Episode 229: Satanic Nude Altars-Why Is This a Thing?

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• From The Discoverie of Witchcraft, Reginald Scot, 1584: You shall read how in the nighttime, an incubus came to a ladies bed side, and made hot love unto her, whereat she being offended, cried out so loud that company came and found him under her bed in the likeness of the Holy Bishop Sylvanus, by which this holy man was much defamed until at the length this infamy was purged by the confession of a devil at Saint Jerome’s tomb. Also it is written in the Legend of Saint Barnard that a pretty wench that had had the use of an incubus by the space of six or seven years would needs go to Barnard, who took her his staff and bade her lay it in the bed beside her. And indeed the devil, fearing the staff, dared not approach her chamber that night. A bawdy priest in Gelderland persuaded a sick woman that she was bewitched, and except he might perform a mass upon her body she could not be helped. Whereunto she consented and lay naked on the altar while he sang masse, to the satisfying of his lust. Other cures I will speak of in other places more civil. Miraculous cures, both full of bawderie and lies, must either have place here or none at all.
• From the Affair of the Poisons, Anne Sommerset, 2004: Marie sorrowfully related how Madame de Montespan’s fury had mounted as, despite la Voisin’s best efforts, the king’s love had receded. She decided to adopt more extreme measures. A priest had carried out black masses on the stomachs of naked women at la Voisin’s house, and de Montespan had been one of those who permitted her body to be thus defiled. Marie went into detail about what took place, recalling how each lady had lain stretched out on a mattress, supported by two chairs placed fairly close together. The priest would then place the cross and the chalice on the naked woman’s stomach. Marie had been too young to watch but had been permitted to help with the preparations by arranging a mattress on the chairs and lighting candles. Once Marie was a bit older, her mother had allowed her to be present when Black Masses were celebrated. It was Marie’s recollection that Madame de Montespan had first had a black mass celebrated on her about three years earlier. Once the ceremony was over, la Voisin said that it was necessary to repeat the procedure. At this the lady had protested, whereupon la Voisin had offered to spare her the inconvenience by acting as her proxy for the two remaining masses. Marie’s testimony was unclear whether or not she had been present when her mother had had mass celebrated on her. The police Lieutenant believed there could be no question that at various times the priest, the priest Guibourg had conducted black masses on naked women: “These scoundrels have given so many details about them that it is very difficult to doubt it,” he remarked. La Voisin had frequently prevailed on priests to say mass in her lodgings, and on one such occasion the ceremony had been performed on the stomach of a girl, and while saying the mass he kissed her private parts. Guiborg confessed that he had first used the stomach of an unknown woman as an altar when he had celebrated a black mass at a chateau near Montiery at the request of a former official in the royal stables. Four years ago he had enacted a similar mass in Saint-Denis in an attempt to summon up the devil. He did not know the identity of the woman whose body had served as an altar, but he understood she was a prostitute enticed off the streets. 
• From Children of Lucifer, Ruben Van Luijk, 2016: Other practices that are reported in the records of the interrogation rooms also comply with what we know from other sources. Mention is made several times of magic “figures,” books of conjurations, and pieces of paper with demands or entreaties to demons that are to be put under the chalice or under the host during consecration. This concurs with similar practices from both learned and folk magic. It is possible that the remarkable custom of celebrating Mass over the naked belly of a woman is derived from similar ideas. In reciting Mass over the body of the woman, the magical operation by which the demons increased her sex appeal was further enhanced, in the same way that the power of the medicinal herbs and amulets put underneath the altar or the chalice was increased during consecration. The records invariably state that the Masses were said over the “ventre” of the women, a word that may simply mean “abdomen” but was also used as a polite term for the womb or the female genitalia. The Mass that would have to be held for such a ceremony would evidently be clandestine: it was hardly feasible to put a naked woman on the altar during services. Another hypothesis might be that the nude woman was meant as an offering. As the witches at the Sabbath sealed their pact with Satan by giving themselves sexually to him, so the nude lady, her legs dangling to the side, might be understood to offer herself to the demon. As was the case with witches, she could expect certain favors in return. If it is suggested that high-ranking ladies “made recite themselves … a Mass of this kind,” this does not necessarily mean that they functioned as naked altars themselves. Rather, some of the earlier testimonies suggest that another woman would be used in a rite performed on their behalf. It is tempting, in addition, to interpret the “carnal knowledge” the priest is sometimes said to have had of this female altar as a kind of diabolical sexual union by proxy. Of course, this may be reading too much into what may simply have been a sexual fantasy.
