Satanic Stories - Tales and News Clippings of Satanic Practices Including the Black Mass (Fantasy and Horror Classics)

By Read Books Ltd.

The Devil has occupied a unique and unrivalled position in art, literature and the mind of humankind. One might argue that no other concept or entity has ever loomed so large in man's imagination and intellect. Satanism, in turn, has grown into a fascinating and alluring set of diverse beliefs and philosophies. Collected here are tales and news clippings of various satanic practices, from the humorous to the terrifying, including the black mass from England and Western Europe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Nov 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781447480501

Book preview

Irwin

The Satanic Mass

MONTAGUE SUMMERS

The great central act of Christian worship is the Mass, a Sacrifice which can be offered to God alone, but the climax of Satanism is the horror of the black mass, a sacrifice of mockery, impiety, and blasphemy which is offered to the Devil. Satanists today often meet with the celebration of the black mass as their main object, and it is indeed the culmination and—to use a term of the schools—the very quiddity of devil-worship and the cult of hell. In detail the black mass imitates, so to speak, and foully parodies with every circumstance of crapulous obscenity and contempt the Sacrifice of Calvary.

The black mass today is sometimes celebrated in a cellar, but Satanists have become so audacious and so strong in evil that the largest room in their house is known to be permanently fitted up for these abominable mysteries. In one case the room is draped with black hangings and the windows are always shuttered with curtains drawn. The fact that the door is furnished with Yale lock and key arouses no suspicion. Sometimes even a disused chapel is bought by a wealthy Satanist and furnished for the ceremonial of the liturgy of the pit.

The Abbé Guignard, a member of the La Voisin coven, chanted Satanic Masses in a cellar over the body of Marianne Charmillon; the Duc de Richelieu (1696–1788), who was, it is said, tutored in black magic by a disciple of the Abbé Guibourg, caused two friars, who were his chaplains, to celebrate black masses in the old deserted chapel of one of his country houses, a remote decaying château. He himself assisted with other devotees. Pierre Davis, Mathurin Picard, and Thomas Boulle, who were attached to St. Louis and St. Elizabeth, at Louviers, celebrated black masses at the sabbats which were held in some house not far from the convent, a rendezvous aptly termed a ‘den of devils’.

I know of a black mass celebrated at night in a room at the back of a small, squalid shop in the slummiest part of Brighton not far from Brighton Station. At Merthyr Tydfil the black mass was said or sung in the basement back room of a little house in a poor street, where lived an old man who was reputed to be a ‘fortune-teller’, and who boasted that he belonged ‘to the oldest religion in the world’.

This back room was furnished as a chapel, and the altar, above which was suspended a pair of queer-looking horns, whilst odd objects were ranged on the gradine, blazed with candles. Sometimes the altar is swathed in black velvet, and there are six black candles, three on either side of a crucifix. The crucifix is hideously distorted and caricatured, as J.-K. Huysmans saw at the black mass in the old Ursuline convent near the rue de Vaugirard. Mons. Serge Basset, who was taken to a black mass, observed that in the centre of the altar where a crucifix should be placed was squatting the monstrous figure of a half-human buck-goat, with staring eyes which flickered with red fire, whilst from the tips of its huge horns jetted a dull crimson flame. The altar table itself is generally covered with the three regulation fine linen cloths, overlying the cere-cloth of waxed linen. Sometimes a frontal of brocade or silk is used, and this has been known to be worked with designs of the most obscene esotericism, with many-rayed stars which had men’s and women’s faces, triangles twined with hissing adders, and the whole heraldry of hell.

In May 1895, at the Palazzo Borghese, which vast palace had been rented in various suites of apartments, a Satanic chapel was discovered, Templum Palladicum. The walls of the room were draped with scarlet and black curtains excluding all light; at the farther end was stretched a huge tapestry depicting ‘Lucifer Triumphans’, the Devil Triumphant, Conqueror of the World, and underneath an altar was erected, in the midst of which between the candles stood a figure of Satan to be adored by his worshippers. The room was furnished with luxurious prie-dieus, with chairs of crimson and gold, with tabourets and faldstools. It was lit by electricity, so arranged as to glare from an enormous human eye fixed in the middle of the ceiling.

