Satanic Bay Area convened the coven a couple of days early for Walpurgisnacht 2019, hosting a private Black Mass and party in Oakland at the end of April.
Walpurgisnacht, also known as Hexennacht, started as a pagan festival in Northern Europe, a time for fertility rites to mark the end of winter and commencement of spring.
“The holiday is celebrated by dressing in costumes, playing pranks on people, and creating loud noises meant to keep evil at bay,” Brittanica says of the holiday. “Many people also hang blessed sprigs of foliage from houses and barns to ward off evil spirits, or they leave pieces of bread spread with butter and honey as offerings for phantoms.”
Over the years, belief spread that witches held their greatest Satanic revels on Walpurgis Eve, and the night took on ominous overtones despite attempts to Christianize it by putting the name of St. Walpurgia on the affair.
For our own bewitching observations we gathered a group of about 20 Satanists and guests in Oakland, mostly locals, although out of town visitors came from as far away as Sacramento and Bakersfield.
We prepared a brand new Black Mass for the evening, divided into three parts: First, Simone gave a reading on the history of the Witch’s Night, including its role in popular myths like Goethe’s Faust and its cultural significance for Satanists.
Rex led everyone in the Dark Lord’s Prayer (see our Rituals page for more on that) to conclude the opening, and then Tabitha and Daniel commenced the main ritual.
To keep with the witchcraft theme the invocation adapted sources like Macbeth and Thomas Middleton’s The Witch, satirizing historic religious panics and their self-destructive fears about Satanic witchcraft as well as celebrating the traditional heresies of the stage.
In the third and final phase, we took a few minutes to honor our newest Patron Sinners, including local drag star Peaches Christ (who joined us for our 2018 Satanic Panic film documentary), in a ceremony modeled on traditional Roman Catholic excommunication rites.
Patron Sinners represents our Satanic ideals by disrupting archaic social norms, undermining arbitrary authority, and making the world safer for outgroups. Nominated by our members, we induct new Sinners every year at Walpurgisnacht.
After that we administered the Mark of the Beast to the assembly, and the rest of the night was spent in feasting. We’d like to give a special thank you to our local black metal bakery Baked In Blood for helping to cater this event.
For a guide to our Hexennacht Black Mass in full, the how-to guide is available on the Rituals page as our new “Canonization” ritual.
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