black magic

War magic is violence, orchestrated or defended against through magic, used
alternately to harm or to heal.1 Compelling the investigator to navigate complex webs of definition in ‘religion’ and ‘magic’, war magic appears multisided, with porous conceptual boundaries incorporating various particular
historical contexts. Janus-like offense and defense inevitably form a dualistic
central pole around which webs of meaning arise, to wit, ‘black’ and ‘white’
magic, spells to harm and protect, and talismans to unleash or ward off the
murderous and sickening powers of unseen enemies, supernatural entities,
gods, demons, and the dead. Taking a performative, ethnographic, embodied approach to war magic—otherwise referred to as assault sorcery, magical
death, and warrior religion—reveals that war magic is located in specific sites
of cultural performance, where people evoke and enact supernatural, liminal,
or divine power, on the one hand, to perpetuate violence and, on the other, to
resist harm. Here we ask not so much what magic means as what magic does,
not if magic is rational or illogical, but in what circumstances it is presumed
necessary and effective. Battles of ideas are resolved in bloodshed in the permanent global theater of war.
Whether a belief held is ‘true’ or ‘false’ from some particular or universal
cultural parameter hardly matters when a hijacked aircraft is about to explode.