Ready for some real old-fashioned deviltry?
‘Tis Hallowe’en, as it used to be written. The Eve of the Feast of All Hallows. This is the beginning of the dark time, where shorter days and colder nights after the harvest have traditionally meant the onset of the hard season of winter. As such, many ancient peoples marked it with a special celebration of the end of the life cycle. In Celtic lands, this meant welcoming their ancestors’ shades from the lands of the dead.
Sources of Satanism
By the Middle Ages, the Christian Church co-opted these feasts as they did most things “pagan”. So the Catholics came up with the Feast of All Saints to honor the pantheon of miracle workers that they used to replace the lesser gods of antiquity. Other feasts were added, including All Souls for those eventually to join the happy fellowship of the saved but were suffering in the afterlife.
In so doing, however, the priests vilified the old gods. The randy half-goat god Pan (who many in late antiquity believed had died) became the model for the very Devil himself. But the great urban gods had become seen as ineffective for their failure to save Rome from decline. They could safely be ridiculed as idols; deaf, dumb, and blind powerless lumps of wood, stone, or metal. All the noble traits of the Olympian gods were then safely attributed to God and members of his family and the imposing statues discarded.
However, living alternative powers were not to be tolerated by the faithful. If the old minor gods still seemed to work their charms for their rustic devotees, their effectiveness could only mean to monotheists that they were demons. “Daemons” were like the djinn, originally both friendly and malicious beings somewhere between gods and humans. But Christian theologians seriously demoted them, casting them straight into hell.
The countless evil entities that the churchmen believed stalked their world belonged to a strict military hierarchy. There were not just that third of all the angels that fell with Lucifer; those were the rulers and officers of the devils. Most of the rank-and-file demons, some thought, were nothing less than the damned spirits of the giants that the fallen angels had spawned on the daughters of men. In the haunted medieval world, demonology became a intricate and dangerous “science” that only approved exorcists and would be sorcerers dared study.
In the struggle to overcome folk religion during the Dark Ages, the Catholic Church somehow turned lingering pagan remnants into witchcraft, and satanic witchcraft at that (in their own minds, at least). Since belief in witches and their powers was common in most cultures, it was not invented by Catholicism. However, the Church certainly Christianized it, turning it into a dark reflection of itself.
Over the centuries an grim theological dark tower was built that turned traditional European folk magical practices into satanic spellcraft. Like magic, folk magic was transformed into sorcery. The theoretical centerpiece of all this, pacts with the Devil, was actually a blessing to the Church. It provided a clear rationale and impetus for the insanity to come.
Once it was believed by those in power that magical effects could be achieved by making a bargain with Satan, whether or not the practitioner understood it that way or not, then the die was cast. The entire community was suddenly in danger, bodies and souls alike.
To Europeans in the crisis of the Reformation, this demanded drastic and immediate action. South of the Alps, once the Church condemned witchery, the state had to take action or lose the legitimacy Rome afforded them. In the north, Protestants were no less keen to purify themselves of Satan’s minions, either. Hence, what the witches and pagans of today refer to as “the Burning Times“, several hundred years of deadly persecution.
It took a long time for this twisted theory to develop and bear its incendiary fruit. The poisonous flower finally blossomed not in the Dark Ages, but at the height of the Renaissance. In 1486, in Germany, the Malleus Maleficarum — the aptly-named “Hammer of the Witches” — was published. Ironically, it was the hot new means of international communication, the internet of its day, the cheap, mass-produced printed book, that allowed this insidious craziness to spread like wildfire across Europe.
However, the Catholic Church has an even deeper and darker responsibility for Satanism. It not only provided the theoretical basis for Devil-worship, but likely a good many of its leaders and active participants. Unpopular spinsters, widows, and crones may have taken the worst rap, though most probably never even imagined that what they were doing was supposedly in any way inspired by the Christian Devil. But fallen clergy were the sorcerers actually casting most spells for anything other than healing, and they knew what they were doing.
The Enemy Within
There were those who did truly worship Satan, however, and still do. How many of them may be in responsible positions in Church and State is impossible to know, and to even speculate invites uncomfortable snickers. But “where there is smoke, there is fire,” as the old adage says. And as Pope Paul VI once declared aloud during an audience, “Through some crack, the smoke of Satan has entered into the Church of God.”
The pope should certainly have known. Confirmation of this comes from a journalistic peek through the crack between the basilica’s doors. The following is excerpted from a book called Pontiff, a colorful insider’s view of the Vatican by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts published in 1983 by Doubleday. It covers the last days of Paul VI through the assassination attempt on John Paul II. This particular scene deals with the Pope’s daily paperwork in July, 1978.
Much of the work near the bottom of the tray requires no more than careful reading and initialing. The Apostolic Penitentiary handles complex problems of conscience… It also advises the penalties a pope may impose for such a dire crime as a priest saying a black mass. Every year there are a number of such cases; they frighten Paul more than anything else. He regards them as proof the devil is alive and well and hiding inside the Church. Cardinal Giuseppe Paupini [the Major Penitentiary]… is the Vatican’s resident expert on sorcery of all kinds. His work is adjudged so important and urgent that he will be the only cardinal allowed during the next Conclave to remain in contact with his office. (Emphasis added.)
