Change is in the air: and other midsummer musings

Black Magic/k and Black Power

Dearly Beloved: We have gathered here in this newsletter for nothing heavy, everything heavy, and to share some musings, love, and updates. 

The first of which is that A Sorcerer's Notebook is finally being closed, the last scribbles are being written, and it is time to say goodbye to this particular point in my writing. I want to thank all of you as supporters and to tell you that this doesn’t mean this substack is over. 

Starting in September we are rebranding the newsletter as a companion to my newest book, which my agent and I are currently shopping around. 

So get ready for Black Magic/k and Black Power coming at you this September 2024! This ain't necessarily a “new” direction for this newsletter. For the last two years or so this newsletter has been focused on the esoteric, the occult, the mystical, the strange, the unexamined, the unexplained. This isn’t a mistake. I have also been at the Graduate Theological Union for five semesters.  Four for course work and one teaching my first course designed by me for MDiv, MA, and PhD students, A People’s History of Magic/k. 

That course will be made publicly available as an offering this October and you can sign up here starting today: https://forms.gle/Viwu3LJxXUvH3kCJ9

The course is 250 dollars, 8 sessions, starting Wednesday, October 9th,  at 6pm PST until November 20th. Tuition is due a week before the course. I will provide all the books you need on PDF, as well as a really student friendly syllabus to help you get ready. Limit 30 students. 5 Scholarships are available. 

Black Magic/k and Black Power: A Hidden History of the Americas is the tentative title of my dissertation, my new book, and the new title of this newsletter!  Each newsletter will focus on the practices, beliefs, sacred sites, and acts of resistance of Black and Brown peoples and some of the intersections with Indigenous practitioners. Acts of rebellion as traditional healing, medicine, divination, acts and rites of magic/k, specifically in resistance to the colonial project. This will also be interspersed with my thinking on certain philosophies, theses, and theories of the study of history itself, history crafting as a discipline in the academy and in society, and finally ontology. 

Words. Ontology. These are the weapons of a sorcerer. The Alchemist. The diviner. We will discuss much on this. 

This sadly means that I will not be posting or writing about, or wrestling with the real problems that my progressive Christian sibling may want to address, and will not be commenting as directly on political news as some of you have come to expect from time to time. 

We will not abandon Christianity, though. My research, my teaching, and even my new book will have to discuss Christianity in the way one discusses the mountains or the sun. One element  to be considered in a much more multifaceted and incredibly compelling picture than previously offered of the religious story of the americas. Hopefully.

Also I'm bored with the question : can the church figure it out?

Or more specifically can the descendants of Europe's thousand years of crusades, pogroms, inquisitions, witch trials, assassinations, diets that decided if “grace” was real, burning of other Christian faith spaces, the continued and completely unjustified colonial regimes in the Middle East, Africa and throughout the world,  will these plucky Christians ever figure out how to live among us without wrecking another country, continent, or people? 

As a religious historian all I can say is more than likely not. 

 My hope lies in those like me in history, tucked away even in church history. I seek the narratives of the harried and harassed and the hymns they sang, often incantations and older stories from other lands. The bata drum beats and tradecraft that followed the north star on bloody paths through the oppressor’s traps and snares on the way towards freedom.  I want to learn to weave anti- imperialist charms and the alchemy of the abolitionist. My hope is in the gifts of the fabled 72 of the Gospel. I want to be  imbued with the power to cast out demons, raise the dead, and heal the sick, to set the captives free. Feed the hungry. To shake off my sandals and watch empires fall and tyrants flee. The cynics are perhaps right and perhaps the age of wonders is over, or  it is simply that this entire age has forgotten how to wonder? 

This newsletter will search the past using the lens of scholars and philosophers of history from different perspectives, cultures, and framings all asking the questions: what is magic/k? I will endeavor to add the much needed black, queer, and trans perspective that will transgress the white bread takes and safe boundaries a lot of my peers have set around the magic/kal and esoteric. 

The hidden ways I know are sharpened pieces of shattered dreams, the new star charts of mothers thousands of miles from their motherland and the herbalist / root worker for whom practical power was the only real power. I can’t wait to start sharing more Black Magic/k and Black Power with y’all as I lay out over the next few weeks leading up to September the big premises, format, and monthly topics we will be wrestling with. 

lenny duncan (they/them