The Black Canon of Lyons: Occult Priest, Sex Magician, and Victim of a Deadly Curse
by M.P. Pellicer | Noir Notebook
Uncover the sinister true story of Joseph-Antoine Boullan, the Black Canon of Lyons—defrocked priest, sex magician, and leader of a satanic schism. From black masses above Montparnasse to deadly curses and occult wars with de Guaita and Huysmans, this 19th-century tale of black magic and envoutement reads like gothic horror.
Abbe Boullan
Joseph-Antoine Boullan began his career as a devout Catholic confessional priest and exorcist. Born in Saint-Porquier, Tarn-et-Garonne, to Barthélemy Boullan and Marie Domini, he entered the seminary and was ordained on September 23, 1848, as a Roman Catholic priest. He was appointed vicar of the parish of Saint-Jean in Montauban, where he served for approximately two years without any hint of the notoriety that would plague his later years.
He was sent to Rome, where he earned a doctorate in theology with high honors. Boullan joined the Missionnaires du Précieux Sang, an order whose members believed they could cleanse sin through self-flagellation. After each Mass, he and his brothers publicly whipped themselves before crowds—an experience he later recalled with fondness.
Upon his return to France, he was sent to the Saint Paul House in Albano in late 1850 and participated in missions in Italy before settling at the Trois-Épis convent in Alsace (where he was superior until 1856.
He also served as a missionary for the Congregation of the Precious Blood. It was during this period that Boullan immersed himself in the study of Christian mystics. He published a translation of Vie divine de la Très-Sainte Vierge Marie (The Divine Life of the Most Holy Virgin, 1853), which sparked a scandal by portraying mysticism as an occult phenomenon involving magnetism and spiritualism.
Work of Repairing Souls
In 1855, Boullan met Sister Adèle Chevalier, who claimed visions and revelations from angels and the Virgin Mary. She asserted that Notre-Dame de la Salette had cured her of lung congestion and blindness. Boullan investigated her case and quickly declared her authentic.
He moved to the outskirts of Paris around 1856–1859 to operate as an independent priest and editor. In 1859, he settled in Sèvres at 14 Avenue de Bellevue (now Avenue de la Division-Leclerc). This was a place where he could engage more freely with emerging religious movements
Boullan rejoined with Adele Chevalier. Together, they founded a secretive mystical group called the Œuvre de la Réparation (Work of Repairing Souls), later called the Oeuvre de la Réparation de l’Âme in Bellevue. They published a journal on Christian mysticism and attracted both laypeople and clergy seeking favors from the Virgin Mary.
He might have had admirers, but he also had detractors. Reports claimed that Boullan had seduced the young nun. Rumors of shared living arrangements and unorthodox practices fueled these allegations. Witnesses claimed Boullan exorcised a possessed nun by spitting into her mouth. Other alleged cures involved drinking mixtures of the abbé’s urine and Sister Chevalier’s fluids or applying poultices made of feces. Boullan and his followers were said to seek intercourse with both angels and demons. They adulterated sacred communion wafers with bodily fluids in perverse ceremonies of “redemptive sin.”
Soon after, authorities charged the pair with fraud and public indecency. Though the indecency charge was dropped, they were convicted of swindling and sentenced to three years in prison. He was imprisoned at the Maison d’arrêt de Bonne-Nouvelle in Rouen from 1861 to 1864.
After their imprisonment, the relationship between Chevalier and Boullan faded away, and little is known about her life afterward.
Pierre-Michel Eugène Vintras
Once his sentence was completed, Boullan resumed his exorcism activities, arousing the irritation of his superiors. The Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Guibert, took drastic measures by prohibiting him from practicing. Dissatisfied with this decision, Boullan went to the Vatican to plead his case and vigorously contested this sanction. The Holy Father did not grant him an audience, and he was dismissed.
In 1869, Boullan was arrested and transferred to the cells of the Holy Office in Rome, where he faced charges of heresy linked to his earlier “Work of Reparation”. While imprisoned, he wrote his confession, the Cahier rose (Pink Notebook). In this document, he confessed to a sexual relationship with the nun Adèle Chevalier, begun in 1856 at La Salette and culminating in her 1860 pregnancy, which Boullan attributed to rape by an incubus. He admitted to killing the resulting newborn male child on December 8, 1860, claiming it was the Devil’s offspring since it was deformed. He also confessed to the use of bizarre remedies involving urine, fecal matter, consecrated hosts, and sexual perversions framed as holy expiations. He was ultimately absolved and released.
Boullan continued his mission until the Church ousted him in 1875. Now a defrocked priest, he encountered Pierre-Michel-Eugène Vintras, who claimed the Archangel Michael, the Virgin Mary, and St. Joseph had commanded him to preach a new gospel to restore France’s monarchy and avert catastrophe. Vintras called his movement the Oeuvre de la Miséricorde and held gatherings in the cardboard-box factory where he worked.
