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The Dark Arts

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Spargel: Elzar had been seduced by the dark side of cooking. Cilantro, mango salsa, raspberry vinaigrette!
Bender: That drizzler!
— Futurama, "The 30% Iron Chef"

Basically, The Dark Arts are any science, discipline, magic, or martial combat stylenote  that is deemed by society in general and the establishment in particular as a Bad Idea.®

In other words, if there are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know, you can expect someone to have thought it would be cool to make an easy to read how-to book on it. The "Dark" Art might not necessarily be evil or dangerous, but there's always at least some cause to consider these powers/skills inherently hazardous, if potent, and not to be left open for everyone to learn.

This can be for any of the following reasons, sometimes several at once:

There are a lot of possible tropes that can be treated as a Dark Art; here are a few:

So, just who practices the Dark Arts in spite of all these dangers? Lots of people/things! If it's magical, then an Evil Sorcerer, if it's a science, then a Mad Scientist of course, and if it's a martial art, then the Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy is likely to know it. Expect them to learn their craft in the Academy of Evil. If any kind of magic/science is considered to be the Dark Arts, you have Magic Is Evil or Science Is Bad.

Even though the only crime in art is bad taste, the Mad Artist usually knows how to drive viewers mad (in the bad way) with their art. A hero might be able to "redeem" the Dark Arts, or at least use them without becoming damned/addicted when the Godzilla Threshold is crossed.

Not to be confused with shadow magic, which allows the user to bend and make darkness and shadows via magic; this tends to be morally neutral, maybe leaning slightly towards evil.

Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime and Manga 
  • In Delicious in Dungeon, Marcille dabbles in forbidden magic, believing that magic is inherently neither good nor evil and only man can be both. She could also be terribly, terribly wrong about this — when she's using forbidden magic to cast dispel on the Lunatic Magician's dragonblood minions, she starts chuckling and smiling as she's spattered with blood, bleeding from the nose, and her eyes are unclear and distant. However, these are also symptoms of large usage of mana, which Blood Magic uses, so it might just be that.
  • The Black Arts in Fairy Tail, made up of Living Magic and Death Magic. Living Magic involves breathing life into often inanimate objects, while Death Magic is Exactly What It Says on the Tin and instantly kills anything it touches. For rather obvious reasons, both of these types of magic are explicitly banned by the Magic Council, especially after the Black Wizard, Zeref, absolutely mastered them, and literally wrote the book on it. He knows damn well what he's done to the world because of it.
  • Fullmetal Alchemist: Human transmutation is forbidden because it violates Rule #1 of Alchemy, Equivalent Exchange. "For what can equal a human soul?" Because of this, practitioners always lose body parts and resurrections always come back wrong.
  • In Naruto, Forbidden Jutsu are any jutsu that are either too dangerous (e.g. Fuuton: Rasenshuriken, which nearly destroys Naruto's arm when he uses it the first time) to perform, or plain immoral (e.g. Edo Tensei, which involves human sacrifices), preferably some combination of the two. Bear in mind that normal jutsu include mind attacking illusions, fireballs and lightning attacks used for assassination, any of which can kill the user if used too much. That's an idea of how bad these can be.
  • Negima! Magister Negi Magi: Magia Erebea is powered by nasty stuff. Negi isn't even human anymore due to overuse of it. In fact, Evangeline starts teaching it to him because she wants to corrupt him into her "mini boss" flunkie... at least, she jokes about it. She could tell soon after meeting Negi that his Martyr Without a Cause complex would cause him to jump at the chance to learn it if that ever arose, and didn't so much teach it to him as slant his regular training towards surviving making that choice. That this suited her sadistic tendencies just fine (it meant she had to break him — just a bit, and carefully — as while you don't quite have to be evil to use Magia Erebea, you can't consider yourself entirely committed to any ideal or virtue) was providentially coincidental.
  • The Cyberdarks in Yu-Gi-Oh! GX. Apparently, the wrong set of children's playing cards exude evil energy and can give people heart attacks.

    Fan Works 
  • In crawlersout, "dark" magic is magic that requires a "price" (usually emotional, but spiritual or physical aspects are possibilities as well) to perform. They're considered "dark" because they're much easier to abuse than "light" magic. It's actually perfectly legal to learn dark magic, it's just heavily frowned upon in magical communities that are highly conservative, such as Magical Britain. Some of the more useful and comparatively less objectionable spells, such as the Patronus Charm (which is fueled by happy memories) often return the "toll", and thus many are unaware that they qualify as dark magic. On the other hand, there are some spells whose "tolls" are so terrible that usually only the most evil of people would ever consider using them; the Killing Curse, for example, takes a piece of the user's soul. The three Unforgivable Curses, along with Blood Magic and soul magic, fall under this category.
  • In New Blood (artemisgirl), Hermione has read a few of these books from Quirrel, even if she has no intention of using them.

