Dark Art: The Changing Face of Public Relations

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In Shadow Ops, the "dark arts" are "prohibited schools" of magic, which are rare but immensely powerful types of magic, or use of a "legal" school in an illegal way. These include Necromancy, Sentient Elemental Conjuration, Gate Magic, and Negramancy, with the illegal uses of legal schools being Whispering (use of terramancy to control animals) and Rending (offensive use of healing magic). If a human manifests powers in any prohibited school, they get a simple choice: death or military service, and in the latter case, if you don't shape up, they lobotomize you to make you more compliant. Looks really scary, or a small but dangerous band used it. Usually the Art itself is Dark Is Not Evil, but the negative cultural associations make the establishment distrust it. The Confederacy in the Hostile Takeover (Swann) series bans LEGO Genetics of humans or other sapients (explicitly including new types of Moreau), A.I. in any form, and Nanomachines likewise. The first two date from the devastating wars immediately preceding the Moreau Series, the third from a Grey Goo incident on Titan. This prohibition is so strong that Orbital Bombardment of any community found to be practicing them is considered restrained. Sterilizing the entire planet is also on the table.

The Book of Vile Darkness sourcebook notes that any spell that taps into negative energy is dabbling in forces that are best left undabbled-with. To see someone's condition with Deathwatch, you're looking through negative-colored glasses. Animating a golem isn't truly "slavery", it's temporary (albeit long-term) attachment of a spirit to the parts (and in the case of clay and flesh golems, it's unstable attachment at that); it's arguable if they're even sentient. Raising a corpse as an undead, on the other hand, is the sort of thing that kills the grass on your lawn even if you're in the basement at the time. Refinement of Flux for the Prometheans, which is based around rejecting humanity and accepting one's monstrous side. Centimani, as they're called, often twist themselves into hideous mutations, and due to the nature of Vitriol, can no longer gain it normally - forcing them to rely on lacuna, a form of Mind Rape that Prometheans view in much the same terms as actual rape. At least, she jokes about it. She could tell soon after meeting Negi that his Martyr Without a Cause complex would cause him to jump at the chance to learn it if that ever arose, and didn't so much teach it to him as slant his regular training towards surviving making that choice. That this suited her sadistic tendencies just fine (it meant she had to break him — just a bit, and carefully — as while you don't quite have to be evil to use Magia Erebea, you can't consider yourself entirely committed to any ideal or virtue) was providentially coincidental. I contend that we must view Dark Art as a movement, as we do Surrealism, Expressionism, or the Pre Raphaelites, and that to do this, we must define the attributes of Dark Art that set it apart from other aesthetically similar works. Do we intend to show those who feel drawn to the Dark that there is a genre of art to feed that need? Is there a desire to show the world that there is a beauty in things they might normally shy away from? Are we intending to force the world of high culture to recognise the value of themes and ideas previously relegated to popular culture?In addition to necromancy, Redguard society considers most schools of magic to fall into this category. The sole exception is made for Destruction magic, because dealing more damage is always good to the Redguards and because it is considered to have fewer of the nasty effects of the other schools. In addition to Conjuration, which includes necromancy, Mysticism and Alteration/Illusion are also disliked due to their associations with soul stealing and altering reality ( literally or perceptions of it), respectively. Dark art does not hold with the idealist visions of modernism, and holds interest in subjects and subjective reality, rather than exploration of materials. It is often anti-authoritarian, aware of its own place within wider culture, and sometimes humorous and self deprecating. As such, work created during and prior to the modernist movement, does not truly belong to Dark Art. The Dark Souls games have variously treated Pyromancy and Hexes as dark and nefarious. Pyromancy was seen as unrefined and wild in the first game, with practitioners from the Great Swamp being stigmatized for using it. It didn't help that there is a history of practitioners literally burning themselves to death or descending into madness. The corruption of the Witch of Izalith when she used her Soul of Flame to try to create a substitute for the First Flame (and dooming herself and the citizens of the city of Lost Izalith to become demons in the process) may have had something to do with that. In Werewolf: The Apocalypse, multiple practices can leave Gaia Garou at risk of Wyrm contamination.