• From The Satanic Mass, HTF Rhodes, 1955: In a corner of the grounds, concealed again by trees, there was a pavilion where the walls were hung with black. At one end was an altar having in general the appearance of that of a Christian church. Behind it was a black curtain with a white cross embroidered upon it. Black candles stood upon its altar. A black drapery, in place of the orthodox white linen, covered the top of the altar. This concealed a mattress. Margueritte testified to a ceremony which took place in January, 1678: At about ten o’clock in the evening a woman arrived in the house, a person of rank, and she was masked. In response to a knock of a special character, she was immediately admitted. It was a requirement of the ritual that the woman who was the client of the Mass should lie upon the altar naked, her body being at right angles to its length with the knees at its edge. Candlesticks with black candles were sometimes held in each hand. When at the altar the celebrant stood between the woman’s knees. He was assisted by at least one clerk, and normally the clerks were women. The celebrant wore vestments of the orthodox shape, but they appear to have been made of white linen. The chasuble and possibly the alb were embroidered with black pine cones. Pine cones as a decoration clearly connect the ceremony with the traditions of the fertility rites and are associated with the Dionysiac cults. Approaching the altar, the celebrant placed the chalice upon the woman’s body, kissed her body, and began the office. Blood was mixed with the contents of the chalice and the offering made: “Astaroth, Asmodeus, I beg you to accept the sacrifice we now offer to you, so that we may receive the things that we ask.” A human sacrifice was not an invariable rule, and was perhaps exceptional. Alternatively, the Host and chalice were consecrated with the customary elevation. The consecrated elements were then subjected to manipulations of a very gross and obscene character. 
• From The Hellfire Club, Marjie Bloy, Victorian Web, 2002: West Wycombe was where the Dashwood family owned its landed estate. Sir Francis Dashwood founded the Order of the Knights of St. Francis of Wycombe, better known as the Hellfire Club. Below the mausoleum is the entrance to the West Wycombe caves, carved to look like the entrance to a Gothic church. The caves crossed a stream of water known as the River Styx. There, he and his wealthy friends held the infamous club meetings and lived up to the club motto: “Do whatever you will.” The Hellfire Club initially was based at Medmenham Abbey, which Sir Francis bought and converted into an erotic garden. The members of the club took part in mock religious ceremonies and used masks and costumes to allow them to indulge in varying degrees of debauchery. Medmenham gained some notoriety, so the Hellfire club moved to a more secluded site at West Wycombe caves. Members included Sir Francis, the Earl of Sandwich, Thomas Potter, the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Wilkes, William Hogarth, the Earl of Bute, the Marquis of Granby, the Prince of Wales, and possibly Benjamin Franklin and Horace Walpole. It was alleged that the ‘monks’ took prostitutes down the Thames from London in barges to act as masked ‘nuns’. The members of the Club also were accused of celebrating the Black Mass over the naked bodies of aristocratic ladies, one of whom was Lady Mary Montagu Wortley, the mother-in-law of the Earl of Bute. https://victorianweb.org/history/pms/hellfire.html 
• From The Hellfire Clubs, Geoffrey Ashe, 2000: These English and Scottish clubs remain obscure, but a few stories probably refer to the George & Vulture club. One concerned an unnamed lord who tied a man to the spit of his kitchen and proceeded to roast him. Another mentioned a Black Mass, complete with a naked girl as altar, stretched out on a table in a bar, presumably after closing time. Anyone with Sir Francis’ sexual energies and odd humour might have progressed from a comic pose of Venus worship to a ritual of female divinity, hower spurious and debased. Dashwood could have drawn on ideas about goddess worship in The Golden Ass, a classic Roman tale of witchcraft and mystical religion, improper enough in places to suit Medmenham. A print published in 1763 does show Dashwood with a female image on the altar extremely naked, a book of ‘evening prayers’ open nearby, and Hymns By Ovid on the floor.
