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Chapter One
THE ORIGINAL PSYCHODRAMA
The Black Mass is a valid Satanic ceremony only if one feels the need to perform it. Historically, there is no ritual more closely linked with Satanism, than the Black Mass It has long been, considered the principal elective of Satanists, who were assumed never to tire of trampling on crosses and of stealing unbaptized infants. If a Satanist had nothing else to do, and was independently wealthy, newer and more blasphemous versions of the Messe Noir would be invented in order to nourish his jaded existence, the theory went. Though a titillating concept to many, it is without validity, and as devoid of logic as the assumption that Christians celebrate Good Friday every Wednesday afternoon.
Although the Black Mass is a ritual that has been performed countless times, the participants often were not Satan ists, but would act solely on the idea that anything contradictory to God must be of the Devil. During the Inquisition, anyone who doubted the sovereignty of God and Christ was summarily considered a servant of Satan and suffered accordingly. The Inquisitors, needing an enemy, found one in the guise of witches who supposedly were subject to Satanic control. Witches were created in wholesale lots by the church from the ranks of the senile, sexually promiscuous, feeble. whirled, deformed, hysterical, and anyone who happened to be of non-Christian thought or background. There was only a minute percentage of actual healers and oracles. They were likewise persecuted.
Them have hom recent attempts to assess great numbers Of "witches" of antiquity as rebels against the Christian Church who held Dianic"esbats" with furtive regularity. This presents a charming picture. But it is folly, because it bestows a degree of intellectual sophistication on people who were essentially ignorant, and who were willing to go along with whatever form of worship the opinion makers gave them
At any race, during the period when accounts of the Black Mass were employed as propaganda against "heretical' a" and orders, few rated about the finer points differentiating the witch from the Satanist. Both were as one in the eyes of the Inquisitors, although it is safe to say that unlike the majority who bore the label of witch, those who conducted themselves "satanically" often carried their stigma. This is ,or meant to condone the actions of the Inquisitors against such freethinkers and rebels# but to concede that they were a very red threat to the holy fathers. Such men as Galileo and da Vinci, accused of traffic with the Devil, most certainly were Satanic in the sense that they expressed ideas and theories destined to break down the status quo.
The supposed high point of the Black Afars, alleged to be the offering to Satan of an unbaptized human child, was not quite the my the collectors of baptism fees gloatingly told it Catherine Deshayes, known as LaVoisin, was a seven. teenth century French businesswoman who peddled drugs and performed abortions. La Voism arranged "rituals, charms and spells" for her clients, all of whom wished to retain the safety of the Church, but whose ineffectual prayers drove them to seek darker magic. This am of desperate miracle seeking a as preva lent today as it was then. In the performance of one of her more popular productions, a clandestine, highly commercial inversion of the Catholic mass, La Voisin provided "and=. ticity" by actually engaging willing Catholic priests as celebrants and sometimes using an aborted fetus as a human sacrifice.(Records indicate that she performed over two hundred abortions.)
Ile priests who supposedly celebrated the Black Mass for her supplied the holy propagandists with more material. If or dained priests were occasionally prone to take part in heretical rites, it is understandable when one considers the social conditions at the time. For centuries in France many mien became priests because they were from upper class families and the priesthood was de rigeur for at least one son of cultured or well to-do parent& The first son became a military officer or politician, and the second was nm off to a religious order. So controversial was the arrangement that it produced a catch phrase: "Le rouge et noir."
If one of the young cam happened to be of intellectual ben; which was often the case, the priesthood provided vans. ally the only access to libraries and avenues of higher learning. It was to be expected that the Hermetic principle of "as above, so below" and vice versa would apply to gifted and intelligent individuals. An inquiring, well-developed mind could often be dangerously skeptical and subsequently irreverent! Thus dun was always a supply of "depraved" priests ready and "ling to celebrate Satanic rites.
History has, in fact, produced entire sects and monastic orders that fell into humanistic tic and iconoclastic fever. Think about it: you personally may have known of a priest or minis. ter who waster quite what he should have been ... I Today, of course, in Christianity's death throes, anything goo in the clergy, and priests once tortured and executed for 'We here. sies" (Urban Grandier, for example) would seem like Boy Scouts by current standards of pastoral conduct. The seven. teenth century priests, who celebrated the Black Mars need not have been intrinsically evil: heretical, most certainly, perverse, definitely, but harmfully evil, probably not...
The Satanic Rituals. Copyright © by Anton La Vey. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
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