The New York-based Satanic Temple will be staging a black mass on Harvard University’s main campus next Monday—and the thought of calling demons into being has the Church all riled up.
Perhaps that’s the point.
The black mass is an inversion of the traditional Catholic Mass that medieval people associated with witches. The witches were accused of stealing a consecrated piece of Communion bread for the mass and worshipping the devil.
However, there’s little evidence that the specter of black masses was anything more than myth that was used by people in power to justify witch hunts and trials.
Satanic Temple spokesperson Lucien Greaves says his group contacted the Harvard Extension Cultural Studies Club to organize a re-enactment of a black mass based on the imaginings of French writer Joris-Karl Huysman in the novel “La-bas.” Huysman wrote the novel during the French Occult Revival of the 1800s.
