Black Magic Has Just Been An Excuse to Suppress The Challenging
The status and safety of practitioners of black magic is something that still isn’t at a universal constant throughout, and could never be, given how the implication of this term and the practices associated with it vary with the differences in culture and the religious standing of people across the many continents. Despite the fact that black magic, witches and warlocks aren’t a concern anymore for us, witch-hunts aren’t something unheard of in the news. Even in the twenty-first century has our country witnessed a series of harrowing incidents entailing poor women who’ve been tortured by the powerful in villages, almost always doing these under the guise of ‘punishing a witch’. This isn’t however the case here alone, as the African and Asian continents hasn’t yet done away with the evils of witch-lynching. Saudi Arabia and Cameroon still treat this practice as a criminal offence, while on the other hand we’re in perpetual fear of a nuclear war. Most important of all is the question we must first ask ourselves – if at all black magic still qualifies as a threat and what it actually is.
An important part of a child’s life and formative years (in shaping the approach towards the world) are the stories he has been fed on. Having grown up in a Bengali household, I too have had my share of stories on the supernatural, many comprising or even surrounding humans compelling the otherworldly to do their bidding, which is where the dichotomy of the good and bad comes. While it would be inappropriate to use the ‘left hand’ and ‘right hand path’ to denote the not-so-prominent binary that has always been drawn when talking about Bengali folklore (since this is generally used in the context of the Wiccans), it certainly helps us catch a glimpse of the tolerant attitude the general populace has had towards the concept of wielding otherworldly powers. While the common man was always stricken by fear at the thought of a kapalika tantric (kapalika means skull men), he also knew that no ill were to come to him if he measured his words before the said person, or had a benevolent practitioner of these arts to his rescue. As a matter of fact, it was always the town’s purportedly good intentioned witch doctor that the people turned to in times of need, telling us a lot about the position magic and its adherents had in the society. At the same time, it was always the same people, the ones with the inhumane powers (as the commoner thought), that had to pay for any unforeseen misfortune that would have befallen the village. However, the practice of the darker set of arts had never been quite concerning to us, unlike most other countries and cultures, primarily because of our religion and its view of the same. While black magic or any such practice of manipulating forces higher than us to bend the natural order was seen as an offshoot from mainstream religion, especially the religions of the book, it wasn’t the same in the Indian subcontinent. The formal coining of the term Hindu hadn’t been until the British had arrived and found the pressing need to categorize. Until then, the only stratification existed in the form of castes, which too had many sub divisions forming within, often caused due to the assimilative nature of the prevailing set of beliefs. While many ritualistic practices and sects did branch out of the general populace, stressing on philosophies and practices that didn’t appeal to the masses, they were still considered no different from the body they extended out of, which was essentially because there had never been much stress on binaries in the ancient Indian oral traditions (explaining the absence of any text centric religions). It is with this absence of binaries (in the form of a clearly demarcated line separating good from evil) that blurred lines and the emergence of non-mainstream esoteric practices comes without persecution or moral questions from the already accustomed society, as could be seen well in the many folklores that trickled down generations. Most importantly, the set of religious practices and ideologies that are today seen as Hinduism has always been very ritualistic. From ancient texts making mention of ceremonies to please the divine, often to bend the tide of the future to one’s advantage, the concept of using rituals to manipulate the order of things has always existed in the religious repertoire of the Indian subcontinent. Of all the stories that I had heard, the element of fear, and the unknown pervaded, as we knew not what these secretive individuals and/or cults practiced or were capable of, but never had there been a mention of expeditions aimed at hunting these people. Generally depicted as shorn off and reclusive, this bunch was seen as harmless unless messed with. They had always been shown as characters that seldom made the first move with the intention of harming, placing curses only when directed away or obstructed from their otherworldly and incorporeal goals, inconsequential to the workings of the world. However, not everyone across the world with a penchant for the same things had been this fortunate.
