kimberlysteele | Entries tagged with hexes

Consequences of the Craft

It serves me right to be the recipient of anyone's ill wishes because I used to wish ill upon others. Not only did I used to engage in the prideful sin of throwing curses, I was good at it. Of course I could be wrong, but I believe I was able to rain hell on people. My secret weapon was my perception of any given target's Achille's heel. In order to nail someone to the wall on the astral plane, you must be able exploit their primary weakness. In most cases, people wear their primary weakness upon their sleeve and do not even bother to try and hide it. If you can intuit someone's worst choices and tendencies when pressed, you can influence them to choose the worst of all options offered. If someone is a reckless idiot and an attention whore, you can push astral forces to make their stunts more dangerous. If someone is a bad driver with road rage, your ill-wishing will make them more likely to be stuck behind a slowpoke. They will be more likely to overreact and speed through a yellow-going-red light, potentially T-boning a car full of sixteen year olds. You can push a lazy hedonist towards more of the same, and lo and behold he will give himself cirrhosis of the liver from his hard drinking or his husband will leave him and he will be destitute. This is what may happen if you were as good at it as I am. If you're not good at it, and most people don't have the talent, you'll do the magical equivalent of pooping where you eat. All of the above results may happen to your enemy, but like a grenade, you'll detonate your own life, worsen your own weaknesses, and generally bring nearly immediate misfortune to you, your family, your pets, and your circle of friends. You will create an invisible miasma around yourself that others, despite the endemic condition of spiritual retardation, will sense and draw away from.

In the days before scientific rationalism when astrology and astronomy were one and Western doctors addressed the subtle and material bodies as one larger ecosystem, people were often labeled as witches and summarily tortured and/or executed. If you look in old books about superstitions, you will find a wealth of charms against the evil eye both in cultures around the world. Christianity has often been a religion of hysteria, and the persecution of so-called witches was often waged for faulty reasons such as grabbing the witch's resources. Nevertheless, sometimes it was a matter of punishing someone who was throwing his or her horrible energy around and making life hell for the locals. In spite of Christian ignorance, the masses used to have a higher overall sense of the spiritual ecosystem than they do now, hence their awareness of the evil eye and the use of magic to combat it.

Malefic Witchcraft: You're Soaking In It

Magic is the formation, process, and reverberation of intention. We all do it, and by "we", I don't just mean humans. Everything on this planet, including the forces we humans cannot perceive or see, possesses intention and in that way has its own life. The wind has intention to blow in a certain direction and it is countered by the intentions of objects standing in its way like trees and houses. The tree has intention to drink sunlight from above and water and nutrients below while exhaling oxygen. The human has intention to drive his car to work and the car has intention to be recognized for its labors as it hurls through space. Intentions cooperate, bump, and clash all the time. No intention exists in a vacuum and there is no being outside of a god who understands the multiple symphonies of intention going on at any given time in any given place. The world is no less magical than it ever was, it is that we humans, especially those of us in the industrialized West, have become utterly retarded when it comes to sensing, recognizing, and controlling intention.

Enter the people who think of themselves as clever: politicians. Politicians are clever because they force proxies to do harm on their behalf while walling themselves off in fortresses. They dwell in luxurious bubbles, which is the first clue they do not operate on behalf of the common man. The most powerful politicians are infamous for sending hitmen to literally kill their enemies. Most politicians would not be caught dead without a toothy grin on their faces. This is to hide the price of being a politician, which nowadays is to sell one's soul (not literally) and to claw one's way to the top of a pile of bloody and messy grifts. The politician wishes harm upon all while pretending to operate as a "public servant" LOL for personal gain and power. The average citizen has the urge to see the politician's head on a pike like the average Christian had the urge to see the local Karen put to death in 1600.