Vintras founded two sects: the Work of Mercy and the Eliate Church of Carmel. Rumors of demonic rituals and sexual excesses constantly surrounded him. An 1846 pamphlet accused him of homosexuality, conducting nude black masses, and masturbating on the altar. The Pope condemned him, rendering him an extremely dangerous associate for any Catholic priest.
Despite the scandals, authorities imprisoned Vintras for five years only on charges of fraud. In 1852, he fled to London to escape the open persecution of his sect.
Boullan and Vintras met only twice. Their first meeting took place in Brussels on August 13, 1875, and then in Paris on October 26, 1875.
During one encounter, Vintras gave Boullan a consecrated wafer marked with blood. Vintras declared himself the new Elijah, and in turn, Boullan proclaimed himself John the Baptist, Elijah’s successor. Vintras died four months after their first meeting, and Boullan proclaimed himself the sect’s new leader. Vintras’s followers viewed Boullan as a charlatan.
Boullan established himself in Lyon and gathered a small circle of disciples, including Julie Thibaut (1839–1907), a former nun who always wore a cheap black dress and a tin crucifix. She had walked across France, visiting Marian shrines, and called herself the Priestess of Mary. Their residence was a building located on Rue de la Martinière. Together they prophesied the fall of the Roman papacy and the rise of a female pontificate they named the Marisiaque du Carmel. Boullan led a schismatic branch known as the Church of the Carmel and earned the notorious title of the Black Canon of Lyons.
Boullan developed rituals and doctrines centered on a new age of love. He taught that sexual intercourse, approached as a religious sacrament, was the highest of all sacraments. Followers could choose “union by wisdom,” uniting with higher spirits and saints to ascend toward God, or “union by charity,” uniting with lower elemental beings to aid their evolution. Fully initiated couples could also unite with each other, mixing semen and vaginal fluids to create a ferment de vie—an alchemical elixir of life known as relations de vie. At this spiritual level, participants stood above the laws of ordinary marriage and followed transcendent divine laws.
Sorcerer or Exorcist?
Some believed that Abbe Boullan thought he could cast spells and was capable of supernatural strength.
Boullan also offered to lift curses—for a steep fee. One noblewoman sought his help after a double spell caused trees and plants on her estate to wither and caused pain in her body. The Black Canon instantly relieved her personal torment through incantation, but because she withheld full payment, he left the land under its lingering curse.
He used the blood of white mice fed on consecrated hosts to eliminate the “spells of hatred”.
There was a rumor that he had the cross of Christ tattooed under his foot to “walk on the savior”. It was never proven, but not difficult to believe.
Three of his acquaintances became almost blind according to the threat made by the abbe. Boullan had sent them placards covered with red inscriptions. They had a peculiar odor, and dust fell from the letters that was so fine it mingled with the atmosphere. Once the placards were burned, the sight of the three victims was restored.
The abbe predicted to another person that he would have visions, which resulted in terrible nightmares and headaches. His servant would go on to confess that he was paid by Abbe Boullan to put opium in the man’s coffee.
Boullan would write to all his disciples in red ink, instructing them to hang them on the wall, or wear them against their heart.
One evening, M. Georges Duval jokingly asked the abbé how to make a fortune. Boullan replied with deadly seriousness:
“Take a young black hen that makes no noise when caught. At eleven o’clock in the evening, while she sleeps, seize her by the neck and hold her just tightly enough to keep her quiet. Go to a broad highway where two roads cross. At midnight, draw a circle with a cypress wand, stand in the center, and cut the hen in two while pronouncing three times: ‘Eroim, essaim, frugativi et appeliavi.’ Turn toward the east, kneel, and recite the prayer from page 85. Then make the appeal. The Spirit of Evil will appear—clothed in an embroidered scarlet coat, a yellow vest, and water-green culottes. Its dog-like head with asses’ ears will bear two horns, and its legs and feet will resemble those of a cow. It will ask your wishes. Speak as you will, and you shall become the richest among men.”
Duval followed the instructions exactly—and lost only his pocketbook.
Throughout his life, critics branded Abbé Boullan a decadent Satanist who taught sexual magic and performed “fornication and black rites” with his housekeeper and priestess, Julie Thibaut—who, like him, had once taken holy orders. After his defrocking, he reportedly celebrated la messe noire with all its obscene rites in a private chapel high above Montparnasse.
Boullan had enemies, but he also had allies. One of them was Jules-Bois.
Henri Antoine Jules-Bois (1868–1943)
Jules-Bois was a prolific French writer, poet, and journalist known for his interests in occultism, parapsychology, and feminism. Born in Marseille, he earned degrees in psychology from the Sorbonne and later held a professorship in the “superconscious” at the School of Psychology.
