On the Troubling Topic of Baneful Magic
Yes, it's okay to do it. Sometimes it's necessary. But here's why I often don't.
There is not a single Witchcraft 101 class where this doesn't come up. The question can happen in a variety of contexts. Sometimes it's the young witch who's been told that she needs to be a "white witch" who doesn't do "black magic." Sometimes it's the young witch who really wants to learn how to hex someone she doesn't like, or who wants to break a hex he is convinced has been laid upon him by someone else. Whether they are fascinated or frightened of the prospect, whether or not you can or should do bad things to people with magic is always, always something people want to talk about. Among experienced witches, this is a topic that usually engenders very strong reactions and a wide range of opinions.
So, here's your caveat: the Rule of 100* is VERY MUCH in effect here.
Now, let's begin.
The reason this topic is so fraught is because harming someone with your magic is serious business, just as physically or emotionally harming someone might be. If you throw a punch at somebody, you have assaulted them. If you call someone a racial slur or a bad name, you have in fact injured them. There are times when doing harm might be justified, or whether an action is actually harm might be called into question. A surgeon cuts us open with a scalpel, but that isn't considered an act of harm, but part of healing. If the fact that my fist hit your face was an accident, was it really an assault? Maybe not, but it still frigging hurts. And of course, punching Nazis is always a good thing. Fuck Nazis.
And of course, there is always lurking in the background the fact that witches and magic are mistrusted in our society. The fact that we are not bound by the strictures of their scriptures means that we should be seen as capable of all manner of evil, and the magic we use is a power that "normal" people don't have. This makes people nervous. And then, there are the stereotypes and tropes, nurtured over centuries, of ugly, evil witches who want to hurt people, particularly children and pretty women.
So let's get clear here on what we're actually talking about.
What is "baneful magic," really?
If I were to give a simple vocabulary definition, "baneful magic" is magic performed for the purpose of inflicting harm on someone. Many think it is synonymous with "hexing" or "cursing" someone. And certainly hexing and cursing meet the definition.
The problem with baneful magic, however, is that just like with physical harm, magical harm is often a matter of perspective. It's easy to see that hexing someone, a spell which seeks to actively work injury on a person, is aggressive and harmful, even if you are casting it for a defensive purpose. People will also say that a binding spell, one that instead seeks to deprive the target of the ability to do injury to others, is a more legitimate choice. But is binding somehow less aggressive, really? The act of restraining someone from action is a form of violence. Yes, it is done to "keep the peace." But then again, George Floyd died because he was being restrained allegedly to keep the peace, wasn't he? One can make the case that binding, particularly if it is forcing restraints upon another, is also "baneful" in nature.
One of my favorite works by Mark Twain was a small book called "The War Prayer." I found it in a stack of books in the attic when I was 12 and it affected me profoundly. The basic story is that a nation is praying in church during a time of war, asking for their god to give victory to their soldiers. An old man disrupts the gathering, claiming to be an emissary of God, who is going to tell them what they are really praying for. He tells them that if they are praying for their side's victory, they are also praying for the other side's defeat -- for their soldiers to die, and for those soldiers' mothers to have to bury their children. They are praying for the other side to experience the full and fearsome ravages of war. It is a deeply moving lesson in empathy. Twain feared that the book would be misunderstood, and therefore told his publisher not to release it until after he was dead. Twain said that he had "told the whole truth" in the work, and only a dead man may safely do that.
The truth The War Prayer teaches us as witches is that when you insert magic into a conflict to try and "win," the thrust of what you are really doing is trying to make the other party to the conflict lose. That can be seen as baneful magic, even though the magic is being used not to harm one party, but rather to bolster another.
I am saying all this not because I want to assert that doing magic to help a person is actually bad in some way or shouldn't be done. I say this mostly to help you understand that what is and isn't "baneful" isn't always so simple. What is intended to benefit or protect one may harm another. As with all things magical, intent matters a lot. So does context.
There are many who, in their quest to detach witchcraft from its dark and sketchy reputation, attempt to claim some kind of purity by pronouncing themselves a "white witch" -- one that only does "good" magic. What does that mean, exactly? The admonition to "harm none" sounds great on paper. But in practice, it's damn near impossible.
Try for a minute to imagine what it would take to go through an entire day without harming anyone or anything. Did you eat breakfast? Did that breakfast include meat or eggs? Maybe you could go completely vegan, but what about your leather shoes? Oh, you want to wear sneakers? Are those rubber soles? Were they made in a sweatshop in Bangladesh? Are you driving a car that belches greenhouse gases into the air that cause asthma? Truly harming none when you live as part of a global economy and in a modern community is darn near impossible. The "harm none" admonition, taken to its purest form, is a truly unwinnable game.