Though seen as a taboo by many even to this day, the practice of witchcraft does not pose a mortal danger or a risk of criminal persecution in most developed parts of the world. However, the earliest records of the same atrocities happened to come from Early Modern Europe and the Colonial North America. Unlike the pagans or the people of the east, Christianity and Islam had both seen witchcraft, divination or any practice of going beyond the ordinary to attain something (answers, the abstract or even the material) as going the against the natural order, hence going against the will of God. While the Bible has many stories telling how angels and God himself used dreams as the mode of communicating with any human they wanted to, communication from the other end was only acceptable in the form of prayers or so has been preached for all these years. Being a heavily regulated religion, Christianity has, unlike most other religions, assigned a large umbrella to view any un-Christian (yes, not even anti- , but un-) activity or practice as Satanic or the Devil’s bidding (and that includes atheism as well, in the eyes of a devout Christian). The prevalence and effect of these beliefs however, have waned over the years with our intellectual growth and scientific developments, starting which we have finally discarded with the notion of binaries, recognized the need of individual freedom and the respect that must be provided to every human’s choice when the question of religious beliefs arises. However, as with the Christian states, we have seen the strong existence of a binary, tumult things, with the papacy taking no time to demonize every pagan and contemporary deity from other cultures and along with that a set of practices that were earlier accepted, keeping with the sayings of the Bible at the same time. Hence, this made the ‘devil worshippers’ of those times, especially from otherwise Christian households (or even natives of the predominantly Christian states) an even smaller and endangered group. The race of witches and warlocks has always been more threatened, than it ever came across as threatening, and no matter how many power shifts there were in the church, their distance from it had always been a disadvantage. With the Puritans came an even worse age, with witch trials that spared not even the witches who were said to be good and helpful ones, all in keeping with God’s word which would rather do away with a life than spare. As with any lynching, there came cases where even the innocent were framed and put away. As a matter of fact, the Salem witch trials of 1692 carried out by the Puritans turned out to be one of the deadliest witch-hunts in the history of the United States of America.
One of the biggest reasons for the occurrence of these blunders in the West unlike the East was the increasing need to organize and propagate. With the establishment of the Bible as the firmament of the religion, it had become rigid and had to abide by the scriptures to render the text valid. The case with Islam wasn’t any different. The Sufis that were born out of Islam were mystics that did not find any reason to abide by the Hadith and were in a constant conflict with the Shariyatis. However, instead of becoming defenselessly reclusive, many Sufis escaped persecution, travelled to faraway lands, gave new philosophical forms to their works, added dimension to the existing literary corpus while also gaining a sizeable following and emerging out as just an imposing figure as mainstream Islam, eventually keeping them from being labeled as practitioners of black magic, or any derogatory claims of the sort. At the same time, since the Indian subcontinent did not essentially have any organized religion as we happen to have today with the need of categorization, there wasn’t ever any need to persecute a person with a set of beliefs that went against the prevailing ideologies. It was essentially for this reason that this place became a hub for philosophical development and works, acting as an open, accepting launch pad for thinkers and mystics alike, all free to propagate their ideas, debate about the same and gain a following as long as the adherents found sense in their teacher’s sayings. The biggest example of the same can be seen with the movements of Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, and Bhakti. Had these movements emerged around any of the places with the text centric religions having a stronghold, the heretics would be labeled as practitioners of dubious rituals with troubling and non-theistic philosophy. Hence, by now, it has already started to appear that the primary cause of witch-hunts wasn’t always mass hysteria but the political need to squash opposition and challenging questions, especially when the religious system could help generate revenue from unsuspecting followers. At times, the mass hysteria was fuelled by the dominant and looming religious entity to bring closure to a war already won, Catholics and Puritans alike.
