Black Magic and Sorcery

Written by Baal-Hiram

What is the difference between sorcery and magic? This question should naturally arise in the minds of many of our readers, because so often in the press, the Internet and cinema, we find the erroneous identification of these two seemingly different tenets. However, these vulgar ideas come only from the ignorance of those who consider these two paths identical to each other and do not have any serious basis for doing so.

While the previous article delved deeper into the meaning and understanding of magic, I will shed light on sorcery in the following paragraphs. From a Martinist perspective, sorcery is a superstition or a delusion about physical or metaphysical phenomena and it claims to have ways to influence them with the help of an action or a set of actions that do not make sense, but performed habitually. In order to better understand the meaning of this reasoning and definition, we should touch upon the question of what superstitions mean and why they exist.

First, let’s discuss the most common superstitions. They are nothing but remains of what used to be part of a ritual - magical, religious or social - but at the moment, as a result of the evolution of an individual or society, they have become irrelevant and transformed into a heavy baggage, which is delaying the manifestation of the Divine Spark.

Probably the most well-known superstition is that of a black cat crossing the road. While believing in this gross superstition, we somehow forget that in some European countries this sign is considered lucky, and I will explain on how this is perceived most often among Russians. It is believed that this is a sign of unhappiness or misfortune. In which way does superstitious custom offer us to ward off this misfortune? This custom suggests us to hold a button of your clothes as a remedy.

A sensible person from this example can easily extract confirmation of the theses previously stated and come to the conclusion that it is definitely a senseless custom, as it is completely unclear how the button is connected to the cat crossing the road, and the absolutely ridiculous fear caused by a completely harmless phenomenon, like a cat running across road no matter what color it is. People who believe in such nonsense should ask themselves the fate of the unfortunate ones who have black cats as pets. Perhaps they should stick a button to their fingers to avoid any possible misfortunes or bad omens.

Here’s another example. It is believed that people with brown eyes, closer to black, have an ‘evil eye’, and can jinx others. Therefore, when meeting such a person, you need to keep a hand folded in a fig in your pocket. How the hand folded in a fig is connected with the eyes of another person is also completely incomprehensible. Does that mean that those ‘unfortunate’ people who have brown-black eyes should not look into the mirror and look at themselves at all for the fear of casting a malefic spell on themselves?

It is possible that these phenomena are perverted elements of some ancient pagan rituals. It is not our task to consider what these rituals were, but we can say for sure that in the Mediterranean region, a sign called “cookie” or “fig” is used by superstitious people as a sign supposedly protecting from evil spirits. Perhaps in ancient times it was used by priests or priestesses of pagan cults in order to prevent crop failures from fields during annual fertility festivals. However, this sign has nothing to do with protection from the evil eye, the black cat, or similar beliefs. These examples are illustrations of the so-called social superstitions. In fact, they represent the practice of folk sorcery, and more precisely, its simplest and most vulgar version. A slightly more complicated form of the existence of folk sorcery is the belief in all sorts of phrases, that should be said, or actions that need to be done under certain circumstances. For example, with hiccups, people believe that someone is remembering them, and if they give the name of the one who is remembering them right now, the hiccups will stop. In fact, you just need to drink water, since the physiological phenomenon called hiccups is in no way connected with a person or people whose names are pronounced by hiccups.

Perhaps switching the thought process from obsessing to one's own hiccups somehow helps to end the process, but in this case it doesn’t matter at all whether the person recalls the names of people he knows or, for example, word games. The absurdity of this superstition is obvious. Perhaps it was also part of a kind of pagan sorcery, or even the recommendation of some pagan sorcerers to the common people who turned to him to get rid of this not very pleasant phenomenon.

In fact, any social superstition can be likened to an example: imagine that a modern person, coming from the street, is used to wash his hands with a soap. And so, a group of such persons in a certain hypothetical way ended up with supplies of water and soap outside of civilization, where they continued to wash hands with soap all their life, and taught it to their children, but not really explaining why this is necessary, just saying that it protects from diseases. Suppose the next generation could also use soap until it was over. Children of this generation will no longer have soap, but will have a custom prescribing to water their hands and rub them. Perhaps the soap will even find some substitute - some kind of wooden block or pebble. It is possible that after a couple of generations, watering your hands with water before eating will also be eliminated, and only rubbing your hands will remain, as well as people's faith that this will protect them from disease, the attack of evil spirits and other things.

