Dangers of Magical Curses

Retrieving Your Lost Power

Books

Two Performance Artists Kidnap Their Boss And Do Things With Him
A dark caper-comedy about two best friends who kidnap their billionaire boss and turn him into an unhinged shaman & performance artist.
“Madcap . . . the chaos, danger, absurdity, and insanity keep ratcheting up . . . .” —Publisher's Weekly

Witches often receive requests for magick spells that go like this:

My friend/lover/partner wronged me, and I want revenge.
Please make my "ex" love me again.
How can I make Joe/Jane do the things I want?

The problem with these requests is that they involve compelling someone against their will. Manipulating people in the physical world isn't great, and it's not great in the magical realm either.

Magical manipulation steals a person's freedom to choose their own path. And while this can be tempting against jerks, depriving someone of their freedom feels wrong to me. I was bullied relentlessly as a kid, and while I've dreamed manyyy times of exacting revenge, I haven't done it, because that would make me a bully too.

Picture of magical Puck casting a spell in the 15th century Manipulative magick can seriously backfire. The universe is a place of equilibrium,¹ and if you send out negative energy in the form of manipulation or curses, what do you think you'll get back?

I experienced this "bounceback" effect in small doses when I first started doing magick, and it wasn't pretty. A magick spell may "return to sender" with its original level of force — but it can also come screaming back home in a corrupted or more powerful form that turns out to be far worse than what was sent out into the cosmos originally.

In witchy terms, the above is known as The Threefold Law: anything you send out will come back three times, or with three times the ferocity, so it's best to err on the side of love and compassion.²

Some witches don't believe that The Threefold Law is real, and that the universe permits firing off curses willy-nilly because we're creatures with a "shadow side" that needs to balance the light with the dark. This sounds great in theory, but I'm not sure I'd want to be standing anywhere nearby when those negative spells come roaring back home!

In her great occult book, Positive Magic: Occult Self-Help, the famous witch Marion Weinstein is crystal clear:

There are really only two kinds of magick — positive and negative — and anything manipulative is negative.³

So, how can magical spells avoid being manipulative? Simple: set your intention to seek equilibrium and goodness for all, full stop. Equilibrium and goodness in the universe might mean your lost lover finally comes home, or your bully gets a punch in the nose, but it might not; how the solution unfolds is really up to the universe, and the universe knows what is best. Trust it.

So, a spell with an intention like this:

Please cause my bullies to suffer for the pain they've caused me.

. . . . becomes this instead:

I ask for safety and peace, and trust the universe to levy justice that's good for all.

Going the peace-and-love route may sound less satisfying than fire-and-brimstone, but it can be very effective without the nasty side effects that can accompany outright curses. I once used the revised intention above during a spell to help resolve a situation where a person was committing psychological and other abuses against someone who needed help. Not only did the abuse stop, but the abuser was sentenced to a long prison term, which was even more than I'd hoped for. Good job, universe!

Sending out positive vibes may not get the exact outcome you imagined, but it will likely be the best overall outcome for you in the long run . . . . and for everyone else, too.

Sources

Positive Magic: Occult Self-Help by Marion Weinstein, Phoenix Publishing, WA, 1980, p. 211.
Ibid., pp. 70-71
Ibid., pp. 35-66