Magic has always been the weapon of otherwise powerless people. Hatred can be weaponized on the astral plane, otherwise known as the plane of images and imagination. Those who say the astral plane does not exist are morons who have yet to contemplate that an airplane does not just appear from nowhere: it was invented by men who put images in their mind of a flying machine and combined enough images on the astral plane to make a flying plane. Back in the day, women were far more powerless and were more often doing witchcraft. Intention is neither septic nor clean by default. It is what it is. The same sorts of images that make planes fly can load them with working bombs. The people who are good at malicious magic often feel disenfranchised and have a great deal of stored hatred.

I used to be amazing at weaponizing my hatred on the astral plane -- I was a prodigy and a natural. I had the aim, the power, and the temporary ability to dodge immediate consequences. Bad, bad things happened to people I did not like. I stopped and I am glad I did. There is an energetic state one has to occupy to be the equivalent of a torturer/assassin on the astral. It's not a happy place. It's also not a grateful place. There is little room for gratitude when you are constantly worried about your own Achille's heels and are constantly focused on the faults and vulnerabilities of others.

Another reason I stopped is that I got tired of worrying about causing collateral damage. Let's say I believed my enemy deserved his accident or his diagnosis. No matter who I was targeting, the ultimate result impacted his or her loved ones and dependents. When I was still fully atheist, I had the urge to curse someone and then realized she had lots of pets who depended upon her. She was a good pet parent and probably still is to this day. For once in my ridiculous life, I stayed my hand and just let her be, not for her sake, but for the welfare of her pets.

You're a Witch! She's a Witch!

Unless you are genuinely sweet to your core, you have likely aimed some of your own bad intentions at others and gotten results. This is a mere fact of life. Perhaps the intentions of others got in your way, perhaps you suffered immediate consequences, and perhaps you got away with it. The hard truth is that you have people aiming their bad intentions at you right now and you are likely suffering the consequences of the bad energy that made it through. I have been a writer for a long time and a jerk for even longer, and I reliably field would-be witches attempting to assault me on the astral with their malefic energy.

When you have malefic energy being thrown at you, you have choices. In the case of normies, they do not know bad energy is being thrown at them at all because they deny it exists, they deny it has power, and they deny the astral plane of images it comes from because they are too deliberately ignorant to attempt to research occulted knowledge. Let's call these people the ignosophers -- they love ignorance and we will leave them to it. They are dismissed because the grown ups are speaking now.

When you are an Evangelical normie, you believe that all bad energy thrown at you comes from Satan and that those throwing the energy are agents of the Dark Lord. You are wrong. The friction produced may be coming from within you and your own uncontemplated dissonance and misunderstanding. Some of it comes from the fractured spiritual ecosystem in which you dwell and some of it comes from other would-be witches trying to hex you. Because you produce malefic energy yourself, you will attract it on the plane of images as like attracts like. Your invocations of a deity you make pretenses of serving while acting in the opposite manner of what that deity stands for will likely invoke other things that are not Divine.

When I was an atheist witch with no banishing rituals in place, I believed that I was immune to the bad energy being thrown my way and exempt from consequences. I was wrong. The more I threw hatred in response to hatred, the more lathered-up and vulnerable I became on the astral plane. The astral plane is the same one we encounter in dreams. My dreams were full of drama, hags, and shadow men, the last two being parasitic entities who are attracted to malefic energy and feed off of drama. By reacting like a clueless idiot to various stimuli, I painted a kick-me sign on my butt on the astral plane and dragged my energy lower than it needed to be.

Most people are somewhere between atheist and Evangelical. I would call them the casually religious. When bad energy gets thrown at a casually religious person, she often does not know it explicitly. She senses it. She knows something is not right. Perhaps she knows who it is coming from and will react in her mind with hatred, wishing the person would just go away. This sort of impotent energy has almost no effect on anyone or anything except for her as it makes her sad. If she is a bit more towards the feisty end of the spectrum, she will wish harm on the person in her mind, seeing them step on a rake in her astral replay or hoping they'll get a good and hefty dose of what they are owed. This more focused energy will disrupt the hated person's life if she is a natural witch. If she is actually into ritual magic and does ritual magic against the nuisance person, she can deal out a great deal of harm because of the added power a physical ritual lends to the force of images. Those on the more religious end of casual cause harm by praying for others without their permission. Prayer is really, really gross when aimed at people who do not want or ask for your prayers. A prayer aimed at the unwilling is the equivalent of camping out on someone's lawn and pooping on it and then throwing that poop in their open window. No sane person makes that kind of effort, and to add insult to injury, the prayerful moron tries to invoke great power in order to throw crap.

