Old Fashioned Hexing

When I was growing up in a family that practised what would now be called the ‘dark side’ of witchcraft, one never heard the ‘an it harm none’ dictum.  Instead there was a reliance on a version of the old proverb ‘curses are like old hens, they always come home to roost.’ It was always accepted that you had magical choice, just as was always understood that you would have to live with the consequences of it.  In that sense, it’s no different to any other walk of life – whatever we choose to do we have to shoulder responsibility for it.  Certainly the people I came across were not all that bothered by the morality of cursing.  In their view it was neither good nor bad – it was simply a possibility to be considered. 

This article is not about whether or not it is right to hex.  I am simply relating my own experiences in a family that hexed people on a regular basis.  Saying that magic should never be used before all other options have been considered is basically good advice.  What it fails to take into account however is that when you want to hex someone, the only non-magical possibilities to achieve the same result will usually involve some sort of criminal activity.  If you go out into the street and deliberately try to hurt someone, you run a high risk of either being arrested or receiving a black eye.  You can however, sit up in your window and make people fall flat on their face without them even realising who is behind it.  So although considering other options may be good advice for most types of magic, people who resort to hexing usually don’t bother with all that hand wringing and soul searching.  Or to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw’s famous saying, ‘Them as can, hex, them as can’t, just moralise about it.’

Of course the real problem with hexing is that it can be highly addictive.  Normally, the better you become at magic, the less you need to do it.  But for people with a certain temperament, hexing is easy.  This can lead to the strong desire to hex people not because you wish to, or even because you consider that they deserve it, but because you can. Once you start, it’s very hard to stop.   Worse, it encourages you into some really bad magical habits, and you become very lazy about the mechanics of spell casting.  If you get lazy enough you begin to take risks and if you take too many risks, sooner or later you will reap the whirlwind.

For example, you should never, ever, hex someone when you are in a temper because when your emotions are in turmoil your magical practice goes out of the window.   It becomes a psychic scattergun, and all sorts of people can be injured in the fall out.  One witch I knew often hexed others when she was in a foul temper.  She never gave herself chance to calm down; she certainly never looked for any kind of compromise.  No, she got down to magic while still incandescent with rage.  The result unfortunately was that her magic, although accurately directed at her victim (often with very unpleasant results) also had a tendency to hit other people.  Sometimes it even injured people close to her, whom she would never normally have harmed in any way.  Truly, in magic revenge is a dish best eaten cold. 

In the same way you should really avoid all magical work when you are under the influence of alcohol and drugs.  Yes, they’ve been used since time immemorial, and yes, they do help in spell work but they’re difficult to control properly and have a nasty habit of reducing your ability to focus properly.  I know there are people who will disagree with this, claiming that drugs can be useful aids to visualisation.  As I’ve never tried drugs I can’t vouch for them, however I do know that alcohol can quickly become a bad master, and given that people who hex tend to do so regularly, there is an attendant risk of over use with all its problems.  The same goes for rites requiring sexual or sacrificial climaxes.  They can become so addictive, that rather than being a means to an end, they become the end in itself.  Once this happens, your magic will deteriorate accordingly.  Personally, I don’t like sacrifice in any shape or form; if you must spill blood it should be your own, go and nick your finger with a knife or stick a pin in it.  It’s your spell; take responsibility for it. 

Of course the word ‘hexing’ is open to a wide interpretation.  I tend to use the term to cover spells designed to harm others, but I know others might broaden the interpretation to include the ability to impose your will on someone else, whether they like it or not.  It isn’t a particularly difficult skill to learn, and the possibilities for mayhem if it is abused are extensive.  However, it’s quite possible to think of situations where ‘changing someone’s mind’ is positively the best thing to do.  For example, your brother finds out his girlfriend has cheated on him and intends to go round to her house and confront her.  You know he has a vile temper.  Would ‘changing his mind’ so that he stays in and watches Match of the Day be such a bad thing in the circumstances? 

Now there are witches out there (and I think they should know better) who will jump in and say it’s the wrong thing to do because it interferes with his free will.  But isn’t that what we do all the time?  Even without magic, surely most of us would talk to our brother, try to persuade him not to go and speak to his girlfriend, at least not until he had calmed down and was in a more reasonable frame of mind.  And how many of us would be likely to go further and first ask his permission to have this conversation?  I think if something’s acceptable in the everyday world, then you can also make a case to justify it in the magical world.  The techniques of hexing do not necessarily harm – it is the intention that makes the hex.

