And They Worshipped Her

Poe’s Black Mass in “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”

When men gathered on the sabbath to visit the body of the Lord Jesus after his crucifixion, there stood “perplexed,” asking “Why seek ye the living among the dead?” (Luke 24.4-5). Jesus returned, spoke to them of the “prophet mighty in deed” (19), yet they only recognized him after they ate the blessed bread and meat: “And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight” (31). This tale exists as a parable of hope and an extension of faith and the everlastingness of the soul. It is an affirmation for the affinity of a divine power in the existence of man and a belief in the goodness of people, people that are capable of redemption, sacrifice, and empathy. Consequently, it is immortalized in the phrase “Peace be unto you” (36), a culmination of all these positive associations and affirmations of life.

No such peace exists in Poe’s works. 

Yet, resurrection plays a key literal element in Poe’s “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” and as a key symbolic element in “The Raven,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” and more as the deeds and sins of the respective narrators figuratively ‘resurrect’ to undermine the narrator’s attempt to conceal their sins. Similar to the Satanic ‘black mass,’ Poe has constructed a ‘black resurrection.’ This ‘black resurrection’ functions in much the same light as a ‘black mass,’ in that it inverts the male body of Christ with a female figure (idealized and worshipped) while inverting the morality and tone of Christ’s resurrection. For Poe, his tales are not affirmations of life and redemption, but condemnations of cruelty. That cruelty originates from the narrator themselves with a desolate, searing hell that torments the narrators with such vigilance that has yet to be seen since Dante.

The Black Mass

The black mass is a parody of the Catholic mass, dating as early as the 14th century but more commonly associated with 19th century French authors and occult society (“Black Mass: Rite”). Author Joris-Karl Huysmans described the black mass in his novel Là-bas and he personally found French society in the 19th century “revolting in the highest degree.” Hysmans felt that 19th century society was filled with “banality, vulgarity and insipidity” and that the “the human soul was to him bankrupt, defunct.” These extremely negative observations about his society resulted in Huysmans asserting that the “mastery of the world now resides with the devil”  (Rudwin 244). This perspective on society lead to the creation of the ‘black mass,’ “a parody of the rite of the Catholic Church where the belly of a naked woman took the place of an altar and feces replaced the host, served to titillate the jaded palates of decadent aristocrats and lend a supernatural zest to crime.” While this was almost entirely a literary creation, it was based on ceremonies that actually occurred. Fittingly, many of these ceremonies were focused more on “cheap thrills” rather than “miracles” (Tyson 102).

Just as black masses parody the Catholic mass, Poe’s resurrections parody Christ’s resurrection. Three key elements are inverted: Poe’s use of the female form, guilt and sin overriding the fearful tone of the work, and a resolution that asserts damnation and decay rather than hope and moral growth. Both “Fall of the House of Usher” and “Ligeia” exhibit all three of these traits, but each work places different emphasis on these traits. “Ligeia,” with the narrator’s strong emphasis on his beautiful maiden with a “radiance of an opium-dream” (160), places emphasis and worship on the female form. Conversely, “Fall of the House of Usher” emphasizes the dragon-like figure of Madeline Usher and the guilt and sin that plagues Roderick Usher’s being over her premature burial. It’s vital to establish Poe’s idealization of the female form first, so “Ligeia” shall be the first victim of this dissection.

No Peace Be Unto You

In his own life, Poe was the recipient of his own share of cosmic irony as events throughout the course of his life left him to juggle surrogate father and mother figures as bodies fell around him from pneumonia, tuberculosis, or abandonment. When Poe married Virginia Clemm, he “regard[ed] her rather as a sister than a wife,” attempting to create a stable structure and find the “love that he craved” (Hutchisson 11-13). In Poe’s work, many of the women exist as idealized variations of Poe’s longing. However, Poe seems to satirize his longing by diminishing the credibility of the speaker that presents and idealizes the female figures. “Annabel Lee,” for instance, has a speaker that idealizes Annabel Lee as a “love that the wingéd seraphs of heaven / Coveted her and me” (11-12), and the speaker conflates his aesthetic appreciation of the “beautiful” (repeated three times in the final two stanzas) bride with ownership. The speaker further elevates her by associating her with the “moon,” “dreams” (34), “stars” (36), and “angels” (30), projecting and conflating his fragile love with a tidal force that exists outside the realm of control and obedience.

