Black Mass: Fact or Fiction?
Monday May 19, 2008 8:12 AM
It's a staple of horror films: the black mass, an obscene parody of the Catholic holy mass at which the Devil is worshiped. The scene is usually a dark cavernous space lit with smoky torches and candles. Frenzied participants gyrate around an altar draped with a naked woman. They indulge in wild feasting and drinking, and a demonic-looking defrocked priest tramples on the cross.
There is little evidence that such black masses ever were performed with frequency or consistent organization as a ritual for devil-worship. Over the course of time, however, fiction has evolved into fact.
Stories of perverted masses have been told since the beginning of Christianity. Most of the "perversions" dealt with magical uses of the mass, such as for weather control, fertility, protection, love divination and even cursing. Magical masses were officially condemned in 694 by the Church's Council of Toledo.
During the Inquisition, a reign of terror against heretics that lasted from the 1400s into the 1700s, demonologists put more of a satanic spin on the stories, insisting that Devil-worshiping witches gathered regularly for black masses.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, priests in France were arrested and executed for conducting black masses, which usually were theatrical events intended for social shock and protest against the Church. During the reign of Louis XIV, it was fashionable among nobility to hire priests to perform erotic black masses in dark cellars. Louis arrested 246 men and women, many of them some of France's highest-ranking nobles, and brought them to trial. Confessions were made under torture. Most of the nobility got off with jail sentences and exile in the countryside. Thirty-six of the commoners were executed, some by being burned alive.
Black masses also figured in high-profile demonic possession cases, such as the Ursuline nuns in Louviers, France in 1647. The nuns said they had been bewitched and possessed, and were forced by chaplains to participate nude in black masses.
The black mass continued as a decadent shock fashion into the 19th century during an occult revival. J.K. Huysman's 1891 novel La-Bas ("Down There") contains a lurid description of a black mass that became a model for fiction.
Aleister Crowley, the English magician famous for his outrageous behavior, composed a Gnostic Mass that some confuse with a black mass. Crowley said black masses are an abuse of spiritual power.
Today the black mass, a product of fiction, legend and history, lives on in the practices of modern satanic groups who perform it for a variety of purposes, including social shock, magic and spiritual expression.
