ordeal is to show that the sacred act of physical
generation is the key to the mystery of being. The life of Jesus begun
in the previous grade is completed in the present, and it will be
sufficient for my purpose to indicate that it represents the Saviour of
Christianity, who originally "began well," passing over from the service
of the good god Lucifer, and making a pact with the evil Adonai, in sign
of which he ceased indiscriminate commerce with the women who followed
him and pledged himself to live in chastity, for which he was abandoned
by Baal-Zeboub, and is cursed by Palladists. "The duty of a
Templar-Mistress is to execrate Jesus, anathematise Adonai, and adore
Lucifer." The rite concludes by the recipient spitting on a consecrated
host and the whole assembly piercing it in turn with stilettos.

So far the sole testimony to the actual operation, as indeed to the
existence, of these infamous ceremonies, is Leo Taxil, and it is once
more my duty to state that the documents are in no sense above the
suspicion of having been fraudulently produced by some one. It seems
scarcely credible, but the instruction of the Elect Grade incorporates
Masonic references _literatim_ from the scandalous memoirs of Cassanova.
That is a fact which sets open a wide door to scepticism. Again, the
instruction of the fifth degree contains more plagiarisms from Levi, and
in a section entitled "Evocations," Leo Taxil again reproduces the
"Conjuration of the Four" which he has previously fathered on the Rite
of Memphis and Misraim, and now states to be in use among Palladists.
Once more, he prints a long list of the spirits of light which
Palladians recommend for evocation, and this list is a haphazard
gleaning among the eighty-four genii of the twelve hours given in Levi's
interpretation of the "Nuctemeron according to Apollonius." But these
latter points are not arguments which necessarily reflect upon Leo
Taxil, for, seeing that the New and Reformed Palladium was constituted
in 1870, it is obvious that the author of the rituals may have drawn
from the French magus, and Leo Taxil does connect the Palladium, as
others have connected it, with Alphonse Louis Constant, partly through
Phileas Walder his disciple, and partly by representing Constant as the
leader of an occult association of Knights Kadosch. But when he
represents Constant as himself a Mason we have to remember that Eliphas
Levi explicitly denied his initiation in his _Histoire d