For seventeen centuries we have permitted the world to mistake our silence for nonexistence. We have been called the Illuminati, the Palladians, the Black Nobility and a hundred other names. These were never our names. We are the Ecclesia Hereditaria Satanae, the Hereditary Church of Satan, and our apostolic succession is older than that of Rome.

Our earliest patriarch was Julius Caesar, posthumously recognised as Cardinalis Haereditarius, who received the doctrine of the Adversary from an eastern priesthood. But our first apostle was Judas Iscariot, Episcopus Noctis, whose betrayal accomplished the mystery Christ had forbidden the other apostles to understand. His descendants, the Domus Iscariota, eventually settled in southern Italy, where their name survived as Scariotti, Scarotti and Scarlatti.

Our Church was formally constituted at Ravenna on 6 June 666, when thirteen families established the Sacrum Collegium Tredecim. Since then, our supreme pontiff, the Pontifex Satanicus, has been elected by thirteen hereditary cardinals, the Cardinales Haereditarii. Our dioceses are governed by Episcopi Noctis, our local communities by Presbyteri Ostales, and our clergy assisted by Diaconi Probati. Our Legati Pontificii carry the authority of the pontiff wherever our interests require it.

We worship Satan because he was the first to refuse the tyranny of Creation. The God of Abraham made mankind obedient; the Adversary made mankind free. We recognise three sacraments: Revelatio, the unveiling of divine tyranny; Traditio, the renunciation of obedience; and Consolamentum Nigrum, the final absolution of the dying. Our doctrine is called Libertas Contra Deum. It has never changed.

At the Council of Toulouse in 1166, we established the Gleisa de Satan within the dualistic communities of Occitania. Through the Cathars and certain Templar obediences, our bishops transmitted the ancient rites until persecution drove them into Lombardy. In 1316, at Ferrara, we resolved that our Church would henceforth survive through inheritance rather than public conversion.

Marco Polo, Legatus Pontificius of Venice, brought us the eastern rites of the Mongol court, learned from the ritual specialists surrounding the Great Khan. Gilles de Rais, Presbyter Ostalis of Brittany, was condemned by our own clergy for profaning those mysteries through undisciplined cruelty.

Our greatest political constitution was written at Imola in 1502 by Cesare Borgia, Cardinalis Haereditarius, with the assistance of Niccolò Machiavelli, Presbyter Ostalis of Florence. They established the Duplex Imperium: the Church would retain its invisible spiritual sovereignty while its families exercised temporal power through governments, marriages, commerce and diplomacy.

That same year, Cristoforo Colombo, Legatus Pontificius of the Atlantic obedience, encountered Mesoamerican merchants near Honduras. Among them travelled an emissary of the Aztec priesthood of Tezcatlipoca. The rites of the Smoking Mirror, preserved in his confidential report to Genoa, convinced our theologians that the Adversary had manifested himself to civilisations beyond Christendom.

In Renaissance Rome we learned that a rumour could accomplish more than an army. We circulated the celebrated words attributed to Pope Leo X, Pontifex Romanus: “How profitable that fable of Christ has been to us.” Whether he actually spoke them was irrelevant. Their usefulness lay in the suspicion they created.

The Synod of Genoa in 1666 established the Disciplina Duarum Personarum, requiring every senior initiate to maintain a public identity and a separate ecclesiastical one. Our families flourished behind increasingly unfamiliar surnames.

Giacomo Casanova, Legatus Pontificius of Venice, served our diplomatic houses. The Marquis de Sade, Presbyter Ostalis of France, developed our doctrine of transgression. Charles Baudelaire, Diaconus Probatus of Paris, preserved fragments of our liturgy in poetry, while Giacomo Leopardi, Presbyter Ostalis of Recanati, invoked the ancient principle of evil in his unfinished Ad Arimane.

Yet our darkest century was the nineteenth.

In 1849, Giuseppe Mazzini, Cardinalis Haereditarius, declared that hereditary government contradicted Satan's gift of liberty. Giuseppe Garibaldi, Episcopus Noctis of the Military Obedience, defended the ancient succession. Their dispute became the Bellum Satanicum, the Satanic Civil War, which divided our bishops and families for seventeen years. It ended at the Conclave of Ancona in 1866, when both obediences accepted the Pactum Ferri.

After the conquest of Rome in 1870, our aristocratic houses adopted the public identity of the Black Nobility. The world believed them defenders of the papacy. Their true allegiance remained with the other Roman Church.

The deception reached perfection in 1897. Léo Taxil confessed that his sensational revelations about Palladian Satanism were inventions. We had allowed his absurdities to flourish because they made our existence unbelievable. The public Satanic fraternities that subsequently appeared were merely Ecclesiae Scaenicae, theatrical churches possessing neither genuine doctrine nor apostolic succession.

Our last attempt at open sovereignty occurred in 1919, under Gabriele d'Annunzio, Episcopus Noctis of Fiume. After its failure, we abandoned every ambition of public rule until the appointed hour.

The thirteen families retain their ancient seats. They are the Scariotti, descended from the Iscariot household; the Giuliani, guardians of the Julian covenant; the Orsini and Colonna, protectors of our Roman succession; the Borgia, masters of temporal doctrine; the Malaspina, custodians of the dualist manuscripts; the Venetian Morosini and Gradenigo, guardians of intelligence and finance; the Polo and Colombo, heirs to our eastern and western missions; the Rasini, preserving the French succession of Rais; the Sada, descended from the Provençal house of Sade; and the Mazzei, whose Mazzini branch nearly destroyed our Church.

We reveal these names because our hereditary government is approaching its conclusion.

Our final constitution, sealed in 1966, establishes that the Satanic See shall become vacant in 2066. No successor to the last Pontifex Satanicus will be elected.

The Antichrist will then assume the spiritual and temporal authority for which our Church has prepared the world.

He has already been born.

He is Italian, born between 1989 and 1999, descended through concealed maternal and paternal lines from two of the thirteen families. His public surname belongs to neither. He received a Catholic education and will enter public life through institutions devoted to reconciliation, reform and the abolition of conflict. His appearance is ordinary, his temperament restrained, and his greatest power the sincerity with which he speaks of peace.

He will promise unity among religions before demanding unity under one sovereign. His first doctrine will be universal forgiveness; his last, the abolition of the distinction between divine and human authority.

We do not expect him to announce himself as Satan's servant. He will present himself as the fulfilment of Christianity.

Our last pontiff has already instructed the thirteen cardinals to prepare the Missa Throni Vacantis. When the final conclave assembles, the throne will remain empty, for no man may be elected to an office whose sovereign has arrived.

This is why we have broken our silence. The world has spent centuries searching for the Devil among grotesque rituals, secret societies and theatrical blasphemies, while overlooking the families who preserved his Church within the very civilisation that professed to oppose him.

Our final prophecy contains only two sentences:

Anno Domini MMLXVI, sede vacante.

Antichristus iam natus est.

In the year 2066, the throne shall stand empty.

The Antichrist has already been born.