According to a similar pattern, a large part of social superstitions has appeared. Although some of them, of course, owe their origin exclusively to someone's sick imagination and idle fiction. However, their examples are not interesting at all, and we will not cite them. Now let's look at where superstition becomes conscious sorcery, because the previous examples given above are unconscious sorcery, since a person holding a fig in his pocket or clutching a button or calling the name of the person who supposedly remembers him does not realize that he commits an act of sorcery, but acts so exclusively mechanically, unconsciously, because of its own lack of enlightenment and because of his ignorance.

Speaking of ignorance. Many people are afraid of the number 13, and especially Friday the 13th. When you try to find out from them why they are afraid, you will never get an intelligible answer, you will only hear vulgar tales that this is the number and day of the devil. The historical background of the negative perception of this number is only due to the fact that on October 13, 1307, exactly on Friday, the master of the Knights Templar Order Jacques de Molay was arrested in Temple, the residence of the Order on the outskirts of Paris. From his arrest, a story began for a long time that excited European minds - from commoners to noblemen and members of royal families. During this story, already during his execution, Jacques de Molay cursed the French king Philip IV, his adviser Guillaume de Nogaret and Pope Clement V, and soon his curses were not slow to be fulfilled. In this regard, people have gained the belief that Friday the 13th is supposedly an unlucky day, and the number 13 is an allegedly unlucky number. The formation of these superstitions was also affected by the fact that Friday is considered the day on which the Lord Jesus Christ was crucified, and the number 13 is the number of the Apostles together with Jesus Christ and His traitor, Judas Iscariot.

Having mixed up in the popular consciousness, and having lost even the slightest attachment to the original sense of negative attitude to this day and number, this most extreme superstition is rooted in the minds of the ignorant and unenlightened, causing them to irrational horror and animalistic fear every time they hear the number 13.

Yes, these are the fruits of ignorance. Let us return to the question of how and under which circumstances superstition becomes conscious sorcery. Superstition becomes conscious sorcery at the moment when someone takes words or rites of dubious origin, and even more dubious content, and uses them to achieve a particular egoistic goal, while realizing that it affects a certain sphere in which some invisible forces are living. Thus sorcery, but not magic, is all these spells, curses, love spells, as well as sessions of spiritualism, vulgar sessions of clairvoyance and similar phenomena common among a gullible and equally ignorant public.

Many phenomena of sorcery are on the verge of mixing with or smoothly flowing into the black magic currents, but we will elaborate about it a bit later. Let us now consider an exclusively witching example. For this, let’s take village spells which are well-known to the Russian public. All of them are, upon careful examination, distorted by Christian prayers with a fair amount of folklore and village superstitions, such as faith in brownies, goblins, kikimores, periodically identified in these same plots with chorts, and other evil spirits. Very popular is the mentioning of the island of Buyan, Saltan the king, along with completely gospel characters, such as John the Baptist, Jesus Christ, Virgin Mary, King Herod, Pontius Pilate and the daughter of Herod Salamea. Apparently, they were compiled in the villages on the basis of earlier pagan spells, which could be inherited in the families of sorcerers, but were often invented on the way by people prone to hoaxes, or possessing, due to various circumstances, certain superpowers that, most often, these people can’t control.

The existence, appearance and manifestation of all kinds of superpowers is a separate topic, directly dependent on our current reasoning, but requiring separate coverage in a separate chapter. So, once active pagan magic spells, or spells composed by people with superpowers to manifest these very superpowers, were recorded, which ultimately fell into the hands of either their heirs or other people.

Over time, either Christian motifs were added to them, or they were originally composed with them. Nevertheless, magical pagan rituals lost their original essence, and the result of all this is the existence of certain notebooks with the spells transmitted by inheritance in our time, which work solely by virtue of the belief in their effectiveness of those who possess these notebooks. As we have already indicated, most of these spells are completely incoherent and in most cases simply absurd. For example, let’s talk about the transfer of Gospel stories to Buyan Island, on which lies some kind of black stone with the saying that someone there said something to someone, and from now on, “just like how this branch lies under a stone, so let the cow’s tooth not hurt”. The absurdity of these methods is obvious and the absence of both a physical and a metaphysical causal relationship is evident.

Such spells work and can work solely by virtue of the fanatical faith of the person who pronounces them. It is the absence of a causal relationship, both physical and metaphysical, in the methods and formulas used by the sorcerer that distinguishes sorcery from black magic. sorcery is superstitious. The sorcerer, like a monkey, repeats, often quite ridiculously, certain actions, and believes that repeating them will give him the desired result.

