Practical Blasphemy

From Serbia to Saint-Secaire

“French peasants used to be, perhaps are still, persuaded that the priests could celebrate, with certain special rites, a ‘Mass of the Holy Spirit’, of which the efficacy was so miraculous that it never met with any opposition from the divine will; God was forced to grant whatever was asked o Him in this form, however rash and importunate might be the petition…Gascon peasants believe that to revenge themselves on their enemies bad men will sometimes induce a priest to say a mass called the Mass of Saint-Secaire…None but wicked priests dare to perform the gruesome ceremony…The Mass of Saint-Secaire maybe the said only in a ruined or deserted church, where owls mope and hoot, where bats flit in the gloaming, where gypsies lodge of nights, and where toads squat under the desecrated altar. Thither the bad priest comes by night with his light o’love, and at the first stroke of eleven he begins to mumble the mass backwards, and ends just as the clocks are knelling the midnight hour. The leman acts as clerk. The host he blesses is black and has three points; he consecrates no wine, but instead he drinks the water of a well into which the body of an unbaptized infant has been flung. He makes the sign of the cross, but it is on the ground and with his left foot.” - J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough

Blasphemy of the blatantly religious sort once served as the greatest means of breaking down humanity’s moral and cultural barriers, but only because its sensational novelty appealed to the repressed psyche of the Victorian aristocrat. Towards the end of the 19^th century, the novels of J.-K. Huysmans and the satanic verses of Baudelaire gave way to a more comprehensive aesthetic; pagan, rather than anti-Christian; natural, rather than immoral; sensual, and erotic, rather than perverse.