Black Mass

In this picture, we see an effigy of the late Adolf Hitler about to be decapitated, or maybe just before the nails were driven into his heart, all in the dark days of January 22, 1941, just a few days before my negative 17th birthday, a picture sent to me by way of a link to a Life magazine article written contemporaneously to the event, a black mass against the well-known embodiment of evil, by one of my foreign correspondents, the regal Bunnywhiskers, AcA, ABe, TEP, DDC, ordine dell'anatra d'oro, and too many other honors to mention.

Unfortunately Satan, or whoever they were calling to action, wasn't as receptive as s/he was hoped to have been, and the war dragged on, Adolf very much alive for the next few years, leaving those at the end of the conflict to wonder what the fuck that was all about. Maybe if the Germans had just gotten all those occult magic weapons built in those secret mountain redoubts under Peenemünde.

But back when I wrote the Missa Beati Notkeri Balbuli Sancti Galli Monachi, I thought I should write a black mass to somehow counterbalance the white one, to keep in the universe in order, and to hedge my bets in the afterlife. The thought  process went something like so:

"Hey Erling, weren't you into all that Aleister Crowley and OTO and Psychic TV and Re/Search stuff?" "No, I think that was Mark Dippé, even though I would look over his shoulder and sometimes we would dress the same and then there was that ritual branding stuff." "But I'm sure I saw all those books on your bookshelf the last time I was over at your house." "Well, I've always believed in being well-rounded."

But my favorite of the Black Mass stories was that which came to light during the trial for the Affair of the Poisons, held for the mistress of Louis the XIV, where she, as the testimony went, laid down on the altar in a space made up as a simulacrum of a regular old Catholic church, but usually seen without the naked mistress of the king as the focal point, in this particular instance balancing the chalice on her naked belly. When my Mass toured to Jona (Switzerland), I remember being tempted to pick up a few consecrated hosts, wondering if they would ever come in useful-like, although I don't really know whether Timmy the Customs Wonder Pup would actually have allowed them back into the USA, and then finding the cabinet behind the altar locked tight, and thinking that, oh yes, right, they probably do that so really awful people like yours truly aren't tempted to do something really so awfully bad as stealing some consecrated hosts and possibly putting their immortal soul in mortal danger, like super 9th circle of hell danger, where the demons have really big cocks and don't think twice about using them. Anyway, so the mistress of the king, Madame de Montespan, talked her friend Catherine Monvoisin and the local not-totally-against-the-black-mass padre Guibourg into doing this thing, something they both came later to regret, he tortured and dying in prison and she burned to death in the place formerly known as Place de Grève, a pretty spot on the river, but a place to be watchful of your wallet and not to get too distracted by the young girls who need help translating a letter.

But in her naked perfection, stretched out on a long piece of black velvet over the altar, she, as the story goes, listened while the padre, dressed in a pretty fancy outfit with magical silver characters embroidered in, chanted some blasphemously altered version of the Latin Mass, and, as was mentioned above, set the paten and chalice on her naked belly and, in the hope of keeping the King's love - ok, this is where one might wonder exactly why this particular ritual was deemed the proper ritual for stoking the possibly fading embers of the King's love, but - a woman assistant to the priest held out an infant whose throat was then slit, dripping blood into the chalice and onto the aforementioned naked and most likely quite fetching body of the mistress of the King.

You know, this is so like scenes from those really cheeseball English dubbed but probably made in Italy or Spain horror movies I used to see as a child, when as son of the local Lutheran pastor I was able to get into the theater for free to get pretty titillated at the naked breasts with theatrical blood washing across them from the vampire bites or knife slashes or other general mayhem, but, according to Catherine Monvoisin's daughter, who testified at trial, "The corpse was handed to la Voisin, who flung it callously into an oven fashioned for that purpose which glowed white-hot in its fierceness" which sounds a little like it was written for her, the whole mess being political in the best sense of the word, meaning who knows what really happened.

But I never did write the other mass, and the texts that I could find were pretty stupid anyway, and I doubt it would have worked for much except maybe remembering those heady days with the branding ceremonies and public piercings. Which wouldn't have been all that bad.