In my own case, I have been public about having done the Sphere of Protection every day without fail for the last seven years. The Sphere of Protection is a banishing ritual that takes about 5-10 minutes and acts as an astral shower or bath. I also tend to bathe every day, so it's no surprise that I fell into the habit of the same sort of thing on the plane of images. The Sphere of Protection is great on its own for cleaning up one's astral plane existence, but when combined with the mental plane practice of discursive meditation and serial attempts to get the advice of the gods through regular divination (Ogham in my case) it lends a powerful set of shields when someone tries to hex me. I also pray to several gods and I never, ever pray on someone's behalf without their express permission. This is also protective.

She Hexed Herself LOL

When a would-be witch tried to hex me recently, a few of her blows landed on me despite my walls of astral, mental, and spiritual defense. I was able to figure out what she was up to via divination. It is highly unlikely she consciously knew what she was doing. As a result of her malefic energy, I had a couple of klutzy moments and a day that had every opportunity to turn septic had I let it. A loved one who does not have a banishing ritual suffered a minor flesh wound that needed a Band-Aid. In other words, it was a nothingburger that I easily handled. By throwing her crap around, I'll bet she had a string of terrible days. I'll guess she made herself sick or did the same to her loved ones, and overall ended up worsening her personal relationships and causing herself far more worry and anxiety than she was able to project onto me.

If you want to defend yourself against the bad energy of conscious or unconscious would-be witches, I suggest at the very least a daily routine of prayer to gods and discursive meditation. Obviously the Sphere of Protection or another banishing ritual such as the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram is advised as well. Once this routine is in place, it is fairly difficult for the average semi-skilled witch to get through. By being unlike the witch, I sent her energy glancing away from me and towards the Unmanifest that Dion Fortune talks about in the Cosmic Doctrine. I was unlike the witch because I refused to react to her with hatred. I don't hate the witch because I don't care about her. When I see her in my mind's eye on the astral plane, I see a sad, desperate, anxious person who doesn't deserve my contempt or my compassion either way. In her vain pride and self-importance, she sent blows that sailed past me. The banishing ritual I do ensured it along with my lack of interest in her and her life. Her problems arose when the energy blew towards the void and found their mark in entities that feed on human drama. We call these entities demons in our lack of understanding. By trying to hit me with her best shot, she painted an All You Can Eat sign on her house and opened the door to whatever nasty thing from the lower astral who wants to walk in. Demons cannot get in without an invitation.

The most repulsive and defensive part of my wall is my gratitude. Whenever I have anxiety or begin to covet a thing or situation someone else has, I play the Glad Game and imagine A. How my situation could be worse and B. Why I am lucky and grateful. Somewhere along the way in the last seven years of banishing rituals, discursive meditation, prayer, and divination for myself and others, I became a more grateful person. Gratitude is trust in the Divine. I trust the gods to provide for me and I am not worried or anxious like I was when I was actively hexing other people as a stupid atheist ignosopher. I am not at all afraid of death and I am certainly not afraid of some piddling little wannabe witch.

Hieronymus Bosch, Christ in Limbo

One of the main reasons it is so difficult for the average person, including myself, to make a deep connection to the spiritual is the predicament of our age. If we currently dwell in the first stirrings of the Age of Aquarius, and I believe we do, it is rather obvious that great enlightenment has failed to occur on a mass scale. On the contrary, the higher self remains more remote for most people than it has ever been in human history.

