Druid Ceremony
I'll be involved in a druidic ceremony around the time of halloween... actually, it will be taking place over a three-night period, after which I anticipate being very, well, tired. And sooty.
Ugh... "Is it black or white magic?" Yeah. Okay. Magic is power, raw power, it's not good or evil. This is a basic concept, here. The only people who practice "black" or "white magic" are silly little teenagers who have no idea what the hell they're doing and like to run around and say "teehee! I'm a WITCH!" Or Wiccan, which they typically don't know anything about being beyond the name.
I had one of those in my high school. The only "Wiccan" thing she did was complain about the halloween decorations that depicted witches on brooms with warty faces. She got awfully pissed when the five or six of us who actually knew something about what we were getting into failed to back her up. The administration, in a very surprising gesture, went to the other openly pagan students and asked them how they felt. We unanimously replied that we honestly couldn't care less (the language varied from one individual to the next, they didn't round us all up into the same area first).
If you point your finger at someone and say, "heal him!" you're doing something good.
If you point your finger at someone and say, "give him smallpox!" you're doing something bad. And pathetically stupid. Apparently somebody in my high school was fairly stupid... that girl who complained broke out in warts three days later. Either somebody arranged that, or the goddess got mad, which is always a possibility... she's not as nice as the New Testament Jehovah, she's more like a traditional-values mother with a very big paddle.
Y'know what I always found interesting? That Christian study which was done regarding how far people will go to maintain a "primitive" belief in magic. They came out with something along the lines of "magic can apparently fail 90% of the time and people will still believe in it." Fancy words, considering that in their own studies magic not only failed to, well, fail, half as often as that, but it worked more often than the prayer they asked people to try an even-handed amount of the time instead.
The world is a much larger place than people like to think.