Taking a human life through metaphysical means is serious business. Anybody who doesn’t realize that is a moron, and an asinine waste of flesh. People who take pictures of themselves with a stash of coffin boxes meant for D.U.M.E (Death Unto My Enemies) curses are just proving that they don’t understand the meaning of any of the words they are using. They actually deserve to fuck around and find out the things I am going to discuss, on their own terms.
There’s been a lot of ink spilled over the questions of the morality of such magical attacks, and using magic for uncivilized deeds and for personal gain. I will not waste the pen on those. Instead, I want to relate to you some Old Lore, the observations that come from practice. That which I have witnessed to work, and to happen when these powers are invoked for baneful purposes, and a story of a dying bride that was told to me by an old witch who is not with us anymore because she failed to honor the taboos herself.
Baneful magic in its most classical form that leads to the demise of an otherwise healthy victim, when performed correctly, takes about a year to manifest. You can devastate people’s lives faster, or even cripple them irreparably, but the road from wellness to death is a long road. That makes it a rather slow-acting means of justice or removal of enemies, and if that’s what you’re looking for. I have heard those who mastered it speak in front of me begrudgingly about the relative uselessness of such harsh measures in a situation where they simply do not have that kind of time frame in mind, and they need for things to shift fast. A witch who was stuck in a marital triangle had the means to get rid of her love rival, but knowing it would likely take two years of her life, some terrible disease and dying, she commiserated to me, ‘I wish I could kill quickly.’
She was well aware that in her situation seeing her rival die, and all the loss and drama that would befall the family, would make her life sour, and that she would likely not be interested in winning the man if she had to wait that long.
Sometimes, people are so hell-bent on a goal that they will, in fact, wait for the inevitable, on this path of no redemption. One such story that reached me from the witches in the Black Forest was about a jilted bride, who was somebody known to them personally. It was a young woman who was engaged to be married when a few weeks before the wedding her fiance did the unimaginable – he called off the nuptials, and instead, he married another woman. The scandal and shame for the jilted bride were beyond the imagination of our sensitivities today. Back in the day, this was a big thing. A matter of family honor that was met with a harsh vengeance. She went to the witches and worked with them against the new bride, using terrible means of folk magic which I will not repeat here suffice to say the ritual elaborated on the notion of using decay and dripping water, and the victim’s personal effects in order to destroy her life force. In American hoodoo, these customs are still practiced, where an object will be disposed of in a tidal estuary, causing the victim never-ending trouble.
The spell was successful, her rival died of cancer within a few years of the accursed wedding. The rest of the story is tragic. With her old flame now being free of societal obligation as a widower, he was approached but the flame could not be ignited because this man from watching his wife wither and die became so traumatized and partially insane, that he left all of his possessions behind him, and moved to a foreign land.
If you want to “kill” someone, perhaps think again. Is that what you want? Or is it actually, you need to make them stop doing what they’re doing. You need them to get out of the way. You want to see them suffer loss. All of these motivations might blend in at the height of passion, but they render very different outcomes in ritual. There is much less to consider if you just want to ruin someone, through any and all means, to fuck them up. Especially when you don’t care about collateral damage inflicted upon those near them. For that is the nature of curses – unless performed with surgical precision, they will uncontrollably spread to those around, and create suffering that wants to attach to the target, in any way.
It’s far too common for people to fantasize, or fanaticize themselves into believing someone’s death is the best or the only solution to the matter at hand. They don’t think it through. Honestly, they can’t. There is always a significant element of surprise in the Works of Magic. What I warn about is for us to follow that well-known forsaken path that has been captured by crime stories so well – one corpse looks like a tempting solution to all problems, but more problems are created in the wake of the events. This is where poor judgment leads to what one sorceress has described as ‘the pyramid of wrong decisions’ that just builds up, and carries momentum that oftentimes ends up swallowing up the caster, or in stories such as the one of the corpse bride, you end up with a metaphorical rather than actual pile of corpses, some of which belong to your dreams.