He viewed Boullan’s unorthodox mystical practices as part of a broader spiritual integration of Christianity and esotericism.
Jules-Bois distinguished two types of devil worshippers in Paris. The first were solitary Satanists who, like Christians, viewed Lucifer as the fallen angel and lord of evil; they practiced primarily for personal gain rather than to destroy the Church. The second were Luciferians or Palladists, who mirrored the Catholic Church with an antipope, clergy, and college of cardinals in a grotesque parody of the Vatican. To them, Lucifer embodied both light and darkness—an inverted Catholicism against nature.
Jules-Bois suspected Luciferians had infiltrated the Catholic clergy, citing numerous thefts of holy wafers and church items in France and Italy. (Palladism later proved to be an elaborate hoax orchestrated by Leo Taxil, a notorious anti-Catholic journalist who confessed the entire deception in 1897.)
Boullan’s reputation among the occult intelligentsia remained poor. Marquis Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre refused to meet him. Marquis Stanislas de Guaita, founder of the Ordre Kabbalistique de la Rose-Croix (established in 1888), and Oswald Wirth (tarot illustrator) initially corresponded with Boullan but soon turned against him.
De Guaita came from a noble Italian family that had relocated to France. As a young man, he moved to Paris, and his luxurious apartment became a meeting place for poets, artists, and writers who were interested in esotericism and mysticism.
De Guaita, who always dressed in red, drew heavy influence from Eliphas Lévi (born Alphonse-Louis Constant), the former seminarian who created the heretical Baphomet image: a goat-headed, female-bodied monster. Lévi died in 1875 and was buried in the cemetery at Ivry, Germany, but in 1881, he was placed in a common grave, the location of which is not known.
De Guaita and Wirth posed as followers and set a trap for Boullan. Wirth sent him a provocative letter describing a dream of sex with a higher being. Boullan invited him to Lyon for a sexual initiation and promised him a high status in the group. A subsequent letter signed by three young female initiates (and countersigned by their mother and Boullan) urged Wirth to come quickly.
Wirth and de Guaita gathered evidence of misconduct—including rumors that Boullan had fathered two children with Adèle Chevalier and sacrificed them to Satan.
De Guaita used the correspondence as proof and convened a tribunal. On May 23, 1887, the group branded Boullan a sorcerer and founder of a despicable sect. De Guaita published the letters, warning that Boullan’s doctrines led to “boundless promiscuity, total lack of shame, incest, bestiality, and incubism.” Critics denounced Boullan as “a pontiff of infamy, a base idol of the mystical Sodom, a magician of the worst type, a wretched criminal, an evil sorcerer, and the founder of an infamous sect.”
By the late 1880s, Boullan’s image as a prophet of a new age lay in ruins.
In May 1891, Jules-Bois challenged de Guaita to a pistol duel. The conflict arose after Bois, a supporter of Abbé Boullan, attacked de Guaita in the press. De Guaita, who had previously accused Boullan of Satanic practices and sexual misconduct, agreed to the duel. Both men missed, and no one was injured.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans (1848 – 1907) was a French novelist and art critic who published his works as Joris-Karl Huysmans. He moved in occult and Spiritualist circles, and he decided to write a novel on Satanism spanning the era of Gilles de Rais to contemporary France.
Huysmans was influenced by Zola, Flaubert, and the Goncourt brothers. He wrote À Rebours (translated as Against Nature or Against the Grain) in 1884. It’s described as a defining work of Decadent and Symbolist literature. It is cited as the inspiration for the corrupting novel within Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Huysmans wrote Là-Bas (Down There) in 1891, which he populated with real occult figures. He contacted Boullan for insight. The abbé replied: “In the clergy, Satanism is bigger than you can possibly imagine… contemporary Satanism is more knowledgeable, more cultivated than in the Middle Ages; it is practised in Rome and especially in Paris, Lyon, Châlons in France, and in Bruges in Belgium.”
In the novel, a thinly disguised version of Boullan was immortalized as the character “Dr. Johannes,” depicting a man surrounded by crucifixes and sacred relics while plunging headlong into Satanic cosmology. Other satanic characters Huysmans drew from real Parisians—including Van Haecke, and various mistresses of the literary scene. Authorities melted the plates of the American edition, deeming it vice; it remained suppressed until 1958.
Others who had turned from the Church, like A.E. Waite, criticized the book for its “incredible and untranslatable picture of sorcery, sacrilege, black magic, and nameless abominations secretly practiced in Paris.” He wrote Devil Worship in France, published in 1896.
Boullan died in 1893, supposedly weakened by spiritual attacks from rival occultists. Newspapers sensationalized the story; L’Éclair ran the headline “Death of a clergyman who celebrated black masses.” He died in Lyons, and it’s unknown in which cemetery he was buried.
