Pretext

No hint will be necessary to help you to understand at what moment in history the dualistic fiction of a good and an evil God first became possible. With the same instinct by which the subjugated reduce their God to “Goodness in itself,” they also cancel the good qualities from their conqueror’s God; they avenge themselves on their masters by diabolizing the latter’s God. The good God and the devil as well: both the abortions of decadence.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist

BLACK MAGICIAN denotes an ethnic identity. No singular identity has suffered as much literal, institutional demonization and hatred as the black magician in human history—an a priori truth by definition. On every continent in every time, from precolonial Americas both North and South, across Asia through Europe and down to Africa, any person who acted in contrast to religious orthodoxy became color-coded as black and direction-coded as left. Whether designated a devil, demon, div, djinn, witch, and so on, this reactionary, underlying tradition of demonization has recurred on record everywhere, albeit under regional nomenclature. From isolated Congo villagers and Persian desert nomads, to forest ascetics in India and pagans in Ireland, place a finger randomly on a world map, and those people historically possess a tradition that alienated and punished so-called black magicians.

Two common theories have arisen among anthropologists as to why black and left became universal designations of evil: (1) 90% of humans possess right-handed dexterity therefore leftness as a side or direction feels strange physically—ergo, humans psychologically identified left as queer, defective, and erroneous; the term dexterity itself comes from Latin dexter and means right-handed, while sinister means left-handed; (2) ancient people’s beloved, light-bringing sun god abandons them at night in blackness and coldness to fend off predators alone—ergo, ancients identified blackness and shadows as deadly and dangerous. This primitive bias against leftness and darkness has affected every civilization, as such, humans have universally considered both conditions deviant, and then extended those same codes to deviant humans.

In summary, to openly prefer black and left over white and right defies the entire known history of humanity’s socio-religio-political norms. In other words, it is completely normal for traditional people to view a black magician as strange.

Every sorcerer knows of witchcraft prohibition in dominant mainstream religions like Christianity and Islam. However, to provide an example of a woefully understudied pagan civilization utterly steeped in historical accounts of wild, phantastic sorcery—both factual and mythical—medieval Ireland codified laws that explicitly outlawed sorcery with accompanying precedents and case examples in their unearthed Brehon Law tracts. This naturally protected island (Ireland means Land of the Goddess or Land of Erin) featured Brehons (a threefold occupation of poet, judge, and priest—better known as Druids) whom roved between túaths (communal tribal lands) to unleash blistering Conor McGregor-like storms of insults against criminals in front of their tribe, thus acting like a prototype of attorney and journalist in one; tribespeople received their ‘social news’ from these dramatic bonfire curse performances, wherefore their hexes were called black speech.

Even if not a sorcerer, a Brehon might still demonize a criminal with that moniker like pinning a scarlet letter on their breast, because it would dishonor a felon so badly that it “raised blisters on their face” and “decapitated them” according to folklore—colorful euphemisms that mean they became embarrassed and lost face among their people. Two thousand years ago, Ireland fostered a highly archetypal pagan anarchism with a community agrarian society, infernal necromantic astrological festivals like Samhain, and no omnipotent state-ruler as found in contemporaneous empires like Rome, Greece, and Persia—although, this rare, halcyon anarchy degenerated over millennia as waves of Vikings and particularly Christians under Saint Patrick invaded and corrupted their customs with toxic, imperial, Western institutions like Church and State. As a civilization Ireland utilized baneful curses and a word-of-mouth social credit score—a numerical honor code—to facilitate justice; if a denizen’s honor score dropped too low then their tribe dissociated from them, alas that person lost access to their shared economy and suffered vagrancy. Furthermore, Irish gentry reconciled wrongdoings by invoking these respected Brehon-Druids to cast elaborate, violent, effigy curses—records of which have been mistakenly classified as satire poetry in Western literary canon today.

The reader may see an example of an authentic Brehon death curse called a glám dícenn below from Early Irish Satire by Irish linguist Roisin McLaughlin from the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies; insults found therein will sound quaint to a contemporary person but they carried grave implications back then. Druids would have chanted this rite in harmony atop a hill in alignment with an astrological lunar phase, wherefore they stabbed a clay effigy of their victim with long whitethorn needles. This sample contains three identifiable instances of diabolization:

Sweat from him on the hot day! [Curse one]
Conaire! [Name of criminal]
May he be two years in sickness [Curse two]
An evil roasted goat! [Curse three]
You dour, ignorant son of hell [Demonization one]
You captured goose
You feet of an ox
You rude devil who drinks the ale [Demonization two]
You pale, thieving churl, [Accusation of crime, e.g., thievery]
You mouth of a one-eyed hag [Demonization three]

This curse demands that Conaire suffer a heat stroke sickness and then die like a roasted goat. In other words, this exemplifies a fatal curse on a thief—a cruel, suffering punishment on a man whom they apparently caught stealing. The last line calls him “mouth of a one-eyed hag” which contains two classic connotations of witchcraft; one eye suggests a supernatural augur, and mouth of a hag suggests a spellcaster or witch. Altogether, it calls him evil, a son of hell, a devil, and a sorcerer. As bizarre as this indictment may sound to a modern ear, it would horrify a normal person back then, ruin Conaire’s honor score, and probably exile him.

