#malefic magic

A little find for dear @graveyarddirt, enjoy!

Vrazhe (Enemy) - Angy Kreyda

Translation under the cut:

During our elaborations, we have already mentioned the poisonous and piercing rays of Saturn, whose impact on the logocentric individual can cause great havoc. This is reflected in the fact that all over the world the Saturnine deity is considered one of the most harmful powers, his influence causing hardship, misfortune, illness, destruction, and death. Related to these ruinous qualities is a concept of magic taught within our current we call the Baneful Gaze. The Baneful Gaze is reflected in a weaker sense in the practice of casting the evil eye, a notion found in various cultures globally, which take effective measures to shield against its influences. Witches, sorcerers, people possessed by evil spirits or forces, but also certain types of spirits and daemonic entities are said to possess the power to cast wittingly or unwittingly the evil eye with devastating consequences for the victim. The power root for the evil eye is often thought to originate in the Saturnine deity. Experts on Tantra in the Sepulcher Society, for example, have reported to us that in many branches of Hinduism it is Śani, the Saturnian deity, who causes the most destructive of all evil eyes."

---David Beth for A. Moros' "The Cult of the Black Cube"

I love this song, but there are problems with it that bug me every time I listen to it. Some of them are opinions, some of them are facts.

1. “Black magic” is a fairly outdated concept. She’s using it to mean “malefic magic” (which itself is kind of a complicated idea), but some people really don’t like the wording of “black magic” and “white magic.”

2. “Hit you with that Voodoo” - Voodoo is a religion, not a magical practice. There’s also a lot of controversy around white people practicing Voodoo/hoodoo. Let alone a white girl using it incorrectly in a song??

3. It sounds like her girlfriend is really wanting to talk to this other person? “I made her block you” suggests that the girlfriend didn’t want to block him. So I don’t know if hexing the guy is the best move? Maybe a binding spell on the girlfriend would make more sense? (Morally, I personally wouldn’t approve of that, but as far as practicality...)

4. “Power of the full moon.” This is probably the one that irks me the most, strangely enough. The full moon is traditionally associated with benefic magic (”white” magic), so why is she using the full moon? The new moon is more associated with malefic magic.

“A minor form of malefic magic was to inflict hiccups on your victim. One way of doing this was to remove your cross, put it under your heel, and say:

‘I deny God and his life-giving cross. I give myself into the hands of the Devil.’ Then whisper over some salt: “Misery-hiccups, afflict this man [name], shake and torment him to the end of his life’. 

Then take the cross out of your boot and put it on back to front, this should cause devils to appear. A day later move the cross round to the front and sprinkle the salt where the intended victim will walk, saying: ‘As this salt will dry up so may this man dry up’.”

A while ago I made a post about a simple way for revenge on people already buried in their graves, in Chinese folk traditions. 

https://daveykimy.tumblr.com/search/revenge+on+dead+folks

Today after some reading, researching, and chatting and confirming with my nanna and some elders (nanna’s gossip buddies), I found out there are ways to take that curse further. There are ways to have the dead folks you’ve just cursed to an existence of angry and painful restlessness to go after and take their anger out on another living person. 

In addition to cursing the dead folks’ graves, you can dig their grave and place a paper cutout of a person on their coffin or into their urn. You would’ve written the target’s full name and birthdate on the paper cutout beforehand. The dead folks’ spirits you just cursed will now go after the target and haunt them, torment them, and take out their anger and frustration out on them. They won’t stop either, as time goes on the spirits will only get angrier due to being cursed to restlessness and eventually become a harmful spirit/evil spirit and Lord have mercy on your target then. 

 And because this is Chinese folk magic, there are more than one way to do one thing depending on who you talk to and which region (sometimes township) they’re from. Another way to curse dead people is to put a dead rat and a dead snake into a container, fill it with water and let it go rancid. Seal it with wax and bury it at the grave of the person you want to curse. This too will cause their spirit to become restless and wander the Earth in pain and despair, eventually transforming into a harmful spirit filled with rage who can’t move on to their next life. 

Slow down there speed racer. We’ll start out with the first little thing...curses are different than hexes, are different than jinxes.

Yes, they all fall under the umbrella of malefic or baneful magic, but it’s like saying oranges mangos and apples are all fruit.