Among the Silent Striders, members of the Eaters of the Dead camp practice the Rite of Dormant Wisdom. Participants ritually devour a dead person's brain to acquire their memories. Not only is the rite a grave violation of the Litany, but participants risk attracting the attention of the Urge Wyrm Foebok. If a Garou takes part in the rite more times than their permanent gnosis score, they become a slave of Foebok. Compulsion (magical mind-control) and Rending (torturing and directly ripping apart someone's body using the Power) are seen as weaves that can almost only be used for evil purposes. In the beginning of the series, the knowledge of them has been lost for a long time anyway, but most Aes Sedai consider that a good thing. To this day no respectable medical scientist admits using knowledge gained from Josef Mengele's archives. He was such a bad scientist that there is nothing to glean from his files. The experiments performed by Imperial Japan's Unit 731 were at least as bad as Mengele's experiments, but the people involved got away with it, because the U.S. government offered them amnesty in exchange for their research. Some of them are still alive and still claim that vivisecting human beings without anesthesia was a perfectly sensible and moral thing to do. Improvised Explosives. While modern technology makes it impossible to completely eradicate such knowledge, the authorities become VERY unhappy if they find out you know this stuff.The three Twilight Invocations grant greater power than the Radiant Invocations, but each comes with both risk and moral flaw. It invokes dangerous forces, beings, and entities which are impossible to control once released, and which tend to hold a grudge about being forced into service — if they were ever really under the user's control to begin with and not just giving them the rope to hang themselves with. On the "misunderstood" side of things, Dishonored: Death of the Outsider emphasizes the fact that the Outsider himself is not inherently evil or good, and the people who made him into what he is, without having direct access to the magic, are much worse. Essentially, the powers of the Void are just tools, and it is up to the caster for how they decide to use them, though direct connection to the Void is akin to a magical variation on radiation poisoning. With this movie standing as a kind of ouroboros of Dark Art, both inspired by and inspiring artists, should we consider the movie itself a work of Dark Art? Charms like Ghost-Eating Technique that can permanently destroy the essence of spirits and gods are considered very very evil by said gods and spirits, who usually consider themselves immortal and hate being reminded that it is not really the case. They can intuitively feel any Exalt who knows such techniques and they fear and hate them intensely.

Interestingly, infernal charms with the Heretical keyword are considered the Dark Arts by the demon princes themselves, since most of them are designed to allow Infernal Exalted to free themselves from their patrons and become their equals. A few charms are even labelled as both Blasphemy and Heretical, which means that both Heaven and Hell freak out if you use them. So, just who practices the Dark Arts in spite of all these dangers? Lots of people/things! If it's magical, then an Evil Sorcerer, if it's a science, then a Mad Scientist of course, and if it's a martial art, then the Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy is likely to know it. Expect them to learn their craft in the Academy of Evil. If any kind of magic/science is considered to be the Dark Arts, you have Magic Is Evil or Science Is Bad. The Calignes, spells that call on the All-Consuming Darkness. Just to learn one is a ding on the Karma Meter (and usually requires human sacrifice), and nearly all of them are morally repugnant to use.A lot of what humans know about the effects of freezing and phosgene gas on the human body comes from Nazi experimentation - the ethical debates are still raging. One side holds that it is inherently tainted due to the sheer evil acts that were committed to gain them, while the other holds that not using available knowledge to save lives is cowardly at best or hypocritical at worst. Demonology in general is seen as a dangerous, risky and best avoided field of study. The line between demonology (using demons) and infernalism (being used by demons) is thin, it is easier to summon a demon than to control it or to banish it, and during the First Age the sorcerers of the whole world had to to gather for a great feast every Calibration night just to make sure none of them attempted the dreaded ritual to summon a Third Circle demon (which can only be done during that night). With both of these artists rising to prominence in the 1960s and 70s, we are well served to look to other cultural changes happening in the west around this time. The rapid expansion of counter cultures in this time period (notably the freak, hippy, and punk trends) were rooted in questioning of authority and saw collective cultural fear, which is most readily identified by studying the production of horror movies, shift from the terrors of mad science, to fears centred in society itself. Depiction of possession, cults, serial killers, and zombies started to rise as the monster became an invading force from within. In other words, if there are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know, you can expect someone to have thought it would be cool to make an easy to read how-to book on it. The "Dark" Art might not necessarily be evil or dangerous, but there's always at least some cause to consider these powers/skills inherently hazardous, if potent, and not to be left open for everyone to learn. Negima! Magister Negi Magi: Magia Erebea is powered by nasty stuff. Negi isn't even human anymore due to overuse of it. In fact, Evangeline started teaching it to him because she wanted to corrupt him into her "mini boss" flunkie.