than Sovereign Grand Commander of the Supreme
Council of the 33rd Southern Jurisdiction of America."
The case of Mr John Yarker, Grand Master of the Memphis Rite in England,
I have already had occasion to mention, and have cited his explicit
denial of any acquaintance with the New and Reformed Palladium, but he
is included by Dr Bataille in his wonderful enumeration. Upon the
general question, Mr Yarker observes: (a) that the Scottish or Ancient
and Accepted Rite has nothing occult about it, but the Memphis and
Misraïm Rites are wholly occultism. (b) That Pike has, however, in his
lectures added occult matters from these occult Rites. (c) That Pike, as
a very able man, ruled the whole of the Supreme Grand Councils of the
33° (Ancient and Accepted), which almost all originated from Charleston.
(d) That this is the only form in which there can be said to have been a
Dogmatic Directorate.
In like manner, Mr William Officer of Edinburgh, an initiate of the
Scotch Rite, Inspector-General of the Supreme Council of the French
Grand Orient, and Hon. Member of its Grand College of Rites, denies his
alleged connection with any Central Directory, and has heard nothing of
such an institution.
I do not conceive that there is any call to fill space by the
multiplication of these denials, and I need therefore only add that I
have others equally explicit in my possession. The obvious conclusion is
that the alleged Table of High-Grade Masonry is a bogus document founded
on some official lists of the Ancient and Accepted Scotch Rite.
Lastly, there are certain statements made by Dr Bataille which warrant
the presumption that he could have had little, if any, active
acquaintance with the Memphis Rite. That he may have purchased a diploma
from Pessina is probable enough; what I learn of the Grand Master of the
Neapolitan Sovereign Sanctuary, through sources not tainted like those
of the witnesses of Lucifer, does not place him wholly above financial
considerations, but Pessina was, and is, totally unrecognised by any
Masonic power in the world of Craft Masonry. So far, therefore, from
such a diploma acting as an _Open Sesame_, it would have sealed all
doors against its owner, and this statement is true not only for
ordinary Craft Masonry, but for the great majority of lodges under the
Misraïm obedience. Dr Bataille would not, therefore, have much
opportunity for participating in that Rite to which he had purchased
entrance, and, as a fact, he is wholly ignorant concerning it. For
example, he seems to represent the Memphis and Misraïm Rites as enjoying
recognition from the Scotch Rite, and the latter as consciously
subordinate and inferior, whereas the position is this. Memphis
recognises the 33° of the Ancient and Accepted as its first steps, and
places 62 degrees upon them, which are not recognised in return. Misraïm
also includes the 33° of the Scotch Rite, but in a more irregular
arrangement, other degrees being interspersed among them. Pessina's
Misraïm Rite has been reduced by him from 90° to 33°, which are
virtually those of the Ancient and Accepted Rite approximated to Misraïm
teaching. So also he states that General Garibaldi was in 1860, and had
been so for many previous years, the Grand Master and Grand Hierophant
of the Rite of Memphis for all countries of the globe. This is
completely untrue, for, as a matter of fact, Garibaldi succeeded
Jacques Etienne Marconis of Paris, becoming president of a confederation
of the Rites which was brought about by Mr John Yarker in the year 1881.
Before this period he was simply an Hon. Grand Master of Pessina's body.
The articles of this treaty, with a true copy of all the signatures
attached to it, and with the seals of the Sovereign Sanctuaries against
them, is before me as I write. I may state, in conclusion, that Dr
Bataille also falsely represents himself to have met with Mr Yarker, who
told him that he had personally aspired to the succession at the death
of Garibaldi, which Mr Yarker characterises as "an infamous concoction."
I am in possession of ample materials for illustrating more fully the
marvellous inventions produced by this witness of Lucifer, but the
instalment here given is sufficient for the present purpose.