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A Rite Attested Mainly by Its Accusers

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A Rite Attested Mainly by Its Accusers

The difficulty with this rite is evidential. Almost everything written about it before the nineteenth century was written by people prosecuting others for it, and almost everything written since has been fiction or has descended from fiction.

Massimo Introvigne's history sets out the sequence. The medieval and early modern accounts come from inquisitorial proceedings and witch trials, where the descriptions were produced under interrogation against a prepared list of questions, in the same way and with the same reliability as the Templar confessions. What such proceedings generate is the interrogator's expectations returned in the defendant's voice.

The one episode with substantial independent documentation is the Affair of the Poisons at the court of Louis XIV in the 1670s and 1680s, where the investigation recorded allegations of sacrilegious masses celebrated by the priest Etienne Guibourg in connection with poisoning and abortion. Even there the testimony was obtained under torture and the political stakes were high, and historians differ on how much of it is reliable. Something appears to have happened; its exact character is not recoverable.

The rite as generally described today, the inverted cross, the reversed Latin, the desecrated host, the naked altar, comes substantially from Joris-Karl Huysmans's novel La-Bas of 1891, which supplied a detailed scene that later writers repeated as though it were documentary. Nineteenth-century French anticlerical and sensational literature, including the frauds perpetrated by Leo Taxil, who publicly confessed in 1897 that he had invented his accounts of Masonic satanism wholesale, contributed the rest.

The rite has been performed since, by people who read those descriptions and enacted them. That is a real practice, but it is a twentieth-century one derived from a literary source, not a survival.

The wider claim of an organised tradition of such worship was tested most thoroughly during the satanic ritual abuse panic of the 1980s and early 1990s. Investigations by the FBI in the United States and by government-commissioned research in the United Kingdom found no evidence of the organised networks alleged, and a number of criminal convictions obtained during the panic were subsequently overturned.

What can be said is that the rite is chiefly a construction of those who feared it, elaborated by novelists, and enacted afterwards by readers of both.

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