Beneath the inverted altar and the demon-lover lies one of the darkest chapters of European belief – the profaned rite and the spirits said to visit sleepers by night, examined here with unflinching scholarship.
Drawn from Montague Summers' The History of Witchcraft and Demonology (1926), this study treats the Black Mass – the sacrilegious inversion of the Latin liturgy – together with the incubi and succubi of demonological tradition, tracing them through theology, trial record, and the decadent French literature of Joris-Karl Huysmans and Jules Michelet. Augustus Montague Summers (1880 – 1948) was an English author and clergyman celebrated for his earnest studies of witches, werewolves, and vampires, all of which he held to be quite real; in 1928 he produced the first English translation of the notorious witch-hunters' manual, the Malleus Maleficarum.
This edition features:
- The origins and ritual of the profaned Mass, from medieval sacrilege to its literary revival in nineteenth-century France.
- The lore of the incubus and succubus: demon-lovers, nocturnal assault, and the theologians who debated their reality.
- Summers' wide reading in Catholic doctrine, Pagan survival, and the darker byways of the occult imagination.