In honor of the witchy holiday that is about to come up, I wanted to write on a “Can a Jedi...” question that has been weighing on my mind as I watch all these Halloween Season shows, movies and documentaries- Can a Jedi engage in or be party to Curse Work?
First, let’s begin with: It doesn’t matter if you believe in curse work, there are Jedi who do believe. Furthermore, it’s good to know what the Jedi Philosophy has to say on the matter for those times that a person may desperately reach out to curse work as a last resort to resolve an issue. Secondly, I’d like to have to dispel a few myths about Curse Work.
- The first myth is that it’s confined to Pagan Traditions. In the Old Testament, you actually find a couple Prophets who curse others. Noah cursed his grandson, and that curse has sadly been misinterpreted (even misplaced as Noah having cursed his son, rather than grandson) so many times that it is used to discriminate against Black People. Eventually, you find that Prophets will only deliver the oracle of a curse from God, rather than pronouncing one of their own. In the New Testament, you see that pronouncing personal curses upon others is not in line with Christ’s teachings- only God can pronounce curses. However, in Islam, you find that there is a precedent for Muslims to call upon God to pronounce a curse upon liars (Ayah al-Imran 3:61). And in fact, if you call for God to see his wrath upon the enemies of Israel, you could say that you are still engaging in a form of Curse Work, but you’re handing over the reigns to God to ultimately decide. This means that at least 2 of the major 3 religions theoretically allow for curse work. I’m sure you’ll find Christian denominations which also allow for it, but the overarching message is that you need to forgive and let God handle it.
- The second myth is that curse work is always vengeance oriented. Did you know that the Hawaiian Chiefs sometimes had a sorcerer who could pray people to death. They were called Kahuna ‘Anā’anā. Under the monarchy, they were banned. But before that, they were highly regulated. If they were caught killing (or at least trying to) someone they weren’t suppose to, they were put to death themselves. This is it’s own curse- a curse of Death. And it’s not just here we see this, in the Old Testament, we see a case where a monarch tried to get a prophet (Balak) to curse Israel (it didn’t work out, instead God had him bless Israel). Since we have an example of two very distant cultures with state-sanctioned curse work going on, we can assume that there was more of this going on in the ancient world. And today, someone might engage in curse work on behalf of a paying client or out of a sense of justice (perhaps targeting a convicted child murderer you learned about in the news).
Now that we have these things established, there can be a more in-depth discussion had on this subject. Buckle in, because my exploration got rather lengthy, and is going to take the whole week to publish. It may be more stream-of-consciousness than streamlined thoughts, too, so I apologize ahead of time, but it will all come together. You’ll have to read to the end before the whole puzzle is pieced together.
As a disclaimer- this exploration is my personal take on the subject after careful consideration. Others are welcome to disagree, and if they do, I hope they will put just as much effort into the thought process as I have.