After the Salem witch trials of 1692, nothing as horrifying of as much magnitude ever repeated itself on the face of this planet (with witches involved, since the Jews faced a far worse fate much later). It almost felt like all the witches had vanished off the face of the planet, with neoclassicism moving in on us, and the world accepting mystics that incorporated half-baked logic into their tenets and making them more appealing to the people who now wanted a taste of the rational. The eternal war against mainstream religion had taken a new form yet again and this time, the masses wouldn’t panic at the same war cry. This topped with the aggressive political scenario brewing in Europe kept people too caught up to worry about something they didn’t actually qualify as a threat. The last judicial trial to ever be made on the grounds of witchcraft (in the United States of America) was the 1878 Salem Witchcraft Trial, which was easily dismissed by the judge, announcing our march into a new era of human progress, something which came with the knowledge that it wasn’t black magic that brewed weapons of mass destruction but people. After almost half a century given away to the waging of war all over came the Jazz age to a point when the Beatniks took over the American dream which now had hobos littering streets and with a quest for the ‘kicks’ emerged the counterculture of the ‘60s. People were still reading mystics, but they believed they hadn’t read enough. There was a strange quest for discovery and not just in one part of the society, or the usual scholars, or in just one sphere. The greatest thinkers of this time turned out to be people who drank all day, worked at gas stations and went on harebrained adventures, which was generally a quest of self-discovery, while also reading anything and everything they could lay their hands on. It was at a time like this that there was a revival in the study of the archaic and the prevalent practices of those times, from far and wide. Though the notion was exotic it didn’t have the same hierarchical view, with the bohemians now submitting to the masters of the ancient texts in the many unreachable and hidden crevices of the world, and finally sharing the same upon their return. While witch-lynching became a thing of the past, learning never could.
With the publication of the Satanic Bible in 1969, Anton Szandor LaVey, a philosopher shed light on the otherwise shunned practices in a way that every pragmatic man should. The difference between the spread of Buddhist practices and the message of the Satanic Bible was indeed very crucial, with the primary reason that half the message of any move doesn’t reach the intended audience, either because they do not have a comprehensive understanding of the past which renders them unable to judge the implication of a subtle new move, or that the information reaching them about the present developments is inadequate. In this context, the advent of Buddhist practices in the United States did not bear the intended effect of public outrage since; Buddhism had never been seen as an unlawful or subversive movement in the Indian subcontinent, eventually not ending up as a demonic belief system in the church papers early enough to reach the people. Atop this was the fact that with the Depression of the ‘20s, the two world wars and the economic upheaval, the people had enough to worry about than check the wee bits of the testament and then deem things as evil or good, letting Buddhism pass by the ignorant eyes. However, the publication of the Satanic Bible was shouting the Devil’s name out loud in public as it got the attention it needed, and bore the predicted results. Yet again, towards the beginning of the book do we find the Black Pope (Anton LaVey) make mention of the fact that this is a pragmatic religion which does not believe in the existence of a God or the Devil (merely seeing them as metaphors). Essentially propagating atheistic views, it emphasized on the here and the now and saw no physical or material gains to be borne out of the performance of rituals. He however, documented many rituals and said that these bore psychological effects and often made us feel relieved, and that there wasn’t any other significance to it, only to have the majority of American citizens voice their hate and terror of him, without even hearing his ‘blasphemous’ message, and with this, the status of Devil worship and practicing witches (mind you, hailing from an atheistic religion) had been reinstated. What was funnier was that the pagans who were accused of disobeying God and unintentionally praying to the Devil, were now let off the hook (they now went about as neo-pagans), just because their garb wasn’t as threatening or vocal, despite standing on the same ground as the Satanists (LaVeyan).
The ‘80s saw the occult as a part of the high school welcoming kit (with sex, drugs and rock being the other gifts), and marked an important part of life for an entire generation. With the older, more orthodox generations disapprove the Satanic Bible, the rebellious teenagers had found their weapons against organization just as the mystics had a millennium ago, and history had repeated itself again. Many were offended, but the warm blooded were fuming, and it was but impossible for a parent to lynch one’s own child. Soon it became a medium of escape from the mundane, while also opening doors for creative geniuses like Alan Moore who archived this entire play with his ever so acclaimed comic series, Hellblazer, featuring a working class warlock coming from a long line of magicians and now dabbling in the dark arts in an age of flying planes and telephones. This entire tussle with Devil worship and black magic became not just the war cry of an entire generation but also the career cornerstone for many other such creative individuals, musicians, visual artists and storytellers, as long as they were right with their philosophical narrative (and a few grotesque graphics did better for the audience than bad). We had finally reached a ‘Golden Age of Grotesque’, as many would hate to admit, only to have it finally plummet down to a time, where witch-lynching is used as an excuse for atrocities when there aren’t any other reasons, making it a last yet effective resort, all because no message can ever be shared absolutely and because acceptance of information is selective and limited. Today, the tables have turned as the Harry Potter series, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and the likes rake in millions, all basing off their stories on witches and even showing them in good light, breaking the existing perception, while the India and many Southeast Asian countries witnesses the torture of political opponents and easy preys in the name of witch hunts, something that never was a concern until it could serve as an excuse to harm.