    Film 
  • Attachment: Lev tells Maja how some practices are considered black magic by the Talmud and so forbidden. Nonetheless, he resorts to a forbidden ritual after nothing else works, one that risks the life of everyone nearby when it's performed.

    Folklore 
  • The Scholomance, from Romanian mythology, is a school for evil wizards which teaches the dark arts to students. In particular, attendees of the school are said to learn how to talk to beasts and control the weather, with one student even being forced to stay after graduation and ride around on a dragon handling the world's weather for all eternity. In some tellings, the school is supposedly also where Dracula learned how to become a vampire.

    Literature 
  • Necromancy in An Army of the Dead, which revolves around using the energy of formerly living things to power spells. Oddly enough, the time it was actually used was for a good reason.
  • Bazil Broketail: The Masters of Padmasa along with their servants practice magic which involves drawing blood, inflicting pain or killing to work. It's used for creating horrific war monsters.
  • Black magic in The Black Magician Trilogy involves drawing magical energy from a target through a cut, and allows a magician to store far more power than they would otherwise be able to generate. Actually, "higher magic" is only forbidden in the Allied Lands; the Sachakans and Traitors use it all the time. Also, the good guys eventually wise up and start using it to defend against anyone else who might use it, but put strict limits on it to avoid abuse.
  • In Dragaera, normal sorcery is done by manipulating the energy of raw chaos which has been filtered through the Imperial Orb. Elder sorcery is done by directly manipulating raw chaos, and by imperial edict practicing it carries the death penalty, because making a blunder with raw chaos... well, the results would be Bad with a capital B. Of course, this doesn't prevent several of the main characters from dabbling in elder sorcery.
  • The Dresden Files has the Seven Laws of Magic laid down by the White Council that bar against certain types of magic; the penalty for breaking any of them is death. These laws prohibit: using magic to kill a mortal, necromancy (specifically, human necromancy), Time Travel, changing another's shape, Mind Rape, or summoning Outsiders. Preventing killing and Mind Rape is pretty self-explanatory, changing someone else's form will probably destroy their mind as a side-effect, time-travel is too likely to backfire in your face, and Outsiders want to destroy all reality. The laws are always enforced with death after the first transgression (unless the transgressor is vouched for by another wizard), which is actually a case of Shoot the Dog. See, to make magic happen you have to believe that doing it is right; ergo, Black Magic users are genuinely choosing to jump off the slippery slope real fast.
  • Harry Potter:
    • There's some categorization in-universe on the seriousness of offensive magic, as such spells are called either jinxes, hexes or curses. Jinxes are defined by Word of God as "spells whose effects are irritating but amusing". Hexes are darker, intended to cause some pain or discomfort, while curses are described as "the worst kinds of dark magic". Three in particular, the "Unforgivable Curses" — Crucio, Avada Kedavra, and Imperio — are so called because any use of them is punishable by life in prison. Villains use them all the time, naturally, but our heroes will only consider it after crossing the Godzilla Threshold.
    • One of the core subjects at Hogwarts is Defence Against the Dark Arts (DADA), which is exactly like the name suggests. A foreign wizarding school, Durmstrang, teaches actual Dark Arts, explaining why Lucius Malfoy almost sent Draco there before Narcissa objected. In Deathly Hallows, Hogwarts teaches Durmstrang-style Dark Arts for a year throughout its occupation by Death Eaters.
  • The Confederacy in the Hostile Takeover (Swann) series bans LEGO Genetics of humans or other sapients (explicitly including new types of Moreau), A.I. in any form, and Nanomachines likewise. The first two date from the devastating wars immediately preceding the Moreau Series, the third from a Grey Goo incident on Titan. This prohibition is so strong that Orbital Bombardment of any community found to be practicing them is considered restrained. Sterilizing the entire planet is also on the table.
  • In The House of Night, using the power of any element/force of nature or an ancient immortal, whether it's Darkness or Light, is Power at a Price. It's played straight with Neferet but subverted with Rephaim, who has only been shown thus far to use his Dark powers in a good way.
  • Journey to Chaos:
    • Bladicraft contains a number of techniques that are known as "Forbidden techniques" because they are either unethical, dangerous, or considered sacrilege. One of these is "Conversion" and it transforms another living thing into a member of the Bladi clan, which runs a high risk of killing them. Another is "Bladi Puppetry" which involves hijacking someone's blood vessels to mind control them. The last person to practice them was killed and then Unpersoned.
    • Ordercraft gives everyone the willies because it is contrary to reality, which is based on chaos, can shut down all other forms of magic, and will eventually corrupt its user into an Empty Shell. It's treated as Necessarily Evil, and those who practice it legitimately, as guardians, are held in high esteem.
  • For a considerable time in the Known Space history, almost all technological research was considered this. The Earth government suppressed any new technology that could be weaponized, which turned out to be everything.
  • In the Lord Darcy series, black magic is a matter of symbolism and intent, using dark symbols and/or intending to harm. It inevitably harms the soul of the practitioner. In one story, a major MacGuffin is a magical device that disrupts those intending to do harm. Since it only sows confusion instead of intending harm, it is not itself black magic.
  • In Pact, Diabolism is seen as this because making a Deal with the Devil tends to cause damage to the world itself and nothing good comes from it.
  • In President's Vampire, necromancy and some forms of alchemy are called "Dark Arts" by Cade, due to the fact that they need Human Resources to work properly.
