Thank you for this explanation, but the difficulty here is that Taxil called a press conference at which he would show Diana Vaughan to the world. At this press conference, instead of showing Diana Vaughan, what happened is that Taxil himself showed up and said he had made her existence up completely, and had pranked and trolled the Catholic Church for years with her story, and that his conversion to Catholicism had never been sincere, but that he had only pretended conversion in order to embarrass the Church by writing false revelations of the supposed Diana Vaughan in order to make a mockery of Catholics.
And Taxil appears to be the only source for Diana's existence.
Thus, I have a hard time understanding how one can say Diana did actually exist, when the only person through whom we know of her existence, himself publicly stated he had made her up.
There were those who knew or suspected Diana Vaughan did exist and was a member of an ‘Androgynous Lodge,’ one that admitted women members. In his investigation for example, Craig Heimbichner questions Leo Taxil’s assertion that he invented Diana Vaughan and all those revelations of the highly guarded inner sanctum of the Scottish Rite of Fɾҽҽmαsσɳɾყ.
‘Masons claim that Taxil was simply a disgruntled expelled Entered Apprentice (First Degree) mason who turned on them for base motives. If that is the case, how did Taxil manage to publish accurate details from numerous advanced secret rituals in the higher degrees? This writer can attest to this truth because I possess in my personal archive both Taxil’s original descriptions and the secret rituals themselves. How would a low-level, ex mason have gained these explosive secrets?’ (Craig Heimbichner: Blood on the Altar, Independent History & Research, USA, 2005, p.68.)
Heimbichner then goes on to rebuff Taxil’s other assertion, that only males were freemasons. He quotes the respected masonic historian Robert Macoy, to prove ‘the rules admitted both sexes to membership, the male members were called the “Companions of Ulysses,” and the females the “Sisters of Penelope.” Heimbichner also quotes freemason and Golden Dawn leader A. E. Waite admitting that the Order of the Palladium existed. We are then told of the discovery of the Palladium Temple in May 1895 wherein the owners of rented buildings found a room inscribed with the words Templum Palladicuм. A large tapestry was found in this room upon which was woven a larger-than-life figure of Lucifer. Heimbichner tells of a modern writer, William Schnoebelen (formally OTO IX˚) who said he was inducted into a Palladium Lodge in the late 1970s by a David DePaul. DePaul restarted the Palladium after supposedly invoking the spirit of Diana Vaughan. ‘If Leo Taxil was a hoaxer, then this invocation is difficult to understand since “Diana Vaughan” had been “Priestess of Lucifer” in the freemasonic Palladium rite described by Taxil. If Vaughan was a figment of Taxil’s fevered imagination, why would she be invoked by an OTO (Order of Oriental Templars) faction
in the 1970s?’
The idea that Taxil could have been fed fiction by freemasons is not ruled out by Heimbichner, nor that he might have been a double or even a triple agent. He ends his chapter on Diana Vaughan with ‘Is not the OTO the continuation of the Palladium of Diana Vaughan, the “Graduate School” for salivating and serious masons?’ Others however, closer to the woman at the time of her disappearance had their own story. Evidence of her existence was found in a church in Loigny in Northern France that Diana Vaughan had visited in secret in March 1897, one month before her set date for a public appearance.
To make a long story short, the parish priest of Loigny confirmed Diana Vaughan’s visit by means of a visual reproduction and also the signature she had left in his church’s log. It was not the name Diana Vaughan that she had signed, for anybody could have forged her name, but Juvana Petroff, a mysterious signature known only to her and the priest to whom it made sense. It was later revealed as her baptismal nom de plume that she took when taking her confession of faith in the church, a name unknown to all but herself and the priest who baptised her.
I will record some of her writings soon.