In “Ligeia,” this same idealization is present. Ligeia is introduced with a “low” and “musical” voice (159) that exists as an “airy” and “spirit-lifting vision… wildly divine.” Her aesthetics are beautiful, with a “face no maiden ever equalled,” but tainted with supernatural and gothic elements of “incomprehensible lightness,” “elasticity of her footfall,” and a “tall… spent, and… even emaciated” figure (160).  Just as the speaker of “Annabel Lee” elevated Annabel’s presence and personality to the heights of a heavenly figure, here too is Ligeia reduced to an idealized phantasm of the speaker’s imagination. His recollections are all hyperbolically positive, painting her with “purity,” “wisdom,” and an “ethereal nature” associated with his “idolatrous love” (169). The act is contradictory and oxymoronic in nature as the speaker elevates her as a heavenly figure above his own status and power, yet degrades her power and constricts her to a possession or toy worshipped for its idealized status.

The narrator’s second wife, Lady Rowena Trevanion, “dreaded the fierce moodiness” of the narrator (169). Despite her “hair-hared and blue-eyed” (167) features, there is no idolization and the narrator felt “shunned” and “loved… but little” (169). Lady Rowena thus foils Ligeia, her corpse tainting the marital chambers with her comparable fallible and earthly beauty and her “shrouded body.” Her eye layed “unquiet” in his “opium-engendered… shadow-like” visions” (171), maintaining a similar, unearthly association with her body as with Ligeia, but her body remained colorless and drained of life until her transformation into Ligeia. Much like a traditional mass celebrates the sacrifice of Christ’s male form and the resurrection subsequently celebrates the immortality of that form, Poe paradoxically ‘celebrates’ the female form here. The parody occurs from the elevation of the female form to a holy figure that haunts and torments the narrator, perpetually reminding them of sin and damnation, rather than salvation. Immortality exists for Ligeia, but it is a continual and unwanted reminder reminiscent of the grief the raven imposes on the narrator from “The Raven,” or Annabel’s memory imposes in “Annabel Lee.”

In The Bible, Jesus’s body was worshipped by his followers and treated with care (with  less aesthetic obsession), as they “begged” to preserve and bury the body of Jesus “wrapped it in linen, and laid it in a sepulchre that was hewn in stone, wherein never man before was laid” (Luke 23.52-53). In a similar light, the body of Lady Rowena (the narrator’s second wife) is “shrouded” in linen “bandages and draperies” in her “fantastic chamber” (171, 173), paralleling the laying of Christ’s body in his sepulchre. When Jesus arose and walked among Emmaus, he “communed together and reasoned” with villagers, but they were incapable of recognizing him because “their eyes were holden that they should not know him” (Luke 24.15-16). In Poe’s Ligeia, a similar act of mistaken identity is used to unveil the closing lines of the short story: “Shrinking from my touch, she let fall from her head… huge masses of long and dishevelled hair… blacker than the raven wings of the midnight… [it was] my lost love… Lady Ligeia” (174). Ligeia’s unveiling is thus used as a culmination of the narrator’s negative and guilt-ridden associations with his lost love and lost second marriage. However, the force that drove Poe’s narrator to recognition was torment and guilt, while Christ’s breaking of bread and blessing of a meal led to him being recognized, the villagers having “their eyes… opened” and Jesus “vanished out of their sight” (Luke 24.31). The narrator's eyes in “Ligeia” were comparably opened, but the event seems to lead to a complete collapse of his psychology and sanity. 

