Black Mass

A Black Mass is a ceremony supposedly celebrated during the Witches' Sabbath, which was a sacrilegious parody of the Catholic Mass. Its main objective was the profanation of the host, although there is no agreement among authors on how hosts were obtained or profaned; the most common idea is that they were profaned by means of some ritual related to sexual practices. Authors also disagree on which rites were performed during the ceremony. Some medieval writers believed that the host was replaced by a toad, a turnip or a piece of dry flesh, but most judges and authors believed that true hosts were given by Christian priests, who had made diabolical pacts, to the attendants of the Sabbath to be profaned by them.

It is not clear if the Black Mass was ever celebrated in medieval times; the works referring to them are lurid and unreliable sources such as the Malleus Maleficarum, and it may have served solely as a shocking act with which to accuse enemies.

Read more about Black Mass:  Origins and History of The Black Mass, The Modern Black Mass

Famous quotes containing the words black mass, black and/or mass:

    To avoid the consequences of posterity the mulattos give the blacks a first class letting alone. There is a frantic stampede white-ward to escape from Jamaica’s black mass.
    Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)

    When a bachelor of philosophy from the Antilles refuses to apply for certification as a teacher on the grounds of his color I say that philosophy has never saved anyone. When someone else strives and strains to prove to me that black men are as intelligent as white men I say that intelligence has never saved anyone: and that is true, for, if philosophy and intelligence are invoked to proclaim the equality of men, they have also been employed to justify the extermination of men.
    Frantz Fanon (1925–1961)

    Too much traffic with a quotation book begets a conviction of ignorance in a sensitive reader. Not only is there a mass of quotable stuff he never quotes, but an even vaster realm of which he has never heard.
    Robertson Davies (b. 1913)