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Blake, William 29
(because God requires that we love one another).
There are, however, limits to what ends the Mass
can be put. For instance, Grillandus goes on to
relate how a priest had devised prayers designed to
cause four nuns to fall in love with him. He then
paid other priests to include them in the Mass.
This was considered a minor offence—criminal
but not heretical—and the offending priest was
banished from Rome temporarily.
It is only a short step from this tradition of the
priestly deployment of the Mass for selfish ends to
the fully developed notion of the Black Mass.
Despite the emergence of a substantial literature
on Satanism and the dark rite, however, the fully
developed Black Mass seems to have had almost
no existence outside of the literary productions of
ecclesiastical writers. The basis of most early
accounts were the confessions extracted under
torture by officials of the Inquisition. The one
well-documented case of devil-worshipers practicing
a form of the Black Mass was a group of
courtiers around Louis XIV who used black magic
in the attempt to remain in favor with the king.
The government was almost brought down when
the practice was discovered.
See also Sabbat
For Further Reading:
Cavendish, Richard. The Black Arts. New York:
Capricorn Books, 1967.
Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. The Encyclopedia of Witches
and Witchcraft. New York: Facts on File, 1989.
LaVey, Anton Szandor. The Satanic Bible. New York:
Avon, 1969.
Black Roses
A heavy metal band whose lead singer is Satan
corrupts a small town in middle America in this
1988 film. The rock band creates a musical passage
into the underworld through which the teens fall
after listening to the lyrics. They then turn into
evil monsters and start killing family members. A
naïve English teacher saves teens from their fate.
Blake, William
The work of the English mystical poet and artist
William Blake (1757–1827) is full of visions of
angels, including fallen angels (“demons”). Blake,
who is known to many for such poems as “Tiger,
tiger, burning bright,” was born in London. He
attended Henry Pars’s drawing school in the
Strand, and at the age of fifteen he was apprenticed
to the engraver James Basire. After ending his
apprenticeship in 1779, he went to the school of
the Royal Academy, where he first exhibited a
picture in 1780.
In 1783 his friends paid for the printing of
Poetical Sketches, and in 1784 Blake married
Catherine Boucher, who was destined to be very
important for his work. In 1789, Blake issued
Songs of Innocence, the first considerable work to
be executed by his novel method of “illuminated
printing,” combining text and decorations on a
simple etched plate.
By 1795, Blake lived through the American and
French revolutions, which left a deep impression
on his mind. His Songs of Experience are permeated
by undertones of indignation and pity for the
human state. He was also deeply influenced by
study of the philosophers as well as of mystical
writers such as Paracelsus, Jakob Boehme, and
Emanuel Swedenborg. Among Blake’s illuminated
books are The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a work
mixing satires on Swedenborg with metaphysical
and religious discussions; The Book of Thel, a delicate
allegory of the descent of the soul from eternity
into mortal life; Visions of the Daughters of
Albion, in which free love is defended; The First
Book of Urizen, containing an account of the
creation of the material world and of humankind
burdened with the problem of evil; Europe; The
Book of Los; The Book of Ahania; The Song of Los.
His two later and longer poems are Milton and
Jerusalem. In Milton the whole problem of an evil
world is correlated with his own psychological
struggles. It is in this poem that Blake asks whether
Jerusalem could have been built amid England’s
“dark, Satanic mills.” In his final epic Jerusalem, on
the other hand, Man awakes from error and is
finally redeemed by union with God. His last
major poem, The Everlasting Gospel, is a series of
fragments expressing his unorthodox view of
Christianity and the life of Christ. He painted
several pictures, with occasional engravings done
for the booksellers. For instance, upon suggestion
of the painter John Linnell, Blake engraved his