Why Harvard Students' 'Black Mass' Act-Out Is A Dumb Idea

The Inquisition's torture of heretics, alleged witches, and unbelievers led directly to 'Sabbats' conducted for Satanic 'favors'

By now, virtually everyone not living under a rock is aware of the plan by a student group at Harvard University to conduct a "black Mass."  Even a letter from the vaunted university's President hasn't appeared to halt their determination.  As might be expected, the Harvard Extension Cultural Studies Club, ignited a furor by announcing that they were planning an educational program of ceremonies from different belief systems around the world, and that one of these ceremonies, in partnership with the New York-based Satanic Temple, was going to be a Satanist black mass.

The only problem? "Satanism" is a myth, a hoax perpetrated on those ignorant of the history of the "Satan" meme, and "black Masses" constitute a manifestation of the myth.  A salon.com columnist came close to exposing this nonsense in a column two days ago by noting:

"Because this is an easy mistake to make, it should be emphasized that most Satanists don’t literally worship the devil. They’re atheists who treat the figure of Satan as an inspiring piece of mythology, a symbol of individual freedom and resistance to oppressive orthodoxy."


But "atheists" is the wrong term to use. The accurate term would be anti-theists, and most specifically anti-Catholics. As I've taken pains to note in earlier posts, atheism is the simple withholding of belief in any claimed deity or supernatural domain or entity. Anti-theism, meanwhile, is active hostility to any claimed belief.  To therefore assert "atheists" in any remote way would even exploit "Satan" as a piece of mythology to work up Xtians is bare balderdash.

Did I dabble in black Masses? Sure! As I noted in my post of May 14 on exorcisms. But none of the dozen or so who attended took these affairs as anything more than a lark, a riff on Anton LaVey's "Satanic Bible' and humbug. Yes, we used sliced Snicker bars as eucharistic wafers, and burned 'curses' in a metal pan as prescribed by LaVey. Hell, I even donned a black cloak and "Satan" goat mask, but no one regarded it seriously. (They pretended to, but only to acknowledge the whole exercise at root was theatrical, like a play- and they were 'extras') It was a bunch of college students doing something besides getting pissed drunk on a Friday night.

This brings up the next remark from the salon.com columnist:

"What drew the most outrage is that, in a true black mass—to the extent that such a thing exists, and isn’t just the invention of medieval heresy hunters—there’s a prop representing a Eucharist wafer that’s symbolically desecrated, perhaps stepped on. A rumor, subsequently denied by the Satanists, that they’d be using a real consecrated wafer drove Catholics to new heights of frenzy"


This is where it gets almost like 'Alice through the looking glass' in separating psycho-drama from reality. I refer to the writer's reference to being an "invention of medieval heresy hunters". Indeed, this is the closest he comes to the truth. "Satanism" was invented and promulgated by the Church's demon-witch hunters themselves to further their warrant and reach and condemn even more hapless innocents to their fires, racks, leg breaking blocks, anal  spike seats and other devices.

Even before this we know that the 250,000 -odd women burned as witches were mainly anti-social elderly females or younger, single ones deficient in appearance - who also often kept cats as companions. Because the women - or their habits, odd behaviors and appearance- antagonized those around them, they were accused of "witchery".  The next step was merely to identify a painless spot or the symbol '666' on their bodies, and they were headed for the fires. The witch hunter's bible, the Malleus Maleficarum provided the template to use needles to probe flesh and excavate the evidence needed.

Other victims were simply practitioners of ancient beliefs that predated Christianity - as embodied in assorted rites of paganism. The collective suffering from the Inquisition's tortures had to be endured for centuries before some relief and reaction emerged. As observed by Peter Stanford ('The Devil', p. 183):

"For the most part the ancient traditions and beliefs that survived the torturer's rack took many decades, even centuries, to reassert their presence"

This "reassertion" he goes on to write, took the form of Catholic religious ceremonies "parodied by 'Satanic' hellfire clubs in the early eighteenth century."  The 'Black Mass' thus evolved as part of this parody idiom via deliberate invention, i.e. as the inverse of the normal Catholic Mass.  Hence the Eucharistic wafer stomped on before ingestion, crosses turned upside down and other inverted props. In other words, the whole phenomenon arose from a psychological reaction to centuries of tortures and dispossession of property. There was no genuine, self- consistent belief system.

