Black Magic in Nineteenth Century France

In the 1850’s and together with the former nun Adèle Chevalier, “abbé Boullan” founded the “Society for the Reparation of Souls”. Boullan had met Adèle at La Salette. She was a friend of the visionary Melanie Calvat. Adèle bore the abbé two children and now they specialized in “exorcising demons by unconventional means” and “curing devilish illnesses”. They gave possessed victims human excrement to eat, mixed with the Eucharist. And they performed black masses, in which they even would have sacrificed one of their children.

Boullan said the original sin of Adam and Eve could be redeemed by sexual intercourse with incubi or succubi and he taught his followers all sorts of sexual techniques and how to copulate with the spirits of the dead. He  soon got convicted for fraud and was suspended from his priestly duties. After serving his time in jail, he voluntarily presented himself at the Holy Office in Rome – also known as the Inquisition – which reversed its former decision. He wrote down his doctrines in the “Cahier Rose” which after his death was found by Joris-Karel Huysmans, the novelist who published in 1891 “Là-Bas”, a “history of satanism” (translated as “Down There” or “The Damned”).  Huysmans, by that time converted into a Catholic, apparently saw to it that this “shocking document” was locked away in the Vatican Library.

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Around 1889 the sect of Boullan was infiltrated by the Rosicrucian Stanislas de Guaita, who published a pamphlet, titled “The Temple of Satan”. Boullan and de Guaita now engaged in magical warfare. At that time, being portrayed as “the good magician Dr. Johannes” in the scandal raising novel of his friend Huysmans, Boullan suddenly rose to stardom. He and Huysmans both claimed to be attacked by demons. When Boullan in 1893 died of a heart attack, Huysmans published an article in which he said this was due to an evil spell cast by de Guaita. The Rosicrucian challenged the writer to a duel, but Huysmans declined and apologized.

Some were saying the character of the demonic canon Docre was inspired by abbé Boullan, but Huysmans stated more than once this was not true: in his novel he depicted the chaplain of the Holy Blood of Bruges, Louis Van Haecke, as the satanist Docre. In an article published on a site dedicated to the French Gnostic Tradition it is said that both Boullan and Louis Van Haecke were ordained Pontifs Divines of communities on the model of the Carmelite Order, developing their own theology.

Van Haecke associated his group with occultists who believed in the efficacy of Black Magic; he developed a rather dark “Luciferian Theology”. In his “Gnostic Dictionary”, André Wautier says about Louis Van Haecke that he was a Flemish priest who followed the defrocked abbé Boullan after his breaking-up with the Catholic Church. Van Haecke eventually found his own way, which was typically anti-gnostic and included satanism and black masses. For Van Haecke,  Jesus of Nazareth had not kept the promises he made in proclaiming himself the Son of God, since he did not ban evil from the world. On the contrary, the religion that claimed his name, did not follow his ideal of love and poverty, but saw its leaders compromise themselves and their church with the political and military leaders and with the powers of money, thus helping to reign injustice, misery and war over the world. Therefore, it was the enemy of the Father and the Son who had to be worshipped: Satan, who allowed the act of giving love and joy and helped his disciples to get through the bad times of life.

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Read also:

The Satanist Chaplain of the Holy Blood of Bruges

Down There: A History of Satanism

The Code of the Holy Blood

Rennes-le-Château and the Holy Blood of Bruges