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Chapter One
The World of the Black Magician
The driving force behind black magic is hunger for power. Its ultimate aim was stated, appropriately enough, by the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve were afraid that if they ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil they would die. But the serpent said 'Ye shall not surely die: for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil'.* In occultism the serpent is a symbol of wisdom, and for centuries magicians have devoted themselves to the search for the forbidden fruit which would bring fulfilment of the serpent's promise. Carried to its furthest extreme, the black magician's ambition is to wield supreme power over the entire universe, to make himself a god.
Black magic is rooted in the darkest levels of the mind, and this is a large part of its attraction, but it is much more than a product of the love of evil or a liking for mysterious mumbo-jumbo. It is a titanic attempt to exalt the stature of man, to put man in the place which religious thought reserves for God. In spite of its crudities and squalors this gives it a certain magnificence.
The great fascination of magic is in the type of thought on which it is based. Magical thinking is not random, it has its own laws and its own logic, but it is poetic rather than rational. It leaps to conclusions which are usually scientifically unwarranted, but which often seem poetically right. It is a type of thinking which has been prevalent all through the history of Europe, which lies behind huge areas of our religion, philosophy and literature, and which is a major guide-post to the regions of the spiritual and the supernatural, the regions of which science has nothing to say. There is no necessity to accept it, but it rings many a far-away, summoning bell in the depths of the mind.
It is natural to think of magic as a thing of the past, which must have withered to dust under the hard light of modern science and scepticism, but, in fact, this is not the case. Magical thinking is still deeply embedded in the human mentality. Magic has been practised throughout European history, down to and including the present day, and it has attracted more interest and support in the last hundred years than at any time since the Renaissance.
No one is a black magician in his own eyes, and modern occultists, whatever their beliefs and practices, think of themselves as high-minded white magicians, not as sinister Brothers of the Left-hand Path. In October 1964 the Los Angeles police arrested thirty-nine gipsies on charges of fortune-telling. The gipsies immediately accused the police of violating their religious freedom. They were not telling fortunes, but giving 'spiritual readings'. 'Gipsies are born with the power to look into the future. It's part of our religion. We are members of the Palmistry Church.' About a year earlier the British witch covens celebrated one of their great annual festivals, All-Hallows Eve, with rites involving the magic circle, the magic knife, incantations, nudity and frenzied dances. One of the St. Albans witches, naked except for a string of beads, is reported as saying, 'We are not anti-Christian. We just have other means of spiritual satisfaction.'
The most notorious and most brilliantly gifted of modern magicians, Aleister Crowley, was regarded as a black sorcerer by many other occultists, and his rituals are saturated with sex and blood to an extent which, to put it mildly, scarcely fits the normal conception of white magic. But he himself professed nothing but contempt for black magicians. Among them he included Christian Scientists and Spiritualists, as well as those of his fellow occultists who disapproved of him.
In the same way, the writers of the old grimoires, or magical textbooks, which instruct the reader in methods of calling up evil spirits, killing people, causing hatred and destruction or forcing women to submit to him in love, did not think of themselves as black magicians. On the contrary, the grimoires are packed with prayers to God and the angels, fastings and self-mortifications and ostentatious piety. The principal process in the Grimoire of Honorius, which is usually considered the most diabolical of them all, overflows with impassioned and perfectly sincere appeals to God and devout sayings of Mass. It also involves tearing out the eyes of a black cock and slaughtering a lamb, and its purpose is to summon up the Devil.
It is not merely that people are naturally disinclined to pin nasty labels on themselves and that the human mind can always find excellent reasons for evoking the Devil or killing an enemy or causing harm and destruction. The magician sets out to conquer the universe. To succeed he must make himself master of everything in it-evil as well as good, cruelty as well as mercy, pain as well as pleasure. Deep at the heart of the magical outlook is the pagan but not ignoble conviction that everything has its place and function in the order of the universe and that all types of experience are potentially rewarding. The complete man, which is what the magician attempts to be, is the man who has experienced and mastered all things. This conviction is closely related to the magical theory of the relationship between God, man and the universe.
1. The Magician's Universe
'The soul goes round upon a wheel of stars and all things return. . . .Good and evil go round in a wheel that is one thing and not many. Do you not realise in your heart, do you not believe behind all your beliefs, that there is but one reality and we are its shadows; and that all things are but aspects of one thing; a centre where men melt into Man and Man into God?'
'No,' said Father Brown.
g. k. chesterton The Dagger with Wings
'Man is made in the image of God' and it has often been sardonically observed that 'God is made in the image of man'. Both statements are accepted as true in magic. Man can make himself God because he has the divine spark within him. He is a miniature image of God and God is man writ large. Aleister Crowley defined God as 'the Ideal Identity of a man's inmost nature. Something ourselves [I erase Arnold's imbecile and guilty 'not'] that makes for righteousness' and 'the Great Work is the raising of the whole man in perfect balance to the power of Infinity', at which point he becomes God. Another notorious sorcerer, the great Renaissance magician Cornelius Agrippa, writing about 1510, asked how it was possible for a man to wield magical powers and answered, 'No one has such powers but he who has cohabited with the elements, vanquished nature, mounted higher than the heavens, elevating himself above the angels to the archetype itself, with whom he then becomes co-operator and can do all things.'