Author Lauran Paine ('The Hierarchy of Hell', p. 113) takes even greater pains to describe what transpired:

"Ecclesiastics filled entire libraries and spent whole lifetimes proving people worshipped Satan. They influenced ten generations of more or less rational human beings, in Christendom alone...to believe this monumental fallacy.....The great hoax of witchcraft, which was as uniquely Christian as it was being incapable catalogued as mythology, folklore or anthropology, but which lay in the exclusive province of theology, arose from the concept of Devil worship. In Christendom was found the epitome of this belief which despite its longevity, was fallacious from beginning to end.

Those gloomy devout who imagined the black rites of Devil worship throughout Europe created an entire black theology based on their knowledge of Christian dogma and ritual - and no one accused them of perpetuating the most unforgiveable of all heresies - yet in fact this is exactly what they did."

 Lauran Paine's point is clear:  that the whole Satanic worship shtick is bull crap - a monumental hoax perpetrated by the religionists themselves. Hence, to re-enact a "black Mass" is merely to play into the original ecclesiastic hoax and emulate their rituals - only inverted. It is not, as the Harvard students believe, to demonstrate or replicate a ritual from an independent belief system. In other words, the Harvard students are merely going to carry out a phony rite invented by the Church's own Satan-mongering lot.

This is not to dispute that as the Inquisition wound down, 'Sabbats' of a sort were conducted - as Stanford notes - but this was not out of faith but to elicit favors. For example, recovery of bodily health, or property seized by the Inquisitors. Bear in mind the travails that millions had to endure while the Inquisition reigned.

In his revealing book The Peril of Faith, Martin L. Bard estimates that counting all such executions, plus deaths directly following from extreme tortures, plus witch burnings (which killed over 100,000 in Germany alone) more than 3 million perished over all the years of the Inquisition - from its start in the 13th century, to when the Spanish Inquisition finally folded in the 19th century. By proportionate statistics, this represents a comparative number of innocents slain that is roughly a factor three greater than all the Jews incinerated in the Holocaust. (Taking into account the population statistics during the inquisitional centuries vs. the global population statistics from 1940 on). Uncounted are all those innocents who suffered cruel, barbaric tortures, and then were released - only to die subsequently from tetanus, gangrene or other severe bacterial infection. If then you were such a victim-  maimed at the hands of "holy Mother Church"- why wouldn't you seek surcease from your physical or mental plight via begging "favors" from the Church's enemy, "Satan"?

Numbered among the victims were many women, who were branded as aiding and abetting "familiars" or discoursing with heretics and demons. Note it was Urban's Bull ('Ad extirpanda' ) that officially sanctioned torture at the discretion of the Inquisitors, and left open the degree to which it could be carried out.

Let's return to the salon.com author who writes:

"The Harvard Satanist fracas shows the immense hypocrisy of the Catholic church and its spokesmen. In their battle against the contraception mandate, they’ve made religious liberty their watchword, arguing that a believer’s right to follow the tenets of his faith is sacrosanct and must never be infringed, even if it causes harm or inconvenience to others. But when it comes to a belief system that the church doesn’t like, they claim, two-faced, that those beliefs can and should be stifled and their practice barred."

The problem again, is that "Satanism" constitutes no independent, self-consistent belief system as I noted above. It is a fraud, invented by the Catholic hierarchy itself, as Lauran Paine points out. Hence, the exercised Boston Catholics are railing against the Harvard students for replicating the Catholics' own Satanic fallacy and fraud. The students, meanwhile, are being played by actually thinking they're demonstrating a genuine belief system, when they're enacting a parody of one  -engineered within the Catholic Church itself.

Sadly, the bottom line in all this is that supernaturalism remains too prevalent in our supposedly advancing world.  Even the allegedly progressive and kindly Pope Francis—is pushing a major resurgence of belief in a literal Satan and literal demonic possession. This is appalling especially coming from a guy who used to study a natural science (chemistry) - but my hope is he's just mouthing this BS to not appear to diverge too much from Catholic codswallop. (Remember he took lots of heat from the Vatican's Curia for saying "atheists can get to heaven") So he doesn't want to press his luck too much.

What we need to do is extirpate supernaturalism from the modern landscape, and this especially pertains to the misbegotten "Satanist" meme.

To assist in this objective, the Harvard students' best option is to leave its "black Mass" out of its educational program of  belief ceremonies .

Antonin Scalia: Innocuous 'Devil' Babble- Or Is The Man An Idiot?

Antonin Scalia: Now seeing the Devil everywhere and wondering why no one else does. Maybe it's time for him to pack it in.

