Satan Worship and the Black Mass Spiritual Meaning

A commonly found thread of black magic ironically is located in Christianity.

More accurately it can be found in the antithesis of Christianity, known as Satan Worship.

There are two forms of Satan worship which should not be confused with one another. There are those who follow a roman tradition which encompasses the worship of the Deity known as Satanus, God of Saturn.

But the kind of Satan Worship that we are going to discuss in this article was developed particularly as a counter movement against the Roman Catholic Church in ancient times. Hollywood movies have recreated a lot of the mystery and intrigue around this particular belief system, but the religion itself came into being as a result of very real events that took place in History.

Within the Bible, the concept of God’s adversary, of pure evil is physically represented in the goat headed god, and fallen Angel known as Satan. The story of Satan goes that he was God’s favorite until he fell out of favor when trying to tell God what to do with Man.

When the Roman Catholic Church began to take over the various religions in its area, the concept of Satan became more represented within what the Priests would call Sin, that which is not a part of God. The church was so restrictive of its followers that people were afraid to make any kind of move outside of what the church commanded of them.

As a result of this schism of confinement a new belief system was born, that of the opposite of the Catholic Church. The complete and utter worship of the evil that is Satan, known as Satan worship.

What makes the worshippers of Satan so frightening to some is that they do not follow the same moral code that the church originally instilled? If the church came out with a law, this law would be twisted and turned in many blasphemous ways so as to show the general and over all disgust which the Satan worshippers had for the Catholic Church.

Practitioners in the black mass were said to supposedly participate in sexual orgies, as well as baby and animal sacrifices within the practice of worshipping the Devil. Many participants believed that they would call Satan to their rituals and ask for him to embody them physically.

The movie, ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ is an excellent illustration of the kind of people supposed to follow this tradition. Within Catholicism, one of the primary methods of worship is conducted in a ritual known as Mass. Within the mass,Catholics worship and pray to God through this ritual and what sets them apart from other religions is their believe in the transubstantiation of the bread and the wine into the body and the blood of Jesus Christ himself.

They believe that taking in the body and blood of Christ brings them closer to God, which blesses their life with sacredness. The Catholic Church’s most valuable and sacred sacrament is the Eucharist, or host. Within certain sects of Satan Worship, something known as a Black Mass is also conducted. This black mass is supposedly a ceremony that is celebrated in a sort of sacrilegious parody of the Catholic mass. Instead of encouraging a sacred connection to God, the practitioner’s main goal is to be profane, blasphemous and disrespectful.

Though many authors disagree about the different methods that existed (and exist to this day) within the black mass, one thing that is agreed upon is that the main point of a black mass is to profane the practices within the catholic church by recreating and then mocking them.

Some writers of the medieval era believed that instead of having the sacred host, the practitioners of the black mass would use a turnip or a toad, or even a piece of dry flesh which was blessed by priests that had gone bad and taken on pacts with the devil.

A particular mass parody put on by Black Mass participants is known as the Feast of Asses, where the primary leader would pretend to speak out of his backside and the Feast of Fools which included all manners of debaucherous behavior including orgies, drunkenness and in modern day, severe drug use. Some Masses were entirely focused on drinking or on gambling and often times the worship of the God of Wine, Bacchus was prevalent.

Participants of the Black Mass have been known to recite the ‘Our Father,’ a prayer commonly used in Christian Faiths, backwards as well as make the shape of the upside down cross in a mock form of blessing themselves to blaspheme the particular way that the Catholics ‘Bless’ themselves when they enter or exit the Church. Unlike the Catholic Mass, the Black Mass did not have a completely fixed or ceremonial script.

The end of the Mass would change depending on the individuals present along with the work they were trying to do and there was sometimes an Offertory for a secret prayer when the priests would pray for different personal needs.

The actual format of the ritual was not well known until it was reborn in the 1960’s when it appeared in the United States with the creation of the Church Of Satan as a result of Anton LaVey’s The Satanic Rituals.

There is some debate on which came first in medieval times, the Black Mass itself, or the construction of a black mass put on by the church to recruit new followers. Either way, the development and the practice of the Black Mass originally as a reaction to the overly repressed confines of the church grew larger and larger and continues to this day.