Accuse me of being obsessed with darkness. Go ahead. I'll only ask you to use a stronger word, and tell you that I'm not alone. No, I'm not referring here to the legion of Nightkind who see things in the same, ahem, light. I've made it clear how dear these adults and children are to me, but it is not of them that I speak.

It turns out that scientists are pretty hung up on the dark as well. Oh yes—real, respected scientists. In fact, in the last decade or so, the most fascinating work being done in Quantum Mechanics and Cosmology has been in the study of dark matter and dark energy. The former is a type of matter that is invisible yet believed to occupy as much as ninety-five percent of the known universe. The latter is an energy that is believed to be accelerating the growth of the universe.

What we have in these delightfully-named concepts are the secrets to real occult power, finally being understood by the accepted scientific community. One piece at a time, the science of the hidden, or the occult, is being encountered and quantified, most often under the bizarre phenomena that abound in Quantum Mechanics. It's a great time to be a student of the dark arts.

How does an understanding of dark matter and dark energy help one achieve mastery over the unseen world? How does it not? We're dealing here with a form of matter that touches most of creation, and a type of energy that is proven to accelerate the ongoing process of creation—the ongoing expansion of the universe from the Big Bang. Powerful stuff, indeed.

As close as scientists are coming to quantifying the darkness that permeates all, they're not very close to harnessing its power. We'll probably have fusion-powered cars before one microwatt of dark energy is used in any way—in a lab, that is.

You can use dark matter and energy to your advantage this very night. The occultist already has the tools needed to call forth and apply cosmic forces, be they dark or light. Again, I choose the dark. When dealing with tricky things like, oh, altering reality, it's best to stick to what is most comfortable.

The tools are quite simple, actually: psychodrama and sympathetic links. Forget years of concentration training. Forget studying at the heels of so-called ascended masters who are more interested in having an indentured servant than in passing along wisdom. Master the art of using psychodrama and linking it to a universal force, and said universal force is at your disposal.

The psychodrama is the "dressing" in a ritual: candles, incense, chanting, mystical symbols, or other preparatory methods—whatever it takes to get you to activate the part of your mind that's in tune with the unseen energy of the universe. We walk around in the waking world very much asleep. Psychodrama awakens the parts of our brains that can do more amazing things than typing and ordering at Starbucks, as important as those things may be.

The sympathetic link concept has been used to apply heightened consciousness to some useful goal. Voodoo dolls let you send energy someone's way, with the doll acting as a link to the person. Here's where occultism can get extra potent, though. What if instead of just applying the principle of sympathetic magic to a goal or object we apply it to accessing a powerful force? To access the dark matter that permeates all of creation, and to have the entropic power of dark energy at your disposal, all you need is something to act as a sympathetic link to the darkness.

Enter sweet night. Step outside and you can almost feel it as an etheric field. This is the best sympathetic link to dark matter and energy that there is. Why worry about physics concepts like the speed of light and trying to send out your magick at such a blistering rate? Dark is faster than light. It's already there!

The dark rites I introduce in Nocturnicon allow you full access to forces that may have scared away explorers of the unseen in the past. Death magick, Lovecraftian beings, helpful daemons, and Lucifer himself await you in its pages. The psychodrama is there to create astonishing changes in the rest of your nights.

Unlike with the dark explorations in Nocturnal Witchcraft and Gothic Grimoire, the magick of Nocturnicon does not depend on a specific deity belief system. In fact, these rituals don't even mention or utilize a supreme being. The only thing you'll be relying upon is the godlike ability latent in all of us. Being made of the same unseen energy and matter as the cosmos, we can access and manipulate it.

Brave enough to give it a try? No one to my knowledge has been carried away screaming by the forces you'll be calling forth. At least, no one who lived to tell about it …