A few days ago I wrote describing my own experience of being hexed. It was a nasty experience, but I think the greatest shock to me was that although I knew my mother could and did hex others, I really didn’t think she would do it to her own daughter – particularly considering that I was nine months pregnant at the time.

But this is to underestimate the nature of hexing. It renders you powerful… and power itself can be very unsettling. Power in the hands of people who are simply not ready for it – whether such power be magical, religious or temporal – is dangerous. Normally we have to undergo lengthy training before any amount of power comes our way. We need this preparation in order to use power properly.

Years ago it wasn’t all that easy to find out such things unless you happened to come from a family or know someone who already had such knowledge and was happy to pass it on to you. Nowadays there are hundreds of books out there, all purporting to tell you exactly what you need to know.

Well, yes and no. Some books undoubtedly do give you a great deal of useful information. But they cannot give you the discipline you need to make good use of it. So much in magic revolves around intention – I don’t personally believe in ‘black’ or ‘white’ magic as such. You can use virtually any type of magic for either good or evil purposes depending on your intention. If the friend or family member who was teaching you was responsible, they measured what they taught against how you handled it. A book cannot do this.

But my mother and her family grew up in an era without books, when knowledge was passed on by word of mouth only (the whole lot of them had an almost pathological hatred of books). Yet they still managed to be extremely irresponsible in the way they worked. Presumably this was because at some point back in the mists of time the whole ethos became twisted. There was no thought for being responsible, and no boundaries that would make sense to anyone outside the family. Instead of carefully considering all the options they developed an ‘I can do it therefore I will’. This spilled over into their daily lives too, because I don’t believe you can have genuine, strong ethical magical principles while at the same time living a life that denies all these. Don’t tell me to avoid personal gain and to make sure I harm nobody while at the same time pursuing a part time career as an armed robber!

So how can we instil a sense of responsibility along with magical/occult mentality knowledge? I don’t know. A balance has to be found but at the end of the day it’s all down to accountability. You make a mess, magical or otherwise, you clear it up.

If you play with fire you get burned. If you play with hexing – you’ll get hurt eventually.