Black Mass
A Black Mass is a ceremony typically celebrated by various satanic groups. It has existed for centuries in different forms and is directly based on a Catholic Mass.
However, a Black Mass takes the Catholic Mass and inverts it, intentionally mocking the Catholic celebration. Participants often use a consecrated Eucharistic host and desecrate it, using it in obscene ways. This is one of the reasons why s in Catholic churches have locks and why some parishes have an usher stand next to a communion line. Both policies aim at protecting the Eucharist from being used in a Black Mass.
In the 19th century the Black Mass became popularized in French literature, in books such as Satanism and Witchcraft, by Jules Michelet, and Là-bas, by Joris-Karl Huysmans.
Modern revivals began with H. T. F. Rhodes' book, The Satanic Mass published in London in 1954, and there is now a range of modern versions of the Black Mass performed by various groups.
Origins and history of the Black Mass
Early Catholicism
The Catholic Church regards the Mass as its most important ritual, going back to apostolic times. In general, its various liturgies followed the outline of Liturgy of the Word, Offertory, Liturgy of the Eucharist, and Benediction, which developed into what is known as the Mass. However, as early Christianity became more established and its influence began to spread, the early Church Fathers began to describe a few heretical groups practicing their own versions of Masses. Some of these rituals were of a sexual nature. The fourth-century AD heresiologist Epiphanius of Salamis, for instance, claims that a libertine Gnostic sect known as the Borborites engaged in a version of the Eucharist in which they would smear their hands with menstrual blood and semen and consume them as the blood and body of Christ respectively. He also alleges that, whenever one of the women in their church was experiencing her period, they would take her menstrual blood and everyone in the church would eat it as part of a sacred ritual.Medieval Roman Catholic parodies and additions to the Mass
Within the Church, the rite of the Mass was not completely fixed, and there were places at the end of the Offertory for the Secret prayers, when the priest could insert private prayers for various personal needs. These practices became especially prevalent in France. As these types of personal prayers within the Mass spread, the institution of the Low Mass became quite common, where priests would hire their services out to perform various Masses for the needs of their clients — such as blessing crops or cattle, achieving success in some enterprise, obtaining love, or even cursing enemies. In the 12th and 13th centuries there was a great surplus of clerics and monks who might be inclined to perform these Masses, as younger sons were often sent off to religious universities, and after their studies, needed to find a livelihood. Also within the Church, the Mass was sometimes reworked to create light-hearted parodies of it for certain Church festivities. Some of these became accepted practices at times, such as a festive parody of the Mass called "The Feast of Asses", in which Balaam's ass would begin talking and saying parts of the Mass. A similar parody was the Feast of Fools.Another result of the surplus of clerical students was the appearance of the Latin writings of the Goliards and wandering clerics. There began to appear more cynical and heretical parodies of the Mass, also written in ecclesiastical Latin, known as "drinkers' masses" and "gamblers' Masses," which lamented the situation of drunk, gambling monks, and instead of calling to "Deus", called to "Bacchus" and "Decius". Some of the earliest of these Latin parody works are found in the medieval Latin collection of poetry, Carmina Burana, written around 1230. At the time these wandering clerics were spreading their Latin writings and parodies of the Mass, the Cathars, who also spread their teachings through wandering clerics, were also active. Due to the proximity in time and location of the Goliards, the Cathars, and the witches, all of whom were seen as threatening the authority of the Roman Catholic Church and the Papal Authority in Rome, some historians have postulated that these wandering clerics may have at times offered their services for performing heretical, or "black" Masses on various occasions.
A further source of late Medieval and Early Modern involvement with parodies and alterations of the Mass, were the writings of the European witch-hunt, which saw witches as being agents of the Devil, who were described as inverting the Christian Mass and employing the stolen Host for diabolical ends. Witch-hunter's manuals such as the Malleus Maleficarum and the Compendium Maleficarum allude to these supposed practices. The first complete depiction of a blasphemy of the Mass in connection with the witches' sabbath, was given in Florimond de Raemond's 1597 French work, The Antichrist. He uses the following description of a witches' meeting as a sign that Satanic practices are prevalent in the world, and a sign that the Antichrist's power is on the rise:
Early modern France
Between the 16th and the 19th centuries, many examples of interest in the Black Mass come from France.- 16th century: Catherine de' Medici, the Queen of France, was said by Jean Bodin to have performed a Black Mass, based on a story in his 1580 book on witchcraft De la démonomanie des sorciers. In spite of its lurid details, there is little outside evidence to back up his story.
- 17th century: Catherine Monvoisin and the priest Étienne Guibourg performed "Black Masses" for Madame de Montespan, the mistress of King Louis XIV of France. Since a criminal investigation — L'affaire des poisons — was launched many details of their Black Mass have come down to us. It was a typical Roman Catholic Mass, but modified according to certain formulas and featuring the King's mistress as the central altar of worship, lying naked upon the altar with the chalice on her bare stomach, and holding a black candle in each of her outstretched arms. The Host was consecrated on her body, and then used in love potions designed to gain the love of the King. From these images of the Guibourg mass, further developments of the Black Mass derived.
