Black magic occupies a distinctive and recurring position in the depth-psychological corpus, where it functions not as mere superstition or cultural curiosity but as a psychologically precise category naming the misuse of unconscious forces for destructive, power-driven, or ego-serving ends. Jung’s formulation, as transmitted by von Franz, draws a sharp structural distinction: while white magic seeks to restore order against the unconscious’s disruptive powers, black magic conscripts those same destructive impulses into the service of individual will against the collective good. The figure of Hitler as ‘negative savior’ anchors the concept firmly in clinical and historical reality. Von Franz extends the analysis with characteristic rigor, demonstrating how active imagination becomes black magic the moment the practitioner fixes attention on the object of affect rather than disidentifying from it — a technical boundary with grave psychological consequences. The corpus also preserves a more ambivalent strand: von Franz elsewhere refuses the easy black/white color-coding of magical contests in fairy tales, insisting the distinction is not moral but relational and contextual. Dodds’s treatment of Greek curse-tablets adds a classical-historical dimension, noting that Plato legislated against black magic not from credulity but because it manifests evil will with real psychological effects. Across these voices, black magic consistently marks the threshold where unconscious power escapes ethical containment.
black magic exalts the destructive impulses as the only valid truth in opposition to the order hitherto prevailing, and moreover bends them to the service of the individual as opposed to that of the whole community.
Von Franz transmits Jung’s core definition of black magic as the psychologically destructive exaltation and privatization of unconscious negating forces, exemplified historically by Hitler as negative savior.
, Psychotherapy, 1993thesis
I leave out the object because otherwise I am practicing black magic. The object of your hatred or love is something on which your unconscious greed fastens, and by that you produce wishful thinking, just the opposite of active imagination.
Von Franz defines a precise technical threshold at which active imagination degenerates into black magic: the moment the practitioner fails to disidentify from the affect and instead fixates on the actual object of desire or hatred.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974thesis
black magic expresses an evil will and has evil psychological effects. Nor was this merely the private fussiness of an elderly moralist.
Dodds demonstrates that Plato’s legal prohibition of black magic rested not on credulity but on a clear-eyed recognition that it manifests genuine evil will with real psychological consequences.
, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951thesis
Knowledge, if linked with a state of higher consciousness, is perhaps the greatest means of fighting evil; dissociated from consciousness, it is just one magical trick against another. Anything in this sense can be used as black or white magic.
Von Franz argues that the black/white distinction in magic is not inherent to the technique but depends on whether knowledge is integrated with higher consciousness or wielded dissociatively.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974supporting
you see from the dreams of black magicians as black popes that they represent a shadow of the ruling collective attitude.
Von Franz interprets the black magician figure in dreams as the shadow-projection of the dominant collective worldview, in this case the suppressed pagan and creative energies beneath Mediterranean Catholicism.
, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 1997supporting
One could think of black and white magic, but that is an arbitrary distribution of colors. I would rather say one magic against another, not naming one black and the other white beforehand.
Von Franz resists the conventional moral binary of black versus white magic in fairy-tale contests, insisting the opposition is relational rather than a fixed ethical taxonomy.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974supporting
He dreamed he was standing in the presence of a sublime hieratic figure called the ‘white magician,’ who was nevertheless clothed in a long black robe.
Jung presents the compensatory dream of the white magician in a black robe and the black magician in white as a vivid archetypal illustration of the interpenetration of opposites in the magician archetype.
, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959supporting
the old man had said the Black Magician would be needed. Just then in came another very beautiful old man dressed in white, and this was the Black Magician.
Jung’s seminar elaborates the compensatory dream of white and black magicians, showing how the unconscious deliberately inverts expected symbolic coloring to confound conscious moral assumptions.
, Analytical Psychology: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1925, 1989supporting
It happens quite frequently that when one misuses a religious ritual it has a destructive effect, working as a kind of black magic.
Von Franz shows that black magic is not confined to explicitly occult practice but arises whenever a sacred or therapeutic technique is conscripted by egocentric or complexual motives.
, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 1997supporting
Both in the Russian and in the Irish story, the one who wins is the hero who can make contact with the black magician’s daughter.
Von Franz reads the fairy-tale motif of the hero winning the black magician’s daughter as evidence that the feminine, relational element — rather than superior magical force — resolves the archetypal contest with destructive power.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974supporting
In neither story do the people take the trouble to wonder if it is black or white magic. They just display the usual fear of magic of any kind.
Von Franz observes that the collective fear of magic in African folktales refuses the black/white distinction, reacting to the uncanny power itself rather than its moral valence.
, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 1997supporting
When the so-called ‘black magicians’ (once a title for the Devil) conjures a demon he or she is actually bringing out a force from inside the self.
Pollack, reading through a Jungian lens, reframes the black magician’s operation as an inward psychological event — the liberation of repressed libidinal energy — rather than external supernatural coercion.
, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Tarot Journey to Self-Awareness, 1980supporting
Black or hostile magic is predominantly phallic in Australia… The Pindupi refer to black magic in general as erati, and a special type described as kujur-punganyi (‘bad-make’).
Campbell documents the phallic and somatic symbolism of black magic in Australian Aboriginal practice, grounding the depth-psychological concept in comparative ethnographic material.
, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting
black suggests the left-hand path: ‘She is a black witch,’ or ‘He is a black magician.’ European and Egyptian alchemists’ associations around black are very close to the Africans’: black stands for crude matter, the ‘prima materia,’ lead, and Osiris’ body when in the underworld.
Bly situates ‘black magician’ within a cross-cultural symbolic matrix linking the left-hand path to the alchemical nigredo and the prima materia, connecting moral and cosmological registers of the term.
, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990aside
they are even more convinced that I have received the black art from Philemon. It is an error to believe that there are magical practices that one can learn. One cannot understand magic.
In the Red Book, Jung distinguishes magic from teachable technique by insisting it belongs to the register of unreason and incomprehension, implicitly demarcating black art as the projection of the Other’s uncanny power.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009aside
as in black magic, 109 of black poisonous vipers
A bibliographic index entry in Russell’s study of Hillman confirms ‘black magic’ as a recurrent reference point in Hillman’s thought, co-located with imagery of poison, death omens, and the color black’s broader symbolic field.
, Life and Ideas of James Hillman, 2023aside