Black Mass

if a True Mass is being celebrated in the chancel, a Black Mass is being celebrated in the crypt. It becomes evident, accordingly, that the psychotherapist is the true successor to the exorcist

Fairbairn, cited by Kalsched, uses the Black Mass as a structural metaphor for the internalized bad-object system that underlies all psychopathological development, rendering the psychotherapist a successor to the exorcist.

Kalsched, Donald, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit, 1996thesis

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once each year in spring the people held a carnivalesque black mass… for one day in the year the people gave religious recognition to the lower powers. This was not done surreptitiously or shamefully

Von Franz argues that the medieval carnivalesque black mass functioned as a legitimate liturgical integration of shadow elements—the somatic, sexual, and obscene—that Christianity progressively refused.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 1997thesis

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Radical mysticisms, such as the celebrations of the Black Mass, Jewish Frankism, Christian Antinomianism and satanic cults, and Tantric practices ritually break taboos that keep the sacred in a moral precinct.

Hillman classifies the Black Mass among antinomian practices that systematically violate moral taboos in order to collapse the boundary between the profane and the sacred, elevating transgression to a suprahuman register.

Hillman, James, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis

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Black Mass, 132, 133 Black Sabbath, 132

Grof indexes the Black Mass in close proximity to the Black Sabbath within the perinatal matrices framework, associating it with the boundary-dissolving phenomenology of BPM III experiences.

Grof, Stanislav, Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research, 1975supporting

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Black Mass, 230 blood, 220f, 231; birth from (Hainuwele), 184

Jung and Kerényi’s index entry places the Black Mass alongside blood symbolism and the Eleusinian mysteries, situating it within the broader field of chthonic and underworld religious phenomena.

supporting

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Mass, the (religious rite), 115, 117 Black, 191 for the Dead, 298n; parody of, 260

Jung’s index entry in the Collected Works explicitly categorizes the Black Mass as a parody of the liturgical Mass, linking it to the Mass for the Dead and placing it within the typology of ritual inversion.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959supporting

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black/blackening, 126n, 169, 229f, 271, 390n… Mass, 150

Jung’s index in Psychology and Alchemy cross-references the Black Mass under the rubric of blackening and nigredo symbolism, implying a structural correspondence between ritual inversion and the dark inaugural stage of the alchemical opus.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Alchemy, 1944supporting

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the festum asinorum… the whole congregation brayed. An eleventh century codex states that ‘at the end of the mass, instead of the words Ite missa est, the priest shall bray three times’

Campbell’s description of the festum asinorum as carnivalesque liturgical inversion provides a cognate ritual context for understanding the Black Mass as a culturally endorsed parody rite.

Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959aside

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a promising indication of the gold that lay within the black mass of melancholy

Moore uses ‘black mass’ in a non-ritual, descriptive sense to designate the Saturnine density of melancholic depression, through which a transformative auric potential may nevertheless be discerned.

Moore, Thomas, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1990aside

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