  • The magic-users of Rental Magica has the set of taboo, mainly prohibiting things that either turn the user into an insane Blob Monster more often than not (including resurrection) or cause a massive area contamination. A plain magical crime (like slaughtering the whole village to get a lot of zombies quickly) apparently isn't lumped with it. Of course, there's an opposition, Ophites.
  • Shades of Magic: Among the five types of elemental magic in Red London, Bone magic is strongly discouraged because it lets the user make People Puppets, thereby magically overriding human will. Those born with a gift for Bone magic are expected to unlearn it... tough luck if it's the only element they can control.
  • In Shadow Ops, the "dark arts" are "prohibited schools" of magic, which are rare but immensely powerful types of magic, or use of a "legal" school in an illegal way. These include Necromancy, Sentient Elemental Conjuration, Gate Magic, and Negramancy, with the illegal uses of legal schools being Whispering (use of terramancy to control animals) and Rending (offensive use of healing magic). If a human manifests powers in any prohibited school, they get a simple choice: death by execution or death resisting arrest, with the secret third option of military service. In the latter case, if you don't shape up, they lobotomize you to make you more compliant.
  • Black magic in Shaman of the Undead includes Necromancy and everything connected to demons, as first requires necromancer to do some terrible things and second mostly ends with magician possessed by demon (not good — most of them prey on people when given chance to escape to mortal world). However, magical police of the setting hires necromancers because the knowledge resurrected people may provide is sometimes almost invaluable. Other wizards treat them with dislike and distrust.
  • Sorcery in The Silent War revolves around summoning demons, Mind Rape and gruesome curses, and works better if human sacrifice is involved. It is also stated to corrupt anyone using it, explaining the general mindset of the Brotherhood of the Pit.
  • Slayers: All spells of the Lord of Nightmares are destructive, likely to go horribly wrong, the most well-known of them can end the world, and they are based on the power of an Eldritch Abomination creator deity. Even Lina, who tends to cast the tamer Black Magic spells like there's no tomorrow, is very serious about these spells. The Unholy Nuke "Dragon Slave" is Played for Laughs every second time; these spells never are.
  • Steel Crow Saga: The Tomodanese utterly forbid the magic of Shadepacting, which lets people bond and empower animals as Familiars, because they honour animal spirits and see the practice as slavery. Jimuro is shocked when an Enemy Mine situation shows him the close, mutually respectful partnership that most pacters have with their Shades.
  • Sweet & Bitter Magic: Dark magic here means the kind that draws power directly from the earth, causing a severe imbalance that can do things like release mystical plagues which kill people slowly. It's a fast way to power with terrible consequences for everyone else, and the world generally. It also quickly corrupts the user, turning them cruel and hateful; once depowered, they will return to their previous personality.
  • The Tough Guide to Fantasyland: Black Arts are involved with killing and enslavement, usually requiring sacrifices or blood at least. This blood will be taken by force, not willingly given, and summoning a demon will likely follow. A pentagram is likely to be used for a symbol.
  • Void Domain has two forms of magic that, while technically morally neutral, are frowned on by Magical Society:
    • Demon Summoning Rituals are shunned because Demons tend to be amoral, bloodthirsty, bored, and powerful, and often try to escape or eat their summoners. Eva gains several trustworthy demon allies, but catches a lot of distrust for it.
    • Blood Magic can be fueled by the blood of the mage or of a consenting human or demon, and even has positive applications like healing otherwise lethal zombie bites. However, its greatest spells require bloodstone, which is transmuted from freshly extracted human hearts, so most people assume that every blood mage is a Serial Killer.
  • In The Wheel of Time, the problem is largely irrelevant in the beginning of the story because the only people openly channeling are the Aes Sedai, who willingly put themselves under a powerful Geas that prevents them from doing anything really bad with it. Nevertheless, some One Power weaves and uses are seen as evil:
    • The Balefire weave is a Dangerous Forbidden Technique whose use permanently damages the structure of the universe. Mere knowledge of it is supposed to be enough to be Stilled by the White Tower, since the world was once almost destroyed by channelers abusing it. The significant number of people knowing it we encounter in the series show that this ban is not so strictly enforced, but all of the good guys (and even some of the bad guys — and we are speaking of people who have no problems killing or torturing thousands of innocents at once) consider it something inherently wrong and to be used as a last-resort weapon only. When it starts being openly used in the last book, the world literally starts to fall apart, with cracks to nothingness appearing in the ground.
    • Compulsion (magical mind-control) and Rending (torturing and directly ripping apart someone's body using the Power) are seen as weaves that can almost only be used for evil purposes. In the beginning of the series, the knowledge of them has been lost for a long time anyway, but most Aes Sedai consider that a good thing.
    • The True Power, which is a variant of the One Power bestowed by the Dark One, is incredibly addictive and will make you mad. The Dark One only allows his most favored minions to use it, but even they are not really overenthusiastic about it (except Ishamael, who is mad.)
  • In When Demons Walk, there are all sorts of magic spells that can be fueled by blood, body parts, or torturing people. Using one's own blood is somewhere in between, some think it is evil, but the protagonist considers it justifiable.
  • The Witch of Knightcharm is set at an evil Wizarding School dedicated to teaching these. Judging by the skill of the team which attacks Emily during her first mission, it’s very effective.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Pili Fantasy: War of Dragons: Martial arts from the Demon Realm are generally this, not evil per se but usually nasty to the victim. For one, there's the "exploding head technique".

