Return to thee times three

All witches believe in the idea of karma; what you give is what you get. Some believe as I do in what is known as the Rule of Three, Three-fold Law, or Law of Return. The intentions and actions and behavior that you carry out into the world will return to you threefold. Thus you are rewarded triple for good actions and punished triple for bad ones. Recall that the Wiccan Rede states, “And it harm none, do what you will.” Let’s talk about what constitutes harm.

In the previous post we established that everyone and everything has a soul or spiritual energy, not just humans. As a witch, I am able to experience and interact with this energy in all things, and their spiritual energy can affect me. I try to go about my life being as respectful as possible to the world around me. But does that mean I never do harm? Of course not. On some level, it would be impossible. I’m currently using a computer. It is made by an unethical company from a country that colonized and stole land and resources and exploited the indigenous people of that land for their labor, sometimes even using children. The people that mined the lithium for this battery remain impoverished, chronically manipulated and abused by billionaires, never seeing any real money or benefits. But with everything requiring an electronic account and login, an app to download, a response to emails and messages, it is nearly impossible to exist in a modern capitalist society without a computer and mobile phone. From scheduling medical care to keeping your job to accessing education or ordering food, you need to use the internet. The electricity straining the infrastructure, the data centers clearing trees and draining groundwater. I call pest control when there are unwanted bugs or rodents in my home as they could cause sickness and harm for my family and pets. Even as a vegetarian, the food I eat must be grown and harvested, must use fungicide or pesticide, must be shipped across the country or world, causing harm to countless insects, plants, animals, and other humans along its way to my plate.

And what about words? Is only physical harm the definition of harm or do we include emotional and mental harm? And who decides what words are harmful? If I tell a friend are drinking too much alcohol, they will probably feel defensive and hurt by these words. Who am I to say what they can put into their own body? It’s not like they're driving drunk or anything; they are safely at home with a bottle of wine. But am I harming them by telling them this? Or am I harming them more if I don’t speak up? If your teenager is too emotional during a fight about curfew to control their words and says “I hate you!”, are they harming you? It definitely hurts in the moment. Or are we only including long term abuse? A husband constantly berating and belittling his wife until she’s a hollow shell of a person, existing but not living. A school bully that harasses and mocks a classmate until they end up taking their own life. An anonymous troll leaving comments that some content creator they disagree with shouldn’t have the rights to live , to love who they choose, should be attacked or locked up until that person deletes their account and hides away, afraid to be in public after receiving daily threats. Even though no one was physically hurt, shouldn’t we also consider this harm? We’ve seen too may times that words can kill.

And what about harm to yourself? Not just self-harm as a symptom of mental health disturbances but your daily habits. Are you getting enough sleep? Enough exercise? Or are you overdoing it and pushing your body too far? Are you eating enough and drinking water? Are you staying distracted and disengaged with constant scrolling and entertainment? I know I'm guilty of abusing my body and mind with all of the above. The cracked lips, the fretful and fraught intermittent sleep, the loss of strength as my muscles and lungs wither away, out of breath and shaky from a single flight of stairs; yes, indeed, the lack of care for myself in previous decades has certainly come back to me threefold now that I am in my 40s.

However, I want to be clear here that I do not in any way believe that people who are suffering with severe illness or accidents did anything to deserve it or were cursed by anyone or anything. Wicca is about honoring nature, and we see in nature all the time that things just happen. Tragic and terrible for no reason. A baby rabbit is born without legs and it does not survive. A flood comes suddenly, the water flowing unpredictably and too quickly to avoid. A long dormant volcano that everyone expected to sleep forever wakes up. A chimpanzee kills another chimpanzee for territory or a mate. I never said being a Witch gave me control over nature. It just asks me to be respectfully more aware of it all. I don’t actually think there’s a reason for everything. Why do things like fleas and heart worms even exist? What is their important role in the greater circle of life? Would everything fall apart if we just eradicated them? I can’t say. Being an English major and not a scientist, that question is outside of my lane and well above my pay grade. The Rule of Three is only applied to things in my life that are realistically within my control. It is the same as other religions that share a similar belief. Christians, for example, may believe that prayer and good behavior can earn them favor in the afterlife, but most do not expect it to prevent bad things from happening to them in this life, accepting it all as God’s will or the Devil’s malice. Something that my spiritual path has taught me over 20 years of reading and observing is that we are really not different from each other. You call it a prayer, I call it a spell. You call it God, I call it Universal Spirit. In the end, we are all just seeking purpose, direction, and connection to something beyond ourselves. We, all of us, every human and plant and bug and stone and bird, were born from the same indescribable source of energy. It is us and we are each other. It is impossible to perfect, impossible to exist without offense or harm to some other being, but we are called to try. Treat others as you’d like to be treated. What you do to the least of these, you do also to me. Put out into the world what you would wish returned to you times three.