The vestments worn by the hierophant of the eucharist of hell are often of the richest quality and embroidered with the most delicate workmanship, for the Satanists have immense wealth at their command. At the black mass witnessed by Mons. Serge Basset the celebrant was vested in an alb trimmed with richest lace and a cope of flaming scarlet covered with gilt pomegranates and cones. He wore scarlet silk shoes. The Abbé Guibourg was robed in an ample chasuble thickly sewn with occult characters wrought in silver. At a black mass of fairly recent date the priest wore a chasuble of the ordinary shape, but in colour a deep red and on the back was embroidered a huge triangle of some shimmering silk in the midst of which a black goat standing upright butted with his silver horns.

There have been described to me, by those who actually saw them, a chasuble of heavy orange satin with a he-goat worked in black; another chasuble was of a peculiar shade of brown, embroidered with a pig and a naked woman in delicate flesh-tint; a third was of a hard glaring scarlet adorned with an enamelled plaque of arsenical green on which were a bear and a weasel devouring the host. There was also a cope of exquisite grey silk on which was woven a female figure with buskined legs, wearing a short sky-blue tunic and the red Phrygian cap. The figure, which in one hand raised aloft a severed head streaming in blood, was surrounded by a garland of oak leaves, and beneath appeared the date ‘21 Janvier, 1793’, the murder of King Louis XVI. The figure represented the Goddess of Reason, who attired in this garb was placed upon the high altar of Notre Dame in the person of a common strumpet, adored by the Revolutionaries and Parisian satanists.

For the order of his service the celebrant of the black mass uses a ‘missal’, which is sometimes a printed book, although more often a manuscript. Some of these ‘missals’ are written in red characters upon vellum. Madeleine Bavent speaks of priests celebrating the black mass, and ‘reading from the Paper of Blasphemy’. These ‘missals’ are by no means the same as, but must be entirely distinguished from, grimoires and books of spells.

The host is generally black. In 1324, when investigation was being made into the sorceries of the famous Kilkenny witch, Alice Kyteler, they found hidden away in the lady’s chamber ‘a wafer of sacramental bread, having the devil’s name stamped thereon instead of Jesus Christ’. The devil’s host is often of grotesque shape, triangular, with three sharp points as used in the Mass of St. Sécaire, or hexagonal. In colour it is sometimes black, sometimes blood-red. Gentien le Clerc, a young satanist of Orleans, who was executed in 1614, ‘had often seen the devil’s priest elevate the host and the chalice, of which both were black’. At Rome there were discovered in a brothel two hosts scrabbled over with letters in human blood. These had been stolen from a church and were to be employed in a love-charm.

The thefts of consecrated Hosts from churches is a fearful profanity which has persisted throughout the ages and was never more common than today. The Host is stolen to be desecrated and abused by the Satanists at their assemblies, or it may be in private, secretly and alone.

Presenting themselves at the altar for Communion, these wretches retain the Host in their mouths and then unseen convey It to a handkerchief or handbag. There is a regular traffic in this kind of thing, and considerable sums of money are paid by those who will actually purchase Hosts secured in this way. Nor is it unknown for the Tabernacle of a church to be rifled during the night. A thief can ask his own price for the Reserved Sacrament, and can always find a ready market in certain occult circles.

This is nothing new. We are continually meeting with these abominations throughout the Middle Ages. Dan Michel, of Kent, writing in 1340, speaks of the abuse of the consecrated Host by witches and evil priests as an atrocious crime, but one unhappily known in former centuries. He also mentions the abuse of chalices which have held the Precious Blood. In 1410, when the Queen-regent Dona Catalina was at Segovia, there was discovered a hideous sacrilege, the maltreatment of the Consecrated Host by a band of Jewish sorcerers. They had also attempted the life of the Bishop of Segovia. The Jewish synagogue was converted into a church of reparation, Corpus Christi, and an annual procession still commemorates these events. In 1507 Martin Plantsch, denouncing witchcraft, deplores the magical masses and the profanation of the Host. In 1532 three Hosts were stolen on Good Friday from a church in Aldgate for black magic, as is recorded in the Chronicle of the Grey Friars. There was a terrible scandal in 1614 regarding the theft of numerous Hosts from the tabernacle of the Cathedral at Porto, and the Inquisitor in Portugal, Manuel Do Valle De Moura, issued particular instructions that the Host must be most securely kept under lock and key lest it be stolen for some hideous blasphemy of witchcraft. In July 1938, the Vatican published new rulings to protect tabernacles. These laws are most stringent and most detailed. Thus the tabernacle must be immovable, shut on all sides, and of solid material. The key must never be left in the door or on the altar. The employment of safety-alarms is urged to prevent attempts at stealing the Hosts. ‘World-wide thefts of Sacred Hosts are responsible for the new legislation concerning the safe custody of the Blessed Sacrament. It has been known for many years that attacks upon tabernacles are not inspired by the value of the sacred vessels.’