Since the action of hexing implied the acceptance of its attendant risks, (‘what goes round comes around’) my family took a number of elaborate precautions to minimise the possible fall out.  Our house was full of mirrors.  I mean really, really full.  I counted them once: there were almost seventy!  You couldn’t move without glimpsing yourself out of the corner of your eye.  It was quite creepy.  There you’d be, walking along the landing and suddenly you’d see the image of your back bounced off one of these mirrors.  Weird.  You didn’t need eyes in the back of your head, the mirrors did that for you!  When asked why there were so many, my mother would just say ‘for dressmaking’ but that didn’t explain tiny mirrors all over the place, some in areas where you would have needed to be a contortionist to look in them.  

Mirrors occupy an important place in magic.  Since early times mankind has believed that the soul could separate from the body without causing death, and be viewed as a reflection.  So long as the vessel containing the reflection (bowl of water, mirror, polished metal) remained intact, the soul was safe, but if it broke then death would follow.  There are all sorts of folk tales and superstitions warning against looking in the mirror, from the story of Narcissus who withered away and died looking at his reflection, to the old idea that if you looked in the mirror for too long you would see the Devil looking back at you.  It’s easy to dismiss these as simply Christian admonitions against vanity, but scratch a little deeper and you will see that the real fear was that the spirit could become trapped in a mirror and therefore vulnerable to attack. 

In sending out a spell, the caster always sends something of their self, which is another reason why too much magic can be very weakening.  The hexer is therefore at her most vulnerable just after the spell is cast, and given that the spell can sometimes rebound, the mirrors helped by deflecting the returning hex.  Also they helped protect against any form of psychic attack by thought forms. 

For those of you who have never come across these before, the best way I can describe them is to imagine a monster stepping out of your dreams and into reality.  When based on sound magical practice, thought forms can be useful ‘gophers’ but when fuelled by extreme emotion (the sort that facilitates hexing) they can spiral right out of control.  Personally I feel that thought forms, although useful, should be regarded with caution.  It’s a bit like trying to keep a tiger as a house pet.  Just as certain personalities are attracted to hexing, so some people find it easy to create thought forms.   I’ve done it myself for a variety of what seemed good reasons at the time (and nothing to do with hexing) but when I started noticed what seemed like long scratch marks in the bathroom door I decided there and then to call a halt.  When you have a young family, that’s not the sort of thing you want prowling on the landing at three in the morning!

Some people find generating thought forms is child’s play – which it often is, quite literally!  Haven’t you even wondered about those ‘imaginary friends’ that some children create?  They are an early, simple type of thought form, and while the child is young enough, they are relatively harmless. Most children grow out of them because thought forms require more complexity if they are to remain interesting and useful. Unless the child understands this and is able to keep re-creating the thought form in a slightly more intricate form each time they will outgrow it, just like a teddy bear or Dinky toy.  This is probably just as well, because it is during puberty that children’s magical powers suddenly take off in all directions.  An uncontrollable thought form conjured up by a teenager with raging hormones doesn’t really bear thinking about. 

So how did hexing actually work?  I can only tell you what I observed for myself, and since I was never admitted to the family’s innermost circle (my main interests of healing and divination were considered a bit ‘wet’) I am sure I only ever got to see the tip of the iceberg.  A great deal of it was apparently spontaneous and improvised on the spot, suggesting a very advanced knowledge of the mechanics of spell-casting.  Poppets or effigies were very popular particularly as my mother and all my aunt sewed for people and often had scraps of material left over from making their clothing.  The poppets didn’t have to be made of wax; wooden old-fashioned clothes pegs would do just as well.  Another method was drawing caricatures.  They must have had a great deal of practice at it, because they could go on a shopping trip and caricature just about everyone they had met that day when they got home.  But of course it went far beyond drawing cartoons, and sometimes looking back I wonder at their malevolence towards complete strangers they sometimes only saw for a few seconds.  But then, hexing is addictive.  You do it because you can, and in the end you do it because you have to.

The use of images (sometimes called ‘image magic’) has been widespread at all times and in most places.  I can well remember when I was a child of about eight, going with my family to view an empty house which was up for sale in Llandaff.  In those days you collected the keys from the estate agent and wandered around the house at will.   I often wonder whether the agent had ever seen the upstairs of the house, and if so, what he thought of it.  If ever a place needed a complete makeover that was it.  Curses had been written out all over the nursery walls.  To this day, the memory of it still sends shudders down my spine. 

