An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present - Doreen Valiente 2018

Black Mass, The

Popular belief credits the Black Mass with being the central rite of witchcraft, and the very ultimate in horror and abomination. As a matter of fact, however, the Black Mass is not a witchcraft rite at all.

The whole point of the Black Mass is to pervert and insult the highest Christian sacrament. Therefore, one has to accept the validity of the Mass as the highest Christian sacrament, and to believe in its efficacy, before one can pervert it; and people who believe this are Christians, not witches. They may be bad Christians, but they are certainly not pagans. In fact, they are really playing Christianity, by their very laboured efforts at blasphemy, a sort of back-handed compliment.

The Christian Mass is a ritual involving bread and wine, which the Christian believes to be changed mystically into the Body and Blood of Christ; but the pagan does not believe this. Indeed, to celebrate the Black Mass, one has not only to be a Christian, but a Roman Catholic, who believes in the real Mass. Otherwise, as Gerald Gardner has pointed out, one is going to a great deal of trouble to insult a piece of bread.

The stories about the Black Mass have had a number of different sources; but they are not all fiction. Black Masses of various kinds have taken place, and probably still do. Where they are genuine, they arise mainly from a revolt against Church oppression, and the frustration of those who have to submit to it.

In the Middle Ages the Church ruled public and private life with an iron hand. The feudal system, which the Church supported, was a heavy yoke upon men’s necks. Under the surface, resentment smouldered, and sometimes burst forth into flame, only to be stamped out with pitiless severity. The lords ruled in their castles, while the serf had no future but constant toil, in order to make them richer.

In these circumstances, Satan in medieval France acquired a significant title, Le Grand Serf Revolté, ’The Great Serf in Revolt’; and the stage was set for probably the only circumstances in which real devil worship manifests itself. Not because people choose to worship evil; but because everything they can enjoy or hope for in this world, they have been told belongs to the Devil. Freedom is of the Devil; sexual enjoyment is of the Devil; even music and dancing are of the Devil. Very well—then let us invoke the Devil!

But how can we invoke the Devil? What other means than by reversing the forms of Christianity? Remember, the Mass in those days was always said in Latin; the Lord’s Prayer was the Paternoster. These were the sonorous incantations which invoked the Christian God. Reversed, would they invoke the opposite forces to those of Christendom—the forces of joyous and unbridled lust, of naked freedom, such as the serfs had once known at the old pagan festivals, of which folk-memory still held a far-off echo, a warmth of remembered fire? There may well have been people who thought like this, in those Dark Ages.

Nor was this mental climate confined to those countries ruled by the Roman Catholic Church. John Buchan, in his novel Witch Wood, has vividly depicted the oppressive atmosphere of Puritan Scotland, under extreme, narrow-minded Protestantism; and the means which the people found of relieving their frustrations, in either a genuine or an imitation witches’ Sabbat.

However, the Black Mass does not belong to genuine witchcraft, because the latter has its own traditions and rituals. The real witch is a pagan, and the old Horned God of the witches is much older than Christianity or the Christian Devil or Satan. Though it will be seen from the foregoing how the Horned God can have come to be united in the popular mind with the Devil; especially as the Church had impressed upon everyone that the old pagan gods were all really devils. The only reason people ever worshipped the Devil was that the image of the Christian God was made so harsh and cruel that the Devil seemed pleasanter.

The witches today have a ceremony of wine and cakes, which is described in Charles Godfrey Leland’s Aradia: the Gospel of the Witches. (See ARADIA.) Wine, or ale or cider when wine could not be had, was (and still is) used to drink the health of the Old Gods. But this is not done in mockery of the Christian Mass or anything else. The wine is consecrated to the Horned God and the Moon Goddess, the deities of the witches. The Sabbats and the Esbats always involve a ritual feast, or at least some eating and drinking; and in the heated imagination of anti-witch writers, this nearly always becomes a Black Mass, even though it bears no resemblance to the Christian sacrament.

Apart from the foregoing influences in the story of the Black Mass, there is the fact that some Christian, or nominally Christian, priests perverted their saying of the Mass to the purposes of baleful magic; and this practice, too, is very ancient. As early as the seventh century A.D. the Council of Toledo denounced the practice of saying the Mass for the Dead in the name of a living person, so that the person named should sicken and die.

There are also in existence magical grimoires which require that the instruments of magic, the wand, the knife etc., should be laid upon an altar and a Mass said over them.

The story of the notorious Abbé Guibourg, who said Mass upon the naked body of the King’s mistress, Madame de Montespan, as she lay upon a secret altar, is a well-documented historical fact. The object of this ritual was that Madame de Montespan should retain Louis XIV’s fickle favour, and with it her position as queen in all but name. The rite not only invoked the perversion of sacred things, but ritual murder. The blood of a sacrificed baby was mingled in the chalice.

But the whole point of this Black Mass was that it had to be performed, not by a witch, but by an ordained Christian priest, who had the power to consecrate the elements of the Mass; and this still holds good (or should we say bad?) today. The Black Mass is a perversion of a Christian rite. Its connection with witchcraft, historically speaking, is comparatively recent.

Moreover, the highly-sophisticated Black Mass, so beloved of films and books designed to thrill as they horrify, is mainly of literary origin. The Marquis de Sade included descriptions of it in his notorious novels, Justine (Paris, 1791) and Juliette (Paris, 1797). These descriptions may have been inspired by stories in French high society about the secret activities of Madame de Montespan. De Sade’s books had an extensive circulation ’under the counter’, in spite of efforts to suppress them. Forbidden fruit is always attractive, hence the idea of the Black Mass gained status, especially when suitably decorated with beautiful, nude women.

In Britain, the famous Hell Fire Club, or the Monks of Medmenham, organised by Sir Francis Dashwood, had been staging something very similar, though much more light-hearted. There were in fact a number of Hell Fire Clubs in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; but their object was more daring debauchery than serious black magic. Like some similar organisations today, if their ’invocations of the Devil’ had actually produced some manifestation, no one would have been more terrified—or surprised—than themselves.

Nevertheless, within the late and literary Black Mass, with its theatrical trappings, there is one genuinely ancient figure—the naked woman upon the altar. It would be more correct to say, the naked woman who is the altar; because this is her original role, not that of sacrificial victim (whom the hero of the thriller rescues just in time from the black magician’s knife, as so often seen in films). This use of a living woman’s naked body as the altar where the forces of Life are worshipped and invoked, goes back to before the beginnings of Christianity with its dogmas about Satan; back to the days of the ancient worship of the Great Goddess of Nature, in whom all things were one, under the image of Woman.