    Music 
  • Music has been connected to the dark arts more than once. This is why certain types of music is banned in strict religious communities, and totally banned in muslim societies like Afghanistan during the Taliban regime, or even Iran during the Khomeini regime.
  • Medieval Europe had a religious clause (although not very strict) that music could be used, but not music with rhythm. Couple this with dancing, and you have The Devil in your heels pretty quickly.
  • The Hardanger Fiddle music was accused of this a lot. Legendary fiddlers, usually from the eighteenth century and before, was known for doing tricks with the fiddle, like moving inanimate objects (usually pots of beer) while playing or luring girls, just by plucking the strings. This, coupled with an uncanny knack for going into trance while playing, and making people dance against their will, made the fiddle an acceptable target for religious movements come the nineteenth century. Fiddlers going into trance while playing — let's just say it is still happening. At least one fiddler who died as late as 1970, was notoriously known for getting the girls he wanted just by playing for them.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Blue Rose has arcana classified as sorcery, which involves directly enforcing your will on another being, and harms the wielder in the long term. While there are few effects exclusive to sorcery, using sorcery is almost always easier or more powerful than the alternative, making it a temptation to those willing to risk the costs.
  • In the Champions supplement The Blood and Dr. McQuark, people on the planet Ea are forbidden to use magic or powers that involve interdimensional travel because it could lead to the unleashing of Eldritch Abominations.
  • Dungeons & Dragons:
    • From the C2 adventure The Ghost Tower of Inverness:
      Duke Justinian: Hodar, you dared to defy a royal order and continued to dabble in sorceries which I had forbidden to all the people of my realm.
    • Later editions have a wide range of spells tagged [evil]. Many are poorly explained (Animate Dead uses raw energy to create a non-sapient construct, while golems, which involve enslaving a sapient being, have no such tag) have it for no reason whatsoever (such as Deathwatch, which basically says if a person is dead, near dead or alive). Later source books state that undead exude negative energy, and so make the world a worse place just by existing. That's just one spell.
    • The Book of Vile Darkness sourcebook notes that any spell that taps into negative energy is dabbling in forces that are best left undabbled-with. To see someone's condition with Deathwatch, you're looking through negative-colored glasses. Animating a golem isn't truly "slavery", it's temporary (albeit long-term) attachment of a spirit to the parts (and in the case of clay and flesh golems, it's unstable attachment at that); it's arguable if they're even sentient. Raising a corpse as an undead, on the other hand, is the sort of thing that kills the grass on your lawn even if you're in the basement at the time.
    • In Forgotten Realms, there are prohibitions from the gods of magic (covering Fantastic Nuke, endangering of the world's magical circuit and a few crimes against the magic-using community) plus whatever local laws and traditions don't approve, typically including the most unpleasant forms of necromancy and/or using wild magic in populated areas. From what is known about the elven kingdom of Cormanthyr, it prohibited some enchantments that allow massive binding of magical items and creatures, some blood magics, using mass-destruction and later also selective spells in modes aimed to harm elves or "allied" beings. A few areas don't approve arcane magic at all, claiming it's "dishonorable", but in fact it's the places when magic may attract a curious spell-grub, and no one wants that anywhere around.
    • Dark Sun defilers aren't tolerated by anyone including most other defilers, because their magic is fueled by draining the life-force of every living thing around them, and centuries of using magic this way resulted in the world of Athas becoming a harsh and inhospitable wasteland. All magic is looked upon with at least some suspicion because of this.
    • In 4th Edition, the Warlock and classes with the Shadow power source are this.
    • The easier methods of becoming a lich are also the most heinous.
    • Depending on the setting and exact location there, any use of magic can become this if the local authorities decide to forbid it (usually on pain of death). General bans on arcane magic aren't unknown in some places, though in at least one famous case (Mystara's wizard-ruled Principalities of Glantri) that's replaced with a strict prohibition on clerical magic instead.
  • A few ones in the Exalted setting.
    • Necromancy. Although it is not evil or corrupting in itself and some spells can actually be used for good, it almost always involves gruesome rituals or blood sacrifice. And its foremost practitioners (but not the only ones, and not even the first ones) are the Deathlords and Abyssal Exalted, who are evil by most standards.
    • Demonology in general is seen as a dangerous, risky and best avoided field of study. The line between demonology (using demons) and infernalism (being used by demons) is thin, it is easier to summon a demon than to control it or to banish it, and during the First Age the sorcerers of the whole world had to to gather for a great feast every Calibration night just to make sure none of them attempted the dreaded ritual to summon a Third Circle demon (which can only be done during that night). The fact that summoning demons is one of the first spells you learn at the Realm's Wizarding School contributes much to the awe and dread it evokes. (Although it is actually a no-nonsense and intelligent approach: the idea behind it is that most wizards will end up trying to summon demons anyway, so it is more sensible to teach them how to do it properly and to thoroughly warn them about the dangers than to ban or restrict the spells and let the would-be demonologists dabble into it on their own with partial knowledge.)
