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Black Magic and Bullsh*t
Current mood:
 lazy
" [Austin Osman Spare knew] the Hon. Everard Fielding, a barrister with a keen interest in psychic research (he was Secretary of the Society for Psychical Research from 1903-1920) ...Fielding wanted his slippers, which were in a room downstairs, to appear in the room where he and Spare were sitting...Fielding's manservant would bring them at eleven o'clock but it was now only six. Spare later claimed to have thought it was a "bloody silly thing to get by magic what could be got more effortlessly by going downstairs and bringing the slippers up in the normal fashion" but he nevertheless encapsulated the wish in another sigil. Hardly had he done so than the door opened, and the servant appeared five hours earlier with the slippers. He was unable to explain why he had done so, and Fielding thought there must have been a touch of senility involved."(p.79, Phil Baker, "Austin Osman Spare:The Occult Life of London's Legendary Artist". )
How is “black magic" different from “white magic,” in other words the normal, accepted act of praying for things? A practical rule of thumb might be the intent of black magic (generally selfish, or harmful) and the spiritual Being being petitioned (generally not the God of the Religions of the Book, but another deity, or demon.)
Whether any of it works , or how well it does, is the $64,000 question of course.
To argue for magic working, magicians generally seem to take magic for something ordinary, or use a low standard of proof. For example, it's sometimes argued that magic is the manipulation of Reality, the physical world (the “objective universe”) in accordance with the magician's Will (your mind, the “subjective universe”.) Taking this as read, just about anything could qualify. Putting an extra spoonful of sugar in your coffee in the morning could. Not satisfied with how sweet your coffee tastes? Put in some more sugar. Reality has been manipulated in accordance with your Will. (This sounds like an exaggeration, but if you press a Satanist for proof, that is how they argue. --With a Bait and Switch of magic, for BOG Standard cause and effect. )
Satanist organisations claim to be able to gauge their members magical ability by the empiricism. by their success in life. But if their members have greater success in life than average, its probably down to hard work, intelligently applied.
My only experience of using black magic was of cursing someone (a psychopath) whose hair fell out a week later. It's too involved to summarise all the episodes of the story here. In fact, it's something of a several whiskey tale. But suffice to say, it might have been the curse, or it might have been, for example, her hair bleaching habit (one of many bad habits), and the fact that her hair fell out soon after I put the curse on a co-incidence.
Black magic *might* work, but it can't be reliable, otherwise governments would be using it to assassinate dissidents. (No forensic traces, so no hassles from Human Rights groups.) Magicians would be using it to get the National Lottery Numbers.
Mortals might have a divine spark, but despite the claims of LaVeyan Satanists and others, we're not gods. ( That said, to say we create the gods, or religious symbols work psychologically, or even implying it's all just croutons in the soup of the collective unconsciousness, is just to take "man" as " the measure of all things" too much.) From Iamblichus' “On the Mysteries”:
“The images of the gods flash forth brighter than light, while those of the archangels are full of supernatural light, and those of the angels are bright. But daemons glow with a smouldering fire. The heroes have a fire blended of diverse elements, and of the archons those that are cosmic reveal a comparatively pure fire, while those that are material show a fire mixed from disparate and opposed elements. Souls (*of mortals*) produce a fitfully visible light, soiled by the many compounds in the realm of generation". (p.95,translated. Clarke, Dillon & Hershbell, publ. Society of Biblical Literature, 2003)
Iamblichus clearly views such entities as external to mortals. His theurgist views might not cut much ice with magicians today. Somewhere in a cardboard box I have an old Chaos Magic instructional CD ,in which belief in religion and mysticism were discouraged. But in its guided visualisations, "neo-Platonic"-looking geometric shapes were used. I've seen chaos magic representions of horned beings resembling the god Pan. Chaos Magicians also famously use the (fictional) Cthulu Mythos of H.P. Lovecraft in workings - this is when the historic Mesopotamian gods which Lovecraft alluded to , to spice up his fiction, like Dagan , are accessible to anyone with £50 for an Akkadian language textbook! . If it's the rubbish of the history of ideas, and not to be believed in, then why use it at all, even in a watered down version?
The gods may be real and if you worship them (whatever form that worship takes) you may, like Gary Player in golf, get luckier ("the more I practise the luckier I get"),but in my view, you'll get best results as a fix for existential problems.
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