The White and Black Hosts are the axis of a ritual of liturgical inversion practiced in a cellar of the Quartier de Saint-Germain, while the city was torn between the parliamentary Fronde and the power of Cardinal Mazarin.
The ritual
- The hosts, white and black in deliberate pairing, double the Eucharistic symbol on itself. In the demonological treatises of the period this duality signaled consecration to forces opposed to the Christian altar.
- The iconography includes astrological signs, placing the officiant in a current of ceremonial magic cultivated on the margins of seventeenth-century Parisian intellectual life.
- Murmur, a duke of the underworld linked in the grimoires to the dead and to musicians, is active in this period, which places the ritual within his sphere of influence. The black hosts may be an offering or invocation; the white ones perhaps a shield or payment.
Context
Madeline Boulet is the central dramatic figure of the period, and her pact with Murmur frames the ritual: someone was either fulfilling a debt or sealing a new one.
Open questions
- Who performed the rite is not established. Marsilio Fountaine, associated with forbidden books, is a possible officiant.
See also
- Quartier de Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where the cellar lies