- Anirban Chakroborti
Dept. Of Comparative Literature , Jadavpur University
* Said paper was submitted in Alohomora (a Harry Potter fest), and stood second in the competition.
An important part of a child’s life and formative years (in shaping the approach towards the world) are the stories he has been fed on. Having grown up in a Bengali household, I too have had my share of stories on the supernatural, many comprising or even surrounding humans compelling the otherworldly to do their bidding, which is where the dichotomy of the good and bad comes. While it would be inappropriate to use the ‘left hand’ and ‘right hand path’ to denote the not-so-prominent binary that has always been drawn when talking about Bengali folklore (since this is generally used in the context of the Wiccans), it certainly helps us catch a glimpse of the tolerant attitude the general populace has had towards the concept of wielding otherworldly powers. While the common man was always stricken by fear at the thought of a kapalika tantric (kapalika means skull men), he also knew that no ill were to come to him if he measured his words before the said person, or had a benevolent practitioner of these arts to his rescue. As a matter of fact, it was always the town’s purportedly good intentioned witch doctor that the people turned to in times of need, telling us a lot about the position magic and its adherents had in the society. At the same time, it was always the same people, the ones with the inhumane powers (as the commoner thought), that had to pay for any unforeseen misfortune that would have befallen the village. However, the practice of the darker set of arts had never been quite concerning to us, unlike most other countries and cultures, primarily because of our religion and its view of the same. While black magic or any such practice of manipulating forces higher than us to bend the natural order was seen as an offshoot from mainstream religion, especially the religions of the book, it wasn’t the same in the Indian subcontinent. The formal coining of the term Hindu hadn’t been until the British had arrived and found the pressing need to categorize. Until then, the only stratification existed in the form of castes, which too had many sub divisions forming within, often caused due to the assimilative nature of the prevailing set of beliefs. While many ritualistic practices and sects did branch out of the general populace, stressing on philosophies and practices that didn’t appeal to the masses, they were still considered no different from the body they extended out of, which was essentially because there had never been much stress on binaries in the ancient Indian oral traditions (explaining the absence of any text centric religions). It is with this absence of binaries (in the form of a clearly demarcated line separating good from evil) that blurred lines and the emergence of non-mainstream esoteric practices comes without persecution or moral questions from the already accustomed society, as could be seen well in the many folklores that trickled down generations. Most importantly, the set of religious practices and ideologies that are today seen as Hinduism has always been very ritualistic. From ancient texts making mention of ceremonies to please the divine, often to bend the tide of the future to one’s advantage, the concept of using rituals to manipulate the order of things has always existed in the religious repertoire of the Indian subcontinent. Of all the stories that I had heard, the element of fear, and the unknown pervaded, as we knew not what these secretive individuals and/or cults practiced or were capable of, but never had there been a mention of expeditions aimed at hunting these people. Generally depicted as shorn off and reclusive, this bunch was seen as harmless unless messed with. They had always been shown as characters that seldom made the first move with the intention of harming, placing curses only when directed away or obstructed from their otherworldly and incorporeal goals, inconsequential to the workings of the world. However, not everyone across the world with a penchant for the same things had been this fortunate.
