Black Power & Black Magic/k Part 3

Learn Black Magic/k to Fight White Supremacy

Beloved:

We will continue sharing excerpts from my new book I am shopping around “Black Power & Black Magic/k: a hidden history of the United States” and continue to stay focused on this work rather than current events.

Simply because there are a thousand good writers doing that work, and are joined by a thousand more newsletters on Substack screaming about the VP debate, bringing our attention to those suffering from climate change induced tragedy from Nepal to Asheville, and tracking white men acting poorly like it is a new phenomena.

As a side note I believe the deep spelunking of the consciousness of young white cis straight men will become a new media obsession in the months and years to come. You may say lenny, how is that any different than what we have known, and you wouldn’t be wrong about who is getting the most cultural attention subtly or overtly. No, I mean that media is going to start to create a popular pathology around a lot of what we are throwing in this one size fit’s all bucket of “Christian Nationalism.”

If you are unfamiliar with the ontological changes this term has gone through I’ll spare you the details and my catty commentary and just say it’s become how nice progressive Christians say “my homie is a fucking white supremacist”. “Or I grew up as a white supremacist.” “Or I think my hometown was a sundown town.”

You know the way we never say the thing even though we know it’s a fucking thing.

I say we because a lot of my progressive Christian buddies claim me still. I’ll take it.

Also there are a ton of writers covering the now almost one year attack on the Palestinian people by an out of control Israeli government hijacked by it’s worst elements, who have taken “proportional response”, “the war on terror” and “right to self defense” doctrines and displayed one of the worse apartheid regimes in history engaged in objective war crimes, if not just straight up genocidal acts,  for the whole world to see.

I am trying to stick to my commitment of bringing the esoteric, occult, and mystical responses to oppression like we are seeing today forward from the past in useful, actionable, and powerful ways. To continue that work I will be sharing perhaps my last excerpt from my new book I am currently working on.

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Black Power and Black Magic/k Intro Chapter( Excerpt Part 3)

What I mean by this is that only in the last half millenia have we conceived, explained, or used the language for reality in the ways we do now. By this what I mean is the very meaning of well meaning often called ontology. Ontology is a set of creeds people believe to be real. It is what is observable to us, which can be subjective, but it is the objective or collective meaning of words and language of our subjective observation. An example of this is you and a friend going to visit with a third friend. You arrive with friend B, and you both notice that C seems to be showing some signs of clinical or seasonal depression. When you leave, Friend B says Friend C seems “down” and you agree but say Friend C seems “sad.”

Same meaning. Completely different concepts, one is a physics concept: the direction of down relative to observer position. The other is an emotional state “sad” which can be an incredibly challenging state to communicate exactly what that state is for each of us individually, but collectively it has meaning. And both these very different concepts together in this social construct or context have new shared meaning. “Down” and “sad” respectively become a new shared understanding and this creates a shared ontology or is born from a society’s shared ontology. This is what I mean by ontology in history, it is slightly different from what others can mean when they use this term. I mean when the observable shapes our epistemic understanding of reality and then starts to shape language and meaning, or what is definable in words, concepts, and ideas. 

For me, and many others, ontology is the very real way our minds construct or narrate to ourselves the world around us. The ephemera of our inner monologue. Ontology can also be or shaped by social construct concepts themselves that inform us all how to perceive all we “know.” Like gender “norms.” the way societies create these roles and once a child connects to them they try to live up to these norms set way before they even knew gender was a thing you had to do. Ontology is the urge to create ideas, theories, and systems that explain human experience which from our perspective is reality.

 The American ontological perspective of the world can only be by its very definition only six hundred or more years old. Before that if you want to see how different the ontology of the world was, just look at a map from that time. Of anything. From anyone. The world, the stars, the heavens, or the seas. This is a people who not only perceived the world in highly different ways, but they narrated their human experience with different tools. The people of the Americas are the children of the last seismic great shift in the way this world perceived itself. The last ontological branching. A decoherence in meaning followed by the emergence of new meaning, and by the very means in which define this concept: a new world. 

This shifting of our collective or individual experience of reality is the essence of esotericism, and what “magic” is. It is the historically reported ability to change the collective experience of reality. I leave the argument of whether it is a changing of the nature of reality, or people’s perception of reality, to better minds than my own. For my purpose this thing we shall call magic/k had a sociological, economic, and political effect on the world around it in the historical record. That is enough for me. 

So my claim is the “discovery” of the Americas and the questions it raised for the “western world” caused clashing perceptions of reality, history, science, anthropology, religious cosmologies, creating a new “collective consciousness of humanity” and slipping into the tide of history. This new cosmology, ontology, and emerging epistemology starts to reset the world stage politically, philosophically, and the course of the future. It changed the way the Western powers perceived themselves. History itself had to be rewritten and almost all the so-called Western world thought it knew of its origins, future, and present were threatened by these discoveries. Imagine thinking you were the masters of the world, ordained by divine right to rule, and one day you come across whole culture areas, continents, and nation- states, confederations, empires, kingdoms, and sovereign peoples unknown before. 