    • Some martial arts styles are really frowned upon. The Ill Lily style is about poisoning one's opponent and has a horrible reputation. The White Veil style is only taught by an infamous and semi-legendary secret society and knowing it is equivalent to admitting membership in the conspiracy. The Infernal Monster style is a brutal and unusually powerful celestial martial art but it literally comes from hell and many sifus don't want to have anything to do with it and they are absolutely right to be cautious, since mastering it allows the Yozis to mind-control you once in your lifetime. The Kaleidoscopic Border of Logic and Obsidian Shards of Infinity styles are so powerful they question things like identity and the nature of reality, and the Exalts who know them will only teach them to students they really, really trust. Finally, the Quicksilver Hand of Dreams style is linked to The Fair Folk and is considered unsafe by most experts since nobody really understands where it comes from and how learning it changes you.
    • Charms like Ghost-Eating Technique that can permanently destroy the essence of spirits and gods are considered very very evil by said gods and spirits, who usually consider themselves immortal and hate being reminded that it is not really the case. They can intuitively feel any Exalt who knows such techniques and they fear and hate them intensely.
    • You have also infernal charms with the Blasphemy keyword. These are powerful techniques that are linked to the nature of the Yozis (demon princes); their use unleashes a surge of infernal energy which is detected by nearby gods and spirits and also triggers automatic alarms in the control room of the Realm Defense Grid, and at the Loom of Fate in Heaven, quickly alerting both the keepers of Fate (the Sidereal Exalted) and whoever is in charge at the Imperial Manse (currently the Scarlet Empress) that someone is somehow using evil energies which are supposed to be sealed away for a long, long time and they should investigate at once.
    • Interestingly, infernal charms with the Heretical keyword are considered the Dark Arts by the demon princes themselves, since most of them are designed to allow Infernal Exalted to free themselves from their patrons and become their equals. A few charms are even labelled as both Blasphemy and Heretical, which means that both Heaven and Hell freak out if you use them.
  • In GURPS Technomancer, this concept as such isn't really a part of American magical discourse. Knowing a spell is almost never illegal (though you might be asked questions if you lack the proper security clearance, and some potions and items are illegal), raising zombies is unlawful interference with a corpse (except in Louisiana, where executed criminals work on the zombie chain gang), and summoning demons is a violation of immigration law. The one area where this trope is widely played straight is that everyone is rightly afraid of magical mind control.
  • Blood magic and Toxic/Insect shamans in Shadowrun.
    • Blood magic also has a fun little outcropping called cybermancy. It's one of the fundamental laws of Shadowrun that cybernetics and magic don't mix, and the more 'ware you have in you, the more your... not necessarily "soul," but "spiritual reserve" is compromised, to the point of impairing magical capacity. Too much 'ware can effectively kill you... but through merging blood magic and cybernetics, it's possible for an individual to survive past the point of death and even gain strength from installing 'ware beyond their body's limits. The only downsides are you have to take a heavy regimen of drugs to avoid having your body completely turn against itself and become cancerous; you need a special chip in your brain to keep yourself from permanent dissociation; and you become a walking black hole on the magical landscape. Y'know. Small stuff.
  • The World of Darkness settings (Old and New), naturally, are full of those.
    • Infernalism all round the oWoD: Nephandi, Baali, Black Spiral Dancers, human Wyrm cultists, Earthbound Thralls...
    • Left-handed Legacies for the Mages of Awakening. Most of them involve trafficking with Eldritch Abominations and/or stealing souls.
    • Refinement of Flux for the Prometheans, which is based around rejecting humanity and accepting one's monstrous side. Centimani, as they're called, often twist themselves into hideous mutations, and due to the nature of Vitriol, can no longer gain it normally — forcing them to rely on lacuna, a form of Mind Rape that Prometheans view in much the same terms as actual rape.
    • Princess: The Hopeful:
      • The Calignes, spells that call on the All-Consuming Darkness. Just to learn one is a ding on the Karma Meter (and usually requires human sacrifice), and nearly all of them are morally repugnant to use.
      • The three Twilight Invocations grant greater power than the Radiant Invocations, but each comes with both risk and moral flaw.
    • In Werewolf: The Apocalypse, multiple practices can leave Gaia Garou at risk of Wyrm contamination.
      • Among the Silent Striders, members of the Eaters of the Dead camp practice the Rite of Dormant Wisdom. Participants ritually devour a dead person's brain to acquire their memories. Not only is the rite a grave violation of the Litany, but participants risk attracting the attention of the Urge Wyrm Foebok. If a Garou takes part in the rite more times than their permanent gnosis score, they become a slave of Foebok.
      • Among the Stargazers, members of the Oroborean camp learn about the Wyrm by drinking bane blood or consorting with Black Spiral Dancer hives.
      • The Dying Cubs camp of the Red Talons practices a rite that "feeds" the earth with the pain of a tortured human. The rite cleanses the land and lowers the Gauntlet of the immediate area, but the effects are temporary. Moreover, spiritual guardians of the region will no longer defend the land against Wyrm incursions.
      • Some Red Talons learn a gift that allows them to regain rage or gnosis when they spill another being's blood upon the earth. The gift is taught by decay spirits and banes.
    • In Wraith: The Oblivion, three Arcanoi are forbidden in the Western Underworld on pain of soul-forging — Intimation, the power to create and remove desire (because of its great capacity for abuse); Mnemosynis, the power to explore and manipulate memory (again, because of its capacity for abuse), and Flux, the power to affect the structure of inanimate objects, strengthening them, decaying them, and animating them (because of wraithly politics, rather than any potential to abuse others).

