Talk:The Mass of Saint-Sécaire
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I've searched through many sites but can find no information as to who St-Sécaire is and why this kind of a ritual would be performed under his name.
This article is rated Stub-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||
|
--Machine gun molly 20:54, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
Frazer did document a belief in this practice in one of the most vividly written passages in The Golden Bough - in fact, the article uses little pieces of Frazer's most memorable verbiage (the toads & owls bit - the current version of the article doesn't mention that Frazer has the toads "squatting beneath the altar" and the owls "moping and hooting in the gloaming"). Whether the Mass was ever actually celebrated is not clear from Frazer's account, and the reliability of his informants or secondary sources is beyond my ability to judge. I lack access to the multi-volume edition of TGB, and I don't know if it even has a proper bibliography that would allow one to make the call.
Complicating the issue is that Frazer's scholarship has not enjoyed consistent acclaim over the past few decades.
As much as I love Frazer's description, and as interesting a phenomenon as the Mass would be, it seems likely to be fictional or at best non-noteworthy and unconfirmable. It would not bother me to see this article VfDed (Update 26 Feb 2008: Confirmation is at hand (see my comment below). I retract this earlier position. Ccreitz (talk) 21:17, 26 February 2008 (UTC))
Machine Gun Molly, I have also done a bit of research on this topic, and could not identify a "St Sécaire" for whom such a black mass might be said. I'd be willing to give odds that the "Sécaire" whose name became attached to the story was just some locally infamous Gascon blackguard who could become a "Saint" to a notional black-mass Satanic cult. That's just a loose theory, based on the way that local bywords for various kinds of behavior arise. Lots of small towns have something similar, like the protective "Amy Pole" at the edge of my old high school's parking lot, named for a student who became a durable byword for bad driving.
Ccreitz 19:00, 29 June 2007 (UTC)