|
BLACK EASTER -- AUTHOR'S NOTE |
|
There have been many novels, poems and plays about magic and witchcraft. All of them that I have read -- which I think includes the vast majority -- classify without exception as either romantic or playful, Thomas Mann's included. I have never seen one which dealt with what sorcery actually had to be like if it existed, although all the grimoires are explicit about the matter. Whatever other merits this book may have, it neither romanticizes magic nor treats it as a game. Technically, its background is based as closely as possible upon the writings and actual working manuals of practicing magicians working in the Christian tradition from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries, from the Ars Magna of Ramon Lull, through the various Keys of pseudo-Solomon, pseudo-Agrippa, pseudo-Honorius and so on, to the grimoires themselves. All of the books mentioned in the text actually exist; there are no "necronomicons" or other such invented works, and the quotations and symbols are equally authentic. (Though of course it should be added that the attributions of these works are seldom to be trusted; as C.A.E. Waite has noted, the besetting sins of magic are imputed authorship, false places of publication and backdating.) For most readers this will be warning enough. The experimentally minded, however, should be further warned that, although the quotations, diagrams and rituals in the novel are authentic, they are in no case complete. The book is not, and was not intended to be, either synoptic or encyclopedic. It is not a vade mecum, but a cursus infamam.
James Blish |