The Black Mass

by Matthew Gorman - December 2008

Since medieval times, the notion that a ritual or category of similar rituals that parody the traditional Christian Mass and offer up participants' allegiance to the Devil has persisted. This type of ritual is known as the Black Mass and while there is no actual set of established rites for this satanic ritual it is generally thought to involve some common elements such as mocking the traditional mass by corrupting prayers or reciting them in reverse, defiling the cross and the host that is said to be the body of Christ in the Catholic Mass, and employing a nude female upon whom sex acts are often performed to serve as the ritual's altar. I don't know about you, but that just sounds like a great fucking time! But let's delve now into the history of the Black Mass to see what exactly about this ritual has captured the dark imagination of so many throughout history.

Parodies of the established Christian Mass are certainly nothing new and many of the original mockeries of the Mass penned in the middle ages were created for that reason only, simply as parodies usually performed as humorous revelries at Church festivals, and certainly without the infernal connotations of the Black Mass.

These comical parodies of the traditional Mass, however, eventually gave way to the practice wherein clergymen would be contracted by outside parties to pen masses specific to those persons' needs. This priest/Mass for hire racket was extremely lucrative with people wanting masses performed to bless new ships, livestock, or simply to give a benediction for general business endeavors. Some would even hire priests to create masses that would curse their enemies to death! Not very "Christian" of them, wouldn't you say?

One infamous example of this type of murderous mass is The Mass of Saint-Sècaire that originated in Gascogne, France in the middle ages. The people of Gascogne told tales of criminals and evildoers seeking vengeance against their foes by employing the services of a corrupt priest. The priest would perform the mass by journeying to an abandoned church in the company of a harlot whom he had taken as his lover. The pair were said to arrive at an hour before midnight at which point the priest would begin to recite the mass backwards ending precisely at the stroke of midnight. The host that was consecrated was said to black and triangular in shape, and the priest was said to consecrate no wine but instead use water from a well in which the corpse of an unbaptized child had been thrown. The alleged end result of this, likely the first true Black Mass, was that the enemy of the person who had commissioned the cursed mass would fall ill and waste away slowly to death with no apparent cause. It was said that any priest who performed this ritual would surely be damned and only the Pope, himself, could absolve such a sin.

Another method by which a mercenary priest would bring about a curse upon his benefactor's enemy was to say the traditional Mass for the dead inserting the name of the accursed into the "prayers" while burying an effigy of said person.

However widely practiced these sinister masses may or may not have been, and it is doubtful that they were performed very often, they managed to create a panic within the established Church, leading Church fathers to condemn such practices as early as the 7th century.

As it was generally defrocked or secretly sinister (or just plain greedy!) ordained priests that conducted these original "Black Masses" it seems ironic then that the pagan peoples persecuted for witchcraft and Devil worship in medieval times were accused of such practices by the Church. Nevertheless, the infamous manual on witch-hunting, The Malleus Maleficarum, describes the witch's Black Mass in some depth, including the sacrifice of babies and the drinking of blood. It is generally believed today that the rituals described in this bigoted text are more of an account of Church paranoia and propaganda than of any factual events that may have taken place.

This is not to say that Black Masses wherein the Devil was invoked and worshipped did not occur throughout history, it was just that it was almost exclusively members of a bored and rebellious aristocracy who conducted them. And in no country did this ring truer than in the aforementioned France.

One of the most horrific Satanists of all time was the French Baron, Gilles de Rais, a 15th century child murderer who was said to have slaughtered over 140 children to serve as sacrifices for the Black Masses that he conducted in the cellar of his castle. Gilles de Rais was also said to drink the blood and to eat the flesh of his victims. He was captured, tried, and eventually executed in 1440.

The prevalence of both clergy and aristocracy becoming enamored with devil worship and the Black Mass seemed to reach an apex during the 15th through 17th centuries in France with a growing record of alleged satanic activity.

In 1500, the cathedral chapter of Cambrai conducted a series of Black Masses in open opposition to their Bishop with whom they were at odds. However, these Black Masses were more a form of rebellion against the established church than any true Devil worship.

An excommunicated priest, one Gentien le Clerc, tried for Devil worship in Orleans, France in 1614-1615 confessed to taking part in a Black Mass after which the participants imbibed large amounts of alcohol and participated in a lewd sexual orgy (again, sounds fun!).

In 1647 the nuns of Louviers claimed that their chaplains were engaged in Devil worship and that they themselves had been possessed by demons and forced to participate naked in satanic masses wherein the host was trampled underfoot and the cross defiled by bodily fluids or by insertion into the nuns' vaginas.

The aristocracy became particularly active in Satanic shenanigans under the reign of King Louis XIV who it was said was rather lenient when it came to his courtesans dabbling in the occult. The chief organizer of occult activity within the French aristocracy at this time was one Catherine Deshayes, who was known as "La Voisin". Deshayes was a French Sorceress who practiced fortune telling and sold potions. She was able to gain the allegiance of several prominent French society woman as well as rebellious members of the French clergy including the Abbè Etienne Guiborg.