    Video Games 
  • One in-game book in Caves of Qud discusses the Dark Calculus, a branch of mathematics with some disquieting implications about the nature of consciousness itself. Even Ptoh agreed to leave them alone, though he indicated his agreement by destroying an entire research station.
  • Dark Souls:
    • The games have variously treated Pyromancy and Hexes as dark and nefarious. Pyromancy is seen as unrefined and wild in the first game, with practitioners from the Great Swamp being stigmatized for using it. It doesn't help that there is a history of practitioners literally burning themselves to death or descending into madness. The corruption of the Witch of Izalith when she used her Soul of Flame to try to create a substitute for the First Flame (and dooming herself and the citizens of the city of Lost Izalith to become demons in the process) may have had something to do with that.
    • By the second and third games, Hexes had taken Pyromancy's place as the most reviled form of magic. Hexes are what you get when you take sorcerous/wizardly Functional Magic, or holy White Magic and corrupt it so that instead of using intellect or faith to power them, using the connection to the Dark Soul of humanity and the Abyss. Sometimes Hexes don't just cost typical Vancian Magic attunement slots, but drain your character's Soul (XP). The reputation isn't entirely undeserved, since the "bad guy" faction of New Londo is also big into hexes, and often described in flavor text as using negative emotions or causing the targets pain.
  • Outsider magic (that is, most if not all Functional Magic) in Dishonored. Its practitioners are hunted and slain by the Overseers of the Abbey of Everyman. The Overseers are a fanatic religious police headed by corrupted people in league with an oppressive political power, but as bad as they are they might have a point on that magic. It looks extremely corrupting since people who get involved with it fall in two categories:
    • The huge majority of people who get interested in runes and bone charms just end up fascinated and obsessed with them, usually to the point of madness, paranoia, murder and death. You found plenty of examples of such people in the game.
    • The happy few who are bestowed the Mark of the Outsider don't become mad (or at least not immediately) and can use a powerful magic, but they don't fare so well. Known recipients are Daud (murderer of the Empress), Vera Moray (formerly a beautiful aristocrat, now an ugly half-mad witch), Delilah Copperspoon (evil witch heading a conspiracy to steal the body of the heir to the throne), and Corvo Attano (Player Character who may or may not be a bloodthirsty lunatic depending on how you play him).
    • On the "misunderstood" side of things, Dishonored: Death of the Outsider emphasizes the fact that the Outsider himself is not inherently evil or good, and the people who made him into what he is, without having direct access to the magic, are much worse. Essentially, the powers of the Void are just tools, and it is up to the caster for how they decide to use them, though direct connection to the Void is akin to a magical variation on radiation poisoning.
  • In the Divine Divinity series, Source magic is known to be dangerous, powerful, and likely to drive its users mad. It's used for Healing magic in the original game, but by the time of Divinity: Original Sin II, Source magic also attracts Voidwoken and Sourcerers are being rounded up en masse.
  • Dragon Age has Blood Magic. While magic itself is not evil, blood magic revolves around using life force for power. Most of the blood mages in the game are evil, or at the very least enemies of the heroes. The power is also taught to humanity by personifications of emotions (in-game, only a personification of desire teaches it, no information on which emotions are able to), and while it can just be used as an alternate means of powering normal spells, the big headline blood magic spells allow for mind control, blood-boiling and similar nastiness. Also, of course, the life force you use to power the spells need not be your own, a temptation that few blood mages can resist. (However, other magic schools serve to light people on fire or freeze them alive, hurt or even kill them by tormenting them with visions and so on.) According to one codex entry, the Tevinter archons of old were taught Blood Magic by the Old God Dumat the Dragon of Silence. Since an Old God is basically an Eldritch Abomination that happens to look like a dragon this makes Blood Magic even more unsettling.
  • The Elder Scrolls:
  • Any magic in Vagrant Story, explicitly so.

