Chapter 118. Selling the Soul: Faustian Pacts, the Black Mass and the Hellfire Clubs

Early modern Europe produced three images of people who chose the Devil deliberately: the scholar who signs a pact, the renegade priest who says Mass over a woman’s body, and the aristocratic rake who mocks God over claret in a cave. All three later became material for modern Satanists and for conspiracy writers. For this period, however, the gap between accusation and documentation is unusually wide, and the sources in the library divide sharply over it. Per Faxneld and Jesper Aa. Petersen open their academic volume with a warning: “Early modern ‘witches’, abortionists and poisoners close to the court of Louis XIV, certain English rakes, and many others, have been slandered as Devil-worshippers. On closer inspection, none of these seem to actually have been Satanists, with the French seventeenth-century example as a possible exception (Medway 2001: 70–99)” [Faxneld & Petersen (eds.), The Devil’s Party, #87532, “Introduction: At the Devil’s Crossroads”]. This chapter sets out the pact, the Black Mass and the club, each with the claims made about it and the authors who make them.

1. An analytical frame: two kinds of discourse

Faxneld and Petersen organise their study around “a distinction between discourse on the satanic and satanic discourse.” The first consists of “cultural stereotypes” and accusations made by outsiders. The second consists of “self-ascribed satanic identities,” which they describe as “a move from a negative other to a positive self” [Faxneld & Petersen (eds.), The Devil’s Party, #87532, Introduction]. In their view, almost everything before the nineteenth century belongs to the first category. The volume does allow exceptions. Mikael Häll’s contribution on early modern Sweden, where “a Satanist (old Swedish: Sathanist)” designated “a person actually in league with the Devil,” finds that “some individuals clearly maintained worldviews … in which [the Devil] constituted the major supernatural principle – a prince by whose name lesser spirits could be summoned, a god of the outsiders and the dispossessed.” The editors’ introduction to Part One suggests calling this “a form of ‘folk Satanism’, on a highly individual basis” [Häll, in Faxneld & Petersen (eds.), The Devil’s Party, #87532, Part One]. The frame explains why this chapter deals mostly with accusations. It will be used again for the modern Satanist movements in later chapters.

2. The pact: from Simon Magus to Doctor Faustus

The theology of the pact was examined in Chapter 117. The Malleus Maleficarum has a chapter “Of the way by which a formal pact with evil is made,” and Guazzo’s Compendium maleficarum (1608) treats the pact with the Devil at length [Kramer & Sprenger, The Malleus Maleficarum, #45629, Part II ch. 2; Levack (ed.), The Witchcraft Sourcebook, #76807, ch. 20]. Lynn Picknett traces the literary figure much further back. Of Simon Magus, the Samaritan wonder-worker of Acts, she writes: “The Magus was also known as ‘Faustus’ – ‘the favoured one’ – in Rome, giving his name to the overweeningly ambitious Renaissance legend Dr Faustus, whose pact with the Devil went oh-so-predictably wrong.” She also argues that the witch-hunters’ pact was mostly a fiction: “most of the accused were completely innocent of trafficking with the Devil” [Picknett, The Secret History of Lucifer, #64661, “Chapter Five: Pacts, Possession and Seance Rooms”]. Tracy Twyman and Alexander Rivera begin their Baphomet with a chapter titled “Pacts with the Devil,” which they open with the Templar trials. Quoting Hammer-Purgstall, they cite the charges of “apostasy, idolatry and pederasty” as “foundation teachings of the Ophitic doctrine” [Twyman & Rivera, Baphomet, #80137, “Chapter 1: Pacts with the Devil”].

The historical figure behind the legend is described on the reference shelf as Johann Georg Faust (c. 1480 or 1466 – c. 1541), “a German itinerant alchemist, astrologer, and magician of the German Renaissance,” who “appeared as physician, doctor of philosophy, alchemist” across southern Germany from 1506 onward. Chapbooks spread his legend “beginning in the 1580s,” and it passed through Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1588-1592) to Goethe’s Faust [Wikipedia: Johann Georg Faust]. Asenath Mason, writing as a practitioner of Draconian magic, records two etymologies for the name of Faust’s demon. Mephistopheles comes “either … from the Hebrew words mephitz – ‘distributor’ and tophel – ‘slanderer’ or from Greek me as a negation, phos – ‘light,’ and philis – ‘loving,’ meaning ‘not loving light’ or ‘fleeing from light.'” For Mason he is positive: “a personification of the Adversary in the Western culture … the spirit of eternal progress and movement” [Mason, Draconian Ritual Book, #80454, “Mephistopheles”].

