An Accusation That Became a Genre

Long before anyone calling themselves a Satanist held a rite under this name, the Black Mass existed as a charge: medieval and early modern authorities accused heretical groups and individuals of profaning the Mass, a charge that fed directly into witch trial confessions extracted under torture and into wider fears about clandestine anti Christian conspiracy, with little independent evidence that any organized group actually performed such a rite as described. The idea took on a second, literary life in the nineteenth century, most influentially in the French novelist Joris Karl Huysmans' 1891 novel La Bas, which depicts a fictional Black Mass in vivid, deliberately shocking detail and did more than any historical record to fix the modern popular image of the rite.

When Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan in 1966, he explicitly rejected the Huysmans style inverted Catholic ceremony as the movement's actual practice, treating LaVeyan Satanism's occasional use of Black Mass imagery as symbolic theater aimed at Christian hypocrisy rather than as a devotional rite addressed to any being, a distinction LaVey himself was emphatic about in his writing. The name has therefore moved from an accusation with no confirmed historical performer, to a piece of gothic fiction, to a knowingly theatrical symbol used by a modern movement that explicitly denies believing in the god the ceremony inverts.