Black Easter
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Black Easter is a Hugo Award nominated fantasy novel by James Blish in which an arms dealer hires a black magician to unleash all the Demons of Hell on earth for a single day. It was first published in 1968. The sequel is The Day After Judgment. Together, those two very short novels form one part of the thematic "After Such Knowledge" trilogy with A Case of Conscience and Dr. Mirabilis. Black Easter was serialised as Faust aleph-null in If magazine.
[edit] Plot introduction
Black Easter and The Day after Judgement were written using the assumption that the ritual magic for summoning demons as described in grimoires actually worked.
[edit] Plot summary
In the first book, a wealthy arms manufacturer comes to a black magician, Theron Ware, with a strange request: he wishes to release all the demons from hell for one night to see what might happen. The book includes a lengthy description of the summoning ritual, and a detailed (and as accurate as possible, given the available literature) desciption of the grotesque figures of the demons as they appear. Tension between white magicians who appear to have a line of communications with 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 can not be compelled to return to hell: the War is over, and God is dead.
The Day After Judgement, which follows in the series, develops and extends the characters from the first book. It suggests that God may not be dead, or that demons may 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at the end of the novel, Satan Mekratrig explains that compared to humans, demons are good, and that if perhaps God has withdrawn Himself then Satan beyond all others was qualified to take His place and if anything would be a more just god.