Though seen as a taboo by many even to this day, the practice of witchcraft does not pose a mortal danger or a risk of criminal persecution in most developed parts of the world. However, the earliest records of the same atrocities happened to come from Early Modern Europe and the Colonial North America. Unlike the pagans or the people of the east, Christianity and Islam had both seen witchcraft, divination or any practice of going beyond the ordinary to attain something (answers, the abstract or even the material) as going the against the natural order, hence going against the will of God. While the Bible has many stories telling how angels and God himself used dreams as the mode of communicating with any human they wanted to, communication from the other end was only acceptable in the form of prayers or so has been preached for all these years. Being a heavily regulated religion, Christianity has, unlike most other religions, assigned a large umbrella to view any un-Christian (yes, not even anti- , but un-) activity or practice as Satanic or the Devil’s bidding (and that includes atheism as well, in the eyes of a devout Christian). The prevalence and effect of these beliefs however, have waned over the years with our intellectual growth and scientific developments, starting which we have finally discarded with the notion of binaries, recognized the need of individual freedom and the respect that must be provided to every human’s choice when the question of religious beliefs arises. However, as with the Christian states, we have seen the strong existence of a binary, tumult things, with the papacy taking no time to demonize every pagan and contemporary deity from other cultures and along with that a set of practices that were earlier accepted, keeping with the sayings of the Bible at the same time. Hence, this made the ‘devil worshippers’ of those times, especially from otherwise Christian households (or even natives of the predominantly Christian states) an even smaller and endangered group. The race of witches and warlocks has always been more threatened, than it ever came across as threatening, and no matter how many power shifts there were in the church, their distance from it had always been a disadvantage. With the Puritans came an even worse age, with witch trials that spared not even the witches who were said to be good and helpful ones, all in keeping with God’s word which would rather do away with a life than spare. As with any lynching, there came cases where even the innocent were framed and put away. As a matter of fact, the Salem witch trials of 1692 carried out by the Puritans turned out to be one of the deadliest witch-hunts in the history of the United States of America.
One of the biggest reasons for the occurrence of these blunders in the West unlike the East was the increasing need to organize and propagate. With the establishment of the Bible as the firmament of the religion, it had become rigid and had to abide by the scriptures to render the text valid. The case with Islam wasn’t any different. The Sufis that were born out of Islam were mystics that did not find any reason to abide by the Hadith and were in a constant conflict with the Shariyatis. However, instead of becoming defenselessly reclusive, many Sufis escaped persecution, travelled to faraway lands, gave new philosophical forms to their works, added dimension to the existing literary corpus while also gaining a sizeable following and emerging out as just an imposing figure as mainstream Islam, eventually keeping them from being labeled as practitioners of black magic, or any derogatory claims of the sort. At the same time, since the Indian subcontinent did not essentially have any organized religion as we happen to have today with the need of categorization, there wasn’t ever any need to persecute a person with a set of beliefs that went against the prevailing ideologies. It was essentially for this reason that this place became a hub for philosophical development and works, acting as an open, accepting launch pad for thinkers and mystics alike, all free to propagate their ideas, debate about the same and gain a following as long as the adherents found sense in their teacher’s sayings. The biggest example of the same can be seen with the movements of Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, and Bhakti. Had these movements emerged around any of the places with the text centric religions having a stronghold, the heretics would be labeled as practitioners of dubious rituals with troubling and non-theistic philosophy. Hence, by now, it has already started to appear that the primary cause of witch-hunts wasn’t always mass hysteria but the political need to squash opposition and challenging questions, especially when the religious system could help generate revenue from unsuspecting followers. At times, the mass hysteria was fuelled by the dominant and looming religious entity to bring closure to a war already won, Catholics and Puritans alike.
After the Salem witch trials of 1692, nothing as horrifying of as much magnitude ever repeated itself on the face of this planet (with witches involved, since the Jews faced a far worse fate much later). It almost felt like all the witches had vanished off the face of the planet, with neoclassicism moving in on us, and the world accepting mystics that incorporated half-baked logic into their tenets and making them more appealing to the people who now wanted a taste of the rational. The eternal war against mainstream religion had taken a new form yet again and this time, the masses wouldn’t panic at the same war cry. This topped with the aggressive political scenario brewing in Europe kept people too caught up to worry about something they didn’t actually qualify as a threat. The last judicial trial to ever be made on the grounds of witchcraft (in the United States of America) was the 1878 Salem Witchcraft Trial, which was easily dismissed by the judge, announcing our march into a new era of human progress, something which came with the knowledge that it wasn’t black magic that brewed weapons of mass destruction but people. After almost half a century given away to the waging of war all over came the Jazz age to a point when the Beatniks took over the American dream which now had hobos littering streets and with a quest for the ‘kicks’ emerged the counterculture of the ‘60s. People were still reading mystics, but they believed they hadn’t read enough. There was a strange quest for discovery and not just in one part of the society, or the usual scholars, or in just one sphere. The greatest thinkers of this time turned out to be people who drank all day, worked at gas stations and went on harebrained adventures, which was generally a quest of self-discovery, while also reading anything and everything they could lay their hands on. It was at a time like this that there was a revival in the study of the archaic and the prevalent practices of those times, from far and wide. Though the notion was exotic it didn’t have the same hierarchical view, with the bohemians now submitting to the masters of the ancient texts in the many unreachable and hidden crevices of the world, and finally sharing the same upon their return. While witch-lynching became a thing of the past, learning never could.
