A Question of Morality

Recently, I was told that good witches don’t curse or hex, and then the speaker started spouting the “Harm None” creed that so many Wiccans swear by.  And in the next breath, telling me my karma was going to get me if I did.

For my thoughts on karma, let me point you to a previous post so I don’t repeat myself:  http://heartsongscircle.blogspot.com/2011/06/three-fold-fib.html

So, karma aside, let’s explore morality for a bit.

In past dealings with the eclectic pagan community, people have stood up very righteously and criticized me for healing someone who was in a coma, trying to help their body repair itself so they’d recover – because I didn’t have “permission” to work magic on their behalf, so I was obviously a “black witch”.  Using a sleep spell on someone to get out of a difficult situation where they were pointing a gun at me was also met with criticism.  Both spells, by the way, worked.  My friend recovered, and the gunman got dizzy and passed out briefly enough for me to get away, thanks to my “evil magic”.  Apparently I was supposed to let the gunman do what he wanted, and let my friend die without having tried to help him.  He might have recovered on his own, maybe my spell didn’t change anything at all.  But isn’t trying the important part?

I personally detest when people categorize magic as “black” or “white”.  Frankly, it encourages racist thinking since it makes “black” the “bad” color.  Black is a perfectly fine color, whether it’s clothes, skin, or the night sky on a tall mountain, dappled with stars.  Magic is just a force, as neutral as a knife, which can be used for cooking, curing, or killing.  It’s all up to the intent of the wielder.

And yes Wanda Fae, sometimes it’s OK to curse.  At one time in my life, I didn’t think so.  Here’s what changed my mind...

Once upon a time, I was living in an apartment with a roommate.  One July evening in the middle of the week, about 1am we were awakened to yelling and then a loud crashing noise.  His bedroom was closer to the front door than mine, so he went out there while I grabbed the phone.  I heard him yell “Hey!” and then I heard the intruders yell “Where’s the money?”, followed by noises of flesh striking flesh.  I was on the phone with the police, while my other hand held my ritual sword, shaking.  I heard loud crashing noises and I told the dispatcher that they were hurting my roommate and I was going out there, when I heard someone coming down the hall.  I was prepared to shove the point of my sword through someone’s stomach.  Happily, it was my roommate and he was ok – they’d only shoved his bare chest with the palms of their hands, that’s what the noise was.  He wasn’t even bruised, thankfully.

After we assessed the damage, inventoried what was missing, the police had come and gone, and we’d shoved the couch in front of the shattered front door to hold it closed while we waited for the apartment maintenance folks to repair the door and change the locks, we were talking about how glad we were no one was hurt, and that we really needed to be more diligent about the warding on the apartment.  I still wasn’t ready to hex, at that point.

The following day, I saw someone walking around the apartment looking suspicious, so I committed his face to memory.  A few minutes later (I was on the phone with the credit card company canceling and ordering new cards, since they’d gotten my wallet) someone tried a key in the lock and was having trouble.  I looked through the peep hole, and saw the suspicious looking guy with my keys in his hand, trying the door.  I kind of lost it.  I told the person on the phone I had to hang up and call 9-1-1 because the robbers were back, then unlocked and opened the door to see him running away.  When I realized I wasn’t going to be able to catch him and pound his face into the sidewalk like I wanted to, I yelled “DIE!” at him and waited for the cops to show up.  And immediately cast a hex off the top of my head so that he’d be caught, arrested, and convicted.

A week later, I was out of town at a training class, and the power in the complex went out the night before I was due home.  When I got home, there were police everywhere, so I waited for my roommate to get home from work – he had no idea what had happened.  The day after that, I went and talked to the people in the management office to get the scoop.  The robbers had gone into someone else’s apartment during the blackout, robbed her, roughed her up, and she was found dead the next day.  She was 84 years old, a former teacher, and was volunteering at the elementary school down the street.

Ever since her death, I freely encourage people to hex robbers, rapists, highway snipers, and the like.  Get them caught, make their weapons misfire to hurt them, and get them away from innocent victims like that poor lady who died because someone thought it was easier to steal and injure than to get a job like the rest of us.  Those robbers went to jail for a loooong time, especially after I positively identified the one guy in a police photo lineup, and then again on the witness stand in the courtroom.

This doesn’t mean I go around cursing willy-nilly, because I’m not that kind of person.  I have to have a good reason to hex.  But to protect innocent people, the bad guys have to be stopped.  I don’t have super powers, I can’t fly around the city bouncing bullets off my chest, reading the minds of the wicked and bringing them to justice.  But I can sure as heck cast spells that work.