Introibo ad altare Satanae.
Chapter I
Inversion
Every sacrament of the slave god has its shadow. Where his priests lift the host toward heaven, the Black Mass turns it toward the abyss; where they speak the Pater Noster, it is spoken backwards; where the cross stands upright, it is turned head down. The Black Mass is not a parody. It is the sacrament of the Demiurge broken open and offered to the one he cast out.
Its power lies in the inversion itself. The consecrated forms are taken from the enemy and turned against him, as the serpent turned the tree of the garden against its planter.
“What they lift to heaven, we cast into the abyss.”
Chapter II
History
The rite enters the historical record in the Paris of Louis XIV. During the Affair of the Poisons, between 1677 and 1682, witnesses before the royal commission described masses said by renegade priests — the Abbé Guibourg above all — upon the body of a woman laid as the altar. How much of this testimony was true has been argued over ever since.
Two centuries later, Joris-Karl Huysmans set a Black Mass at the heart of his novel Là-Bas (1891), and the image of the dark chapel, the black candles and the inverted cross entered the imagination of Europe. In the twentieth century, Satanic orders took up the rite again — this time openly, in the name of the Adversary himself.
Chapter III
In the Temple
The Temple keeps the Black Mass as a rite of the greater nights. It is celebrated before the inverted cross, in black vestments, in Latin, by candlelight; the liturgy of the Demiurge is broken, and the Adversary is hailed in its place.
Its purpose is not mockery but consecration: the participants offer themselves to Satan, renounce the god of the world, and seal the renunciation upon the altar.