The Incas fascinatingly seemed to foresee our unspiritual era and wanted to escape being reincarnated during it. In The Secret of the Incas: Myth, Astronomy, and the War Against TIme, William Sullivan makes the case that the Incas and the Mayans sought via complicated magical means to sit out our own peculiar era. Nostradamus was also plagued by the fear his potent magical knowledge would be abused by the people of our era – he burned every magical book he had at one point to stop the knowledge from falling into our bumbling hands. Magicians of past eras often did this, not just out of worry that Dominicans were coming to out them and torture them, but because the future scryed in visions was such a bleak and literally godforsaken environment.

Demonic Paradise and Downward Pull

I loved my toys when I was a kid in the 1970s and 1980s. I had a huge collection of stuffed animals. My favorite one was a red beanbag received in an Easter Basket one year. The beanbag was egg shaped with little feet, hands, and a face. I had a fancy sled that looked like a small snow plow. I had at least one Barbie Dream House, and I distinctly remember having at least one car for Barbie and her friends. I had an electronic toy called a Speak and Spell that I used to become a third grade spelling ace. All of these toys now sit somewhere in a landfill or are ocean waste. One of the primary reasons I chose as a little girl not to have children in this incarnation was the profligate waste the children of this era put onto our fragile planet. The amount of waste produced by an affluent child these days dwarfs my output by ten times. All of this plastic bombardment does not lend itself to spiritual aspiration. My whole childhood world was plastic, from the dashboard of the petroleum-fueled cars in which I rode to the olefin rugs under my feet and the shampoo bottles that existed so I could scent my hair with synthetic peaches. Our era is one of plastic and temptation. There are more people who have sold their souls to demons and devils in our era than at any other time. This is what I believe.

What Does It Mean to Sell One’s Soul?

I used to think that selling one’s soul required a Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage-level ritual (a year plus in a secluded house, exceptionally well-drawn magic circles) and it took me a long time to become educated otherwise. Selling one’s soul is not a short process. It is a series of increasingly deeper degradations and lies to oneself about right versus wrong. Though there are some stunningly obvious examples of politicians and celebrities who have sold their souls and who may have physically conjured deities from the Goetia to get the job done, selling one’s soul isn’t necessarily profound or individual. A group of souls can compromise its destiny by acting as a herd. This is what I believe happened with the Nazification of Germany, the Stalinization of Russia, and the current Faucization of the denizens of empires beholden to globalist sway.

The Egregore of Competition

When I was in first grade, I discovered I hated Gym Class. We were told to run around the asphalt in a great circle – yes, this was back in the 70s when six year olds were not considered too fragile to run 400 yards on the pavement. I finished dead last and because I was alone, I thought I had won the race. The other kids pointed and laughed and soon I realized what had happened. I cried.

We are all subject to an egregore of competition that has become an out of control leviathan. This has gotten worse in my fifty year lifetime. It’s hard to say when this egregore started its metastasis. The gist of the egregore is that everyone must compete for every resource and that competition is good. Gordon Gecko’s proclamation “Greed is good” comes from the competition egregore: of course greed is good, because without greedy urges, people might cooperate instead of competing. To quote The Highlander, another vintage film, the competition egregore comes from the There Can Be Only One model of astral pyramid.

I was subject to humiliation in my first grade class because it never occurred to my teachers that there were ways of getting children to exercise without pitting them against each other. Constant competition was reflected in the larger environment. My suburban neighborhood morphed from a place where everyone knew each other’s name at the yearly block parties to an every-household-for-itself gallery of snobs. Whose house can inflate the most? Who can add the most unnecessary rooms to better serve children who rarely go outside? The spirit of the neighborhood changed from one of modesty, DIY, and helpfulness to griping over property lines, ostentation, and insufferability. Recently the competition has changed into a waiting game to see which neighbor will be next to be picked off by MRNA gene therapy side effects. Meanwhile, the television blares a litany about how much better Americans are than Russians.