It's also inconsistent with the way the natural world works. And as witches and pagans, taking one's spiritual cues from nature is kinda our thing. The natural world is an enmeshed web of ecosystems that contains predators and prey, consumers and providers of various resources, decay and transformation that allows one creature's waste to be another one's food. The fox will harm the rabbit. The rabbit will harm the carrot in the garden. Many of nature's relationships involve one creature inflicting pain, distress and even death on another, and we do not create a value judgement around it, other than to acknowledge that this is what these creatures do.
It's not cruel, it's the way that living things continue to live. The fox doesn't hate the rabbit. It's not personal. The fox is hungry and the rabbit is food. While it is violent, there is no cruelty on the part of the fox where he revels in the opportunity to cause the rabbit pain. The eating, yes, but the killing? Not as much.
"Harm none" is really more about not causing intentional injury and pain where that injury and pain are the entire point of the exercise. That is a much smaller and reasonable prohibition than one might think.
But even though the world is wide enough that witches can legitimately engage in the practice of baneful magic, magic that intends to inflict injury and pain on its target, there are some reasons why the fact that you can doesn't mean that you should.:
There are usually better ways to get what you want.
I am not against baneful magic. I have performed baneful magic. But the thing is, there are very few things in this world that can ONLY be accomplished by baneful magic. Is someone bullying your son? You don't have to target the bully. In fact, it's probably more efficient to put wards on your child, as such an effort will repel ALL the bullies, not just the one you cast the hex on. Trying to stop harmful lies being spread about you? I suppose you could find a creative curse that activates whenever they put your name in their mouth. But isn't it just better to create a shield around yourself that does not allow lies to stick to your reputation?
Most of your classic forms of baneful magic usually can't accomplish much more than inflict pain and hurt on the targeted person, so if you are aiming for a real solution to a real problem beyond that, it's only getting you so far. And the thing is, when we get the urge to do baneful magic, hurting the other guy often isn't enough. Not really. Most of us are trying to use that curse because we are trying to engage in some kind of payback, or visit judgement on someone we see as having wronged us. You've hurt me, so I will hurt you, and it will all be even right?
Wrong.
Because the truth is that an eye for an eye just makes the whole world blind. Most of the time when you triage a situation where someone you love has been hurt, they have more important things that they need first before they need to harm someone else as a form of payback. A person who has been beaten up needs healing and place where they feel safe. They do not need to have the person who hit them get hit themselves. Sure that might feel good for a minute, but it never actually helps the victim. If someone has been swindled by a con artist, what they need most urgently is to find a way back to getting whole financially. Knowing the thief now has a raging case of hives doesn't do much for that.
In the end, keeping the attention and focus on an aggressor or a thief or the awful person you are trying to bring "justice" to, just lets the awful trash person live rent free in your head and consume your precious magical energy. Is that what you want?
The number of situations where devoting significant magical energy to baneful magic is going to be the best way to achieve your goals is much smaller than you think it is. I can usually find a way to meet the moment I am in using more conventional, less purposely harmful means.
The high cost of unintended consequences is a legit thing.
Any magical working can have unintended consequences, i.e. bad things that happen as a result of how you structured and worded your working that you did not mean to occur. For example, if you cast a protection spell that basically says something like "make sure that no one who means this person ill can get close to them," be prepared for certain folks to turn up with COVID and require quarantining, or for someone to break a leg or get their car repossessed so they can't go anyplace.
Why does this kind of thing happen? In the above example, you didn't tell the Universe HOW to do its work. Magic is a determined force, meaning that it will do what it has to in order to meet its mission. And if you commission magic to do a thing, and don't give much of a care as to how it gets done, magic might just choose a pathway causes more problems than it solves. "Be careful what you wish for," the saying goes, and it is not wrong.
This is why my favorite form of hexing is one that I'll deliver right to your face. It's when I wish out loud for you to obtain what you think you want. Usually the person smiles and says thank you, convinced of my generosity in such a benediction. But I am doing this because I know that actually getting what you want will not be the boon you think it is.
There's a certain deliciousness in knowing that you've just thanked me for a thing that I know in the end you will regret. A smart witch realizes, however, that wanting things that ultimately won't work out the way you want them to is a folly that I can also fall prey to if I am not careful. Gooses and ganders and all of that.
