entirely safe and fun

“…only in a ruined or deserted church…”
Photo by Steve Roe, cc-by-nc-sa license

I suspect that many reader’s of James Frazer’s omnibus The Golden Bough were, like me, arrested by his description of a peculiar black mass tradition:

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 Sécaire. Very few priests know this mass, and three-fourths of those who do know it would not say it for love or money. None but wicked priests dare to perform the gruesome ceremony, and you may be quite sure that they will have a very heavy account to render for it at the last day. No curate or bishop, not even the archbishop of Auch, can pardon them; that right belongs to the pope of Rome alone. The Mass of Saint Sécaire may be 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. His 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. And many other things he does which no good Christian could look upon without being struck blind and deaf and dumb for the rest of his life. But the man for whom the mass is said withers away little by little, and nobody can say what is the matter with him; even the doctors can make nothing of it. They do not know that he is slowly dying of the Mass of Saint Sécaire.

And now, every time I think of an owl, it is one of Frazer’s, moping and hooting among the blackened, bare rafters of a burnt church. They just don’t do scholarly works like that any more.

But where, precisely, did he find out about this Mass? The widely available single-volume abridgement of The Golden Bough lacks a scholarly apparatus, and the multi-volume Bough is six feet of shelf and a hundred pounds. An interested scholar is forced to simply search the Net for mentions of the spurious Saint Sécaire, and until very recently, the search was not rewarding.

Then, just in the past few weeks, Google Books came to the rescue by digitizing C. J. S. Thompson’s Mysteries and Secrets of Magic (1973). Thompson referred directly to Quatorze Superstitions Populaires de la Gascogne (1883), by the Gascon ethnographer Jean-François Bladé, and that was the break I needed. The book was published as a scholarly edition of 50 copies 125 years ago, so calling it a “break” is a bit of a misnomer. The inter-library loan search was undoubtedly the most difficult I’ve ever undertaken. But in the end, I chased down a copy in the Cleveland Public Library — Special Collections, in fact, completing the Lovecraftian superfecta of a rare antique book, written in a language other than English, detailing a forbidden ritual, held in an inconveniently-located library.

And so it is, through the magic of scanning (thanks to Rhonda Green at CPL), that I was able to (finally) check the original source — Bladé had his account from “the late Cazaux,” one of his informants, apparently a man well-known to his family. One wonders whether the late Cazaux withered away, the doctors unable to diagnose or treat him… anyway, for your enjoyment, please find a scan of the (signed!) title pages, and of the relevant section of Quatorze Superstitions, in French. My translation of the section is also available, and I’ve been at work on the Wikipedia entry.