Jinxes and hexes can be cast accidentally (jinxes more likely than hexes.) especially when fueled by intense emotions like anger, anxiety, jealousy etc. Even a really heart felt Fuck You can result in a jinx or hex.

That’s because jinxes are the shortest lived. It can be a one and done kind of thing where there’s one manifestation and it’s done. Usually happens in a shorter time frame from when it’s cast and doesn’t require as much forethought as it’s such a burst.

Hexes are the middle ground. A particularly long lasting jinx, or a short lived curse may fall under the category of a hex. It’s a weird balance between severity of the effects combined with longevity. It could be bad luck for a week, flat tires every month for a year, it could be the dissolution of relationships, or loss of job. The severity is more than a jinx and will a lot of times include some kind of ritual. To be honest, a lot of the tumblr “curses” that you see floating around written by users are actually hexes.

Part of that is again the severity and the action of how it manifests, another part is how easy it is to break them, to end them, or to reverse them. I see these “curses” with backdoors clearly written into them! Or a set timeline of how long it’ll last. If there is a timeframe of when it will end, then it is usually a hex and not a curse. If it’s longer than a short time period of a day or two, then it’s usually a jinx...

If there’s no time frame of the spell ending, it has a severely dramatic effect, and there’s no reversal written into it...it may be a curse. You can’t curse someone accidentally because it takes a lot of energy plain and simple. I jinx easily, and hex often, but actual cursing I’ve done 12 times and been a witch for 14 years. If you talk to practitioners who have worked with baneful magic for a while, you’ll notice that a general concensus is that cursing is WORK. The prep time, the actual spellwork, the upkeep, the protections, the loopholes, all of it, takes a lot. A simple writing someone’s name on paper and pinning it between 2 lemons with a nail isn’t a curse on its own.

While jinxes and hexes can be purely emotionally driven, curses have too many variables for you to want to do one strictly on emotion imo. When I’ve cursed part of what that entails is actually meditation and reflection because it is an expenditure of a lot of energy, and preparing to make sure nothing blows back, or that it fizzles out before taking root. So yes, you can curse because of a “why the fuck not?” But with how much work goes into it...why would you if you didn’t hold at least some visceral emotion towards someone?

I do want to clarify why i said visceral emotion and not anger. That’s because curses can also be fueled by an integral sense of morality, a sense of justice or personal code of ethics or social courtesies that are violated by someone else. Witches have been social justice workers from the beginning, before “witch” was even a word. That’s because witchcraft is a tool of need, and when mundane actions aren’t suitable, magic steps in.

Curses can be compared to wine, if cared for and kept in the proper conditions, they can develop, strengthen and get better with age. Alternatively, if there wasn’t the right conditions, attention to detail, energy put forth etc, the wine will spoil and become vinegar (or just spoil and peter out.)

Curses are the big guns. And should be handled with clarity and respect. Do it right and it can be life altering. Do it wrong, and nothing happens at all. Do it wrong and it may be dramatic for a period, then the intended quickly recovers. Do it wrong and the effects may be shared between you and the intended. Do it wrong and it may just be felt by you.

In my experience and from talking to other witches, it’s like horses or dogs. Curses can smell fear so if you aren’t sure that what you’re doing is in fact what you want, there’s a larger chance for it not working the way you want. There’s less pressure and more room for error with hexes. Jinxes can be as simple as someone tripping or stepping on a lego, or a bad dream. Hexes can be losing keys consistently and the financial burden or replacing them, they can be a loss of focus that affects work or school, they can teach a lesson. Curses can cause blight, permanent injury, even death. They can last past the intended’s life and affect the lineage and those around them. Curses can go through generations and past the life of the witch who cast it.

So to do a curse right, bellatrix lestrange has it right “You have to mean them...” because if you don’t, things can and will go sideways.

While I'm far from the sort of practitioner who clutches my pearls at the thought of "dark" magic, I also think there is very much a particular time and place for it. I view it pretty much the same way as I view mundane aggressive behavior; sometimes you need to be able to stand up for yourself or others, but that doesn't mean you should be violent whenever you feel like it, and especially not when it's just to get what you want. After all, would people think it's at all normal or admirable for someone to go on about how they like to hurt or coerce others in a non-magical capacity?