THE BLACK MASS

                                                                             by

                                                                      Suzanne Ruthven

From our The Salem Journal#1

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    In the deep, dank recesses of the imagination there is always the vision of a subterranean chamber.  The impenetrable stone walls suppurating moisture like globulets of blood, glisten in the candlelight, as flickering cowled shadows perform a sinister Dance Macabre by the high alter.  The fetid air mingles with the reek of incense as the high priest prepares to conduct the most blasphemous of all satanic rites of the witches' Sabbat, the Black Mass . . .

    In attempting to portray the ultimate in depredation, writers of Gothic horror have drawn heavily on the supposed satanic or sabbatical elements of the black mass and as a result, created a grotesque chimera that has robbed fact of its reason.  Although according to most fictional accounts, witches celebrated a black mass at every Sabbat, there are no contemporary accounts of this in traditional witchcraft, since Satan in any guise plays no part in the pantheon of witch-lore.

    According to American occult historian, Dr. Rossell Hope Robbiny, author of The Encyclopaedia of Witchcraft & Demonology (1059):  "No matter how titillating, all accounts of black masses (with one exception) must be dismissed as unfounded speculation.  In the eyes of the Inquisitors, witchcraft should parody Christianity and to emphasize the enormity of the blasphemy, they concocted the most amazing fantasies of how priests mixed se- m- -en with holy chrism oil, unended the cross, and enacted all manner of disgusting practices involving the host."  His claim that . . . "even from early times, the satanic mass was a literary creation borne out of questionable ecclesiastical minds for the destruction of their fellows,"are supported by the more recent findings (1990) of Jeffrey Richards, Professor of Cultural History at the University of Lancaster (UK), in his book, Sex, Dissidence, & Damnation, Man, Myth, & Magic, however, contends that the ceremony referred to as the black mass is essentially a magical operation and bears little resemblance to the worship of Satan of popular imagination.  Although there does not exist a single document describing the rites of a black mass at first hand, there are clues pointing toward rites which are "quite divorced from Christianity or any other theology."  For example, it is known that in the 7th century the Church Council of Toledo denounced a "Mass of the Dead" which was not designed to deliver the soul of a dead man from purgatory but to bring about the death of one who was living.  There is also the sinister "Mass of St. Secaire" during which a priest performs the ceremony in a ruined church, his server is a woman with whom he has co -pu- la t_d, together with the usual trappings of a blackened host, water in which an unbaptized child has been drowned, etc.  The outcome of this "malignant" ceremony is the death of its victim, who wastes away by inches--but neither rite has a place in traditional witchcraft.

    Conversely, Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan in San Francisco, states quite categorically: "No other single device has been associated with Satanism as much as the black mass.  To say that the most blasphemous of all religious ceremonies is nothing more than a literary invention is certainly a statement which needs qualifying--but nothing could be truer." LaVey also affirms that the first "commercial" black mass was celebrated in 1666 by Catherine Deshayes or "La Voisin," and the "organized fraud perpetrated in these ceremonies has become indelibly marked in history as the true black mass."

    The famous Chambre Ardente Affaire in 1679 brought rumours of the black mass to public attention for the first time, painting lurid pictures of frenzied priests sprinkling the bre_s ts of a n_ked girl with blood from a newborn baby.  The Affaire had all the trappings of a best-selling novel and involved a poison ring, royal ladies-in-waiting, a favorite of the King, one of his mistresses, the Captain of the King's Guard and two rather unwholesome characters, namely La Boss and La Voisin who were subsequently burned as a result of their involvement in this cause celebre.

    Suggestions of witchcraft had already crept into the Affaire when two priests were accused of conducting black masses over the n_ ked bo -dies of young women who were used for "ob sc en -e ceremonial manipulations."  Under torture came the confessions admitting to the sacri -fi ce of children, white pigeons, and one admission of practicing "abo min -atio -ns with a big Easter candle."  A succession of unsavoury characters related an ever increasing catalogue of equally unsavoury stories until the whole Affaire began to get out of hand.

    The most embarrassing revelation was that Madame de Montespan, mistress of Louis XIV, was the implementor of the satanic rites.  Terrified of losing the King's affections to a younger woman, the lady had resorted to more diabolical means of disposing of her rival.  The biggest problem that faced the investigating officers was the problem of how to stifle the most humiliating scandal of the century.  Many lowborn incriminated in the Affaire were tortured and burned but none of the nobility was affected other than being banished from court.  In 1709, Louis decided to destroy the records but fortunately for history, the Police Commissioner's notes escaped destruction.

    Similarly, the Hell-Fire Club was probably the most famous band of devil worshippers in history and although the members parodied the rites of the Church, their ceremonies were more amoral than evil.  The members were some of the leading politicians of the day and amongst some of the famous visitors to attend the meetings were Casanova, the Chevalier d'Eon (of indeterminate s_x), and Benjamin Franklin, the American statesman.  Sir Francis Dashwood and his followers no more believed in the Devil than they believed in moderation and the Hell-Fire Club was, for all its sinister reputation, nothing more than a glorified bord ell -o.

