Planet Soul
Is Magick Necessary?
Discovering your innate power may be all you need
Several years ago, I experienced an epiphany.
I was asked to write a new introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of Richard Cavendish’s 1967 occult history The Black Arts. Cavendish’s title has always sat poorly with the “white magic” crowd, the witches, occultists, and spellcasters who want to be “understood,” who want to signal the beneficence of their work. One British publisher, in an act of chickenshittery, even changed Cavendish’s title to The Magical Arts.
I wondered how to address the title issue in my introduction. Cavendish died in October 2016 — 10 days short of his last Halloween — so he wasn’t around to talk it over. I asked myself: Did the English historian make a mistake with his provocative title? Did he leave the misimpression that ancient alchemists, soothsayers, wizards, and their modern equivalents were up to no good?
Help arrived from Yiddish Nobel laureate and novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991), who was no stranger to the occult himself. In an appreciative 1967 review of The Black Arts, Singer wrote: “We are all black magicians in our dreams, in our fantasies, perversions, and phobias.” In essence, we are all after the same thing: power. We hate to admit it. We…
