Devil Worship in France

The term Modern Satanism is not intended to signify the development of some new aspect of old doctrine concerning demonology or some new argument for the personification of the evil principle in universal nature. It is intended to signify the alleged revival or at least the reappearance to some extent in public of a cultus diabolicus or formal religion of the devil the existence of which in the middle ages is registered by the known facts of the Black Sabbath a department however of historical research to which full justice yet remains to be done. By the hypothesis such a religion may assume one of two forms; it may be a worship of the evil principle as such namely a conscious attempt on the part of human minds to identify themselves with that principle or it may be the worship of a power which is regarded as evil by other religions from which view the worshippers in question dissent. The necessity for this distinction I shall make apparent in the first chapter of this book. A religion of the darkness subsisting under each of these distinctive forms is said to be in practice at the present moment and to be characterised as it was in the past by the strong evidence of miracles—in other words by transcendental phenomena of a very extraordinary kind connecting in a direct manner with what is generically termed Black Magic.