At the behest of the Marquise de Montespan, mistress of King Louis XIV, Deshayes and Guiborg along with the Marquise performed a Black Mass with the purpose of cursing another woman, one of the Marquise's romantic rivals for the king's affection. During the ceremony a naked Marquise de Montespan served as the altar for the perverted Mass while clutching two black candles, a detail which may have established the origin of this aspect in future Black Masses. Incense was burned and three black masses were said over the Marquise's naked form invoking Satan and his demons, Beelzebub, Asmodeus and Astaroth. The throats of kidnapped children were slashed and their blood drained into chalices where it was combined with flour to make the ritual's host. The host was consecrated over the Marquise's pubis and pieces of it were inserted inside of her vagina. After the ritual the evil priest and the two women took part in an orgy and afterward they burned the corpses of the children in a furnace at Deshayes's home.

After their crime was discovered, Deshayes was burned at the stake as a witch and Guiborg imprisoned. It also sparked an investigation which led to the arrest of some 246 members of French nobility, several of whom were later executed. I suppose King Louis wasn't exactly so lenient, after all.

In 1891, the author Joris-Karl Huysmans penned Là-Bas, a fictional novel that was nevertheless considered the consummate work on French Satanism due to the graphic details of a Black Mass contained within. Many of the elements in this literary work bear striking resemblance to the details gleamed from the prosecution of French noblemen and clergy with regards to their participation in similar masses, including those of the particularly infamous Guiborg Black Mass.

Eventually the practice of the Black Mass spread to groups and individuals in England. In the 1900's, for example, a Satanic society calling themselves The Hellfire Club claimed to practice regular Black Masses in London, though historians believe these were mostly theatrical events involving lots of alcohol and sexual promiscuity and nothing of a truly sinister bent such as human sacrifice.

The famous (or infamous, depending upon how you look at it) British magician, Aleister Crowley, dabbled in Satanism at times throughout his life, though his sentiment was more anti-Christian than pro-Satan. He headed up the British branch of the German-born Ordo Templi Orientis, many of whose modern chapters are accused of devout Satanism today. The O.T.O. claims direct descent from the Knight's Templar, an order of Christian Knights who served the Catholic Church valiantly during the time of the Crusades and who were later accused of Devil worship. An accusation likely spurred by the established Church's jealously over the immense wealth that the order had accumulated during their conquests in the Holy Land.

It was said that a Black Mass was performed at Aleister Crowley's gravesite in 1947, but for the more scholarly among us we know that, in fact, the ritual was Crowley's own creation devised for the O.T.O. known as the Gnostic Mass and considered a Gnostic Catholic ritual rather than a satanic one. Still, some elements within this ritual bear a striking resemblance to some reported elements of Black Masses, in particular a nude female serving as the ritual's altar and the sexual overtones implicit within that aesthetic. Crowley's Gnostic Mass also served as the template for modern day Gardenarian and Alexandrain witchcraft with their emphasis on unabashed human sexuality.

While the Black Mass appears to have had its birthplace in medieval France from a historical perspective it was not until the 1960's in the United States that any instructions on how to actually carry out a satanic Black Mass were actually published and made available to the general public.

The first publicly available instructions for conducting a Black Mass were actually two separate recordings both released in 1968 and both entitled "The Satanic Mass". One was released by the burgeoning Church of Satan (that would later be fully established in California in 1969 by ex-lion tamer Anton Szandor Lavey) and contained text that would later be included in Lavey's Satanic Bible published in 1969. However, this was far from a complete Black Mass ritual containing more theory and philosophy than actual instruction. The other was a 13-minute recording of a full Black Mass released by the satanic rock band Coven. The Coven recording is certainly the more dramatic of the two, drawing inspiration from several sources on Satanism as well as age-old French mystery plays. The Church of Satan would later pen two full Black Masses of their own, one written by member Wayne West in 1970 and the other by Lavey himself, which would both later be published in another of Lavey's books, The Satanic Rituals released in 1972. Another writer employing the pseudonym "Aubrey Melech" penned a Black Mass entirely in Latin, including much of the same Latin phrases as in Lavey's published Mass, entitled "Missa Niger" (Black Mass) in 1986. In both Melech's and Lavey's versions there are several errors with regards to the Latin language.

It is interesting that Lavey actually felt it necessary to pen a Black Mass at all considering the fact that when he founded The Church of Satan he felt that the Black Mass was outmoded and merely theatrical at best. He wrote in The Satanic Bible, "A usual assumption is that the satanic ceremony or service is called the black mass. The Satanist would only employ the use of the black mass as psychodrama. Furthermore, a black mass does not necessarily imply that the performers of such are Satanists. A black mass is essentially a parody on the religious service of the Roman Catholic Church, but can be loosely applied to a satire on any religious ceremony."

Well, kids, there you have it, the Black Mass throughout history, a ritual that never truly existed in one true form or another but one that seemingly never fails to percolate the interest and imagination of those who dare to plumb the dark depths of the human condition. Ave, Satanas!