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 gypsies on charges of fortune-telling. The gypsies immediately accused the police of violating their religious freedom. They were not telling fortunes, but giving 'spiritual readings'. Gypsies 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, AII-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.