The collective trauma of this on the European intellectual mind in particular brought about the death begotten quest to finally figure out—what is and is not a human being? What is and is not a human society? What are the natural rights of a human being? Whose God or gods were right? If a person had never heard your version of how reality came into being then who is wrong? Your scriptures or this entire nation? These ideas were called into question in an unprecedented way in the 16th century. It is in these conditions the magic of the Americas is born and her mystics start to rise. 

Black Power and Black Magic: An Esoteric History of the United States will gather the gospel of and the religion of the harried, rites of the oppressed, and prayers of the often doomed. We will do this by searching for where the sacred encountered the profane. Sugar cane fields, Maryland backwater Chesapeake paths, and the story of Moses all mashed into diverse magical practices of the plantation. Practices that could range from approved spiritual fervor to astrologically coordinated uprising, or both. 

We shall bear witness to the start of the spiritual war for land back. We shall see the sit-in as magical throne, and solitary confinement as sorcery school. We shall trek through unsettling truths that are told from the perspective of one who has to first look up at their oppressor, and then look down again to share hidden ways in hushed whispers with one another. It is the story of a diasporic people who must turn to the original peoples of this land to become re-rooted in the medicines, power, and care it can provide. It is the often sad story of different groups, god’s, orisha, and spirits all being caged with the peoples they love in a place that isn’t home anymore, or never was. It is the story of these same beings being weaponized against one another. 

Why this book? Why tell the story of who we are like this?

In a time that demands to be defined by the rise of Christo-facism, the hard right turn of Protestant America, or if you even pay a passing attention to the narrative of the rather loud media industrial complex of this neo-evangelical movement one would be hard pressed not to believe the religious story of America is anything but a Christian one. If that was our whole story, I would be as scared as the average observer of the miraculous. Of delving too deeply into our history. 

It is a particular story, full of intentional particularity, the story of a “great Christian nation” that is now becoming “more secular.” Of course it is easier and less complicated to summarize all that we see happening in our body politic as an aging political and religious elite whose world is fading. It isn’t the whole story, or even close to the right story to be telling. The American church of the past is a force for democracy, liberty, and all we believe is “good” in the dominant narrative many of us are given in an American history class. If they ever explicitly name the spiritual atmosphere of the formation of this republic at all. We just assume they all went to church, and were “believers.” 

 

But what if it was never that at all? What if the entire story is just another myth, a second “lost cause?” What if we never were the “great christian nation?” 

This isn’t from someone who would reject that notion out of countenance. In fact as someone who has spent years studying Christian theology in the academy I would follow the Jesus I encountered in seminary almost anywhere. Once I was exposed to biblical scholarship, a completely different Christ, one who was politically aware, intelligent, and using the means he had to resist colonial oppression and its collaborators came into view. This Jesus, the one who stands with the oppressed, if this was the Jesus of the Americas, I would follow him anywhere. 

But it begs the question, if God is a God of the oppressed as many a Christian theologians have claimed, then why don’t they teach the practices of the oppressed? Why aren't we studying the rites, prayers, and actions of our ancestors for whom overt oppression was a daily spiritual reality? What powers, forces, and traditions did they turn to protect their families, homes, and hearts from the cold realities of the American experiment and why aren’t we calling on them? 

It has been said by many historians and social scientists that one cannot understand the history of the Americas without understanding its people’s beliefs. But in matters of faith the most recent generations of Americans are just as full of believers, the faithful, as it is the delightfully spiritually curious or the not so faithful. In fact their practices are often diverse, deeply rooted in study, and applied to their everyday life. The thing most pastors would pray for in congregants. They just aren’t Christian. For the media, politicians, and the folks at Pew, this is a problem. There are those in the media who wouldn’t dare center a God, or any spiritual underpinning at all to explain the queer affirming, anti-racist, or anti oppression movements of today. But that's because it's even harder for them to imagine yesterday. Which again: puts our every tomorrow in jeopardy. 

Why don't you hear more about this? Well it flies in the face of the current narrative to explain the social changes we have experienced rapidly since the late 20th century. When the paradigm is shifting, it’s hard enough to get people to admit that, let alone they are wrong about the actual nature of the causality of said social shift. It is perhaps in the final analysis that is helped even less by the academy that I am desperately trying to claw my way into, and if there is fault to be found, it is our almost demonic drive to continue the categorization of reality. Our constant scale of primitive to advanced, savage to civilized. It is only in our creation of what counts as “proper religious values and belief” that these movements are somehow wholly political, or a product of “secularization” of this society .

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Copyrights lenny duncan.

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Next post I will share the syllabus for the course I will be opening this month-

A Peoples History of Magic/k

written in love and liberation

rev. lenny duncan