    Web Animation 
  • Dreamscape: This is one of the main things that drew Melissa to become Melinda's apprentice. She now swears off using it due to that association.

    Webcomics 
  • Cunning Fire: Creating the Elixir of Life is probably a bad idea.
  • Drowtales: Nether Summoning is viewed by most as an evil and dangerous art, as in the past, the nether demons nearly wiped out the fae races, killing entire kingdoms with their aura feeding abilities. The Sharen's use of it in combat marks the sheer desperate levels they have fallen to in their war against the Sarghress, who are winning their war.
  • Kill Six Billion Demons is based on a universe where Might Makes Right is basically encoded into its foundation, and as such there are very few things and arts that are outright described as 'dark'. This includes making deals with actual devils for power, as power justifies itself. There are still some arts of Atum cultivation that are described as 'dark arts', and are ill-defined by the comic except they are implied to involve Cannibalism Superpower or Vampiric Draining of others' life forces for your own ends. Incubus is all but outright said to practice most of them, as befits a God-Emperor who embodies the concept of 'shortcuts to power'.
  • Unsounded: Gruftgramary is the practice of encoding custom spell effects into a personal magical device, making them accessible as a sort of Simplified Spellcasting. It's banned for regulatory purposes — governments encode their own custom spells into the Background Magic Field for both public and restricted use, and they don't like hackers.

