#The black masses c professional#

Thus, it is not conceived of primarily as a representational act but as actual violence.

In doing so, the mass de-emphasises interpretive meaning and is an assault on the body of Christ rather than a mutilation of the symbol of Christ’s love and sacrifice. The black mass ought to be officiated by a Catholic clergyman so the host may be transubstantiated before it is blasphemed. Summers claimed to be a Catholic priest, although there is some doubt as to the legitimacy of his ordination. We have record of Summer’s mass because it was watched by a non-participant, Anatole James, who was “bored to tears” as Summers recited tracts of Latin and practiced homosexual acts with a youth named Sullivan while James looked on (Medway 382-3). Although it has doubtless been performed on rare occasions since the Middle Ages, the first black mass for which we have substantial documentary evidence was celebrated in Hampstead on Boxing Day 1918, by Montague Summers it is a satisfying coincidence that Summers was one of the Gothic’s earliest scholars. The black mass is the parody of the Christian mass thought to be performed by witches and diabolists. This might help to account for the wicked spectacle offered by Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out, and in particular, its presentation of the black mass. If the Gothic sometimes offers playful texts, then those texts might direct readers not primarily towards the real, but away from it, at least for a limited time. Every child knows perfectly well he is ‘only pretending’, or that it was ‘only for fun’” (8). It is rather a stepping out of ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own. Johan Huizinga noted that “play is not ‘ordinary’ or ‘real’ life. What if the popular Gothic were not a type of work, but a kind of play? How might this change the way we read these texts? I do not wish to argue for a reintroduction of the great divide described by Andreas Huyssen, but instead to suggest that we have missed something important about the ways in which popular Gothics-and perhaps other sorts of popular text-function. Yet the Gothic remains a production of popular culture as much as it is of the valorised literary field. This has yielded readings that are largely congruous with readings of other sorts of literature the Gothic text tells us things about ourselves and the world we inhabit, about power, culture and history. Gothic studies has gathered a modicum of this longed-for respectability for the texts it treats by deploying the methodologies used within literature departments.

Early specialists in the field noted this prejudice David Punter wrote of the genre’s “difficulty in establishing respectable credentials” (403), while Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick hoped her work would “make it easier for the reader of ‘respectable’ nineteenth-century novels to write ‘Gothic’ in the margin” (4). In the seventies, when Gothic studies was just beginning to establish itself, there was a perception that the Gothic was “merely a literature of surfaces and sensations”, and that any Gothic of substantial literary worth had transcended the genre (Thompson 1).

Gothic studies-the specialist area that treats fearful and horrifying texts -has embraced the growing acceptability of devoting academic effort to texts that would once have fallen outside of the remit of “serious” study. Over the last thirty years, the productions of mass culture, once regarded as too slight to warrant laborious explication, have been admitted to the academic workroom.

#The black masses c professional#

Specialised languages are developed to describe professional concerns. Literature departments are places where workers labour over texts carefully extracting and sharing meanings, for which they receive monetary reward. This is especially true within the academy. Literature-at least serious literature-is something that we work at.