• From Satanism: A Social History, Massimo Introvigne, 2016: At the peak of the ceremony, Carlotta sinned with the Devil, who this time was played by Father Costantini. The priest traced cabalistic symbols and read orations from a book that had at the beginning “the figure of the Devil,” in the middle five white pages, and in the third of these there was the picture of “a naked woman who was embracing a naked man, and there was the figure of a naked man and woman in acts that were dishonest.” Costantini extracted a black box, from which he took a new wafer, around which he lighted two candles. He then consecrated the wafer. He asked for water, which he blessed with “nineteen or twenty-one signs of the cross” and large grains of salt, which he mixed with the wafer’s fragments. He then asked Agata to strip naked and to put herself on top of the bed “upside down (…) holding the shoulders towards the wall, the legs raised towards the wall and spread, and Father Costantini was supporting my knees with one hand. With the other, he took the glass from the hands of Carlotta, and, making nine times the sign of the cross and reciting some words, emptied three times the glass of the water onto the nature (that is, the vagina) of the girl, informing her she had been baptized in the name of the Devil. “He then took a fragment of the wafer and put it in my nature, pronouncing the same words that the ministers of God say when they commune in churches.”
  • His archives described a mystical experience of Vintras, who in 1855, from his exile in London where he was trying to escape French justice, managed to disturb a Black Mass held in Paris in a house whose walls confined with a cemetery. Vintras saw in this house three people in a state of trance: a young girl around twenty, an old priest, and a mature man. Three tables, like those used by Spiritualists, surrounded another table, placed on a higher step, which acted as an altar, on which a cross without Christ and a statue of Venus were placed. At the foot of the cross, to its right, there was a piece of bread with a goblet filled with blood, perhaps human, and to the left a snake in a glass vase. Two vases contained human fat, extracted from corpses. Fourteen Satanists were engaged in what seemed to be a séance, and the tables started moving. In the other room, one of the Satanists implored: “Omnipotent intelligence who are about to dress with our fluids, manifest yourself”. Vintras was miraculously following the ritual from faraway London. He reported that a spirit appeared and declared: “I am Ammon-Ra. You have to give me the virginal flesh of the woman.”  The girl entered the second room and lied down on the altar, onto which the old priest ascended, then dropped his robes and stripped naked. The Satanists, as Vintras’ notes reported, appeared “certain of their triumph,” but the priest “seemed petrified” and stopped. The head of the Satanists understood that something was wrong and said, “There is an invisible foreign presence here”. It was of course Vintras who, from London, watched everything. Three Satanists tried to jump onto the altar, but an invisible force threw them to the ground. The same occult storm made the altar tremble, the cross, the statue and the bread fall down. Around the head of the chief Satanist a “magnetic prison” formed, from which he could 
• From Juliette, Marquis de Sade, 1801: “Listen to me,” I replied, “it is not to play the vestal I have come here, and since I let myself be enticed into the most mysterious recesses of your palace you must surely be aware I have no intention of resisting you. But instead of getting a congenial partner, an ardent woman, someone of flesh and bone, with an intuition into your tastes, a fondness for them, you’ll have nought but a stone statue unless you grant me four things, and they are these: To begin with I demand, as a first mark of trust, that you give me the keys to your most secret chambers; I wish to visit every nook, every cranny, to see all of what each contains. The second thing I would have from you is a dissertation upon murder: I myself have murdered rather a lot, and have my views upon the question. My third condition is that you convince me of your profound contempt for all the rigamarole and ritual cant of Christian worship. To do so you have simply to proceed thus: After having had your chaplains celebrate High Mass upon the ass of a homosexual, and having with your holy prick rammed the bread of god into my anus, you will then fuck me on Saint Peter’s altar. I warn you that I shall not be fucked by you in any other way. Such follies are nothing new to me, but the idea of seeing them committed by you rouses me. The fourth clause is, that inside several days you give me a lavish supper and that at this supper there sparkle more lewdness and glitter, more libertinage than was ever displayed by any pope of old. The occasion must be gayer a thousand times, and for infamy a thousand times richer.”
