My feelings on "taboo" spells

Now when I'm talking about "taboo" spells I'm talking about the spells that a lot of people seem to not even touch with a 10 foot pole. Spells such as love spells, hexes/curses and general black magic.

So I guess before I really get into those different kinds of spells I want to start off saying that this is how I feel about them, not how everyone should feel about them.

I started off following Wicca and of course with the Rede I said nay and looked the other way from "black" magic. I figured that that was what was right and only doing "white" magic I was in perfect balance with the universe.

After a few years though I started to think about it. Isn't harmony about having a balance of both dark and light, yin and yang? At this point of my pagan path I figured that Wicca wasn't really for me, especially once I found out about some of the inner court information (not really being told because that out make the speaker an oath breaker but it had gotten to a point here they couldn't say no to my questions). So I branched out and stumbled upon hedge witchery/green magic and kitchen magic.

Now with my new found feelings as just being a witch I sat down one day and really put some thought into what magic is. I've heard different spells being referred to as dark/black, grey and white/light magic. It didn't really make sense to me that once something is light it will always be light. Like if you cast a spell to get money then it's considered white, but if that money had come from the death of someone in the family it was still white? Which led me to the realization that magic doesn't have a colour, it just it. It's what you do with that magic, the intent that you use it that makes it either black, grey or white.

And if magic just is, why would there be "bad" spells out there? Then I thought back to the idea of balance. Now to be a doctor, you need to know how to save lives and stop them. To be able to sell anything (whether you're a sales person or a corporate tycoon) you need to know both how to sell and how not to sell. That way you know what you should and should not do. To have that balance. Shouldn't that be the same with magic? Shouldn't you need to know how to curse and hex to be able to heal?

With my new resolve to learn how to cast hexes and curses, the old rule of three popped back in my head. And really what you do does come back to you, whether it be something small or something big, right? But say if you kill the latest cockroach running across your kitchen floor or your eating that steak shouldn't that mean that your friends and family start croaking? No. Obviously there are people who eat meat every day and no one seems to die because of that (besides the animals but that's beside the point).

So after thinking that I started not to really think of karma as this end all and be all of magic doing. Really I started thinking of it as more as what you can personally live with. If you do a hex on someone (say they stole your lunch at work) and you heard that they had gotten seriously hurt then of course you have to live with the idea that that might have been because of you. Say if it's a serial killer on the loose though, I don't have any problem trying to stop them, with any means at my disposal. I mean, magic is for us to make the world/our lives a better place and I'm sure karma wouldn't nip you in the butt for stopping a killer.

In conclusion, I have no problems with love spells, hexes/curses or black magic. Magic is there for you to use and if you do something that you will regret then that's your fault for not thinking things through. Magic isn't one thing or another, it just is.