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. 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.
Saint Augustine, also writing in the fourth century, describes a group referred to as "Catharistas" ("purifiers"), who added the mixture of male and female sexual fluids to flour to create a "
Sacrament" which they ate, in the belief that they were purifying the substance through eating it.
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 (
Votive Masses)—such as blessing crops or cattle, achieving success in some enterprise, obtaining love, or even cursing enemies (one way this latter was done was by inserting the enemy's name in a
Mass for the dead, accompanied by burying an image of the enemy). Although these practices were condemned by Church authorities as superstitious and sacrilegious abuses, they still occurred secretively. 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 ritual of the Mass was sometimes reworked to create light-hearted parodies of it for certain festivities. Some of these became quasi-tolerated practices at times—though never accepted by official Church authorities—such as a festive parody of the Mass called "
The Feast of Asses", in which
Balaam's ass (from the Old Testament) would begin talking and saying parts of the Mass. A similar parody was the
Feast of Fools. Though often condemned, practitioners of such activities, called "
Goliards", continued despite the Church's disapproval. Another result of the surplus of (sometimes disillusioned) clerical students was the appearance of the Latin writings of the
Goliards and wandering clerics (
clerici vagantes). 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" (God), called to "
Bacchus" (the Roman god of wine) and "Decius" (the god of dice, which were used in gambling). 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
Catholic Church and its head, the
Papacy 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 (1487) and the
Compendium Maleficarum (1608) 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 (written as a Catholic response to the
Protestant claim that the Pope was 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: The most sophisticated and detailed descriptions of the Black Mass to have been produced in early modern Europe are found in the
Basque witch-hunts of 1609–1614. It has recently been argued by academics including
Emma Wilby that the emphasis on the Black Mass in these trials evolved out of a particularly creative interaction between interrogators keen to find evidence of the rite and a Basque peasantry who were deeply committed to a wide range of unorthodox religious practices such as "cursing" Masses, liturgical misrule and the widespread misuse of Catholic ritual elements in forbidden magical conjurations. An impressive account of the rite was given by suspects from the Spanish-Basque village of
Zugarramurdi, who claimed that:
Early modern France '', by the
Marquis de Sade 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 ("Affair of the Poisons"
)—was launched (resulting in the execution of Monvoisin and the imprisonment of Guibourg) many details of their Black Mass have come down to us. It was a typical Roman Catholic Mass, but modified according to certain formulas (some reminiscent of the Latin Sworn Book of Honorius, or its French version, The Grimoire of Pope Honorius'') and featuring the King's mistress (the
Marquise de Montespan) 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 (on account of the magical power believed to be in the consecrated Host). 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 (
Pope Pius VI in
Juliette) in blasphemous sexual settings. •
19th century:
Joris-Karl Huysmans wrote the classic novel of French Satanism,
Là-bas (1891). 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 (in particular
Les Litanies de Satan), more than it resembles an inversion of the Roman Catholic Mass.
Late 19th century and early 20th century scholarly interest in the Black Mass Scholarly studies on the Black Mass relied almost completely on French and Latin sources (which also came from France): • 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 (1862). •
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 (1890). Frazer was recounting material already found in an 1883 French book entitled
Quatorze superstitions populaires de la Gascogne (
"Fourteen Popular Superstitions of Gascony"), by
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 (especially in
The History of Witchcraft and Demonology (1926), ch. IV,
The Sabbat, with extensive quotations from the original French and Latin sources).
20th century • H. T. F. Rhodes' popular book,
The Satanic Mass, published in London in 1954 (American edition in 1955), 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: He went on in the
Satanic Rituals (1972) 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 a theistic Satanist group called
Dakhma of Angra Mainyu (Church of Ahriman). The host to be used in the Black Mass was stolen from a Catholic church. The event saw backlash in the form of protesters such as John Ritchie, the Director of TFP Student Action. •
Dakhma of Angra Mainyu, the same theistic Satanist group, held another Black Mass in 2016 at the same location. An ecumenical Christian protest (with Christians from many denominations, such as
Catholic, Baptist, Methodist,
Episcopal and Pentecostal, present) was held to oppose the Black Mass. • In March 2025 a Black Mass was held in public at the Kansas Statehouse in
Topeka, by a Kansas Satanist group called
The Grotto of Satan. Violence ensued due to public protest, and arrests were made. == The modern Black Mass ==