Recall back in 2011 when Rick Santorum had the "Devil" on the brain?  Well now it's Antonin Scalia, who as a Supreme Court Justice ought to embody the pinnacle of rationalism but appears to have gone loopy with his recent pronouncements on the existence of the Devil. In his own words, from an October 6 remark:

"In the Gospels, the Devil is doing all sorts of things. He's making pigs run off cliffs, he's possessing people and what not. And that doesn't happen much anymore. He used to be all over the New Testament...What happened to him? He got wilier!"

Bill Maher's take on this idiocy on his REAL TIME show last night was exactly correct:

"I don't care why someone acts like a fool, only that when they do we keep them away from decision making. It would be one thing if Mr. Scalia sold pizza for a living. But this is a man we go to to interpret our laws. It's like smelling a gas leak and calling an exorcist.  Antonin Scalia helped put George Bush in the White House and he believes the Devil went down to Georgia. He gets to decide when life begins and he thinks evil is a person."

Maher went on to aptly point out the problem in believing in the Devil, is that you then see the world divided into two camps, one of 'good', the other of 'evil' and will then be inclined to see the "Evil One" on the side of 'them' (the others, who don't share your views). It then is merely one step more to see compromising with your  opponents as compromising with evil. Then, Voila! You have the Tea Party.

Let's return to Scalia. He refers to the "Devil" but which one is it? Historically in ancient scriptures,  numerous named prime entities have assumed that role, e.g. Gaap (left) and Focalor, in the graphic. They were part of the Satanic hierarchy drawn up in the Middle Ages.

Or possibly, Scalia means the "chief Devil" - but even he has a name, 'Lucifer'  - and a recent depiction is shown. Note that we can be reasonably certain this is THE Boss Devil because of the serious look on his visage- very much resembling how we'd expect Dick Cheney to appear in a fire and brimstone environment.


 One problem is that no one is quite sure if he truly controls all the demonic hordes (there is disagreement on whether he has influence on Chinese or Indian entities).  After all, the Chinese and Hindus have their own castes of Devil-Demons with their own chronology and names.

Scalia wonders what happened to this Devil, but as Maher pointed out, it could be he merely became redundant after primitive humans grew out of their intellectual infancy and science replaced superstition. So we now know, for example, that the bubonic plague isn't a result of the Devil,  e.g. casting a spell on followers, but because rats infected with fleas carrying the plague bacteria, pass them on to humans - who get the disease after being bitten. Yersinias pestis then multiplies in the blood stream  - no Devil needed.

Never mind, some minds remain in the primitive infant state and appear to need "the Devil" to explain occurrences in the real world. But, like Maher, I prefer these people remain outside those positions wherein their decisions could affect millions.

In any case, any grown man who subscribes in this century to the notion that entities such as those shown here are real, and "wily" - tricking us all to disbelieve them- must be a congenital idiot. Sorry, but that's the way it is. NO serious person of any intellectual heft or insight can possibly believe in actual demons, or a Devil. And further, any decision such an infantile twit delivers, must be called into question.

Still, we can (possibly) help Scalia to comprehend why the Devil is no longer  evident in the world or discussed, especially as a reality by serious people. First clue, it isn't because he's "wily". As Lauran Paine has noted (‘The Hierarchy of Hell’, Barnes & Noble, 1972, p. 140), the erosion of Church power almost exactly paralleled the demise of the long –enduring “orders and hierarchies” of Hell. In other words, as a supernatural agent or cause, the Devil isn't needed to account for events in the real world - including terrorist attacks, wars, or what have you. The "evil" exists instead within the brain, and is endemic in an evolving world.

The brain, the cosmos and world are still in a process of evolution, and that de facto incomplete process allows for what we call evil and hence human  misjudgments and mistakes. The brain itself is saddled with the leftovers of its reptilian- primitive hominid past and this division continues to govern its dynamics.  It was the philosopher N.M Wildiers who first observed:

Whatever is yet to be completed is of necessity imperfect, defective,  unfinished. Evil is thus structurally part and parcel of a world in evolution. An evolving world and a perfect world – these are mutually contradictory ideas.

In other words, evil is inevitable in an imperfect  and incomplete world governed by evolution.  If we know and have data to support we inhabit an evolving world, as well as universe then it is irrational to expect it not to display evil.  No personalization of evil or "Devil" is required.

Will this change Scalia's mind? Doubtful, because in his Manichean view of the world it's less useful to adopt an objective and rational explanation for evil than one which divides humans into "evil ones" and "good guys."