White and black magic
An old distinction of intent: to help or to harm, to ask or to compel.
What is the difference between white magic and black magic, and how do I recognise the black so I can stay clear of it?
What it is
The division into white and black is a judgement of purpose and of means. White magic, in the usual telling, asks: it prays, blesses, heals and protects, and leaves the outcome to a higher will. Black magic compels: it tries to force a person or a spirit, and aims at harm or at power over someone. The older word for the first is theurgy, work directed to the gods. The mark of the second is the same in every tradition, an attempt on another person's will.
The teaching
As the line between theurgy and sorcery from Iamblichus onward teaches it.
Asking and compelling
The tradition divides magic by two questions: what it seeks, and how it seeks it. White magic, in the old telling, asks. It prays, blesses, heals and protects, works with the powers above by their consent, and leaves the outcome to a higher will. Black magic compels. It tries to force a spirit or a person, seeks power over others or their harm, and works in hiding. Every school that draws the line draws it in the same place, at the attempt on another's will.
Theurgy
The Platonist Iamblichus gave the line its classic form. Theurgy, god-work, is in his teaching not something a human being does to the gods but something the gods do through the rite. The theurgist uses the symbols and tokens the gods have sown through nature, in stones, plants, animals, sounds and names, and through them the soul is purified, lifted and joined to the divine. Nothing is forced, for no human can command a god: the rite only opens the way, and the gods come of their own goodness.
It is not thought that joins the theurgist to the gods, Iamblichus says, but the rites rightly performed and the power of the sacred tokens, which the gods themselves recognise. The fruit of true theurgy is a soul set free from passion and turned toward the good, and by that fruit it is known.
Goeteia and the forbidden arts
Goeteia, the sorcery of the marketplace, is the opposite in every point. It works with lower spirits or tries to threaten the higher, seeks gain, pleasure or injury, and leaves the soul more bound to the body than before. Iamblichus says that its practitioners deal with deceiving spirits that only pretend to be gods, and that what comes to them shows what they called.
The Hebrew Bible draws the line in law. It forbids the diviner, the observer of times, the enchanter, the witch, the charmer, the consulter with familiar spirits, the wizard and the necromancer, and sets against them the prophet, who speaks only what God gives. The Qur'an condemns sorcery outright, and the Church has always counted dealings with spirits as a turning from God.
The Church and natural magic
The medieval Church judged nearly all magic unlawful, whatever its aim. Thomas Aquinas taught that any rite which looks for an effect its means have no natural power to produce must be seeking, openly or not, the help of demons, and so is superstition. Prayer was the right way to ask, and the charm the wrong one, even for a good end.
The philosophers of the Renaissance argued for a natural magic. Marsilio Ficino taught that music, scents, colours, foods and the light of the right stars can draw the healthy influence of the Sun, Jupiter and Venus into a person's own spirit, as a physician uses herbs, with no demon in it at all. Pico della Mirandola divided magic in two: one kind wholly the work of demons, to be abhorred, and the other the highest part of natural philosophy, which marries earth to heaven and brings out the powers God sowed hidden in the world.
Agrippa built his Three Books of Occult Philosophy on the same ground: natural magic for the world of the elements, celestial magic for the stars and numbers, and ceremonial magic for the world of angels and of God. Only a mind made pure by religion, he held, could rightly rise through all three.
The blessing witch and the cursing witch
In the villages the line ran between the cunning person who helped and the witch who harmed. People went to the first to find a lost thing, cure a beast or undo a harm, and feared the second. Many preachers refused the distinction. The English divine William Perkins wrote that the good witch who blessed and healed by charms was the more dangerous of the two, because she drew people away from God to trust in her.
The right hand and the left
The occultists of the nineteenth century took two terms from the Tantric traditions of India, where the right-hand way keeps the ordinary rules of purity and the left-hand way uses what those rules forbid, and made them names for white and black magic. In that later use the right-hand path seeks union with what is above the self, and the left-hand path seeks the power and the lasting rule of the self.
The lodges put the highest aim of white magic in a phrase from the Book of Abramelin: the knowledge and conversation of the holy guardian angel. The book prescribes a long retreat of prayer, purity and quiet living, six months in the copy Mathers translated and eighteen in the German, in which the operator seeks first the angel who guides them; only after that, it teaches, may anything else be undertaken. Many practitioners today put the same line in one word, consent: no working on any person who has not asked for it.
How the two are known
Each tradition tests the two by what they leave behind. Iamblichus judged a rite by its effect on the soul, freer or more bound. The Gospel judges by fruits, and the Church by whether the help sought is God's. Islamic teaching rejects any rite that asks for what God has forbidden. All of them draw the same line, at the will of another person.
How it is practised
The traditions give simple tests for telling the two apart, and they serve outside magic as well. Does the act ask, or does it try to force? Would it be done in the open? Is its object one's own conduct, or someone else's choices? Does the person offering it want money, secrecy or obedience? A reader who meets a working that fails these tests, or a teacher who does, can simply walk away. Nothing is owed and nothing follows.
Where it comes from
The distinction is ancient. Around 300 CE the philosopher Iamblichus defended theurgy as a way to the gods and set it against goeteia, the low sorcery of the marketplace. Medieval church law treated most magic as illicit whatever its aim, while Marsilio Ficino in the fifteenth century argued for a natural magic of music, scent and the stars. In early modern Europe courts prosecuted maleficium, harmful magic, while the same villages relied on cunning folk for remedies and for finding lost goods. Many modern practitioners reject the colours and speak only of intent.
What is known, and what is not
The contrast between theurgy and sorcery is documented from late antiquity onward, and trial records show how courts defined harmful magic. The line itself is a moral one, drawn differently by each age and often by the accuser: one person's healer was another's witch. No evidence shows that a rite of either colour has power over an unwilling person. The harm that is on record comes from fear, fraud and accusation.
Its words
Theurgy- Ritual addressed to the gods to raise the soul, which the late Platonists set apart from sorcery done for gain or harm.
Maleficium- The Latin legal word for harm done by magic to a person, an animal or a crop: the core charge in most witch trials.
Cunning Folk- The village practitioners who found lost goods, made charms and claimed to undo harm, from the Middle Ages to about 1900.
Ask the Oracle further
How did Iamblichus tell theurgy apart from sorcery, and has black magic any real power?How do I tell someone practising white magic from a fraud who wants control of me?
Before you practise
The Oracle explains these traditions as belief and practice, not as proven fact. It will never tell you that you are cursed, or name anyone as the cause. If someone is threatening you, that is for the police. If fear, voices or a sense of being controlled stays with you, please see a doctor.
Its other branches
How a working is builtProtection and cleansingCurses and fearTalismans and sigilsThe grimoiresThe witch trialsWicca and the modern craftCunning folk and folk magicThe evil eyeCeremonial and chaos magicThe whole artSearch the tree
