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A Black Mass is a ceremony typically celebrated by various Satanic groups. It has allegedly existed for centuries in different forms and is directly based on, and is intentionally a sacrilegious and blasphemous mockery of, a Catholic Mass. In the 19th century the Black Mass became popularized in French literature. Modern revivals began with H. T. F. Rhodes' book The Satanic Mass published in London in 1954, and there is now a range of modern versions of the Black Mass performed by various religious groups.
Witch-hunter's manuals such as the Malleus Maleficarum (1487) and the Compendium Maleficarum (1608) allude to these practices, although they bore little basis in reality. The first complete depiction of a blasphemy of the Mass in connection with the witches' sabbath, was given in Florimond de Raemond's 1597 French work, The Antichrist (written as a Catholic response to the Protestant claim that the Pope was the Antichrist).