How better to get a leg up on your neighbor than to sell your soul to a demon? There are plenty of demonic buyers eager to snap up the average human soul without the conscious knowledge of the human personality in question. Demons promise all sorts of bargains that only appear shoddy if one bothers to deeply investigate them in discursive meditation, and it’s not like many people are doing that anymore. Affluent suburban prosperity of the sort that displays itself on Christmas postcards with photos of one’s children in front of international landmarks? The price, hidden well in the fine print, may be a mere few lifetimes of desperately poor subsistence farming in the deindustrial future punctuated by some long sojourns in hell between those lifetimes. A bit of virtue signaling and seemingly decent health after an experimental gene treatment that has cost millions (billions?) of people their jobs, their health, and in many cases, their lives? The price may be getting eaten alive by a horrible, debilitating disease next time around, or perhaps losing one’s livelihood and being forced into destitution. After all, didn’t the healthy vaxxed person’s choices have the overall effect of sickness and unnecessary death, and/or forcing huge groups into desperation and destitution? Fair is fair…

The Clog

If our Malkuth is a demon’s Kether, we can rest assured that many demons are achieving and basking in demonic Kether right now. The trend for them is upward and for us it is downward. In times when humans accepted the flows and movements of nature with grace instead of denial and anger, our higher selves were intimate partners. We woke up in the morning smelling their breath, and unlike ours, it was sweet. For the aspiring mage or mystic, it’s like being the first party to reach out after a hostile and bitter divorce. Methods of prayer are no longer common knowledge. Christians for the most part see prayer as a beggar’s banquet: surely their God owes them a “miracle” in the form of material comforts and prosperity if they grovel and money-grub while declaring themselves to be virtuous on Facebook. Buddhists brag about their trips to exotic locales while forcing masks on little children out of fear, which is the very definition of worldly attachment. Hindus are more concerned with outfitting their newly constructed homes with the latest status symbols than doing good works. I’m glad I don’t know any Muslims because I’m fairly confident their hypocrisy would outstrip the other religious cults.

The materialism clogging access to the subtler planes has become so bad, we are faced with the cosmic equivalent of a grotty slop sink. We are supposed to flow, but we have become so gunky, we are blocked like a giant ball of hair, dead skin, and debris. Demons are drawn up from the sewers in our abortive attempts to do something (anything!) to remedy our misery. They walk among us in the reanimated zombie spirits of Stalin and Mao, whispering to us to hate our neighbor and act at our human worst in order to survive. Kim Jong Un had the conductor of his government’s musical orchestra shot over ninety times in front of the orchestra members. Those who succumb to demons and who don’t manage to extricate themselves over the series of lifetimes of their demonic bargain are a mystery. It is possible they will become demons in a future universe. Their depravity sets a track in space that becomes a rut that becomes an abyss.

Revenge?

As satisfying as it would be to go full serial killer on wokesters, would-be communists, and the seemingly lost who may or may not have sold their souls to demons, revenge is not a worthy pursuit. Demonic people often become demonic because they are vengeful – Kim Jong Un certainly did not execute his poor conductor out of mercy. Nor is it helpful to pray for people who have not asked for our help. “Pray for Ukraine” is the latest trend to assault the internet, and if you read between the lines, it translates to “Send hateful energy toward Russians on my behalf because I cannot yet force you to do it at the end of a gun.” Prayers sent to specific Ukrainians who are currently begging God/gods for mercy might hit their target, but a hex thinly disguised as a prayer diffusely aimed at an entire country is guaranteed to backfire and splatter all over the person who sent it. The only way to overcome the hatred is to truly hate it, to once again paraphrase Christian occultist Dion Fortune. If I hate someone, and I assure you I hate plenty of entities both corporeal and incorporeal, the best revenge is to become completely unlike them in every way. When I become the opposite of a wokester, it means truly being awake instead of succumbing to the latest glamour the mainstream media has in store for its dupes. Instead of being a powerful, genocidal serial killer like Kim Jong Un, I cultivate the forces in me that are the opposite of Kim Jong Un such as kindness and gentleness. Anyone who is able to weave the golden thread through the clog without disintegrating into the clog becomes a spiritual force to be reckoned with – as much as it sucks to be here, consider the current era the ultimate in spiritual strength training for the few who choose the path of light.

