The Black Mass

The difficulty with this rite is evidential. Almost everything written about it before the nineteenth century was written by people prosecuting others for it, and almost everything written since has been fiction or has descended from fiction.

Massimo Introvigne's history sets out the sequence. The medieval and early modern accounts come from inquisitorial proceedings and witch trials, where the descriptions were produced under interrogation against a prepared list of questions, in the same way and with the same reliability as the Templar confessions. What such proceedings generate is the interrogator's expectations returned in the defendant's voice.

The one episode with substantial independent documentation is the Affair of the Poisons at the court of Louis XIV in the 1670s and 1680s, where the investigation recorded allegations of sacrilegious masses celebrated by the priest Etienne Guibourg in connection with poisoning and abortion. Even there the testimony was obtained under torture and the political stakes were high, and historians differ on how much of it is reliable. Something appears to have happened; its exact character is not recoverable.

The rite as generally described today, the inverted cross, the reversed Latin, the desecrated host, the naked altar, comes substantially from Joris-Karl Huysmans's novel La-Bas of 1891, which supplied a detailed scene that later writers repeated as though it were documentary. Nineteenth-century French anticlerical and sensational literature, including the frauds perpetrated by Leo Taxil, who publicly confessed in 1897 that he had invented his accounts of Masonic satanism wholesale, contributed the rest.

The rite has been performed since, by people who read those descriptions and enacted them. That is a real practice, but it is a twentieth-century one derived from a literary source, not a survival.

The wider claim of an organised tradition of such worship was tested most thoroughly during the satanic ritual abuse panic of the 1980s and early 1990s. Investigations by the FBI in the United States and by government-commissioned research in the United Kingdom found no evidence of the organised networks alleged, and a number of criminal convictions obtained during the panic were subsequently overturned.

What can be said is that the rite is chiefly a construction of those who feared it, elaborated by novelists, and enacted afterwards by readers of both.

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.