Black Power and Black Magic/k Part 2

Part two of the introduction to my new book

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I present to you beloved without much aplomb part two of my draft intro to my new work Black Power and Black Magic/k: a hidden history of the United States.

A new lens that retells the forgotten, silenced, and often queer story of how people have practiced so-called occult, magical, esoteric, mystical, and otherworldly traditions for over five hundred years on this continent. One in which everyday esoteric rites and practices collided from all over the world, became interwoven into everyday life of us in such a way that we often don't even recognize it. It is everywhere. You probably cast a spell or a charm twice a week without thinking about it. Admittedly at first to the uninitiated, pun intended, it is hard to explain the ubiquitousness of esoterica, spiritualism, hedge witchery, hoodoo, conjure, vodoun, espiritismo, sorcery, and many other almost intact African cosmologies in the story of this continent. The common analogy of “a fish looking for water” comes to mind but somehow isn’t enough to explain the strange way the academy, the church, and state have dominated the historical narrative with a particular lens we all sense is deeply lacking. For even a fish knows when it is gasping for water on the docks. It does feel lately like America is in the middle of a spiritual gasp, its lungs bursting at the seams full of hot air.

What if the study of the practice of Black Magic could further the causes of liberation, abolition, and that of human freedom generally?

The only price for access to this realm is to believe your ancestors were just as thinking, feeling, curious as you about the same questions that you still wrestle with today, and to believe their self reported narratives as their world. Their ontology. Their epistemology. Just for a second think that our ancestors probably understood their world, its politics, its great questions of the day better than we possibly can. For many in the face of the same systemic, historical, and insurmountable problems we face today, magic was the answer.

In fact, I contend in particular magic, mysticism, and esotericism was a major force in the cause of Black freedom and is a network of diverse epistemologies in resistance to white supremacy, and a multiplicity of spiritual and moral frameworks in America that represent a hidden superstructure that lies in the mortar and the very foundations of this nation.

The Black church represents the most explored historical fruit of Black religious experience in the Americas, but it still is only one part of a much larger spiritual liberation narrative. Abolition, democracy, freedom, human liberty, the right of self organization, these will be our focus but many are the causes bolstered by these brave practitioners of hidden arts I wish to introduce to you too. Cosmologies crafted with the scraps and refuse left behind in a social engineered colonial machine meant to rend them alive. Black magical practices are forged in unique spiritual circumstances and pressures that in turn give them not only utility for us today resisting the heritage of colonialism, but recasts an American story in a new light.

This is a stolen people, on a stolen land. A land already chock full of older rites and cosmological stories from the dawn of time. These stolen people and practitioners had to learn to live alongside, or tap into the power of land based practices in a place where the stars didn’t even align. Engineered with the wisdom of homelands never forgotten, but never seen again. Ancient poems, songs, and dances that learned to be part of telling of the truths of this new land. Indigenous peoples and stories that are still being told by the original peoples of this land today. Just like West African proverbs called Ese Ifa verse are told to this day from the Caribbean, to Seattle, to Peru. Just like stories of Hermes Trismegistus migrated from Nubia and Egypt, to Syria, and then Europe, finally also coming to the Americas. What are we to make of this?

Are we a great nation founded on the principle of religious liberty? And if we are, then why is the modern interpretation of that simply: the tenets of modern Protestantism?

Frankly: if the story of the Americas is one of religious freedom, fervor, and values, it is only Christian in the ink of the historian, and the lips of the so-called winners of colonialism. It can only lay claim to saints, angels, miracles, sacred mothers, and fountains of youth by the work of the people. A liturgy of our collective and stolen labor. It is the people’s blood, sweat, tears, curses, little prayers, angel crown’s from departed loved ones, crystal gazing, Poor Richard's Almanac, hands, toby’s and mojo bags have contributed more to the cause of religious and actual freedom than the church’s illustrious theologians, except the ones deemed heretics or communists.

In many ways “American religiosity” only exists in the minds of academics and scholars. It is a narrow band of intellectual landscape that is only inhibited by Abrahamic religions, and those with a populace too large to ignore like traditions from the continent of India. It is a group of academic disciplines that have parlayed literary criticism, basic use of logic and philosophy that predates all of their traditions, and a certain political value system that is easily blown about the breezes of society into a profession. More importantly for our work together this same group decides what “religion” is and isn’t. I should know. I’m one of them.

This book isn’t interested in relitigating these age-old battles of what counts as religion, natural religion, theology, nor is it going to split hairs with petty doctrinal disputes, the validity of statements of confessional materials of these traditions. In fact, this book is better served by paying attention to the places in the historical record this august body insists nothing of value lies, or the areas they have spent much time explaining away. Our past hasn’t been decided, and our ancestors’ fates are not sealed as the historian would like us to believe. This is because history is a series of tensions, stories, conflicts, resolutions, and great questions that humanity has asked itself over and over. As long as we wrestle with these questions then our ancestors’ final act has yet to be written in the grand game of freedom.

Questions like, Who is God? Why do terrible tragedies happen to innocent people? What power do we have endowed with us? What is our responsibility with this seemingly inherent power to creation, neighbor, or ourselves, and our descendants as we journey through this life?

This searching, this seeking, this collective reaching for meaning, everytime we ask ourselves what yesterday truly meant, today and tomorrow are served. History is myth making, it is a morality tale, and there is no way to avoid the complex social, political, and economic maelstrom of several centuries of engineered tragedy and crimes against humanity of an almost unimaginable scale all colliding here in the Americas. That collision and that need for answers from the questions created by the impact of several different epistemic and cosmological worldviews. A historical and cultural “big bang.” A “new world” as it was commonly called at the time. The Americas was the start of a new world, but not in the way the colonial project meant it……..

To be continued soonish ….

© Lenny Duncan | Black Power, Black Magic