With the publication of the Satanic Bible in 1969, Anton Szandor LaVey, a philosopher shed light on the otherwise shunned practices in a way that every pragmatic man should. The difference between the spread of Buddhist practices and the message of the Satanic Bible was indeed very crucial, with the primary reason that half the message of any move doesn’t reach the intended audience, either because they do not have a comprehensive understanding of the past which renders them unable to judge the implication of a subtle new move, or that the information reaching them about the present developments is inadequate. In this context, the advent of Buddhist practices in the United States did not bear the intended effect of public outrage since; Buddhism had never been seen as an unlawful or subversive movement in the Indian subcontinent, eventually not ending up as a demonic belief system in the church papers early enough to reach the people. Atop this was the fact that with the Depression of the ‘20s, the two world wars and the economic upheaval, the people had enough to worry about than check the wee bits of the testament and then deem things as evil or good, letting Buddhism pass by the ignorant eyes. However, the publication of the Satanic Bible was shouting the Devil’s name out loud in public as it got the attention it needed, and bore the predicted results. Yet again, towards the beginning of the book do we find the Black Pope (Anton LaVey) make mention of the fact that this is a pragmatic religion which does not believe in the existence of a God or the Devil (merely seeing them as metaphors). Essentially propagating atheistic views, it emphasized on the here and the now and saw no physical or material gains to be borne out of the performance of rituals. He however, documented many rituals and said that these bore psychological effects and often made us feel relieved, and that there wasn’t any other significance to it, only to have the majority of American citizens voice their hate and terror of him, without even hearing his ‘blasphemous’ message, and with this, the status of Devil worship and practicing witches (mind you, hailing from an atheistic religion) had been reinstated. What was funnier was that the pagans who were accused of disobeying God and unintentionally praying to the Devil, were now let off the hook (they now went about as neo-pagans), just because their garb wasn’t as threatening or vocal, despite standing on the same ground as the Satanists (LaVeyan).
The ‘80s saw the occult as a part of the high school welcoming kit (with sex, drugs and rock being the other gifts), and marked an important part of life for an entire generation. With the older, more orthodox generations disapprove the Satanic Bible, the rebellious teenagers had found their weapons against organization just as the mystics had a millennium ago, and history had repeated itself again. Many were offended, but the warm blooded were fuming, and it was but impossible for a parent to lynch one’s own child. Soon it became a medium of escape from the mundane, while also opening doors for creative geniuses like Alan Moore who archived this entire play with his ever so acclaimed comic series, Hellblazer, featuring a working class warlock coming from a long line of magicians and now dabbling in the dark arts in an age of flying planes and telephones. This entire tussle with Devil worship and black magic became not just the war cry of an entire generation but also the career cornerstone for many other such creative individuals, musicians, visual artists and storytellers, as long as they were right with their philosophical narrative (and a few grotesque graphics did better for the audience than bad). We had finally reached a ‘Golden Age of Grotesque’, as many would hate to admit, only to have it finally plummet down to a time, where witch-lynching is used as an excuse for atrocities when there aren’t any other reasons, making it a last yet effective resort, all because no message can ever be shared absolutely and because acceptance of information is selective and limited. Today, the tables have turned as the Harry Potter series, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and the likes rake in millions, all basing off their stories on witches and even showing them in good light, breaking the existing perception, while the India and many Southeast Asian countries witnesses the torture of political opponents and easy preys in the name of witch hunts, something that never was a concern until it could serve as an excuse to harm.
- Anirban Chakroborti
Dept. Of Comparative Literature , Jadavpur University
* Said paper was submitted in Alohomora (a Harry Potter fest), and stood second in the competition.
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