| Black Easter | |
| Author: | James Blish |
| Cover Artist: | Judith Anne Lawrence |
| Country: | United Kingdom |
| Language: | English |
| Series: | After Such Knowledge trilogy |
| Genre: | Fantasy |
| Publisher: | Faber and Faber (UK) Doubleday (US) |
| Release Date: | 1968 |
| Media Type: | Print (Hardcover & Paperback) |
| Pages: | 165 |
| Isbn: | 0-571-08699-3 |
| Oclc: | 1562480 |
| Followed By: | The Day After Judgment |
Black Easter is a fantasy novel by American writer James Blish, in which an arms dealer hires a black magician to unleash all the demons of Hell on Earth for a single day. The novel initially depicts the assassination of a Governor of California (a fictionalized version of Ronald Reagan) by a black magician working as a contract killer. The same magician is then hired to release every demon in Hell for a brief time period. However, the demons cannot actually be returned to Hell by the end of the novel. Their traditional opponent, God, has already retired and nobody else can compel them to return to Hell.
It was first published in 1968. The sequel is The Day After Judgment. Together, those two novellas form the third part of the thematic After Such Knowledge trilogy (the title is from a line of T. S. Eliot's Gerontion: "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?") with A Case of Conscience and Doctor Mirabilis. Blish has stated that it was only after completing Black Easter that he realized that the works formed a trilogy.[1]
A shorter version of Black Easter was serialized as Faust Aleph-Null in If magazine, August–October 1967; the book edition retains the phrase as its subtitle.[2] Black Easter and its sequel were later published as a single volume under the title Black Easter and The Day After Judgment (1980); a 1990 edition from Baen Books was renamed The Devil's Day.
Black Easter and The Day After Judgment deal with what sorcery would be like if it existed, and the if the ritual magic for summoning demons as described in grimoires actually worked. Its background was based closely on the writings of practising magicians working in the Christian tradition from the 13th to the 18th centuries.[3]
In the first book, a wealthy arms manufacturer, Dr. Baines, comes to a black magician, Theron Ware. Initially Baines tests Ware's credentials by asking for two people to be killed, first the Governor of California, Rogan (Reagan was governor at the time of writing) and then a rival physicist. When this is accomplished to Baines' satisfaction, Baines reveals his real plan: he wishes to release all the demons from Hell on Earth for one night to see what might happen. The book includes a long sequence of the summoning ritual and the demons as they appear. Tension between white magicians (who appear to have a line of communications with the unfallen host in Heaven) and Ware is woven over the terms and conditions of a magical covenant that is designed to provide for observers and limitations. Black Easter ends with Baphomet announcing to the participants that the demons cannot be compelled to return to Hell: the war is over and God is dead.
The Day After Judgment, which follows in the series, develops and extends the characters from the first book. It suggests that God might not be dead, or that demons might not be inherently self-destructive, as something appears to be restraining the actions of the demons upon Earth. In a lengthy Miltonian speech at the end of the novel, Satan Mekratrig explains that, compared to humans, demons are good, and that if perhaps God has withdrawn Himself, then Satan beyond all others was qualified to take His place and, if anything, would be a juster god. However, the defeat of Satan is complete. He cannot take up this throne and must hand the burning keys to man, as this is the most fell of all his fell damnations. He never wanted to be God at all, and so having won all, has he lost all.
Algis Budrys was dissatisfied with Black Easter, declaring it, despite Blish's outstanding craftsmanship, to be "an unreasonably inflated short story." He particularly faulted the novel's abrupt conclusion, characterizing Blish as an author "genuinely concerned with religion, not with trick endings."[4]
Theron Ware is named for the titular character of Harold Frederic's 1896 novel The Damnation of Theron Ware, a Methodist minister who overestimates his intellectual abilities and social skills, loses his faith and his friends, and emigrates from his native rural New York to start a new life in Seattle.
Many of the white magician monks at Monte Albano are named after Blish's fellow science fiction writers:
(Black Easter, pp. 119–120)
Baines has two employees, names also possibly based on science fiction writers:
A reviewer of Black Easter said, of the book's California governor "Rogan": "A Californian governor named Rogan, which must be an allusion to [Ronald] Reagan", who was then Governor of California.[8] Other people have suggested that Baines, the biggest arms dealer in the world in the book, is an allusion to then-U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson, including Ted White in his review of the book.[9] Blish replied to White's review, but did not comment on that claim.[10]
Blish says in his foreword that all of the magical works and quotations mentioned in the text actually exist, as do the magical symbols reproduced, and "there are no Necronomicons or other such invented works".[3] This is true insofar as Blish did not invent any of the works himself. The Book of the Sayings of Tsiang Samdup was invented by Talbot Mundy; it is the supposed source of the quotations at the beginning of each chapter in his novels Om — The Secret of Ahbor Valley (1924) and The Devil's Guard (1925).