Palladists

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The Palladist cult first appears in The Seventh Victim (1943 film).

History and Scope

The Palladists, founded by Johann Rozenquartz in the 17th Century, were a secret organization of Satanists who in their meetings summoned "the Devil" while committing various blasphemies and sacrileges, and practicing all kinds of obscene sex in orgiastic rites held in lodges in France, the UK, India and New York. They were also known to have operated hidden factories under the Rock of Gibraltar making satanic paraphernalia, and séances where Asmodeus and Voltaire were visualized. The cult is said to be led by a Grand Priestess, who supposedly descended from the union of the seventeenth-century achemist Thomas Redi and a female demon, Lilitu.

The Palladist cult was revealed to the public through the 1930s in a series of anonymously-published articles of the cult's activities, ultimately published as a book in 1939, with special lurid attention given to the sex rituals, before the cult apparently disintegrated in a bizarre incident in 1943, in which attorney Gregory Ward and psychologist Louis Judd, claiming to be the anonymous publishers of the articles and book on behalf of a fugitive cult member who they would reveal to the public to speak for herself; on the scheduled date, Ward and Judd appeared on stage, where they told the audience that the whole thing was a hoax, instructing the audience to go home and forget the whole thing. Instead, the audience erupted in a violent riot, forcing the disgraced Ward and Judd to flee the state, change their names, and abandon their respective professional careers. Authorities would later arrest the cult on charges related to a suspicious suicide, and murders related to the case, with the cult disbanding under public scrutiny, followed by a series of bizarre deaths of the former cultists, apparently freak accidents. Investigators close to both men report that Ward and Judd would privately admit that the the Palladist mystery was not merely real, but that they knew a lot more connected to the case than they could ever reveal to the public, as there are innocent people yet to protect.


Identification, Psychology and Behavior

Palladist Sign, used in a Cosmetic Trademark

The Palladists use an obscure occult symbol for ritual purposes, a parallelogram containing a split triangle.

The Palladist cult appears to have primarily taken the form of a drug and sex cult, with rumors of bizarre rituals connected to "consorting" with demons, and snakes slithering across the bodies of nubile young women. It recruits its members from the "movers and shakers" of society: wealthy, successful young business people, especially women, as well as young celebrities and even important members of governments in France, the UK, the USA, and elsewhere. The cult seems to draw unhappy, lonely people, and make their situation worse.

The Palladists, a branch of Luciferianism, were said to have had a bitter schism with the Satanists over obscure doctrinal differences over whether Lucifer is a god of liberating "light" in co-equal opposition to a Judeo-Christian God of "darkness", as opposed to the Satanic reversal of Judeo-Christian orthodoxy holding Satan to be a rebel creation of God delighting in the liberation of evil for its own sake. The Palladists considered themselves to be a more "serious" branch of Satanism, systematically exploring sins as philosophical lessons to be learned and mysteries to be unlocked, rather than the "simple, base pleasures" enjoyed by their rivals.

Though nominally a mundane Satanic cult, there are implications that among the "Demons" summoned by the cult's rituals were monstrous Mythos entities, possibly including such mind-blasting horrors as Nyarlathotep, Y'golonac and Abhoth.

The Palladist cult was bound by a severe oath of strictest secrecy, and claimed to be pacifist, and was bound by oath to injury to members of the cult (with no such prohibition evident against non-members), though a lurid and well-publicized case is known of a member of the cult who revealed some of the cult's secrets, who was then driven to suicide by her fellow members as a solution to the cult's contradictory edicts to keep the cult secret under pain of death, while doing no harm to members of the cult.


Resources


Quotes

  • from The Seventh Victim (1943 film):
    • "I know the theory behind the movement. If one believes in good one believes in evil. If one believes in God, one must believe in the devil. And an intelligent person can make his own choice...."
    • "Life has betrayed us. We've found there is no heaven on earth, so we must worship evil for evil's own sake. We're not wicked. We commit no violence, unless..."
    • "Our founder must have known when he wrote these seemingly contradictory rules - the rule of non-violence and the law that whoever betrays us must die - he must have known!"
    • "I went back through the history last night. I read about Johann Rozenquartz - I read what he wrote: 'We will avoid violence. For once undertaken, violence becomes its own master and can lead to either good or evil.' But he also wrote, 'Those who shall go out into the market place and let their tongues speak of us, and give knowledge of our being and our deeds, whomsoever doeth this shall die.' Since the founding of our order there have been six betrayals and six deaths. And now there is Jacqueline - she is the seventh."


Appearances

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