The Black Mass Explained

Jules Michelet in his Satanism and Witchcraft traces the blasphemies of the Black Mass to the revolt of the peasantry against the strictures of the church and the perverse sexuality of the ritual's orgies to the dreadful social conditions under which the peasants lived.

Encouraged by the church to increase and multiply, the peasants could not feed the mouths they had.

Forbidden by the church to marry close relatives, they were forbidden by their feudal lords to marry strangers lest they become the serf of the wife's lord.

Only the eldest son inherited his father's few holdings, his power in the family, and the right to marry. Brothers and sisters mated with each other out of wedlock and the mother committed incest with the eldest son, who now exercised all his dead father's rights.

In unholy unions which Michelet finds reminiscent of 'the Jews and the Greeks' of old, the Black Mass's excess found their start. The blasphemous rituals offered a psychological and physical release for the peasants, an outlet for anger and resentment, a time of festivity and feasting and sexual abandon.

While the chatelaines of great castles indulged themselves in the vilest excesses (which their privileged positions permitted) with slaves and cicisbios and lovesick knights and even on occasion their noble husbands, the poor in their dreary lives had the escape valve of the Sabbat, of the Black Mass.