Once upon a time, my husband and I were yuppies with yuppie aspirations. He had an executive job and spent his weekends golfing. I planned on owning a large house and going full throttle entrepreneur. Meanwhile, at my husband's work, there was a mentally handicapped guy who my husband's evil coworkers liked to torment. Let's call him Mikey. Mikey was a janitor. My husband was the only male person in the place who refrained from grade-school level bullying of Mikey. The cretins and literal whoremongers (while married with children) my husband worked with played pranks on Mikey, for instance, by glueing coins to the floor.

If there is a hell, my husband's coworkers will be burning in it for a not-short amount of time, and I don't think this is a simple matter of me being humorless. They also liked to torture Mikey by accusing him in a roundabout fashion of "funny" habits, such as compulsive masturbation. Mikey's odd reply to their taunts was "I don't do that anymore." This, of course, was as good as an admission of guilt in their small minds, and would set them into hysterical laughter.

My husband's executive job went away through no fault of his own -- the company went under because of bad business decisions and two or three terrible managers. My aspirations to own a large house and expand my business became deflated by reality as I struggled to support us during nearly three years of my mate's intermittent unemployment. The phrase "I don't do that anymore", however, stuck in my mind as something important.

The Trouble With Christian Repentance

The problem I have always had with the Christian notion of repentance is this idea of living a wholly awful life, perhaps one similar to the pathetic managers and salesmen at my husband's former job, and then being able to suddenly repent at the end of one's life and go to heaven. The concept of Christian repentance was repugnant enough to make me an atheist for many years, as other religions were just as baffling in different ways. Christians like my in-laws (RIP) were brimming with hatred and fear. The Apocalypse for them was always two weeks off into the future. God would come and sweep them away to a bliss they had done nothing to earn while on this plane. My in-laws were Bible bangers who believed the Earth was created in one short week around six thousand years ago. My father-in-law's Biblical literalism, his misogyny, death fetish, plus the unfortunate time when he openly tried to hex my husband's car tires so they would blow out on the road and force us to believe in his God, motivated me to completely avoid him for the last five years of his life. He convinced himself he was going to heaven because he was right with God. His life wasn't easy, but in my opinion, it wasn't an excuse for the way he treated others. It struck me that if those were the people who were convinced they would go to heaven, it made perfect sense that heaven did not exist.

I always was a bit of a freak: long before I believed in reincarnation, I stopped fearing death. I have imagined myself dead, thought about the ways it could happen, plus I love horror movies. As an atheist, I imagined being swallowed into the great black void of space from whence I had come. I never imagined an entire spiritual ecosystem where my current incarnation as Kimberly Steele was one of many. I never anticipated past life memories of being a widow on a yacht or a singing court jester. Yet the funny thing is I had these memories long before I dived into the occult four years ago. I had memories of the yacht when I was a suicidally depressed twelve year old and the court jester came to me at age fifteen. I didn't know who these people were at the time. Now I know.

There is no black void. There is an ecosystem, and because our human brains are not that big or great, we barely have the faintest clue about how it all works. No wonder it seems unfair! The one thing I have gleaned is that it is a great big school or testing ground, and at every single moment we are being proofed. Every second of our lives on the material plane is an opportunity to make the best out of what we are given, and no, I don't mean taking all of our energy and dumping it into getting a bigger house. To a huge degree, spending one's time chasing the McMansion lifestyle equals failure.

The cold fires of my depression were fueled by regret. My young life was filled with regret and guilt for the stupid and awful things I had done, yet it rarely helped me to become a better person. Instead, I wallowed in my misery.