Photographs were another means of hexing.  Sometimes they were covered or had pieces of brown paper stuck over them, occasionally they were cut out and damaged.  Considering that photography is a relatively recent practice, it seems to have been quickly adapted to assist with magic.  There was a strong belief that photos somehow contained some of the essence of their subject, thus by damaging their photo you were in some sense damaging the person in it.  Conversely it was believed that keeping a photo of a person who did not wish you well was asking for trouble.  The image therefore was a means of conveying a great deal of harm both from and towards its subject.  The one who triumphed was the one with the strongest will.

I only ever actually saw a poppet used on one occasion, though it was often hinted at.  Back when I was young, it was quite common to try and make one’s own doll, either a rag doll, knitted one, or from clothes pegs or wooden spoons.  I was good at this, because I liked most crafts, and I was especially good at making them from clothes pegs.  They were pretty lifelike and I even managed to sell a few to augment my pocket money. 

Once I was asked to make a pair, to represent my friend and her fiancé.  I made my friend’s first and then my mother suddenly took an interest in what I was doing and made the male doll.  She had the most peculiar expression on her face while she did so; she was intent on the task in hand and at the same time observing me closely.  I always used pipe cleaners to make the arms and hands, so it was easy to make the two figures hold hands, which I thought was rather romantic.  ‘No,’ said my mother, and swept them apart with her hand.  ‘Now see what happens.’   I think I expected the figures to start walking and take on a life of their own.  But of course, the magic was subtler than that.  Shortly afterwards I had a phone call from my friend in floods of tears.  She and her fiancé had broken up.  I mentioned it to my mother and she just stared at me for a few moments.  ‘I’m not in the least surprised.’  Looking back on it, neither was I.

Anything which once lived has particular potency.  So leather, nail parings and hair clippings could all be used in hexings.  My family kept hair going back several generations, and I never felt entirely safe until I had retrieved my own hair from them many years later.  This involved some subterfuge on my part, but I reasoned that since it was my own hair anyway, it was fully justified.  In some parts of the UK it used to be thought very unlucky for parents to keep a child’s hair.  

One of my aunts lived abroad for many years, and when she returned on holiday it was clear that not only had she continued the family tradition of witchcraft, but had added to it a number of new practices.  These included the use of bone, skin, leather and feathers as a means of conveying the hex.  Sometimes they were put together in some sort of visual image, often conveyed to the victim as a ‘gift.’ 

My family may have concentrated on hexing to the exclusion of all else, but what fascinates me even more is that years ago, even if you didn’t have any magical traditions within your family, you knew how to deal with a hex.  My mother in law was one of the sweetest, gentlest people you could meet.  She had no interest in witchcraft, and she was a regular churchgoer.  And yet, when she found herself on the receiving end of one of my family’s hexes, she rolled up her sleeves and went into action straight away.  Back in those days we had open fires in the hearth, so the first thing she did was throw salt on the flames.  Then she got a couple of old shoes and burned them.  There was no hesitation, no wondering what to do.  She knew. 

In my family nothing remotely magical was ever written down.  In fact, there was a real pathological distrust of books.  It may have been a deep seated feeling that anything written down could more easily fall into the wrong hands, or it could have been a dislike of ‘book learned witchcraft’ by those whose tradition was wholly oral.  I don’t know.  There was certainly a feeling that some traditions were superior to others.  One of my aunts eschewed hexing altogether and concentrated instead on weather charms but she was regarded as being a bit peculiar, and was never really forgiven for turning her back on the family tradition.  To be able to command fate was, in their view, the pinnacle of their craft.  Nothing else came remotely near it. 

I’m not sure whether any of the younger generation of my relatives has continued with the craft.  I suspect that one or two have and I’ve made it my business to give them a very wide berth.  But the distractions of modern life have taken their toll.  Email and mobile phones have the edge over telepathy, involve no long training and little effort.  We are constantly surrounded by an ‘instant’ world; instant results, instant gratification.  It’s hard to imagine that hexing holds much interest for young people nowadays.   Hex -versus- text?  No contest. 

And yet, over the years I have witnessed how deeply witchcraft and magic are embedded in our collective psyche.  In spite of two thousand years of Christianity, our old pagan beliefs are lurking just below the surface, ingrained so deeply that they have been impossible to eradicate.  Given a chance – even half a chance, it will come to the fore.  I have a sneaking suspicion that if you scrape away the thin veneer of ‘civilisation’ you may find that we are all witches, under the skin.