• From Satanism & Witchcraft, Jules Michelet, 1862: In its earliest phase the Black Mass seemed to betoken this redemption of Eve, so long accursed of Christianity. The woman fills every office in the Sabbath: She is priestess, altar, pledge of holy communion, by turns. Nay, at bottom, is she not herself as God? The priestess is always called, by way of honour, the Elder; but she would sometimes have been young. When the service begins she invokes, “I will come before thine altar; but save me, O lord, from the faithless and violent man, from the priest and the baron.” Then came the denial of Jesus, the paying of homage to the new master, the feudal kiss, without shame, or dignity, or even purpose, the denial of an olden god being grossly aggravated by a seeming preference for Satan. Thenceforth she is a living altar. Last of all they set upon her two offerings, seemingly of flesh; two images, one of the latest dead, the other of the newest-born in the district. These shared in the special virtue assigned to her who acted as altar and Host in one, and on these the assembly made a show of receiving the communion. Their Host would thus be threefold, and always human. Under a shadowy likeness of the Devil, the people worshipped none other than the people. This important fact of the woman being her own altar is known to us by the trial of La Voisin. 
• From La-Bas, JK Huysmans, 1891: A certain priest made a specialty of these abominations. On a table serving as tabernacle a woman lay down, naked or with her skirts lifted up over her head, and with her arms outstretched. She held the altar lights during the whole office. As a matter of fact these masses were very frequent under the Grand Monarch. He officiated, consecrated the host, cut it into little pieces and mixed it with blood and ashes. That was the material of the Sacrament. A woman who was indisposed gave some of her blood; the man who accompanied her stood patiently beside the bed where the scene took place, and the fallen priest gathered up some of his semen into the chalice, then added powdered blood and some flour, and after sacrilegious ceremonies the woman departed. In the Middle Ages the mass was celebrated in a different fashion: The altar then was the naked buttocks of a woman; in the seventeenth century it was the abdomen, and now? I believe that it takes place before an altar as in church. Indeed it was sometimes celebrated thus at the end of the fifteenth century. It is true that the Devil then officiated in person. Clothed in rent and soiled episcopal habits, he gave communion with round pieces of shoe leather for hosts, saying, ‘This is my body.’ And he gave these disgusting wafers to the faithful to eat after they had kissed his left hand and his breech. I hope that you will not be obliged to render such base homage to your canon.
• From Against the Grain, JK Huysmans, 1884: In reality the vice to which the Marquis de Sade has given his name was as old as the church itself. It had been rampant in the 18th century, reintroducing the impious practices of the witches’ sabbath. By simply consulting the Malleus Maleficorum he was able to recognize in the ancient sabbats all of the obscene practices and blasphemies of Sadism. Over and above the unclean orgies dear to the Evil One, nights consecrated to unnatural coition, nights befouled by the bloody bestialities of ruttish animals, he found repeated the same parodies of church processions, the same standing insults and defiances against god, the same ceremonies of devotion to the Rival, when was celebrated, with curses in lieu of blessings, on the bread and wine, the Black Mass on the back of a woman crouching on all fours, whose rump, naked and polluted again snd again, served for altar table, with a black host on the face of which a figure of a he-goat was impressed.
• From Satanism, Joseph Laycock, 2024: Black masses were also said to involve orgies, the sacrifice of babies, asperging the congregation with urine instead of holy water, nude women serving as altars, and other practices deemed evil, blasphemous, or salacious. Gossip sent the curious into seedy neighborhoods in search of Satanists performing black masses, and certain enterprising people were willing to give them what they wanted. From the late nineteenth century until as recently as the 1950s, tourists visiting redlight districts could pay to see what was purported to be a genuine black mass. Some were even listed in tourist guidebooks. These seem to have been little more than a form of lascivious entertainment. Gerald Gardner, the father of modern Wicca, reported that in February 1952, he was invited to see a proper black mass in Rome led by fallen priests and nuns. Unfortunately, he did not have the twenty lire on hand to pay for admission. Gardner opined, “I think it was probably a show put on for tourists, though I was assured by responsible people that it was not.” In 1963, Princess Irene of Greece told a British magazine that she had witnessed a black mass in a Paris cellar where a black cockerel was sacrificed. A silent French stag film from 1928 titled Black Mass: The Initiation of a Neophyte Into the Cult of Satan depicts a man dressed as the devil engaged in a sadomasochistic orgy with a congregation of Satanists. It is significant that French audiences in 1928 needed no exposition – the fantasy of the black mass was sufficiently embedded into the popular consciousness for everyone to understand the premise. 
