Black Magic Today, by June Johns
April, 1971 NEL Books
NEL Books sure came up with some covers, didn’t they? Hopefully Blogger won’t flag this one for “adult content” like they did the cover for Bloodletter. I picked this one up years ago, fortunately for a nice price, with the hope that it would focus on that late ‘60s/early ‘70s shaggy-haired occult revival scene I’ve always been interested in. As it turns out, Black Magic Today only occasionally captures this vibe.
Instead, author June Johns, of whom I know nothing, turns in a digressive polemic on the dark arts; she sums up that only the “deviant” are ultimately drawn to black magic. “I am neither a witch nor a black magician,” she tells us in the intro, and then goes into chapters with titles like “What Is Magic?” We get the history of magic, from primitive superstition to “the astronaut of today who carries a rabbit foot as a mascot.”
As mentioned, the book is pretty digressive throughout its 127 pages. We have “Magic Versus Religion,” with detours into Egyptian and Aztec beliefs, as well as a study of Druids. There’s also a feature on the Salem witch trials – many of the accused witches who claimed to have had sex with the devil. (“His member cold and painful…”) Johns notes the modern belief that these Medieval women were tricked by rascally warlocks who penetrated them with metal dildos or somesuch, fooling the women into thinking it was Satan’s, uh, “cold and painful member.”
There’s an overview on how the Catholic Church created the devil, Johns noting that the Bible has no real figure one could compare to the concept of Satan. She further claims that black magic and devil worship were an outcome of the Inquisition, with the persecuted pushed into further realms of devilry. Of course soon enough we’re on the topic of Aleistar Crowley, which goes on for several pages. Only here, toward the end of the book, does Johns get into the “groovy era” stuff I was looking for, with overviews of news stories about this or that black magic atrocity in England or elsewhere.
Black Magic Today is really more of a digressive overview on magic belief in general than the expose on post-Altamont depravity that I was hoping for. Since I don’t have much to say about the book, I’ll just pad out the review with some arbitrary excerpts:
You must read The Sleepless by Graham Masterton. It's not about Satan, but about Azazel, the enigmatic character from the Old Testament who could well be a forerunner of the Prince of Darkness. I wrote a review in a true state of Priapic/Dionysian ecstasy: https://lasestrellassonoscuras.blogspot.com/2016/02/la-pesadilla-de-graham-masterton-planeta_13.html
ReplyDeleteI have quite a few of these, most I bought when they came out. There were a few that were intended as serious, but a lot were sensational and oftentimes lurid, kind of like cousins to pulp horror.
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