Leo Taxil, born Gabriel Jogand-Pages, anti-clerical pamphleteer, staged a conversion to Catholicism in 1885 and spent twelve years inventing Palladism, a Lucifer-worshipping rite at the top of Freemasonry, complete with a star witness, Diana Vaughan, and a co-author persona, Dr. Bataille. On April 19, 1897 he confessed the entire fabrication at a public meeting in Paris; the weekly Le Frondeur printed the transcript on April 25. Vaughan, he told the crowd, never existed. The hoax had been aimed at the Church's credulity about Masonry, and the Church had obliged him for over a decade.
The famous passage, Albert Pike declaring that Lucifer is God and the Masonic religion must be kept in the purity of the Luciferian doctrine, comes from Abbe Clarin de la Rive's 1894 book on universal Freemasonry, footnoted to Diana Vaughan, Taxil's invention. It appears nowhere in Pike's actual Morals and Dogma (1871). De la Rive himself recanted in print in April 1897 after the confession, disgusted at being used. The quote resumed circulation anyway and is quoted against Masonry to this day.
The darker filing: the hoax survives because it is useful. Taxil designed it to confirm exactly what his audience already believed, and belief, once furnished with a quote, does not check footnotes. Researchers trace the modern circulation largely through Edith Starr Miller's 1933 Occult Theocrasy, which treated the fabrication as evidence. Each generation of readers inherits the quote stripped of its confession.
He confessed in public, in detail, with witnesses. A hundred thirty years later the hoax is quoted more than the confession. What does that tell you about which document wins?