This has some very interesting and horrible implications. At the very least it should be rather disconcerting, if unsurprising, that the Pope, as part of his day-to-day job, is far more aware of the extent of true evil hiding inside the Roman Catholic Church than even the most cynical outsiders can even imagine, and takes it very seriously.
John Paul II retained such arrangements for the conclave after him, and they are likely simply a part of the way things are done in the Vatican. It was surely no co-incidence that Paul’s point man on clerical black magic was the chief pardoner of the Church. And that he retained his office through the sede vacante.
But why? For it is not necessary that he should have outside contact just for dispensing forgiveness on an emergency basis. Any priest — even one defrocked — can hear and absolve deathbed confessions, and anything else under the Apostolic Penitentiary, like dispensations and indulgences, can wait or be handled by Curial bureaucrats.
No, the Major Penitentiary needs such consideration only if the papacy fears the exposure of satanic clergy. It must fear it so much that constant vigilance and total secrecy are necessary. One may further infer from the language used in the anecdote that this is not a new situation at all, and that such “dire crimes” seem to have grown throughout Paul’s pontificate, at least. As the situation within the priesthood has only worsened since then, one can only wonder what horrors with which Pope Francis must contend.
One could read too much into all this. But if the clergy sexual abuse crisis revealed anything about the Roman Catholic Church, it is that the hierarchy can and has gone to great lengths to hide its dirty laundry. It has millennia of experience, and it is very likely covering up even more monstrous secrets than anything revealed so far.
The Devil’s Playground
During the Middle Ages, the Inquisition pushed many unacceptable clerical behaviors underground. Black magic in particular was an activity peculiarly suited to fallen priests partly because it mirrored the “white” magic of sacred liturgy. But nobody else in the Dark Ages had the same freedom and opportunities for trafficking with devils as did clerics, particularly friars. For in the medieval world, only the clerical class had what it took to work serious sorcery — education, free time, professional interest, and most of the tools needed already provided by their day jobs, conveniently enough.
Then as now, there were many men in the clergy who lacked good reasons to be there. Some were ambitious, others had no inheritance. Many who chose religious life were maladjusted, fleeing their past, while many clerical criminals who were caught were sentenced for life to “monasteries of strict observance” to pay for their sins with unending penance. Lots of them did not have the slightest gift or intention to be celibate, or straight, and in any case, not all priests actually believed what they preached.
So over the centuries in the darkness of the cloisters, heresy, sex, and lingering pagan practices subversively combined into Satanism.
In fact, fallen priests were believed to be the only ones who could perform a Black Mass, the satanic mockery of the Catholic rite. For even defrocked, priests retained their sacred power of transubstantiation given at ordination. Changing the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ thus allowed them to defile God himself.
Popular media shows this. People know who supposedly has the real magic, and who does not. Fallen priests have long been stock characters. So just as only Catholic priests are called on for exorcisms in the movies, horror fiction is full of blackpriests, (and often wicked cardinals at that) dealing with the Devil, while evil Protestant ministers are nowhere to be found.
Down There
Indeed, in the very first modern novel about Satanism, Là Bas (“Down There” or “The Damned” in English), there are several very telling remarks. It is a semi-autobiography written in 1891 by Joris-Karl Huysmans about satanic cults in late Nineteenth Century Paris. In one section a character explains:
“Meanwhile think over the phrase which you applied a moment ago to the magicians: ‘If they had entered the Church they would not have consented to be anything but cardinals and popes,’ and then just think what kind of a clergy we have nowadays. The explanation of Satanism is there, in great part, anyway, for without sacrilegious priests there is no mature Satanism.”
Later, the conversation continues:
“But tell me, what class of people are these modern covenanters with the Devil?”
“Prelates, abbesses, mission superiors, confessors of communities; and in Rome, the centre of present-day magic, they’re the very highest dignitaries,” answered Des Hermies. “As for the laymen, they are recruited from the wealthy class. That explains why these scandals are hushed up if the police chance to discover them.”
So what does all this have to do with ritual abuse? Simply this, the worship of the Devil is based on defilement. The more sacred or innocent the object of pollution is, the more power is generated. Thus, sodomizing children, especially in a ritualistic manner, is a satanic sacrament. There are dark depths to the Catholic clergy sex abuse scandals that have yet to be revealed.
For clerical Satanism was not confined to the Middle Ages, nor to modern Paris. I myself am a survivor of ritualistic clergy abuse, and I have met other survivors from around the country. Much of what I detailed in my novel, The Harrowing, was actually based or suggested by my experiences. I know of “black rooms“, often old forgotten closets or storerooms in churches, rectories, schools and even seminaries where rites and abuse have happened. Unfortunately, the old English saying, “where God builds a church, the Devil builds a chapel” can be all too literally true.
I even once told a wise, elderly Independent Catholic bishop once that I was sure that were satanists in the Roman Catholic Church.
He just nodded sagely, and asked rhetorically, “Where else would they hide?”