Curses and fear

The teaching

As the lore of curse and blessing in the faiths and the ancient world teaches it.

What a curse is

A curse is the reverse of a blessing: a word that calls harm down on someone as a blessing calls down good. The old world took both seriously, because it held that speech said with the whole will, in the name of a power, goes out and does what it says. In the Bible the two stand side by side. Moses sets before the people blessing and cursing, life and death, and bids them choose life; and the tribes stand on two mountains facing each other, Gerizim for the blessing and Ebal for the curse, while the Levites call out the curses on hidden wrongs and all the people answer Amen.

The tradition knows several kinds. There is the curse spoken in anger and the curse written down; the binding spell of the Greeks and Romans; the prayer for justice, which asks a god to punish a thief; and the harm that needs no words at all, the evil eye, which comes from envy and is often cast without knowing it. Each has its answer in the lore, and the faiths set one rule over them all.

The bindings of the ancient world

The Greeks called their curse tablet a katadesmos, a binding, and the Romans a defixio, a fastening down. Its aim was most often to hold a rival still: to bind an opponent's tongue in court, the legs of a charioteer's horses, a competitor's trade, or a lover's heart. The tablet went into a grave or a well, because such places were held to open on the powers below, and the restless dead, the untimely and the violently slain, were believed to carry the message down.

Many tablets from Roman Britain are of another kind. At the hot spring of Sulis Minerva at Bath, people who had lost a cloak, a ring or a few coins wrote to the goddess, gave the stolen thing over to her, and asked her to punish the thief, whether man or woman, slave or free, until it was returned to her temple. In these the curse is a plea to a higher court, made by someone who felt wronged and powerless.

The causeless curse

The faiths answer the fear of curses first with a teaching about justice. “As the bird by wandering, as the swallow by flying, so the curse causeless shall not come,” says the Book of Proverbs: a curse with no wrong behind it flutters about and never lands. When the king of Moab hired the prophet Balaam to curse Israel, Balaam could only say, “How shall I curse, whom God hath not cursed?”, and each time he opened his mouth a blessing came out instead.

Islam teaches the same. A hadith says that when someone curses a thing, the curse rises to heaven and finds its gates shut, falls to earth and finds its gates shut, turns right and left, and finding no way, goes to the one cursed only if he deserves it, and otherwise returns to the one who spoke it. Chaucer's parson says that a wrongful curse often turns back on the one who curses, like a bird returning to its own nest.

The Bible also answers the old fear of a curse that runs down a family. The prophet Ezekiel says that the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, nor the father the iniquity of the son: each soul answers for itself.

Return a blessing

The second answer is to bless in return. Jesus tells his followers to bless those who curse them and to pray for those who treat them spitefully, and Paul and Peter repeat it: bless, and curse not, and repay no evil with evil but with blessing. When the people of Ta'if drove the Prophet out with stones and the angel of the mountains offered to crush the town between its hills, he refused, hoping that their children would one day worship God.

The Buddha taught that hatred is never ended by hatred, only by its absence, and that this is an ancient law. The answer the Buddhist chants give to ill will, whether wished on one or feared, is goodwill sent out in every direction, to friend, stranger and enemy alike. Each of these traditions teaches that a heart that blesses gives a curse nowhere to land.

When harm is feared

Where someone believes harm has been worked on them, the faiths turn to their ordinary means. A Christian goes to prayer, to the sacraments and to a priest's blessing, and the Orthodox have old prayers against the evil eye and against sorcery, said by a priest. A Muslim recites the last two chapters of the Qur'an, which tradition says came down when the Prophet himself was bewitched, and asks God's refuge. A Jewish family may say psalms and, by an old custom, have the mezuzot of the house checked by a scribe.

Every one of these traditions warns against two things. The first is buying relief: whoever offers to lift a curse for money has a reason to find one, and the faiths forbid paying soothsayers and sorcerers. The second is blame: to name a neighbour as the one who cursed is itself a grave wrong, and in the past such naming led to trials and killings. The remedy the faiths teach is turned toward God and against the fear, and never against another person.

Fear not

Beneath all of this the faiths name fear as the true danger. The Qur'an says of the sorcerers of Babylon that they could harm no one except by God's leave, and a hadith teaches that if the whole world gathered to harm a person, it could harm them only with what God had already written. The Prophet forbade taking things as evil omens. When angels appear in the Bible their first words are often fear not, and in none of these faiths is a run of bad luck taken as proof of an enemy's work.

The counsel that follows is the same everywhere: keep the ordinary order of sleep, food, work and prayer, speak the fear aloud to someone steady, and look for the plain cause of each misfortune. A threat from a living person belongs with the police, and a fear that will not lift, or a sense of being controlled, with a doctor.