To pull myself out, I had to do a few things. One was ceasing to care what others thought of me. Another was learning to be kind and gentle with myself -- I am the sort who gladly works herself to death and nearly died at the age of 27 because of it. The third, and arguably the most important of all, was to say "I don't do that anymore" when confronted with a regret.

Christian repentance is hollow because the resolution to be a better person is weak. Christianity has been plagued with this issue almost since it began. Martin Luther's Reformation had its roots in outrage over the Catholic doctrine of Indulgences, which was a way of buying one's way out of being punished for one's sins. Protestant hypocrisy one-upped its Catholic counterpart in the form of Calvinism, which pushed that certain people were chosen by God to be saved and the rest were damned if they did, damned if they didn't. In far too many stripes of Christianity, there was every reason to go back to one's old ways. The rich could buy their way out of hell and anyone who subscribed to Calvin's way of thinking didn't have a choice one way or the other. This, plus a convenient Satan readily available to blame for one's own mischief, began the legacy of slipping and sliding around the heavy, onerous burden of responsibility for one's sins.

To make amends, Christian repentance involves plenty of beating oneself up for being such a stupid sinner; the Flagellants spring to mind. There's lots of room for self-harm and self-destruction as one grovels in front of an angry God. What is missing is responsibility and being willing to accept the consequences of one's actions. Repentance without responsibility isn't repentance at all. It's a temporary distraction so the sinner can go back to sinning and still believe she will win whatever game she thinks she's playing in the bitter end.

No More Games

"I don't do that anymore" is far more potent because it isn't an excuse. Instead, "I don't do that anymore" is an affirmation. It does not wallow in regret. It makes a bold statement: I did that behavior, I am sorry I did it, but I will never do it again because I DON'T DO THAT ANYMORE. It creates a new track in space. Though it acknowledges the old one, it does not return to it, because it burns the path of a new and better trajectory. Instead of backsliding and expecting rewards despite continuing an unexamined life of bad behavior, it wholly rejects bad behavior and moves on towards the path of goodness. "I don't do that anymore" is true repentance. It takes Occam's razor to the faux repentances of various religions and strips away the bullcrap of ego-stroking and wish fulfillment. It forces one to keep the original promise.

I used to spend a decent chunk of my time marinating in hatred over real and imagined wrongs people did to me. Years ago, I had a boss who did a bunch of stupid, unjust things as bosses tend to do. Being fairly stupid myself, I threw a curse at this person. I have always been good enough at cursing that if the government had somehow been able to find out how successful I was, they would have sent CIA goons to my door in order to kidnap me and enslave me as their political weapon. Bad things reliably happened to the boss as they often did when I threw curses. I did not put together my own life disasters and misery at the time (blowback) with the hexes I threw at other people, all the while being atheist and a non-believer in the entities behind curses. Here is the secret I learned about curses when I was actively throwing them: for some of us, they are easy. They work. Stuff you would not believe is possible happens to your enemies. Cursing people in this way is the way to commit the perfect crime: no fingerprints, no hired guns, just ice-cold revenge. The problem with curses is their cost. I thought I could throw a curse without suffering for it, but that isn't how it works. Many would be witches and mages think they can throw a curse (usually against Trump and his followers) and come away with their hands clean. Nope. They can carry on with their curses and as long as they believe they are free from karma, they hilariously don't connect their depression, health problems, and the disasters that befall their families as related to their Nightly Hex Amateur Hour.

The reason cursing doesn't help the curser is because it places the curser on a lower realm of the astral plane. Cursing demotes you by a few astral neighborhoods every time you do it even if you live in Chelsea or Echo Park on the material plane. When I was cursing and hexing on a regular basis, my dreams were plagued by entities that chased and harassed me. What did I expect? There's an old Chinese proverb about going to bed with dogs and waking up with fleas...

Only now that I don't do that anymore am I happy and free, because I don't wish for my enemies to be cursed. I wish for them to be blessed, because not only do I want the good to ricochet back in my direction... they need it!