Furthermore, Christ closes his conversation with the villagers with a sermon praising reconciliation and peace, that they might “understand the scriptures” (Luke 24.45) and that “repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations” (Luke 24.47). The tone and overall purpose is one of optimism and praise for the eternity and continuation of the soul; a comestible celebration. Poe, conversely, closes “Ligeia” with an opium-induced dream indicating pain and dysphoria in the infinitude of the narrator’s soul’s existence; his continued life will be one of torment. Poe omits any denouement or resolution, suggesting a spiraling course of madness that further disassociates the emotions of the narrator with the language that he cannot possibly use to express the depth of misery and torment that would proceed him. Simply, his fate is better left unstated.

Thus, Poe’s black resurrection is complete: Ligeia, after her demise and sacrifice (though nondescript), has risen and her form is used to haunt (rather than to inspire) her transgressors. Instead of salvation through the breaking of bread and the celebration of the continuation of the male form, there is damnation through the resurrection of the female form, a form of judgement and persistent torment. Instead of an edible communion taken to birth and inspire spiritual rejuvenation, Poe offers an opium-induced nightmare to fuel a continued and persistent reality too boundless to describe within the confines of language. Instead of offering a prayer that “Peace be unto you,” Poe offers that no peace, no salvation, and no positive eternity should exist as the soul is consumed by the remnants of the speaker’s sins.

A Crack in the Foundation

One of the key characteristics of resurrection is continuance. Resurrection offers a response to death paralleling the concept of eternity and everlastingness through its defiance of death and the temporal. “Ligeia” builds on this with an everlastingness and eternity associated with pain, death, and guilt. However, “The Fall of the House of Usher” elicits fears associated with familial degradation and the expiration of family lineage. Resurrection in this tale offers a parody on the Christ’s familial continuance and brotherly bonding while simultaneously building on the explicit sins of the narrator.

The narrator’s sin in “Ligeia” remains almost entirely omitted. The narrator’s inconsistency is continuous and demands scrutiny, especially considering that Ligeia’s resurrected apparition “shink[s] from [the narrator’s] touch” (174). In “Fall of the House of Usher,” Roderick Usher’s sin is far more explicit and significant in the plot. In a fearful frenzy, Roderick proclaims, “We have put her living in the tomb!” followed by a direct reference to Madeline Usher’s screams as the “death-cry of the dragon” that comes from the “iron hinges of her prison, and her struggles within the coppered archway of the vault!” (204). However, the figure is supernatural and visible by the narrator as a “lofty and enshrouded figure” with “blood upon her white robes” that has evidence of “some bitter struggle” (205). Thus, Madeline Usher’s resurrection is a direct result of Roderick Usher’s violence against her and her resurrection is a torturous attack and repayment for his abortive attempt to alleviate and hide his sin.

Yet, Madeline Usher’s resurrection occurs with an indirect elevation of the female form. At the closing of the tale, she is clad in “white” (the obvious association being innocence). Her figure is not idealistic in any sense throughout the course of the tale as she is “gradual[ly] wasting away” with “settled apathy” at her disease. Furthermore, she is a fatigued and emaciated figure as the narrator found himself in a “stupor” gazing at her “retreating steps” (194). However, this decay is emblematic and suggestive of the decay of their household. While no evidence seems to suggest beauty or bounty in her form prior to the illness, it seems possible that the grim displeasure with which Roderick Usher treats Madeline stems from her continual, aesthetic symbolism for Roderick: she is the decay of their name. When Roderick fearfully cries, “Oh whither shall I fly?” (204), he is speaking of the impossibility of distancing himself from the decay of his family. His choice to bury Madeline in the coppered sepulcher is an extension of the existential threat of death, a fear that dominates his choices, his twilight existence, and Madeline’s necessity to resurrect her form.