He is partly right, but at the same time he is ridiculous and miserable in his delusions and ignorance. Now let's touch on the question of where and in which borders sorcery intersects or flows into black magic. We will not take the aspect when a person is consciously engaged in black magic. We will take, as an example, an abstract sorcerer who, in addition to ridiculous superstitious spells, has quite effective black magic techniques in his arsenal, in the methods of which there are a causal relationship and some magic laws.

The most common example of this is a curse made by spoiling a doll or a photograph. Unlike primitive sorcery, when a sorcerer believes that, if he read the spell with the name of the ill-wisher, the latter would feel bad, the wrecking methods using a doll or photograph work not only from the faith of the person who uses them, but also according to magical laws of analogy. The law of analogy, which also could be called the law of similarity, is a particular manifestation of a more universal law, known as the Hermetic maxim of the Emerald Tablet, which sounds completely like this: “That which is above is like that which is below, and that which is below is like that up". It should be noted right away that similarity does not mean identity, but still, the similarity is sufficient, because, due to its presence, actions performed with a certain object, in one or another similar form, are transferred to a similar object.

All Ceremonial Magic is built on this principle, regardless of the direction of its use. Black magic techniques are based on the same principle. A doll, usually made by sorcerers, with features similar to the person whom they wish to harm, or a photograph, which is his image and likeness, is subtly connected with himself, the object of harmful magic. Crippling a doll, or photograph, in a specialized ritual, a sorcerer is using this black magic method actualizes this subtle connection. That is why, if someone accidentally drops your photo and steps on it, or accidentally drops an ax on it, having no evil intentions or a specialized environment, nothing will happen to you. However, with a conscious desire to harm you through a photograph or a doll, the sorcerer will harm you, regardless of whether he knows how it all works or not. Although here just one subtle point should be made.

In case, if the sorcerer knows the occult laws, and consciously applies them to harm, then he is more likely not a sorcerer, but a black magician, which does not elevate him at all, by no means. These things only exacerbate his cursed position. The sorcerer has the excuse that, being a blind slave to his passions, he does not know what he is doing and is only a puppet in the hands of fallen spirits and disembodied bastards. The black magician does not have such an excuse, because he knows that he is doing evil. He knows that he harms. He knows the occult laws by which this is done. And he knows, in alliance with whom he does this, that in the end they all will be inexorably reckoned, inexorable only as a result of the immutability of the law of equilibrium, the balance of everything in the universe, the symmetry of what we give and what we receive.

Black magic should include the conscious, deliberate use of dynamized will to prevent the evolution of the universe, including any harm, any violation of the free will of other human beings. Any attempt to enslave the free will of another human being is black magic. That is why any ritual aimed at causing attraction to oneself in another person, we mean all the so-called love rituals, are an acts of black magic.

Any ritual, built according to all the canons of the occult tradition, taking into account all occult laws, designed to cause death to another human being, is also an act of black magic. Any ritual aimed at invoking fallen spirits in every possible way, opposing the evolution of the universe, nature and man, is an act of black magic. The first two cases are the black magic, because the operator using them is using universal laws, and violates the free will of another human being, and imposes a feeling unusual for him, or takes his life from him, without the consent of the free will of the object of his attack.

In the third case, which is the summoning the demons or, speaking in a more esoteric language, the fallen spirits, is an act of black magic due to the fact that these creatures, in exchange for one or another egoistic desire of the operator, will be given the power to express themselves and their destructive qualities. Firstly, to implement the wishes of the operator, and secondly due to the fact that the free will of a person has let them into our world. There is only one exception to these rules regarding the third option.

The fallen spirits can be invoked by the operator in order to lead them to repentance, and sometimes they can also be called in order to terminate the contract, which some careless person who accidentally stumbled upon magic books concluded with them, and now, having repented, wants to get rid of his mistake. However, such operations can only be carried out by a person who has reached a certain level of inner mystical holiness and closeness to God, and who uses the corresponding astral protectorate. It goes without saying that among black magicians there are none, and never will be. There are none among the magicians of the Light. An operator capable of doing this can only be the Theurg. Once again, we are on the verge of definitions requiring clarification. I again touched upon questions about what magic is and how it differs from Theurgy. I will elucidate upon this point in another article.

Author of the article © Baal-Hiram 33⁰/66⁰/95⁰ Ancient and Primitive Rite of Memphis-Misraïm, 2012

 Translated into English from Russian by © Viktoria Polikarpova & Ankit Sinha, 20.09.2019