    Founded on the ashes of a former club of the same name, it is alleged that the members "in their baw di -nes s" excelled all the libertines of the reign of Charles II and not even the great Casanova was their equal.  The original Hell-Fire Club had drawn the attention of the authorities when the members had celebrated a mass on the body of a n_ked girl, stretched out on a barroom table.  The "nuns" who provided the s_xu al favors were during the Medmenham period of the Order of St. Francis not har lo -ts, but respectable married women.  Later, one of London's most notorious madams was requested to provide the girls for the "most lic en ti -o -us gathering of men and women who ever met to enjoy themselves on English soil."  Although the Club parodied the rites of the Church as part of their ritual, they cannot seriously be considered Satanists--they were there for the "birds and the booze," and very little else.

    The Hell-Fire Club delighted in shocking the more pure-minded and scandal followed scandal.  However, it was not until the 19th century when the fervor surrounding witchcraft had died away that a "few wayward minds" created the black mass as is thought of today--as a service dedicated to the anti-Christ, Satan. Although some trace this back to the 18th century literary invention of the Marquis de Sade's most infamous fiction, Justine, in which the heroine herself relates:

     "...our lib ert -in -e monks, to compound their impieties, wished Florette to appear at their nightly or gi -es in the same vestments which had brought her so much veneration as the Blessed Virgin.  Each one of them whipped up his fi lt -hy de sir -es to commit the vagaries of his lu s -t -s with her in this costume. Excited by this first blasphemy, they counted other sacrileges for naught.  The monks made this vir g -in str -ip and lie down flat on her belly on a big table.  They lit holy candles and placed a statue of our Lord b_twe -en her legs, and had the audacity to celebrate the most holy of our sacraments on the bu_to -cks of this young girl.  At this horrible spectacle I fainted for I could not endure it. Father Serino saw me in this condition, and told me that in order to be humbled I had to serve, in my turn, as the altar.  They grasped me and laid me where Florette had been.  The sacrifice of mass was consummated.  Severino seized the host, that sacred symbol of our venerable religion, and pushed it in the ob sc -e -n -e entrance he used for his perv -er t_d pleasures, abusively pressing it in; then he ignominiously crushed it under the repeated lun ges of his monstr -ous tool, and, shouting blasphemies, emitted the foul surges of the torrent of his lubricity over the very body of his Saviour . . . "

    It is probably this fictional account of de Sade's, added to the factual account of the Chambre Ardente Affaire, which has provided every occult novelist with the standard format for a black mass.  With this blueprint for deba uc -her -y and de pr av -it -y the Gothic genre was eagerly exploited by classic writers such as Monk Lewis and J. K. Huysmans, whose novel of Satanism, Down There (La Bas), caused a sensation when it first appeared in 1891 because of the "extraordinarily detailed and vivid descriptions of the black mass."  The publisher's blurb on a later reprint claimed:  "These descriptions are also authentic, for Huysmans had firsthand knowledge of the satanic practices, witch-cults and the whole of the occult underworld then thriving in Paris."

    Although Huysmans demonstrates an intelligent awareness in his observations on general occultism, his sources are undeniably old inquisitorial ones and conspicuous for the lack of factual details of initiated witchcraft.  Whatever Huysmans' underworld connections might have been, they were certainly not Satanists nor witches for neither include any form of black mass as part of their ceremonies.  One suspects he may have belonged to a group of Parisian "occultists" whose interests were the intellectual study of medieval mysticism and alchemy, rather than the practice of magic.

    Despite the fact that Aleister Crowley has often been described as a Satanist and devil worshipper, C. R. Cammell, a personal friend of Crowley's refutes the charges that Crowley celebrated the black mass, an act of which he was so often accused . . . "whether Crowley in his youth had ever performed that odious ceremony, I do not know for certain.  He has been accused of having done so in his Cambridge days, but on what authority is not clear.  To me personally he denied it emphatically.  He spoke always with the most profound contempt of such proceedings which he said were fit only for de pr -a -ve -d schoolboys.  When I knew Crowley such crazy travesties were not in his thoughts.  Nor was it likely that they would have been; for Catholic rituals interested him no more than Catholic theology, and travesties thereof would naturally appear to him puerile.  It was the far older magic, the sorceries and Mysteries of ancient Egypt, Chaldea, Persia, India, and Greece which interested him."

    Adding to the wealth of fiction and fantasy surrounding the black mass, in 1946 Montague Summers penned Witchcraft & Black Magic, a totally fraudulent and inaccurate work which was only accepted academically because he had been a priest and in 1928 had published a translation of the "Malleus Maleficarum" (the Hammer of Witches)--the biasof the time supposed that to be expert knowledge.  Again Summers drew on old inquisitorial material to support his claims that "the celebration of the black mass, with itsob sc -e -n -e and brutal rites, still flourishes . . . "

    Summers was not the only questionable "expert" for one leading British authority on occultism, can "name a clutch of occult historians who, although great scholars, are absolutely naive and ignorant as far as initiated magic goes."  However, using these sources to authenticate their own writings, later authors have continued to bandy about phases of which they have little or no understanding, passing off their accounts of black masses, Sabbat and satanic rites as genuinely researched material, when the whole scenario is nothing more than gruesome fabrication.

    The fact that classic Gothic representation of such sensational accounts is pure fantasy should not lessen the enjoyment of such heightened prose, for human curiosity has always been drawn toward the arcane. Rather, let the reader marvel at the realms of dep ra -vati -on and grotesqueness that the darker side of fantasy can produce, for in the dark, dank recesses of the imagination there will always be a vision of a vaulted subterranean chamber . . .

Originally published in Udolpho -- Journal of The Gothic Society, December 1992.




                                                                           
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