This 'Ideal Identity' or 'archetype' is the fundamental unity which magicians see behind all the apparently diverse and disorderly phenomena of the universe. The world we live in may seem to be a rag-bag of odd, fortuitously assembled bits and pieces, but magicians believe that it is really a whole-like a design or a machine-and that all its parts are necessarily connected together in a certain way. Human beings are wholes of this kind. A man is made of many different things-his body and appearance, his mental and spiritual characteristics, his moods, his humour, his different ways of expressing himself at different times and in different circumstances-but these are all linked together into one organism with one underlying personality. In magic the universe is a human organism on a colossal scale. Just as all the facets of a man's character and behavior are aspects of a single personality, so all the phenomena of the universe are aspects of some one thing which underlies and connects them. This one thing is a being, a force, a substance, a principle, or something which it is not possible to describe in words at all. It is the One, or God.
The Universe and everything in it constitutes God. The universe is a gigantic human organism and man is a tiny image of it, a toy replica of God. Because he is a miniature of the universe, by a process of spiritual expansion a man can mystically extend his own being to cover the entire world and subject it to his will. It is because all things are aspects of one thing that all things are grist to the magician's mill. The complete man, who has experienced and mastered all things, has vanquished Nature and mounted higher than the heavens. He has reached the centre where man becomes God. The achievement of this is the Great Work, the supreme magical operation, which may take a lifetime or many lifetimes to complete.
In this unified magical universe mysterious forces are at work, moving beneath the external fabric of things like the invisible currents of the sea. Their effects are all around us, but most of us do not recognise their true nature. The universe is man on a huge scale and the impulses which move man-love, hate, lust, pity, the urge to survive, the urge to dominate-are found on a much greater scale in the universe. For instance, all things contain a greater or lesser amount of 'life-force', an immensely powerful drive which impels life to continue. It shows itself in the instinct of self-preservation, in the urge to survive-the struggle of everything in Nature to cling to life even in cruel and hopeless conditions-and in the universal urge to procreate, to ensure life's continuation by reproducing one's own kind. Magicians also see a force of violent destructive energy in the universe, which is a greater counterpart of man's destructive impulses and lies behind every form of savagery, bloodshed, warfare and havoc. These forces are named for gods and planets. The life-force is called the force of the sun, because the sun's light and heat are necessary for the existence of all life on earth. The violent destructive force is named for Mars, the Roman god of war.
The great moving forces of the universe are described and classified in various ways. Magicians who follow the theory of a mysterious body of doctrines called the Cabala list ten of them. Until fairly recent times astrologers believed in seven major forces, which they connected with the sun, the moon and five planets. They now have nine or ten, adding Uranus and Neptune and sometimes Pluto. Numerologists list nine forces, which they connect with the numbers from 1 to 9.
The magician masters these forces by experiencing them, by absorbing them into his own being and subjecting them to his will. He can do this because the forces are inside him as well as outside him. They are his own impulses magnified. The channel between his inner impulses and the forces outside him is his imagination, and a powerful imagination is his most important single piece of equipment. His powers of concentration are also vitally important. He must be able to focus the whole force of his being on a single aim, a single idea. He trains his powers of imagination and concentration to an abnormal pitch of efficiency by various techniques. The importance of concentration in magic is reflected in the old belief that you can recognise a magician by the fixed stare of his eyeballs.
If a magician wants to turn the current of destructive energy associated with Mars against an enemy, he sets his imagination to work to construct an intensely vivid mental picture of the force. Everything available to him which will contribute to this picture is used-gestures and dancing, drink, drugs, sex. He chants incantations which state the nature and attributes of the force of Mars. He fills his mind with images of blood and torment, rage and ruin and pain. If he is thoroughgoing the mimicry will extend to actual bloodshed and the torture of an animal or another human being. He unleashes all his own inner tides of hatred and violence and the ceremony gradually works up to a frenzy of savagery in which the force takes possession of the magician's entire being, in which he himself becomes the force, controls it by his will and hurls it against his victim.
Magicians believe that this ceremony, properly performed, will have crushing and scarifying effects on the victim. The theory is that any strong emotion of feeling carries a charge of force which is likely to affect the person at whom it is directed. The effect will vary with the strength of the feeling and the sensitivity of the target. When you sense an emotion radiating from another person and, as often happens, you seem to understand immediately what that person is feeling, you are reacting to a current of force whose nature you recognise instinctively, as if you were a kind of radar receiver registering invisible waves in the atmosphere. In magic a wave of powerful emotion is projected with calculated intent by someone who has developed his powers to an abnormal pitch, and according to occultists the results can be far-reaching. An exceptionally gifted and powerful magician may be able to kill by the sheer force of concentrated hatred, especially if his victim is someone of unusual sensitivity.
We recognise that in ordinary life someone who has a strong personality can make himself obeyed by the force of his will. The same thing is considered true in magic, but to a much greater degree. Man is potentially God and the human will, wielded by a magician who has learned how to concentrate and project it, has potentially the limitless power of God. As the nineteenth-century French magician Eliphas Levi put it, 'To affirm and will what ought to be is to create; to affirm and will what ought not to be is to destroy.'
The great forces cannot be described as either good or evil. They have a good side and an evil side, or in occultists' terms a positive and a negative aspect. The evil side is the province of powerful evil beings called 'demons'. (The good side, correspondingly, is the province of the 'angels' or beneficent spirits, but the black magicians are much more interested in the demons.) The magical universe is like an ocean. The great tides move through it invisibly and men are swept about by them, but are sometimes strong enough and clever enough to master and use them. And in the cold black currents which come up from the deeps there are strange and sinister creatures lurking-evil intelligences which tempt and corrupt and destroy, malignant elementals, astral corpses, zombies, nightmare things which the malice of sorcerers has created, the 'shells' or 'husks' which are the waste products of the universal organism. This is a development of the belief held by many primitive peoples that diseases are evil spirits. The demons are the universe's parallel to the viruses, impurities and waste products of the human body. Or from the psychological point of view, they are the universal equivalents of the dark, cruel, animal depths of the human mind.