There is cumulative evidence for these thefts and defilements during the past twenty, forty, seventy years. Indeed, so active in wickedness are the Satanists that scarcely a month passes without some such incident, some sacrilege, is reported.

So close is the mimicry of the black mass that, although the ceremony is actually no part of Holy Mass, the Asperges, the sprinkling of the clergy and congregation with holy water, is often burlesqued. Boguet tells how ‘they say mass at the sabbat’. He who is to celebrate is clothed in a cope with no cross upon it—or sometimes a broken cross—and the worshippers are sprinkled by the Grand Master holding a black asperge with brackish water or even filthy chamber-lye.

Until modern times the burning of incense at the black mass is rarely noted, although there were mystic suffumigations in conjuring of evil spirits. Silvain Nevillon, a member of the Orleans coven (1615), described in detail a black mass at which he had assisted, when the place—it was held in a house—was thick and foggy with a smoke that smelled abominably, not fragrant and sweet as is the incense burned in churches. The witches brought Hosts which they had kept when feigning to make their Communions at various altars, and the Devil (the Grand Master) fouled the Hosts with fearful blasphemies. Water, or some stinking liquid, was scattered over those present, and the Devil chanted Asperges Diaboli. He seemed to read the liturgy from a book which was bound in shaggy skin like the pelt of a wolf. On occasion the Devil preached a sort of sermon, but he spoke in a low gruff voice and it was hard to hear what he was saying.

Today Satanists burn in thuribles and in braziers church incense during their hellish liturgy. They also make a kind of incense from various herbs and spices, the smoke from which is sometimes fetid and stale, sometimes languorous, and swooning-sweet.

‘Every action of the mass which I saw celebrated at the sabbat’, confessed Madaleine Bavent, ‘was indescribably loathsome.’

And so the travesty, the eucharist of hell, proceeds from blasphemy to blasphemy, from obscenity to obscenity, until the canon is reached, or rather the point corresponding to the Canon of the Mass. Then ‘the Host is really and truly consecrated and offered to the demon’. At this moment the celebrant turns his back to the altar.

In some modern assemblies, immediately after the elevation of the chalice there are distributed to the congregation smaller chalices or goblets of wine mingled with some potent aphrodisiac, and before long the scene is a saturnalia of indiscriminate and demented debauchery.

It has been remarked that the black masses of Giles de Rais at Tiffauges and Machecoul, masses said by the young Florentine sorcerer priest, Francesco Prelati, as also the masses said by the Abbé Cotton, by the Abbé Lemaignan, and by the Abbé Guibourg over the naked body of Madame de Montespan, were murderous as well as sacrilege, but whatever the black mass of the modern Satanist lacks in blood it amply makes up in blasphemy and bestial rut.

Yet, if what is whispered be true, and there seems strong confirmation enough, the shedding of blood is not unknown among the devil-worshippers today in London; in Brighton and Birmingham; in Oxford and Cambridge; in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and in a hundred cities more of the British Isles.

Witchcraft—black magic—Satanism, call it by what name they will, for it is all one, the cult of the Devil is the most terrible power at work in the world today.

The Sanctuary

E. F. BENSON

Francis Elton was spending a fortnight’s holiday one January in the Engadine, when he received the telegram announcing the death of his uncle, Horace Elton, and his own succession to a very agreeable property: the telegram added that the cremation of the remains was to take place that day, and it was therefore impossible for him to attend, and there was no reason for