Elk feared that US policies would destroy the Lakota Nation’s identity, so during the summer of 1930 he dictated his life story to John Neihardt. The resulting book, Black Elk Speaks, was published in 1932 and has been reprinted many times. In it Black Elk described the history of the Lakota Nation and provided a sense of hope for the future. His vision eventually became a message to the Lakota people – a warning not to assimilate completely and thereby lose their unique heritage.
Although Black Elk died in 1950, long before the passage of the Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978, his teachings, combined with this legislation, created a new respect for and interest in Lakota spirituality.
BLACK MAGIC
The use of supernatural and psychic power for evil ends, the opposite of white magic, which is concerned with healing and promoting what is good.
The term ‘black magic’ has been used with a wide variety of meanings and evokes such a variety of reactions that it has become vague and almost meaningless. It is often synonymous with three other multivocal terms: witchcraft, the occult and sorcery. The only similarity among its various uses is that it refers to human efforts to manipulate the supernatural with negative intent and the selfish use of psychic power for personal gain. Workers of black magic are thought to have but one goal: to satisfy their own desires at whatever cost to others.
Magic, good or evil, is universal, with no ethnic or racial association, and it is unfortunate that not just in Western civilization but many cultures around the world, good and evil have for centuries been denoted as white and black. White often designates healing, truth, purity, light and positive energy, while black is darkness, falsehood, evil and negative energy.
In modern times probably the most popular synonym for black magic is the occult. Originally the term meant hidden, hence mysterious, and was routinely used by classical and medieval scholars to refer to ‘sciences’ such as astrology, alchemy and kabbalah, but from the late nineteenth century, when magical sects such as the Order of the Golden Dawn emerged, the term began to take on the meaning of evil or satanic. Perhaps the best-known occultist and black magic practitioner was Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), who dubbed himself the Antichrist. More than any other person Crowley gave the occult an evil connotation.
BLACK SHUCK
Spectral dogs in general play a role in many haunting legends and it is reported that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle based his story The Hound of the Baskervilles on accounts of the Black Shuck legends.
Black Shuck is alleged to be a phantom dog in British folklore that has frequently been sighted in Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Devon. The common name of this ghostly animal varies according to locality: ‘Old Shuck’ (Norfolk), ‘Old Shock’ (Suffolk), ‘Yeth’ (Devon), ‘Pooka’ (Ireland), ‘Barguest’ (Yorkshire), to name but a few. His appearance is often considered a death omen.
The origins of Black Shuck remain shrouded in mystery, but the stories probably originated from the hound of the Viking raiders’ god Odin and from the Celtic legends of Arawn, whose hounds of hell searched for human souls. The name Black Shuck may have originated from a local word, shucky, meaning ‘shaggy’, or an Anglo-Saxon term scucca, meaning ‘satan’ or ‘demon’. Other local names have been ‘Galley Trot’, ‘Old Snarleyow’ and ‘Old Scarfe’.
Black Shuck is described as being black, and the size of a very large dog or even a small calf. It is reported to have large, saucer-shaped eyes of red or yellow. In some instances it has been reported as being headless or having just one large Cyclops-type eye and to wear a collar or chain, which rattles as it moves.
The hound is said to roam graveyards and lonely country roads, and on stormy nights its howling can be heard. It is believed to leave no footprints, but its icy breath can be felt. To see or even hear the phantom animal is thought to be a foreboding of misfortune, madness or death. In parts of Devon even speaking its name is thought to bring misfortune. In Suffolk, though, it is thought that Black Shuck is harmless as long as it is not bothered. In Cambridgeshire, Black Shuck is said to have favourite haunts along the banks of the river Ouse and in the flat landscape of the fens.
There is little evidence of Black Shuck causing anyone any harm on contact, but there is a curious account of an attack back in 1577 in the parish of Bungay, Suffolk. The parishioners were at church when the church darkened and a violent storm broke out. Black Shuck appeared from nowhere in the middle of the congregation. It charged through the church, causing mass panic, and killing two men who were kneeling in prayer. A third man is thought to have died from severe burns. At the same time, a few miles away in Blythburgh, another black dog reputedly appeared out of nowhere in the local church, killed three men and left burn marks on the church door.
BLAKE, WILLIAM [1757–1827]
William Blake was a mystic, poet, artist and engraver whose visionary art was much misunderstood by his contemporaries. He published his first set of poems when he was 26, and six years later, in 1789, he printed the Songs of Innocence, which he also engraved and illustrated. In his forties he wrote his more symbolic epic poems, Milton and Jerusalem, and his best-known illustrations of the Book of Job and Dante’s Divine Comedy were created in the last few years of his life.
Blake lived and died in relative poverty. He received little formal schooling, which makes his visionary interpretations of the Bible and the classics all the more remarkable. From a young age he experienced visions; when he was ten he told his father he had seen hosts of angels in a tree, and when his brother, Robert, died at the age of 20, he saw his soul ‘ascend heavenward clapping its hands for joy’. Throughout his life Blake drew his strength from the spirit world. He believed deeply in the human imagination – indeed, that it was the only reality – and he often spoke with the apparitions, angels, devils and spirits that he drew and engraved in his work. His interest in the spirit world brought him into contact with many of the visionaries and writers of his time, such as Emanuel Swedenborg.
BLAVATSKY, MADAME [1831–1891]
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, daughter of Russian aristocrats, was a key figure in the nineteenth-century revival of occult and esoteric knowledge. A highly intelligent and energetic woman, she helped to spread Eastern philosophies and mystical ideas to the West and tried to give the study of the occult a scientific and public face.
Blavatsky became aware of her psychic abilities at an early age. She travelled through the Middle East and Asia learning psychic and spiritual techniques from various teachers, and she said that it was in Tibet that she met the secret masters or adepts who sent her to carry their message to the world.
In 1873 Helena immigrated to New York, where she impressed everyone with her psychic feats of astral projection, telepathy, clairvoyance, clairsentience and clairaudience. Her powers were never tested scientifically, but her interests were always more in the laws and principles of the psychic world than psychic power itself. In 1874 Helena met and began a lifelong friendship with Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, a lawyer and journalist who covered spiritual phenomena, and a year later they founded a society ‘to collect and diffuse a knowledge of the laws which govern the Universe’. They called this society the Theosophical Society, from theosophy, a Greek term meaning ‘divine wisdom’ or ‘wisdom of the gods’.
Travelling to India, Blavatsky and Olcott established themselves at Adyar, near Madras, and a property they bought there eventually became the world headquarters of the society. They established the nucleus of the movement in Britain and founded no fewer than three Theosophical Societies in Paris.
Throughout
