Can you get undesired effects from practicing Dark Magick?

One of my least favorite tropes in fiction is the trope of temptation and corruption — the Dark Side is inherently evil, and any amount of interaction with it will leave a permanent and lasting stain on your soul.

So many stories of this type are about resisting the temptation of the darkness. I really, really don’t like this idea. There’s not much in the way of balance if there’s all-light, no darkness. I’m not a fan of the conflation of darkness with evil, whether that’s literal darkness or figurative darkness. I also think that the only way something becomes a “temptation” is because it’s evil. If it’s not somehow corrupting, it’s not a temptation, it’s just a desire. My favorite stories are those in which characters are able to safely engage with the darkness, whatever that may be, and use it to become stronger.

Bad power, good people is one of my favorite tropes. So that brings me to occultism. Firstly, in real-life magical practices, there’s no “dark side of the Force.” There’s no such thing as inherently evil magic. That’s as absurd as drawing a distinction between “dark fire” which destroys buildings and forests, and “light fire” that sits calmly in a stove, forge, or fireplace. Fire is just fire, and magic is just magic. The difference is only in how it’s used.

Secondly, though “the occult” may have something of a sinister reputation, that is only because it is poorly understood by people who haven’t studied it, and because the word is often applied to supposed shadowy cults in conspiracy theories.

Occultism is not corrupting. Studying or practicing it won’t have a negative effect on you if you do it safely, the same way fire won’t burn you if you know how to safely handle it. Likewise, the darker and edgier practices within occultism do not make the practitioners evil people. Demonolators can be perfectly normal, decent people. On the other side of the same coin, those who preach “love-and-light” are sometimes self-righteous jerks.

And thirdly, I don’t think the darkness is a bad thing. In fact, I think it’s necessary for any occultist to be willing to “descend into the Underworld” and confront the darker side of their own nature, and that of the spiritual world. Darkness is just a part of nature, not inherently good or evil. Many gods and goddesses are dark, and those that aren’t still have qualities and powers that can be terrifying. You do yourself no favors spiritually by being afraid of the dark.

I think that by becoming comfortable with our own Shadows and gaining control over them, we can use their powers for good, so to speak. That requires courage and self-awareness. There’s gold in the Shadow, and there’s enlightenment hidden in the dark.