    Western Animation 
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender and its Sequel Series The Legend of Korra have Bloodbending, which lets user control water in a body of another person turning him/her into a human puppet. This technique is mostly seen as morally questionable, because it takes away the victim's freedom and violates his/her body. Almost every known Bloodbender seems to use it for sinister purposes (Hama kidnaps innocent villagers, Tarrlok forces Korra out of the city, Yakone used it to try and conquer the city, Amon/Noatak used it to remove people's bending), and only one who doesn't (Katara) has to be forced to learn it because she is terrified and disgusted at a very thought of using it on another human being. She does use it again when she's in an especially bad place mentally. Bringing this back to the "misunderstood" side of the trope, the show website once referred to this as a non-violent counterpoint to Firebending's ultimate technique of lightning generation. Rather than destroy an opponent, Water seeks to control and pacify. Potentially, an ethical Bloodbender could subdue any opponent without harming them. They also point out as fact that those who use this technique open themselves up to madness.
  • Dark magic in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic appears to be this since even Twilight Sparkle, who is very knowledgable on the subject, was surprised by it when Princess Celestia uses it to demonstrate the threat King Sombra poses in the Season 3 Premiere. Twilight herself manages to use it later, but it does not look anything less than painful to even cast.
  • All the main characters in Ninjago use Spinjitzu, and while that isn't considered a dark art, variations on it such as Forbidden Spinjitzu and Airjitzu are. There are also certain magical artifacts in the show that could, in theory, be used for good, but are never used by heroes because of how dark they are. These include the Helmet of Shadows and the Oni Masks.

    Real Life 
  • Infamously, the witch hunts of Medieval Europe focused on finding and punishing/killing those claimed to be witches or warlocks. The Catholic Church believed that witchcraft was despicable as it came from the devil and those who could use it only used it for evil curses and enchantments. Ironically, The Catholic Church was responsible for killing hundreds of innocents, as several incidents involved people accusing others as witches so they could gain their property and money.
    • Despite dissent towards witchcraft, The Catholic Church wasn’t entirely against magic. The church believed ceremonial Magic was evil, as they thought it relied on making pacts with spirits, while another type of magic, natural magic, was permitted as practitioners of it claimed to be using natural processes, not spirits, to do supernatural feats. These natural magics usually were composed of The Hermetic Arts and the primary types of magic used were Alchemy: The replication of geological phenomena through manual craft and early experimentation with medical herbs, and Astrology: The prediction of events and diving of information through the observation of celestial body movements.
  • To this day no respectable medical scientist admits using knowledge gained from Josef Mengele's archives. He was such a bad scientist that there is nothing to glean from his files. The experiments performed by Imperial Japan's Unit 731 were at least as bad as Mengele's experiments, but the people involved got away with it, because the U.S. government offered them amnesty in exchange for their research. Some of them are still alive and still claim that vivisecting human beings without anesthesia was a perfectly sensible and moral thing to do.
  • A lot of what humans know about the effects of freezing and phosgene gas on the human body comes from Nazi experimentation — the ethical debates are still raging. One side holds that it is inherently tainted due to the sheer evil acts that were committed to gain them, while the other holds that not using available knowledge to save lives is cowardly at best or hypocritical at worst.
  • Improvised Explosives. While modern technology makes it impossible to completely eradicate such knowledge, the authorities become VERY unhappy if they find out you know this stuff.
  • In Less Wrong parlance, this is used to refer to the use of faulty logic, fallacies and self-deception, Double Speak... in two words: Bad Faith. Even for ultimately good purposes, those arts are a double-edged sword. Truth, and logic, ultimately, always win.
  • Despite only making the headlines in mid-2011 with the News of the World Hacking Scandal, journalists have for a long time referred to the use of telephone and email hacking as "The Dark Arts". Apparently it used to be common practice BUT IS DEFINITELY NOT ANYMORE.
  • Some people hold a(n extremist) Christian belief that even pretending to use magic in, say, a Video Game or Tabletop RPG is bad, even though such games are usually set in a fictional universe where the fictional magic is known to not actually be from the devil even in-universe.
  • The third type is a common theme in weapon bans. Bans on switchblades, saps, and "Saturday Night Specials" were billed as ways of keeping weapons out of the hands of "those sort" of people. While a ban might include your Perazzi shotgun that costs as much as your SUV, it was billed as going after the riot shotguns that the inner city badguys were shown using in that movie. Likewise, bans on bearing arms were rather selectively enforced, and "may issue" concealed carry permit laws allowed similar discrimination.

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