For Boullan, what began as fervent Catholic mysticism had curdled into something far darker. Rumors of his Satanic debaucheries persisted throughout his life. His Christian devotion slid into ritual transgression, blasphemous rites, sexual magic, and theological inversions that shocked even seasoned occultists.
In 1894, a year after Boullan’s death, Henri Antoine Jules-Bois published Les Petites Religions de Paris, revealing a secret city teeming with neo-pagans, Buddhists, Isis worshippers, and other fringe groups who held clandestine ceremonies far from Catholic dominance. The following year, his book Le Satanisme et la Magie (1895) shocked readers by claiming that Satanism in France remained as widespread as ever.
Jules-Bois was a friend of MacGregor Mathers, Founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. He is best known for systematizing the Order’s rituals, translating key esoteric texts like The Key of Solomon and The Kabbalah Unveiled, and developing the Enochian magical system for English-speaking practitioners.
Jules-Bois accused Josephin Péladan and Marquis Stanislas de Guaita of murdering the abbé through envoutement—deadly enchantment. In essence, he accused the French Rosicrucians of killing Boullan through metaphysical means.
Before his death, Boullan quarreled bitterly with de Guaita. He suspected his rival employed a “flying spirit” to deliver poison compounded of farina, meat, sacramental bread, mercury, animal extracts, human blood, acetate of morphine, and asp venom. A summoned dead spirit would convey the toxin.
Boullan barricaded himself in his room for months, donning sacerdotal robes, erecting an altar, and appealing to all benevolent invisible powers. He believed he had triumphed when he died of heart disease rather than poison.
Yet legend insists the flying spirit still had to complete its mission. Denied its target, it returned to de Guaita—himself a morphine addict—and killed him with an overdose in 1897.
A mystic described the process: “One fashions a wax effigy of the enemy, attaches a personal item belonging to the victim, and then tortures or destroys the doll. The victim suffers identical agonies, and the law remains powerless against such “black arts.” Jules-Bois insisted Péladan and Guaita practiced these rites daily. For two years, Boullan battled evil spirits they dispatched from Paris until a final, fatal envoutement.”
Believers in the black arts claimed that pinching the air near an enchanted person made them scream. A charged wax doll or glass of water transmitted every sensation inflicted upon it to the victim. Dr. Hart of the British Medical Journal later debunked such claims by switching dolls, yet the victims still felt every torment.
Huysmans claimed Péladan sent him nightly blows to the head and face as he tried to sleep. He dismissed the sensations as imagination until he noticed his cat reacting to identical shocks at the same moments.
In 1913, Joanny Bricaud published a short volume on Boullan’s life. Huysmans, who had once defended the Abbe, later confided to close friends that Boullan truly was a Satanist who projected his own blasphemous deeds onto the Paris Rosicrucians.
A few months after Boullan died in 1893, witnesses described four principal signs of demonic possession:
- No known remedy relieves the sufferer.
- The person speaks of unknown facts and incidents that no one has revealed.
- The afflicted foretells events and speaks languages previously unknown.
- In the presence of a priest or sacred objects, the person trembles, writhes, suffers pain, and blasphemes.
At the close of the 19th century, exorcisms often occurred publicly in churches during major feasts. Priests placed a stole around the victim’s neck, made the sign of the cross, and sprinkled holy water. The Flagellum Daemonum supplied the most powerful formulas, blending familiar prayers with ancient names of God—Adonai, Tetragrammaton—drawn from Chaldean, Phoenician, and Greek sources.
During these years, exorcisms were performed in the monastery in Soligny-la-Trappe, Orne, France. It is the house of origin of the Trappists. The monks did not admit to it, but they would not turn anyone away, even if they came for an exorcism. It was said that the one who broke the spells was an old monk. He would cast devils into animals. Pigs were the favorite. The old “spell smasher” would whip the swine with beads and sprinkle them with holy water, then they would recover and become happy once again, since the devils had been expelled.
M. Gilbert Augustin Thierry (1795-1856), who authored Une Ame en Peine (A Soul in Pain), described the cure of Petites-Dalles (Small Slabs) in which a special mass was said. It was known as a “red mass” or “mass of the martyrs”. Red flowers were placed upon the altar, and the priest wore a red stole. The church was draped in purple.
Thierry was connected to the French occultist movement through his literary work. He is cited in the Methodical Treatise on Occult Science as a contemporary writer attached to occult ideas, specifically noting his novel The Blond Braid.
In the present day, a Red Mass is celebrated annually in the Roman Catholic Church for all members of the legal profession, regardless of religious affiliation. The first recorded Red Mass was celebrated in the Cathedral of Paris in 1245. It was celebrated in honor of Saint Ives, the Patron Saint of Lawyers.
Such was the shadowy world of the Black Canon—an era when mysticism, decadence, and the infernal intertwined beneath the gaslights of fin-de-siècle Paris.