- 18th century: The Marquis de Sade, in many of his writings, places the host and the Mass, monks, priests and the Pope himself in blasphemous sexual settings.
- 19th century: Joris-Karl Huysmans wrote the classic novel of French Satanism, Là-bas. The characters in the novel have long discussions on the history of French Satanism up to their time, and eventually one of them is invited to participate in a Black Mass, the type of which Huysmans claimed was practised in Paris in those years. Although a work of fiction, Huysmans' description of the Black Mass remained influential simply because no other book went into as much detail. However, the actual text which Huysmans' satanic "priest" recites is nothing more than a long diatribe in French, praising Satan as the god of reason and the opponent of Christianity. In this way, it resembles the French poetry of Charles Baudelaire, more than it resembles an inversion of the Roman Catholic Mass.
Late 19th century and early 20th century scholarly interest in the Black Mass
- The French historian Jules Michelet was one of the first to analyze and attempt to understand the Black Mass, and wrote two chapters about it in his classic book, Satanism and Witchcraft.
- J. G. Frazer included a description of the Mass of Saint-Sécaire, an unusual French legend with similarities to the Black Mass, in The Golden Bough. Frazer was recounting material already found in an 1883 French book entitled Quatorze superstitions populaires de la Gascogne, by :fr:Jean-François Bladé|Jean-François Bladé. This Mass was said to be employed as a method of assassination by supernatural means, allowing the supplicant to avenge himself if he was wronged by someone.
- Montague Summers discussed many classic portrayals of the Black Mass in a number of his works.
20th century
- H. T. F. Rhodes' popular book, The Satanic Mass, published in London in 1954, was a major inspiration for modern versions of the Black Mass, when they finally appeared. Rhodes claimed that, at the time of his writing, there did not exist a single first hand source which actually described the rites and ceremonies of a Black Mass.
- Gerhard Zacharias and Richard Cavendish, both writing in the middle of the 1960s, while presenting detailed studies of source material, offer no new sources for a Black Mass, relying solely on material that was already known to Rhodes.
- When Anton Szandor LaVey published his Satanic Bible in 1969, he wrote that:
The usual assumption is that the Satanic ceremony or service is always called a Black Mass. A Black Mass is not the magical ceremony practiced by Satanists. The Satanist would only employ the use of a Black Mass as a form of 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.
He went on in the Satanic Rituals to present it as the most representatively satanic ritual in the book.21st century
- In 2014 the Black Mass was held in public at the Oklahoma City Civic Center by the Dakhma of Angra Mainyu. The event saw backlash in the form of protesters such as John Ritchie, the Director of TFP Student Action. The event was also condemned by Archbishop Paul Coakley in a public statement.
- The Dakhma of Angra Mainyu held another Black Mass in 2016 at the same location.
The Modern Black Mass
- The first was a 13-minute recording of a full-length "Satanic Mass" made by the U.S. band Coven. Coven's Satanic Mass, part of their stage show beginning in 1967, was expanded and included on their 1969 record album Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls, together with the full published text. On the album cover, it is stated that they spent a long time researching the material, and to their knowledge it was the first Black Mass published in any language. The result was eclectic, drawing chants and material from numerous sources, including two medieval French miracle plays, Le Miracle de Théophile and Jeu de Saint Nicolas, which both contain invocations to the Devil in an unknown language. These chants, along with other material on the album, could be found in books on witchcraft popular in the 60s, notably Grillot de Givry's Witchcraft, Magic and Alchemy. A large portion of the English dialogue was taken verbatim from Dennis Wheatley's 1960 occult novel, The Satanist, in which the female protagonist is initiated into a Satanic cult. Additionally, the recording, while using a couple of the Latin phrases the Church of Satan was already making popular, also added a substantial amount of church Latin, in the form of Gregorian chants sung by the band, to create the genuine effect of the Catholic Latin Mass being inverted and sung to Satan.
- The second was a record album of readings in Satanic ritual and philosophy by the Church of Satan, called "The Satanic Mass", which contained material later to appear in their Satanic Bible. In spite of the title and a few phrases in Latin, this album did not deal with the traditional Black Mass.
All three of these newly created Black Masses contain the Latin phrase "In nomine Dei nostri Satanas Luciferi Excelsi" , as well as the phrases "Rege Satanas" and "Ave Satanas". Additionally, all three modify other Latin parts of the Roman Catholic Missal to make them into Satanic versions. The Church of Satan's two Black Masses also use the French text of the Black Mass in Huysmans' Là-Bas to a great extent.. Thus, the Black Mass found in The Satanic Rituals is a combination of English, French, and Latin. Further, in keeping with the traditional description of the Black Mass, all three also require a consecrated Host taken from a Catholic church, as a central part of the ceremony.
A writer using the pseudonym "Aubrey Melech" published, in 1986, a Black Mass entirely in Latin, entitled "Missa Niger".. Aubrey Melech's Black Mass contains almost exactly the same original Latin phrases as the Black Mass published by LaVey in The Satanic Rituals. The difference is that the amount of Latin has now more than doubled, so that the entire Black Mass is in Latin. Unlike Coven and Wayne West, LaVey and Melech don't give the source for the Latin material in their Black Mass, merely implying that they received it from someone else, without saying who.