To Hex or Not to Hex?
This is the age old question of witchcraft, are hexes inherently bad?
The answer? Well, it depends.
What is a hex
A hex is a type of magick which seeks to do harm to another person. Whether it be a freezing, binding or pain inducing, hexes are meant to hurt someone else.
Sounds like it could be pretty useful, right? But it’s also a little complicated. So let’s get into the nitty gritty of hexing.
Why do people think hexes are bad?
There’s this phrase you’ll hear in witchcraft called the three fold law. The three fold law, in short, is the belief that any spell you do towards another will return to you times three. So if you’re sending healing energy towards someone it will come back and heal you too. If you are doing magick seeking to hurt someone else, that will also come back to you, harder and stronger.
It makes sense, right? The energy you put out into the world can and will return back to you, kinda like an energetic boomerang. This is often thought of (in majority white nations) as karma, but it’s not. Karma is rooted in Hinduism and reincarnation, so it’s actually more so about how the way you live this life will impact that next life you are born into.
In developed Christianized countries, we aren’t inherently taught to prescribe to the belief in reincarnation. Instead, Karma has been bastardized to the idea that energy boomerangs back around to the receiver, usually in a short period of time.
For instance, if someone does a hit and run to your car in the parking lot, they will have something bad happen to their own car in the near future… but that’s not really true, is it? Sure sometimes it does happen but I’m sure you can think of plenty of people who are honestly bad people who never have their actions come back in return.
Bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. Unfortunately, life is chaotic.
Now, there is something to be said about the energy we put out into the world…
Imagine energy as a physical thing we can see. Bad actions create a red energy, good actions create a blue energy. The more blue, good feeling energy you put out into the world, the more there will be. The more red, negative feeling energy you put out into the world, the more there will be of that as well. Now imagine all this energy floating around us--visible to the named eye--it would obviously be nicer and feel better to have more of that good feeling blue energy around than it would to be encompassed in mostly red.
In short, the more good energy we put out into the world, the more good there is!
So, looking at it that way, yeah it does seem like putting out the hexing energy would create some generally bad vibes in your energy field, and who knows what would come of it?
Where did the three fold law come from?
We can’t leave the hexing debate there though! It’s important to understand where the idea of the three fold law came from.
Christianity--many, many moons ago--sought to extinguish the earth based and polytheistic religious practices all over Europe (and the rest of the world, but the Christians did a real good job of converting Europe almost completely to Christianity). Since these folk practices were predominantly oral traditions, when Christianity swept the land, very little of what was practiced before was kept on record.
In fact, Christianity did this smart little move where it said, “hey you can keep doing all that stuff with the eggs and bunnies, but come do it at our church and celebrate the resurrection of Christ with us.” So, many folk practices became intertwined in the Christian practice, making the conversion easier and the two spiritual practices a bit muddled.
In the early 20th century, the desire for earth based religions began to grow. What happened next is that many of the lost practices were recovered and sown together like a Frankenstein religion (excuse me, Frankenstein’s monster I mean). Wicca was born and the title of “witch” was well on its way to being reclaimed.
Since there was very little documentation of folk practices from yesteryear, much had to be created and glued together from the scraps of remembrance in order to make a cohesive practice of it all. The only problem with this is that too much of the world was still deeply Chrsitian, and certain Christian beliefs wound their way into these spiritual practices still.
Chrsitianity in witchcraft today
Today we still suffer from lingering Christian ideals in modern witchcraft.
Purity plays far too large a role in what we consider “good” witchcraft. This looks like the belief that we intake the energy of another person when we have sex with them, and that their energy remains inside of us forever. It’s the belief that we have to be 100% sober from all mind altering substances because they block our spiritual nature. It’s the idea that we have to eat clean foods because things like chips and soda are negative energy.
There’s nothing wrong with being picky about who you sleep with, or deciding to live a sober life, or only wanting to eat healthy food, but it is a puritanical belief to think that it must be done in order to be a proper witch.
The three fold law was created about a hundred years ago when Wicca was stitched together and it happens to be Christian in nature, since the principle of it is purity of one’s self and one's energy. As the Wiccan rede goes, “an it harm none, do what thou wilt.”
Purity, forgiveness, and only doing good deeds--these are pervasive Christian ideals that have permeated into the secular belief system. You don’t have to have ever even been in a Christian church to have been taught that these ideals are righteous ones to uphold.
You can hex if you want to!
Honestly, witchcraft is far more gray. There is no unifying moral code that aligns modern witches, and that’s because the reclaiming of (European) earth based religion was a means to create more freedom--a backlash of rigid Christian rule. The purpose is to not be pigeonholed to a “this is bad and this is good” way of life. We have the freedom to create our own moral codes based on what we feel is right and true.
So the choice to hex or not is up to you, but I do want to offer more food for thought.
Let’s think back to the idea that the world is unfair since good things can happen to bad people and bad things can happen to good people. You can eat all the healthy food you want, you can be totally pure and healthy in heart and spirit, and still someone can do something absolutely horrendous to you. You can be harmed and you can experience trauma you never expected.
Imagine perhaps that someone close to you fools you, a romantic partner perhaps, and then one day out of the blue they take everything from you. Money, treasured items, and even your pet, would retribution be out of the question for the pain they caused?
There is a time and a place for hexes.
It might be a gray area as it whether or not it comes back to you energetically, but it is worth meditating upon whether or not someone deserves to have their energy fucked with after they have hurt you.
People do bad things to us, even if we are good people. In witchcraft we have hexes to help deal with this.
Protect yourself
You can always say “fuck it” and do the hex, accepting whatever may come back to you, so long as the other person gets what is coming for them, but there is a way around that!
Protecting yourself is like level 1 in witchcraft. It is essential and necessary in order to do most any magickal dealings.
You can sprinkle salt around all the doors and windows in your house for protection. You can cast protective shields by focusing your energy. You can carry protective talismans to keep you protected on the go. You can also keep a piece of iron nearby for protection from unwanted energies.
It is always a good idea to protect yourself when doing a hex, especially if it is being done to another magick worker (because they probably already have some protection magick up).
Some quick hexes
If you want to freeze a person out of your life, write their name and birth date on a slip of paper, fold it away from you and then put it in the back of your freezer.
If you want to stop someone completely. Write their name and birth date down again, but this time put it in a small freezer safe container, fill it with water, put the folded up paper inside and then put it in your freezer.
The slip of paper with the name and birth date can also be put in the bottom of your shoe, or even taped on the bottom of your shoe in order to cause physical harm.
If you want to make their life stink, put that paper in your cat’s litter box, in your dog’s poo bag, or use it as toilet paper and flush that sucker down.
This one’s a bit more advanced, but very effective. Pee into a jar, add some rusty nails and spices/pepper into it, and then put the slip of paper into the jar, seal it, and bury it in your backyard.
Remember
A person’s choice to hex is their own, so respect other witches and their practice. The world, and especially the world of magick is not so black and white, so “do what thou wilt.”