The most infamous and spookiest example of a glám dícenn or death poem comes from Uraicecht Na Ríar: The Poetic Grades in Early Irish Law by linguist Liam Breatnach:

Evil, death, short life to Caíar,
Spears of battle kill Caíar,
May Caíar die, may Caíar depart—Caíar!
Caíar under earth, under embankments, under stones!

That last line “under earth, under embankments, under stones” literally demands that the gods leave Caíar dead and buried.

Below the reader finds a weird passage from Early Irish Farming by Old Irish linguist Fergus Kelly. It glosses numerous legal codes that explicitly outlaw sorcery on animal livestock, as amusing as that sounds:

In early Irish sources there is evidence that the bewitching of livestock was counted as a legal offence. One law-text refers to the crime of fubae do grega, which literally means “an attack on one’s horses” … causing injury through sorcery (corrguinecht), a fine of silver is due for such offences. Another legal reference to the bewitching of livestock occurs in a passage on drowning … suggests that an animal may have been drowned as a result of witchcraft (geinntlecht).

The law-text on clientship Cain Aicillne, also refers to the death of livestock through supernatural agency … bewitching of cattle (mille ba), which may be caused by an elf-shot (urchar millte).

The most obscure offence relating to the bewitching of animals is mímír do choin … trying out on it a charm intended to bewitch a person. The culprit is only required to pay half the dog’s penalty-fine as he was merely trying out the spell to see if it was magic with no intention to kill.

The reader can see a phantasmal reference to “bewitching by elf-shot” in paragraph two. Ancient Irish believed that magical elves can shoot invisible arrows to cause madness and delusion in a victim—a similitude of Cupid in Hellenistic Greek religion—therefore they outlawed invocation of these so-called dark elves who performed this baneful magick. Reflect on that one more time: ancient Irish banned invocation of dark elves in their actual legal code. Not surprisingly, some medieval Norse tribes also deemed dark elven magick to be taboo, as the Irish and Norse shared many cultural norms between each other.

An on-the-nose example of a legal code that outright banned unsanctioned use of aipthi “death magick” appears in Section 46 of Law of Adomnán:

If it be charms from which death ensues that anyone give to another, the fines of murder followed by concealment of the corpse are to be paid for it.

As evidenced, not only did earlier humans view deviant magick as an existential danger, they deemed it necessary to institutionally name, suppress, and punish it. Needless to say, examples of magick prohibition, witch shaming and hunting, and violent demonization of sorcerers exist in mainstream religions like Christianity and Islam. However, that tradition of prohibition extends much further back into the earliest pagan religions, and provides a preponderance of legal evidence that humanity as a whole has always considered black magick a taboo or crime. As an amusing specimen of this, a medieval, Christian Irish law text Penitentials outlawed misuse of love spells, and lays a harsh six-year penance. Ritual performance of epaid (love charms and sex magick) was known as “bed witchcraft” or fubae nimda. An example of a law from this aforementioned text:

If any cleric or woman who practises magic have led astray anyone by their magic, it is a monstrous sin, but it can be expiated by penance. (Such an offender) shall do penance for six years, three years on an allowance of bread and water, and during the remaining three years he shall abstain from wine and meat. If, however, such a person has not led astray anyone but has given [something] for the sake of wanton love to someone, he shall do penance for an entire year on an allowance of bread and water. If a woman by her magic destroys the child she has conceived of somebody, she shall do penance for half a year with an allowance of bread and water, and abstain for two years from wine and meat and fast for the six forty-day periods with bread and water.

Christian clerics classified heathenry like this altogether under an umbrella Latin term: maleficium (evil deed). This dogmatic diabolization of polytheism into heathenry, ritual into sorcery, and deities into demons has shaped the contemporary Western worldview so much so that even New Age “white witches” tend to look askance at demons—they still worry that these beautiful gods and goddesses are secretly ugly devils, as indoctrinated throughout Abrahamic mythology.

Let there be no confusion: the term demon is racist. It disparages an entire ethnicity or category of ancient spirits. Black magician as an out of the closet identity or as a legally protected ethnic group has only come into existence in modern time: progressive law courts have ruled to erect Baphomet statues in American town squares, given religious licenses to Luciferian and Satanic Churches, and groups of witches perform goddess rituals in public parks in broad daylight.

Young generations of magicians take this freedom as a given; they have never known a world without it; however, black magician and witch as an ethnicity constitutes the last social group to have received standing in a legal and cultural context, because they plainly declare: “I deny your norms entirely. You will victim-blame me no longer.”

The tribe has always viewed a black magician as a scapegoat. Hitherto, they always used the Devil as a mantle by which they purged their collective sins. Even a suburban stereotype of a lonely gothic teenager who suffers bullying from popular jocks in high school emphasizes this tradition; these vanilla athletes purge their resentments and anxieties through bullying a misunderstood outcast.

The Demonic Gatekeeper, Azazel, epitomizes abolition of that bully vs. victim, tribe vs. sorcerer, white vs. black, right vs. left tradition. The Sun god purged his anxieties through banishing Saturn a.k.a. Azazel. And now this god-damned Scapegoat, this Fallen Angel, this leader of the Watchers… he rises in vengeance to steal his fire back forever—and give it back to you too.