  • Messe Noire, 1928: https://archive.org/details/messe-noire_1928 
• From The Satanic Bible, Anton LaVey, 1969: The popular concept of the black mass is thus: a defrocked priest stands before an altar consisting of a nude woman, her legs spread-eagled and vagina thrust open, each of her outstretched fists grasping a black candle and a chalice containing the urine of a prostitute (or blood) reposing on her belly. An inverted cross hangs above the altar, and triangular hosts of ergot-laden bread or black-stained turnip are methodically blessed as the priest dutifully slips them in the altar-lady’s labia. Then, we are told, an invocation to Satan and various demons is followed by an array of prayers and psalms chanted backwards or interspersed with obscenities. Man’s earliest altars were living flesh and blood, and man’s natural instincts and predilections were the foundation on which his religions were based. Later religions, in making man’s natural inclinations sinful, perverted his living altars into slabs of stone. Satanism is a religion of the flesh, rather than of the spirit; therefore, an altar of flesh is used in Satanic ceremonies. The purpose of an altar is to serve as a focal point towards which all attention is focused during a ceremony. A nude woman is used as the altar in Satanic rituals because woman is the natural passive receptor, and represents the earth mother. In some rituals nudity for the woman serving as altar may be impractical, so she may be clothed or partially covered. If a female is performing the ritual alone, no woman need be used for the altar. If no female is used for the altar, the elevated plane used for her to lie upon may be used to hold other devices for the ritual. Black robes are worn by the male participants. The robes may be cowled or hooded, and if desired may cover the face. The purpose in covering the face is to allow the participant freedom to express emotion in the face, without concern. It also lessens distraction on the part of one participant towards another. Female participants wear garments which are sexually suggestive; or all black clothing for older women. Sexually appealing clothing is worn by women for the purpose of stimulating the emotions of the male participants, and thereby intensifying the outpouring of adrenal or bioelectrical energy which will insure a more powerful working.
• From I Attended A Satanic Ceremony For THE WITCH (There Was Nudity), Devin Faraci, Birth.Death.Movies, 2016: A group of naked people lounged on the altar of the church. They were surrounded by candles whose lights flickered through the artificial fog created by machines that chug-chug-chugged loudly along the back walls of the once holy space. Menacing organ music filled the remaining air. A ritual was about to begin. The Satanic Temple had taken over a deconsecrated church in East Hollywood as part of their tour supporting The Witch, a film to which they had given their devilish seal of approval. Coming of age in the 80s meant that I was living right in the middle of the Satanic Panic, hearing news stories about devil worshippers who were going on killing sprees or fucking babies in daycare. Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan was interesting to me: I was a student of the 60s counterculture, and while the hippie dippie stuff appealed to me it didn’t feel like a natural fit. LaVey’s rebellion seemed cool and sexy, and I mean that pretty literally; as a fat little nerd, the sexual revolution looked to be alive and happening in the Church of Satan. I maintained many desperate plans for eventually getting laid, and ‘join the Church of Satan’ was on the list. As I grew older I recognized that the Church of Satan was really just Libertarianism For People Who Like To Imagine Themselves Taking Part In Orgies. My interest faded. 
  • After a screening of The Witch (attended largely by what seemed to be fashion and art world folks who seemed kind of perplexed by the movie) everyone jaunted down a few blocks to the ceremony. Once you got inside a very stern trans woman wearing only pantyhose and high heels drew an X on your forehead with a blood-like substance. I could see that the altar was adorned with a half dozen naked bodies. They were all men, except for one woman placed carefully in the center. I was impressed: For one thing, it was so hot in that room that I envied their lack of clothing. But I also envied their body positivity; none of them were particularly extraordinary physical specimens, but they were letting it all hang out. The idea of exposing myself in that way – and being on display! – was unimaginable. Jex Blackmore, who leads the Detroit temple, started the invocation, and the naked people chanted at her: “Non serviam!” A guy came out from behind the altar in a traditional priest outfit and began washing the feet of east side hipster girls. Naked guys walked through the diminishing crowd handing out black and white American flags. I am strongly considering hanging one in my office. https://birthmoviesdeath.com/2016/02/17/i-attended-a-satanic-ceremony-for-the-witch.html 
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