Sebastian Essene

Black/White Magic is built as two parallel sequences of fifteen pieces. The White Magic cycle draws on Alice Bailey’s Fifteen Rules for Magic, where the soul acts as the magician through meditation, alignment, focused thought, astral force, and the creation of forms intended to manifest in the world. The Black Magic cycle answers each rule with an original counterpart devised by Sebastian Essene as its inversion or concealed double.

Here, “white” and “black” are not fixed synonyms for good and evil. They represent competing claims about who may command hidden forces, for what purpose, and under whose authority. White Magic follows self-mastery, constructive intention, spiritual hierarchy, group service, and the subordination of personal desire to the soul. Black Magic turns toward secrecy, coercion, individual will, transgression, spirit command, and knowledge condemned or excluded by religious and occult institutions.

Across both cycles, magic is treated as a process: intention is concentrated, given symbolic form, charged through word, image, rhythm, and desire, then directed toward change in the practitioner or the world.

The album therefore presents thirty connected stages rather than two moral camps. Each white rule encounters a black reflection, creating a double initiatory system in which service and sovereignty, illumination and concealment, release and control converge on the same unresolved question: the source, use, and legitimacy of magical power.