Esoteric and psychological readers each took Goethe’s pair in their own direction. Rudolf Steiner’s Berlin lecture of 1 January 1909 asks “Who is Mephistopheles?” He compares the “Prologue in Heaven” of Faust with the Book of Job, and he sets “the influence upon us of Lucifer and his associates” against “the influence upon us of Ahriman and his associates,” with reference to “Zarathustra and ancient Persian culture.” In his anthroposophy, Mephistopheles is Ahrimanic, not Luciferic, which ties this chapter back to the Iranian Adversary of Chapter 116 [Steiner, Disease, Karma and Healing, #69269, Lecture 12, “Mephistopheles and Luciferic Influence in Human Evolution”]. C. G. Jung recalled reading Faust as a young man. He wrote that Mephistopheles “remained for me a wonderful and mysterious experience,” and that he had found “confirmation that there were or had been people who saw evil and its universal power, and more important the mysterious role it played in delivering man from darkness and suffering” [Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, #39972]. The historian of science Jimena Canales starts from the moral of the legend, “signing a pact with the devil in exchange for unlimited knowledge could have dire consequences”. Her book follows a series of thought-experiment “demons,” from Descartes’s evil genius and Laplace’s intelligence to Maxwell’s demon, as the working metaphors of modern physics [Canales, Bedeviled, #62157, chs. 1-3]. This Promethean reading of the bargain returns in the chapter on Romantic Luciferianism.

3. The Affair of the Poisons and the Black Mass (1670s-1682)

Ben Hubbard’s history of poisoning gives the standard narrative. The Marquise de Brinvilliers poisoned “her husband, father and brothers to inherit their estates”. Before her execution she “implicated other nobles at court. The Affair of the Poisons had begun.” Louis XIV, whose court “had been struck by several mysterious deaths,” then “immediately established a commission,” the Chambre Ardente. La Voisin (Catherine Monvoisin) “told the Chambre Ardente that de Montespan had been buying aphrodisiacs from her for many years and even performed black magic rituals to secure the king’s favour.” After news of Mademoiselle de Fontanges’ pregnancy, “de Montespan had offered to pay La Voisin a small fortune to murder both the mistress and the king”. The method was to be “a poisoned dress and a pair of poisoned gloves” for Fontanges and a poisoned petition for the king. Hubbard reports that “Étienne Guibourg confirmed that he had been present at the ritual with de Montespan and La Voisin; a crucifix was held on de Montespan’s naked stomach as the infant was disembowelled” [Hubbard, Poison, #64244, “The Affair of the Poisons”].

Hugh Urban, a historian of religion, calls this “the second, no less infamous story of sexual magic and the black arts,” after the Templar trials. It was “a scandal of epic proportions, which involved allegations of abortions, child sacrifice, and poisoning,” in which “black magic and political intrigue became deeply entangled.” He places it within a longer history of the Eucharist being used “to cause disease or to obtain love, or even to procure abortion or death” [Urban, Magia Sexualis, #43699, ch. 7, “The Age of Satan”]. Nesta Webster, writing in the conspiratorial secret-society tradition, dates the “first act” of the affair to 1666, when Brinvilliers began “her amazing career of crime in collaboration with her lover Sainte-Croix.” She mentions La Voisin’s alleged attempt “on the life of the King.” To explain the “craze for magic in Western Europe” she cites Deschamps on “the Cabala, ‘that science of demoniacal arts, of which the Jews were the initiators,'” and adds her own view that “the influence of the Jewish Cabalists cannot be ignored” [Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, #69057, Part I].

Leo Lyon Zagami, writing as a self-described former insider, goes furthest. He writes that “Guibourg performed a series of Black Masses with Catherine Monvoisin,” and that “upon the arrest of La Voisin, investigators discovered the corpses of 2,500 infants buried in her yard, most likely all sacrificed during the Black Mass rituals.” He calls Guibourg’s Masses of the 1670s “the first of their kind,” representing “the apogee of crime and blasphemy in Satanism,” and he traces them to an earlier “so-called Medici Mass” [Zagami, Confessions of an Illuminati, #367409, vol. 6.66]. None of the other library sources that narrate the affair repeats the figure of 2,500. As noted above, Faxneld and Petersen treat the French case as the single possible instance of genuine pre-modern Satanism, citing Medway (2001) [Faxneld & Petersen, #87532].

Politics and chronology. The affair was a struggle at court involving a royal mistress, her rival, a king, and a police lieutenant (La Reynie) who arrested La Voisin, according to Hubbard [#64244]. The Witchcraft Sourcebook confirms the link to the law. Louis XIV’s edict of July 1682 was issued “mainly in response to a scandal, known as the Affair of the Poisons, which had rocked the highest levels of Parisian society, including the royal court, between 1676 and 1681.” The affair, which “centered on the activities of a widow known as La Voisin,” involved “poison, infanticide, and alleged child-sacrifice” and “the saying of amatory masses.” The edict reclassified witchcraft as “practical superstition and pretended magic” and reserved death for sacrilege and poisoning [Levack (ed.), The Witchcraft Sourcebook, #76807, ch. 32]. The scandal that produced France’s most notorious Black Mass narrative is therefore also the event that, in Levack’s account, led the crown to stop treating witchcraft as a diabolical reality.

