Our Mass of Blasphemy is one of the central rituals of the Church of the Morningstar. Though it has become a real and magically effective rite, its roots are in literature. The variant you will see tonight borrows from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Charles Baudelaire’s Litanies of Satan, and Aleister Crowley’s Hymn to Lucifer. But it owes more to one source than to any other: namely, a decadent novel called La-Bas, written by Joris-Karl Huysmans.

La-Bas is a work of fiction, but its author didn’t quite realize that. It was published in France in 1891, the same decade and country which would also see the Taxil Hoax, a satanic panic about the supposed Luciferianism of the Freemasons. The novel tells the story of Durtal, a disillusioned writer (and obvious author self-insert) who descends into the underworld of Parisian Satanism after becoming attracted to a female devil-worshipper. The book’s climax comes when Durtal attends and witnesses a blasphemous “black mass” which ends in an orgy.^[1] The curse against Christ that I use in our mass comes from this scene.

La-Bas was the product of author Joris-Karl Huysmans falling in with one Joseph-Antoine Boullan, a defrocked Catholic priest turned occult charlatan.^[2] Boullan claimed to be engaged in spiritual warfare with Satanists,^[3] and fed Huysmans a lot of wild stories about black masses taking place in Paris.^[4] La-Bas was written based on these “true” stories that Boullan told to Huysmans.^[5]

If the author believed these stories, so did much of the public. Following La-Bas, there seems to have been an explosion of interest in content about “real Satanism” and a thirst to believe in its authenticity. (For instance, another piece of Satanic-themed fiction, Aut Diabolus Aut Nihil by Julian Osgood Field, was published in Blackwood magazine in 1888 and generally presumed to be a factual account.^[6]) Leo Taxil saw an opportunity to jump on the Satanic trend. He had started publishing “exposes” of the links between Satanism and Freemasonry in 1885, but with limited traction. That all changed after La-Bas.  Leo Taxil was a yellow journalist and a known prankster and scam artist,^[7] but Huysmans was already a respected literary figure. His publishing La-Bas lent legitimacy to the fringe conspiracy theories that Taxil had already been spreading for years.

Leo Taxil publicly admitted to his hoax in 1897, but people continued to believe La-Bas was real. Though A.E. Waite had debunked the Taxil in his book “Devil Worship in France,” he thought La-Bas was a factual account, writing:

“A distinguished man of letters, M. Huysman, who has passed out of Zolaism in the direction of transcendental religion, is, in a certain sense, the discoverer of modern Satanism. Under the thinnest disguise of fiction, he gives in his romance of La Bas, an incredible and untranslatable picture of sorcery, sacrilege, black magic, and nameless abominations, secretly practised in Paris.”^[8]

Aleister Crowley made La-Bas required reading for his students, calling it “An account of the extravagances caused by the Sin-complex.”^[9] And in his 1933 essay “Black Magic Is Not A Myth,” Aleister Crowley asserts that the Black Mass really is celebrated “in Paris, and even in London.”^[10] While he claimed that he could not celebrate the Black Mass even had he wanted to, parts of his Gnostic mass are obviously inspired by accounts of Black Masses, notably the presence of a nude woman on the altar^[11] and the inclusion of bodily fluids in the host.^[12]

Anton LaVey used segments from La-Bas in his version of the Black Mass,^[13] but claimed that his Black Mass was not constructed by him, rather found in the wild– “The Black Mass which follows is the version performed by the Societie des Luciferiens in late nineteenth and early twentieth century France.”^[14]

Thus he continued the tradition of behaving as if content from La-Bas came from real Satanists (and also believing, or pretending to believe, that the Taxil Hoax was real). Ironically, even as he did so, he incorporated words from La-Bas into actual Satanic ritual for probably the first time.

The story of La-Bas is not of a novel that exposed Satanism. It is the story of a novel that, after a hundred years, became incorporated into real Satanism. Fact did not become fiction here, rather, fiction became fact. This is not at all unusual in the history of Satanism. After all, the idea of Satanism is centuries older than its practice. Our religion consists of reclaiming and remixing the slurs and libels that were made against us before we even existed.

This is why literature has such an important role in Satanism– it allows us to vividly imagine a history for ourselves, even if it never happened. It gives us traditions which, even if fictional, can be drawn upon. And yet because that history, and those traditions, are fictional rather than real, we can feel liberated to use or discard them however we please.

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^[1] Joris Karl Huysmans, La-Bas, trans. Keene Wallace (New York, NY: Dover, 1972), 240-249.

^[2] Ruben van Luijk, Children of Lucifer: The Origins of Modern Religious Satanism (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016), 177.

^[3] Van Luijk, 176.

^[4] Van Luijk, 189.

^[5] Van Lujk, 208.

^[6] Van Luijk, 243.

^[7] Van Luijk, 217.

^[8] Arthur Edward Waite, Devil Worship in France , Project Gutenberg (London: George Redway, 1896), accessed April 15, 2025, https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/21258, 9.

^[9] Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice (New York: Dover, 1976), 213.

^[10] Aleister Crowley, “Black Magic Is Not a Myth,” London Sunday Dispatch, July 2, 1933, accessed April 15, 2025, https://lib.oto-usa.org/crowley/essays/black-magic.html.

^[11] Magick in Theory and Practice, 350.

^[12]Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law (San Francisco, CA: Weiser Books, 1976), 41. Also, Magick in Theory and Practice, 180.

^[13] Anton Szander LaVey, The Satanic Rituals (New York, NY: Avon Books, 1972), 46-51.

^[14] LaVey, 34.