What is the actual "history" of the "Black Mass"?
The topic arises now and then but frequently seems to involve considerable invention:
... For instance, several writers rely heavily on the confessions of Anne-Marie Georgel and Catherine Delort, made in Toulouse in 1335, in which they claimed to have attended Sabbats at which they “ate the bodies of newborn children”. Unfortunately for these case-citers, neither of these women ever existed, as was established by Professor Norman Cohn a quarter of a century ago. The two self-confessed baby-eating Witches were actually invented by Etienne Lamothe-Langon for his 1829 History of the Inquisition of France. Lamothe-Langon was apparantly a man in a hurry –- over a period of 50 years he wrote some 400 books, which was probably a record until the invention of the typewriter –- and did not have time for the huge amount of research that a serious history would have required ...
Satan in Suburbia
By Gareth J Medway
November 2001
Medway's Lure of the Sinister (NYU Press: 2001, pp 380-384) finds no real historical indications that anyone ever discussed such a topic until the 1594 trial of Jeanne Bosdeau in Bordeaux, which included some account of a parody mass; and finds no credible record of such a parody mass actually performed until 1918 in Hempstead, by Montague Summers (who seems later to have become the first English translator of Malleus Maleficarum)
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You're killin me, smalls.
