Black Power & Black Magic/k

The first issue in our new format!

Greetings beloved:

I want to welcome you to our new format, newly minted newsletter, and to thank you for your support of my work over the years. But in all honesty it is more like a welcome back to the madness. You are well aware of what you get with this newsletter. Or at least you should after 2 years of “a sorcerer’s notebook” know this newsletter deals in the so-called occult, esoteric, mystical, and what many claim is magic/k.

I think some of the biggest differences you will notice are:

• A laser focus on theory, praxis, my actual thesis on the nature of history, time, ontology and a bunch of other intellectual goodies.

• Direct connections to Black and African Diaspora history and narrative crafting.

• Classes, zoom discussions, panels with experts, all helping us wrestle with hard to grasp concepts, traditions, ceremonies, techniques, and what I call the praxis and weaponry of sorcery: words and ontology.

• Finally any subscriber who wants to reach out for one on one instruction who wants to focus on the various esoteric areas of study: divination readings, discovering and co creating your tradition , or esoteric, occult, and magic/kal research and investigation, I will be making myself available a few times a month for those interested in that sort of one on one attention.

But for the next few weeks I am going to share excerpts from my new book that I am shopping around tentatively entitled: Black Power and Black Magic/k: a hidden history of the United States. I figure if you are new or old to this newsletter it’s a great way to jump in with both feet first.

(PLEASE NOTE: Subscriptions were turned back on today. If you are a paid subscriber and you no longer want to be, please go to your substack account settings and turn off paid subscriber for this newsletter if you don’t want to be charged)

Introduction: The Future Lies Behind Us:

What you have in your hands is the result of decades of persistent curiosity. It is written by someone who has a knack for asking the most unanswerable question at the absolutely most impolite time. This is a history book that attempts to undo the very concept of “history making” and “crafting,” and is full of the eerie disquiet that many scholars try to ignore throughout the historical record. This disquiet, this uncontented feeling is hard to describe, but when studying the story of us, what people in the academy like me call the subject of historical and cultural studies, one is often left with the idea that something is “wrong” with history. Or with us. That there is a pattern of self destruction and self sabotage that follows humanities footsteps. When trying to decipher what is wrong you are at  best a postscript witness to tragedy and   left with nothing but stories, framings, ontologies, epistemologies, myths, and legends to try to decipher what happened. Or why. From this rubble, wreckage, wastepile of the past  you try to pin sometimes a whole century worth of the mess that is humanity into a word.

History.

 If you are really paying attention you realize there is an invisible liturgy to the way you are expected to retell history, a beat, an accepted societal rhythm that often has more effect on the “story of us” than the data. These swings in how society likes to hear the story of us re-told in this invisible symphony are often political, ahistorical, and are perhaps easier for me to see as a Black Trans queer scholar. History has and always will always be one of the most important battle grounds in the fight for human liberty across space and time. 

“History” of course in this thought experiment becomes a stand-in for humanity, since it is composed entirely of us, people, our story. That is why throughout this book I will often call it the collective body of stories of us, or for short: the story of us.

 So the question then becomes is something wrong with us? Why can’t we seem to learn the lessons of the past collectively about war, pestilence, hatred, and the oppression of the “other?” 

Black Power and Black Magic: A Hidden History of the United States is my attempted answer to these questions. It is an exercise in history crafting, which is the art of ontology creation. 

Make no mistake, the future requires deep study of history. It is not a passive means of resisting oppression, it is in a word: revolutionary. Nor is history a series of facts to know or memorize that have little to no discernible pattern but a butcher’s bill. History can be condensed and repackaged into Aesop styled tales, neatly wrapped up parables to stick in your pocket like a party trick to be used in rhetoric or political gain. But none of this is what history crafting really is. It is a field full of just as much wonder as the quantum foundation scientist rave happening all around us. 

Simply put: historical recording keeping, the crafting of historical narrative and required cultural studies to pull off these feats is a world saving and redeeming enterprise. Which brings us back to our question: what is wrong with history? Or more accurately—what is wrong with us that we don't seem to collectively learn and grow from the lessons history has to offer us? A common example is war. We know the cost of war, death, trauma, culture groups erased or irreparably harmed, people groups wiped out, the loss to art, to the sciences, and to the future. We abstract this and conceptualize any war. Even now when you can instantly watch hours of horrific images from around the world, we don't. We watch maps, graphics, b-roll with death edited out. We know the bloody track record of war across all our cultures, countries, and yet we persist to ignore. Why? We know “what” is happening. War. 

The answer has always seemed simple: it’s the “how” we re-tell the collective colossal story of us. It is the way we tell the story of war that makes war possible around the world today. 

 Or for another way of thinking of it, it is the framework in which we tell the stories, myths, legends, and one-sided accounts that we often call “history.” Eye witnesses are incredibly unreliable with an event a few days ago. The memory itself is composed mostly of what we think happened and in the hands of a historian like me it can often have divergent interpretations. History; we are taught is as concrete as chemistry, mathematics, or even quantum foundation work. But all those sciences are malleable, movable, able to be shaped to consider new or available data. But the fields of history and its sibling anthropology in the mind of the average citizen is concrete. In stone. History by its very definition is in a word: over. This paradoxical way of approaching history can stifle new perspectives, or new approaches to history and history crafting. 

In this book, this thought experiment we are going to embark on together, we are going to re-enchant history. This I believe is the only way to secure a more equitable, just, abolitionist, and decidedly democratic future for the cause of collective human liberty. Our plan is to rescue the past from this terrible present day America we have all become entangled in. My home, whatever that word means to you, has been and perhaps shall always be the United States of America, and I am for better or worse an American. So I wanted a different framing, a new beat, rhythm, symphony, or liturgy to what we call the History of the United States to middle school classrooms across the country. I ended up embarking on a very unexpected trajectory of which you now hold the results. 

 I decided I would tell the story of the United States from the perspective of the magical practitioner. 

 Black Power and Black Magic is the untold story of magic’s rather direct impact on the history of the United States, and the Americas as a whole. A story that while largely unexamined by the average citizen: it is a story whose impact we still live in today. Untold, unexamined, lampooned, censored, and misunderstood are the more common treatments of the story of magic, esoterica, mysticism, and its adherents here in the Americas. This doesn’t change the uncomfortable historical fact that nations have been born from powerful cultural, political, and magical rites of the oppressed on this continent. Sorcerers, hoodoo doctors, seers, those touched by “the spirit,” and traditional medicine workers of all stripes have used those same skills in the cause of abolition. Of Landback. That people of good conscience have believed that they have had powers divine, eldritch, sorcerous, ancestral, and that these same people believed they used these epistemological systems in the cause for human liberation…….

( TO BE CONTINUED SOON-ISH)

written in love and liberation

lenny duncan.