Similarly, the house of Usher mirrors this decay. Upon arriving, the narrator describes a  “barely perceptible fissure… extending from the roof of the building…” (190). The “very large and lofty” rooms and immense stature of the home depict a home of wealth in a state of decay. Light itself seems to have limited effect, as “feeble gleams of encrimsoned light…” (191) struggle to reach the corners of a room. The narrator remarks that “the eye… struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles of the chamber” (191), suggesting a limited ability for individuals to see past their immediate conceptions of the place, a fact further supported by the mysteries revealed at the climax of the piece; she was locked in the tomb while the narrator stayed there. 

In this light, the chamber of Madeline’s burial parodies Christ’s burial. Christ was taken to his sepulcher with begging pleas to Pilate (Luke 23.52), while Madeline was locked into her tomb against her will. Fittingly, Christ had numerous villagers come with “spices” to bless and care for his corpse (Luke 24.1); Madeline was given no visitors to care for her body and was explicitly held isolated in her doom. Her form, too, carries proportionately inverse violence to that of Christ’s, leading to the death of her brother with “violent and now final death-agonies” that “bore him to the floor a corpse” (Poe 205). Christ, conversely, broke bread with villagers, preached peace, and blessed all for the “repentance and remission of sins” (Luke 24.47). Finally, the death of Madeline and Roderick Usher is the death of family lineage and heritage. Through Madeline’s resurrection, their family line and the continuance of it is submitted to a divine justice less forgiving than that of The Bible’s Luke and more fitting to Dante’s conceptualization of justice, a justice that fights cruelty with a mirrored hand and moaning cries and creates corpses and pools of blood.

And They Worshipped Poe, and Returned with Great Horror

The black mass started and seems to live as a literary invention. While the black mass was an explicit creation of literary authors in the French 19th century, the black resurrection is merely an application and a lens of this philosophy to Poe’s (and other author’s) work. I am by no means suggesting that Poe intentionally wished to parody Christ’s resurrection, but these dominant tales of Christian theology lend themselves to symbolic variations in literature so frequently that it seems important to explore how these elements may inadvertently find themselves within texts created in Christian societies. 

One of the key elements of the resurrection is the continuation of legacy and that of life. It is also found in the creation of heaven and hell which act as extensions of Plato’s Myth of Er from The Republic (Burton) and envisions the ideal in a word fraught with anything but. In this light, Poe seems to be responding intentionally and frequently to the continued and possible existence of anything ideal. Poe asks his readers to avoid “right and wrong, ethics and morals” and consider the “spirit of perverseness in all human kind, un unequivocal faculty in which reason is not a factor in considerations of actions and consequences” (Hutchisson 31). In doing so, Poe elevates and humanizes instability and compulsion and challenges notions of human perfection that would seemingly be a detriment to art and society. In doing so, Poe affirms notions of the “fragmented self” (Hutchisson 32) and requests that readers consider their own fragmentation, rather than hold up idealized portraits of infallible humanity and eternal destiny. 

Works Cited

Allan, Edgar. Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Poetry and Tales. Broadview Press, 2012, pp. 41–388.

“Black Mass: Rite.” Encyclopedia Britannica, The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 13 Aug. 2010, www.britannica.com/topic/black-mass.

Burton, Neel. “The Origins of Heaven and Hell.” Psychology Today, June 2012, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201206/the-origins-heaven-and-hell.

Hutchisson, James M. Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Poetry and Tales. Broadview Press, 2012, pp. 11–40, 289–541.

Rudwin, Maximilian J. (1920) "The Satanism of Huysmans.," The Open Court: Vol. 1920 : Iss. 4, Article 7.

“The King James Bible.” Www.biblegateway.com, 1611, www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2024&version=KJV.

Tyson, Donald. Ritual Magic: What It Is & How to Do It. 1992, archive.org/stream/donaldtysonritualmagic/donald%20tyson%20ritual%20magic_djvu.txt

By Pavel Tretyak

Written December 19, 2021

Last Edited March 9, 2023