As I’ve said already, I don’t think ‘threefold’ need be taken to mean that what you send out once will come back to you three separate times. Perhaps it might mean three times as powerfully? I’m not sure that applies, either. I have preferred to regard it more indefinitely, as coming back multiplied. Now that I examine it in the light of my own experience, I’m not even sure that’s true.
A theory occurs to me. Three is considered a magic number. Perhaps ‘threefold’ indicates only that it will return to you augmented by magic. That certainly is true in my experience. I’ll tell you just one of several stories (breaking the rule to keep silent, since these events are many years past) –
When Andrew (my third husband) and I lived up the end of a long, winding country road with only one exit, some new neighbours moved into a rental property a couple of houses down. They had big, threatening dogs which ran out to chase away passers-by. Other neighbours up our end of the road very soon stopped their kids from riding their bikes past that house – which severely limited how far they could ride. Similarly, we all became reluctant to go for walks past that house. The dogs weren’t always roaming free, but there seemed no pattern to that. However, adults sometimes risked it if all seemed quiet. The people renting the house made no attempt to get to know any of us, or be friendly in the slightest way.
One day when I was away in town, Andrew decided to go for a little walk. That was a mistake! When he passed that house, the three large dogs ran out at him. He was not a young man; perhaps if he’d been quicker to retreat… But they attacked; he was knocked over and bitten on the leg by one dog while the others danced around him, barking. He yelled out, and eventually a woman came out of the house and stood laughing at him for a little while.
‘Call your dogs off!’ he yelled, and so then she did. She offered him no help to get up, just kept laughing as she watched him limp off the property, but at least she did control the dogs so that the could do so.
He was bleeding. I was out and had taken our car. He went to the neighbour on the other side of us, a guy who had always been friendly and helpful. Randall disinfected and bandaged Andrew’s leg, but also insisted on taking him into town to the hospital for proper medical attention and then to the police station to report the incident.
I was furious about the whole thing, and decided to do a banishing spell to get rid of those people from our hitherto peaceful neighbourhood.
Next thing we knew, only a few days later, the unfriendly neighbours and their dogs had suddenly gone.
We soon heard on the grapevine that the police had visited the house to follow up on the report about the unrestrained dogs attacking Andrew, and had immediately recognised the woman as a wanted felon, so they arrested her on the spot, also ensuring the dogs were restrained. The two men who also lived there promptly decamped. They not only took the dogs and all their possessions; they also trashed the house – among other things, smearing excrement all over the walls. The poor owner, who lived a little way distant, hired Randall and his wife to do the horrible task of cleaning it up; so it was from them we heard about the state the place had been left in.
Sure enough, Andrew and I soon afterwards received unexpected notice from our landlord that he wanted his house back. Oops! The law of return!
But we were given options. The trashed house, only two doors down from where we lived, had been cleaned up and the landlord wanted new tenants. He knew us, because when we first moved in he was still living in the house he owned. Randall told him our situation, and he immediately invited us to rent his place.
It was tempting – hardly a move at all, in a place we enjoyed. But a couple of things gave us pause. The house was heated in winter by a wood fire. This meant chopping and carting the wood, and Andrew and I were both getting a bit elderly by then. And it was not nearly as spacious and comfortable a home as the one we’d been living in: not so suitable for the Reiki seminars I often held.
Also, we’d been getting slightly disenchanted with where were living. It was an unpaved road; I could have swept a dozen times a day and not dealt with the dust blowing into the house. And it was a somewhat inconvenient distance from town, which was where we needed to do all our shopping, attend medical appointments, make library visits, etc.
When we received notice, via a note left in our letter box, we were on our way to a Sunday morning market in town where we had a regular stall (Andrew offering Reiki treatments and Indian head massage, and me Tarot / psychic readings). After we set up our stall, a friend wandered past and asked how we were. We told her we’d just got notice to vacate the house. It happened that she worked in the office of a real estate agent.
‘Let me have a look tomorrow and see if we’ve got anything suitable,’ she said.
The following morning I was running a Tarot class in town, at the home of one of the students. While I was out, Andrew got a call from our friend to say a place had just come onto their books, not even advertised yet, which sounded ideal for us, but we’d have to be quick to look at it. But there was no public transport from where we lived, and I had the car!
He told me afterwards that he walked out to our front gate, ‘just knowing’ that he would get a lift into town. Sure enough, in a minute one of our neighbours drove past and picked him up, delivering him to the address where I was teaching just as the class was finishing up. We picked up our friend from the real estate office, and went to see a place that completely eclipsed all the advantages of where we’d been living.
It was in the hills too, but in a different direction closer to town, and even more scenically beautiful than where we were. (And the roads were made!) The rental property was a house on a horse stud. The place and the horses were owned by a couple who lived on the Gold Coast and had a business there, so they didn’t want to move yet, even though they spent weekends and all their spare time visiting to look after the horses. At least one would come to let the horses out into the paddocks every morning and put them back in the stables at night. They told us they had planned to race them, but then found out the racing industry is not very kind to horses, so kept them as glorified pets. They were very devoted, but didn’t yet wish to occupy the house on the land. They didn’t need us to have anything to do with the horses, just to live in the house so that it and the garden immediately around it were cared for.
AND it had a huge front room, converted from a garage, which was ideal for running Reiki classes!
We had a wonderful life there for the next five years, and they even allowed us to have two cats when a friend had to move home and couldn’t keep them with her. (They were barely beyond kittenhood then, and became our ‘fur kids,’ living with us the rest of their lives into cat old age.)
So yes, the law of return applied: I did a banishing spell and those nasty neighbours were very soon gone; then almost immediately Andrew and I were turfed out of our home in turn. But it cannot have been a bad thing for those people to be moved away from a lovely neighbourhood they were tainting and harming. Certainly I did my spell in a spirit of protection for the neighbourhood rather than rancour against the people concerned. I can’t say I was feeling kindly to them either – I was outraged at what happened to Andrew – but I didn’t want them harmed, just gone. Anything else, like one of them being arrested, they brought upon themselves.
We weren’t thrilled when eventually our new landlords also wanted their house back, but we came to realise that all our moves – always initiated by others, not ourselves – had a larger purpose, related to our tasks in this life.
I used to say, if anyone enquired who I worked for:
‘I work for the Universe, and the pay is good.’