What is Black magic?
Black magic is magic understood to pursue harmful, selfish, or morally illicit ends. It is the conventional counterpart to white or beneficent magic, though the two are less a meaningful traditional distinction than a category imposed from outside.
Black magic vs adjacent concepts
The comparison with white magic seems obvious but collapses quickly under examination. Most historical magical traditions did not sort their own practices into black and white. Cunning-folk in early modern England might use the same herb and the same prayer to heal a person on one occasion and curse an enemy on another. Ceremonial magicians working within Hermetic or Kabbalistic frameworks understood their operations through a cosmological map that had no simple moral binary. The black/white split was usually applied from outside — by church authorities, colonial administrators, or hostile neighbours — and reflects the priorities of those doing the naming as much as the nature of the practice itself.
Sorcery is a related but distinct category. Anthropology uses it to describe harmful magic as an insider concept: in many societies, communities draw a line between the healer and the sorcerer, but where exactly that line falls varies widely. Necromancy — originally the conjuration of the dead for divination — became a catch-all term for demonic magic in medieval Europe. The English black magic arrived via Middle English nigromancy, a corruption of necromancy that attached the association with darkness more firmly to the name.
History of the term
The association of magic with evil runs through Christian Europe's response to folk practice across the medieval period. Church authorities prosecuted both healers and cursers, and the witch-trial literature treated most magic as diabolical. In seventeenth-century France, the priest Étienne Guibourg is recorded as having conducted Black Mass rituals — ceremonies designed to invert Catholic liturgy — for aristocratic patrons. In the nineteenth century the French occultist Éliphas Lévi drew a line between elevated magical practice aimed at cosmic understanding and low or selfish magic aimed at material gain or harm. The esoteric revival he helped launch sorted itself partly around this distinction.
Black magic in the Western esoteric traditions
The Western ceremonial tradition — running from the Renaissance mages through the nineteenth-century Hermetic revival — contains operations that outside observers labelled black magic. Aleister Crowley, writing in the early twentieth century, explicitly worked with the category, but in his Thelema system the operative question was not white versus black: it was whether an act aligned with the practitioner's True Will. The Left-Hand Path in Western esotericism goes further, embracing transgression and the forces mainstream traditions call dark as a deliberate spiritual method. Modern chaos magic — including the technique of the servitor, a thoughtform assigned a task — descends partly from this lineage, stripped of its cosmological frame.
Black magic in Indian and Tibetan traditions
Tantra includes a strand known as vāmācāra, the left-hand way, that works with prohibited substances, transgressive ritual, and the fiercer aspects of deity. Most tantric lineages draw a careful distinction between initiatory transgression used to break conventional conditioning and malicious magic aimed at harming a specific target. The siddhis — supernormal capacities catalogued in the Yoga Sūtras and tantric texts — include destructive powers, and the classical literature issues consistent warnings against using them to harm. In Tibetan Buddhist hagiography, Milarepa is the most-cited example: before becoming the tradition's greatest yogi, he practiced mthu, a form of destructive ritual magic, causing deaths among the enemies who had wronged his family. The tradition presents this not as an endorsement but as the moral weight the rest of the life is understood to transform.
Scholarly disagreement
Historians of Western magic — including Owen Davies and Ronald Hutton — have argued that the black/white binary is a modern construction. It was applied retrospectively to traditions that had their own, quite different internal categories. The practitioners of folk magic in early modern Europe, for instance, did not typically understand themselves as choosing between good and evil magic. They understood themselves as working with specific techniques for specific ends, evaluated by whether the technique worked and whether the end was justified — a moral framework continuous with ordinary community life rather than a cosmic battle between light and darkness. The binary persists in popular usage because it is vivid and because the Romantic and occultist writers of the nineteenth century found it useful. Whether it has descriptive value for the historical practices is a separate question.
In the index
The index does not yet hold items specifically addressing black magic or ceremonial magic traditions. Hermeticism is the tradition whose lineage is most directly upstream of European ceremonial practice. Shamanism covers the cross-cultural pattern of spirit work that popular usage most often conflates with black magic. Tantra addresses the left-hand way in Hindu and Buddhist contexts. The siddhi entry covers supernormal capacities, including the destructive ones. The servitor entry covers one concrete modern technique that sits within the broader category.