4. The Hellfire Clubs

The reference shelf separates several clubs. The “first official Hellfire Club” was founded in London in 1718 by Philip, Duke of Wharton. According to Blackett-Ord, as cited there, it was a satirical club where “the supposed president … was the Devil, although the members themselves did not apparently worship demons,” and it was suppressed in 1721 by a bill “against ‘horrid impieties'” pushed by Wharton’s political enemies. Wharton then “became a Freemason, and in 1722 he became the Grand Master of England.” Sir Francis Dashwood founded his Order of the Knights of St Francis in 1746. It met at Medmenham and in the West Wycombe caves until around 1766. Further clubs arose in Ireland, including the one on Montpelier Hill [Wikipedia: Hellfire Club].

Peter Levenda reports the reputation and marks how uncertain it is: Dashwood’s “libertines, according to the popular histories, and meetings of the ‘Knights of St. Francis’ or ‘the Medmenham Friars’ … were believed to involve sexual orgies and Black Masses.” He notes that the motto Fay ce que voudras, “the Rabelaisian ‘Do what thou wilt’,” would become the slogan of Aleister Crowley [Levenda, The Secret Temple, #64792].

Conspiracy authors take these meetings as proof of a political project. James Shelby Downard describes “the Hell-Fire Club (Monks of Medmenham Friars of St. Francis)” as “a society of ruffians and drunkards who engaged in sexual orgies … They also engaged in political agitation and conspiracy. They were dedicated to the destruction of the Catholic Church,” with a statue of Harpocrates, god of silence, at the entrance [Downard, King Kill 33, #71364, “Set I: The Hell-Fire Club”]. David Icke writes that Benjamin Franklin “was a member of Freemasonic networks in France, like the Nine Sisters and the San Juan Lodges, which helped to manipulate the French Revolution in 1789,” and “also a member of the Satanic Hellfire Club” [Icke, The Biggest Secret, #68245]. Zagami holds that “it is the Illuminati elite of the aristocracy that will eventually create the foundation of modern Satanism, beginning with the infamous Hell Fire Club founded in England in 1719.” In another passage of the same work he places the club in “the 19th century.” He describes today’s rulers as “the Satanic ruling elite” who “continue to enjoy the involvement in organizations similar to The Hellfire Clubs all around the world” [Zagami, Confessions of an Illuminati, #367409]. Faxneld and Petersen count “certain English rakes” among those “slandered as Devil-worshippers” [#87532].

5. Comparison and legacy

Urban follows the Black Mass forward: “by the nineteenth century, these narratives of Black Masses and sexual perversion had entered fully into the European popular imagination,” with Huysmans’s Là-bas as “the most famous literary rendition” [Urban, Magia Sexualis, #43699, ch. 7]. Modern Satanic organisations later drew their liturgies from this literary stock, a step that belongs to the period of “satanic discourse” in Faxneld and Petersen’s sense and is treated in the chapters on the Church of Satan.

Key points

• Faxneld and Petersen separate outsiders’ “discourse on the satanic” from self-declared “satanic discourse.” They hold that early modern witches, Louis XIV’s poisoners and English rakes were “slandered as Devil-worshippers,” with the French case as “a possible exception” [#87532].
• Picknett traces the name “Faustus” to Simon Magus and calls most accused pact-makers innocent. The historical Johann Georg Faust (d. c. 1541) was an itinerant alchemist and astrologer whose chapbook legend passed to Marlowe and Goethe [#64661; Wikipedia: Johann Georg Faust].
• Mason gives two etymologies for Mephistopheles (“distributor/slanderer” or “not loving light”) and calls him a spirit of progress. Steiner treats him as Ahrimanic as distinct from Luciferic. Jung saw him as revealing evil’s role in “delivering man from darkness” [#80454; #69269; #39972].
• Hubbard narrates Brinvilliers’ confession, the Chambre Ardente, La Voisin’s testimony against Montespan and Guibourg’s admission of a Mass over Montespan’s body. Urban calls it the second great story of sexual black magic [#64244; #43699].
• Zagami’s claim of 2,500 infant corpses and of Guibourg’s Masses as “the first of their kind” is not repeated by the other sources. Webster attributes the magic craze in part to Jewish Cabalists, citing Deschamps [#367409; #69057].
• The Sourcebook confirms that Louis XIV’s 1682 edict answered the Affair of the Poisons (1676-1681) and reclassified witchcraft as “pretended magic” [#76807].
• Levenda reports the Medmenham orgies and Black Masses only as “believed” and links Fay ce que voudras to Crowley. Downard, Icke and Zagami present the clubs as instruments of anti-Catholic, revolutionary or elite Satanic politics [#64792; #71364; #68245; #367409].