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Curses!
By David F. Godwin
FATE :: March 2001
A curse is a malediction, the opposite of a benediction. The person doing the cursing is wishing or invoking misfortune or evil upon the victim. The only question is, does the curse have any effect, or is it merely a satisfying way of letting off steam?
An irate driver may shout at another, “I hope you crash and burn!” But aside from helping pump adrenaline, the words have no effect. If such curses were effective, the world would be chaotic indeed.
But a curse delivered by a being of power-a god, a spirit, a magic worker-is a different matter indeed. Someone, perhaps a Native American shaman, is said to have cursed the U.S. presidency so that, beginning with Indian-fighter William Henry Harrison in 1840, the person elected every 20 years would die in office. The curse held true for Abraham Lincoln (1860), Chester A. Arthur (1880), William McKinley (1900), Warren G. Harding (1920), Franklin D. Roosevelt (1940), and John F. Kennedy (1960). Ronald Reagan (1980) escaped this curse, but there is speculation that it is nevertheless not yet broken. And when you get to someone like Jesus Christ, the mere utterance of a phrase “You shall wait until I return” is enough to create the Wandering Jew, cursed with being forced to wander the earth and being unable to die until the Second Coming.
Human beings capable of delivering effective curses are commonly thought to include shamans, priests, and witches. The heaviest curse delivered under the authority of the Church is excommunication. The priest reads the rite from a book: “We exclude him from the bosom of our Holy Mother the Church in heaven and on earth… We judge him condemned to eternal fire with Satan and his angels.” The book is then shut, symbolizing the fact that Scripture is now closed to the victim.
A bell is tolled, as if for the dead. Finally, in a hideously dramatic gesture, candles are thrown down or inverted and extinguished against the floor, showing that the soul of the cursed one has been removed from the sight of God.
Although witches in fairy tales and folklore are said to have been fairly free with curses, from turning people into frogs to bringing about the ruin of Macbeth, king of Scotland, modern Wiccan ethics advise against the practice. The operative principle is the Threefold Law-whatever harm you cause will return unto you three times as harshly. Before modern times, however, it was commonly thought that witches might curse cattle with disease, or poison a well. And as recently as the 20th century, there have been curse wars between ceremonial magicians. A notable example is the feud between Aleister Crowley and MacGregor Mathers. One result was that Crowley’s hounds all died and his servants fell ill, but Mathers never recovered from the financial ruin that set in after Crowley retaliated by summoning “Beelzebub and his servitors” and setting them on Mathers ...
Read the rest of this article in the March 2001 issue of FATE
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