The point is this -- when you cast any kind of spell, but particularly a baneful one, you need to think through all the ways the magic might operate, all the potential vectors it might use to meet its mission. And if some of those vectors are undesirable, you need to find a way to shut them down as you craft your spell. Sometimes it's too hard to get to that level of specificity or you simply can't imagine all the things, and the magic will do what it does. The fact that this risk if often high and with baneful magic, the consequences are often particularly ugly, means that you might want to be careful invoking such magic casually. Hurting people you do not intend to hurt, or hurting people in ways you do not intend is something you want to avoid.
You are known by what you cast.
I am not going to go into a whole exposition of why I think the admonition that "everything you put out into the Universe comes back threefold" is bullshit. While a good deal of the forces that guide the Universe do follow mathematic formulas, magic is not one of them. The "threefold law" is often used to admonish new witches to ensure that they focus on only doing "good" magic, and to demonstrate to outsiders that witches are not to be feared.
The truth is that you can do a bad thing and you might not see any negative consequences from that choice for a very long time. And you can do something that is aimed at being helpful and very immediately experience the adage "no good deed goes unpunished." (This is why adages are so useless. They are great in a specific moment but that hardly makes them universal truth.) And as we've already discussed, often what is "good" or "bad" in any given situation is an amalgam of intent, context, impact, and perspective.
Doing magic makes you a magical being, and the magic you do lets other beings in the Universe know that. And much in the same way that animals know another animal is present by its scent, magical beings now know you to be using magic, and therefore you become magically interesting. You've lit up a beacon in the magical world, and identified yourself as part of it. It's one of the big reasons why we encourage young witches to learn warding techniques as some of their basic magical practice. Being "on the map" magically can lead to more interaction with other magical beings, and that can be a little unsettling if you aren't prepared for it.
And now that you are "on the map," what does your magic "smell" like? What kind of light is the beacon you've fired up giving off? That's up to you, really. If you become too reliant on aggressive magic that is aimed at harming people, that's going to give off a certain quality that identifies you as aggressive and dangerous. And while you might think that that's a good thing because it makes you a badass, it might not be. Because projecting yourself as aggressive and dangerous means that magical beings will often respond in kind. Behaving as a threat will invite you being treated as a threat, and while some beings will shrink away, others will take you on.
Will a single act of baneful magic make you appear threatening in the magical sense? Probably not. But if hexing and cursing become the magical tools you reach for first when you are trying to solve a problem, then sooner or later that's going to make you into something that looks a bit menacing. And you will be reacted to in magical circles accordingly. Is that what you want?
Our ways do not include a big Sky Daddy who is going to punish you for not being pure sweetness and light. That is not how this works. You are sovereign over you path and if you want to be the witch that constantly uses magic to wreak havoc and pain on others because you think that makes you strong and fearsome, you can do that. And you will have to accept all the consequences that come with that -- among them the fact that you are now, in the eyes of the magical world, an active threat to others.
Living a life where you're itching to prove you're the biggest baddie in the room may sound good on paper, but in truth it means constantly having to be vigilant against everyone and everything. It means living in a Universe where you are never trusted, and where fighting becomes the thing you do most. Most witches I know would find that soul-crushing and exhausting. But if that is what you want, then you are welcome to it. Don't say you haven't been warned.
I tell my students that you can do anything you want, so long as you are willing to pay the price for it. And the price of that freedom is that you own the consequences of all that you do. In the end, we are only ever the sum of all the things we do. Some of those things are good. Some are bad. Some are good or bad depending on the context and perspective. But this is what it means to have freedom to choose -- you have to own your choices and their consequences.
Right now in particular, we're going to face some hard choices to protect ourselves, our community, and others who are afflicted and oppressed. Baneful magic is not out of the question. It's a tool in the arsenal and we shouldn't be afraid to use it when appropriate, and when we've properly prepared for it. Don't let anyone tell you that you don't have that choice. You absolutely do.
So choose wisely. Nowhere is that more important than with the decision to do baneful magic.
Blessed be, witches.
*The Rule of 100 is something I teach my students to help them understand that nothing is 100 percent true for 100 percent of witches 100 percent of the time. We are diverse bunch with a lot of varying viewpoints. It's a good bet that when you ask a question of a dozen witches, you will get 100 different answers, all of which will be right, and all of which will be wrong. So, know that this is my teaching, what I think, and other witches will have other opinions and teachings that are just as valid as mine. Your path is yours, and how you choose to roll with it is your decision alone.