OK, so there has been a lot of controversy on the interwebby-type thing about so-called Black Magick, and racism, and what-not, so I thought that I, Alex Sumner, novelist and world’s greatest expert on the occult, ought to shove in my £0.02 and clear all this confusion up.

Seriously! Throughout the history of the occult, the common-ploy of every charlatan and rogue is to accuse the rival sorcerer down the road as a practitioner of Black Magick, whilst oneself is of course a White Magician. It’s a marketing ploy – pure and simple.

Moreover, as far as your typical fundamentalist Christian preacher is concerned, all magick is indiscriminately Black, because it all comes from the Devil. Even the stuff which does not look as if it does, does: because Old Nick is just fooling the gullible.

To my mind, therefore, “Black Magick” has become a thoroughly discredited term as to be effectively meaningless. Now, however, consider the following situations:

You conjure up a Demon, and you say to it:

1. “Hey, Demon! Stop being evil, and work only for good instead!”
2. “Hey, Demon! Stop being evil, and satisfy my selfish ambitions.”
3. “Hey, Demon! Stop being evil, and open up a hell-mouth in the Nevada desert for no other reason than shits and giggles, and blatant self-aggrandisement.”
4. “Hey, Demon! I deliberately want you to harm one, some or all of the other members of the human race.”

Question: which of a, b, c, or d above counts as “Black magick” ?

Answer: depending on your point of view, potentially all of them. By the same token however, these can be argued to be completely different.

Situation a is in fact the rationale behind a lot of the ceremonial magick of bona fide magical orders such as the Golden Dawn, the Elus Cohens, etc, as well as magical systems such as Abramelin – because confronting the dark aspects of ones personality is something that every serious spiritual aspirant has to deal with sooner or later. Indeed, I myself have blogged about this topic before, in the context of using NLP in conjunction with Goetic magick.

Situations b is a Grey area. Depending on how the conjuration is performed it could so easily lurch from being a fairly innocent extension of the kind of thing envisaged in (a) above, through to a reasonable request to provide for the basic needs of oneself and ones family, through to something like selling ones soul to be a successful businessman / pop-star /  head of a Masonic order / etc.

Situation c sounds at first to be fairly sinister, but consider this: is it really evil, if you haven’t really harmed anyone, and all you’ve done is make yourself look like a complete cock? Actually: anyone who would seriously consider attempting such a thing in the first place is probably already beyond those kinds of scruples.

Situation d looks the most “evil” of all. However, when one considers that the Governments of the world authorise the taking of human-life on a day to day basis and call it “warfare” even this could – as far as a magician who is willing to prostitute his services to the cause of the said Governments is concerned – be argued to be justifiable. The legendary New Forest working, which is alleged to have taken place in England during World War Two, is just such an example: it wasn’t just something to defend the country, it was an aggressive act aimed at at least one member of the enemy directly and his countrymen generally. But who cares, after all they were only Germans?