Interpolation: Experiencing the Law of Threefold Return

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 at 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 the place. 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 he 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 so furious about the whole thing, I promptly did a banishing spell to get rid of those people from our hitherto peaceful neighbourhood. It was not a thing I did lightly, or often. I took spell casting seriously, particularly a spell of that kind. But it was easy to feel it was justified in this case.

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 'wanted.' 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 own 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 outshone 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, five years later, 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 ever asked who I worked for:

‘I work for the Universe, and the pay is good.’)

16. Learning About Magic

 

Some of the things Ridge taught me, I learned by example. For instance, since becoming a psychic reader myself (a story I’ll tell you later), one of my methods of reading for people has been to clasp their right hand in mine, close my eyes and tell them what then comes into my mind – as Ridge habitually did when reading for me. (I find it effective; so do my clients. But it required a huge degree of trust when I started, to actually open up like that and then to say what I got.)

Some other things he didn’t exactly teach me, so much as acquaint me with the fact that they were possible. For example, when I came to encounter hands-on energy healing, I already knew that it existed and could work, having witnessed him use it on our dog Suey. I wasn’t afraid of it, nor dismissive of it, which I might otherwise have been. (Many people are.) Since then I’ve received hands-on healings myself, from gifted practitioners whose treatments I found helpful; and there came a time when I was guided to learn Reiki (another story to tell in more detail later). I went on to become a Reiki Master, i.e. qualified to teach it myself, and have worked with it for around four decades now.

Mostly, he responded with personal anecdotes to my fascinated questions about how he became a magician and what sort of things he did in that capacity. 

It was immediately clear that it was an absolute commitment on his part, something he took seriously – not just a game, or hobby, or passing interest, and certainly not a way to deceive people for his own advantage, nor big-note himself. It wasn’t a thing he would normally mention to people at all, but our renewed friendship had soon come to include discussion of things decidedly out of the ordinary, such as my ghostly visitors. He probably had good intuition as to who he could and couldn’t tell. I think, too, it must have been clear that I had a genuine curiosity and a thirst to learn; I wasn’t just a sensation-seeker. By the same token, I wasn't going to go around gossiping about him.

I wasn't seeking to learn as a student; such a notion didn’t occur to me. I saw myself as an interested friend, wanting to understand what his life was like now, as well as to explore a mysterious topic.

He told me he was a Hermetic magician, meaning one who was a follower and pupil of the Egyptian god Thoth (who was equated – by both scholars and magicians – with the Greek Hermes). There were written teachings which Ridge had been studying, known as The Emerald Tablets, purportedly authored by Thoth. Ridge did not regard himself as in any way slavish, but rather as a respectful friend to the deity – considerably less learned in the matters Thoth had to teach him, but of equal value as an autonomous being. 

To me it was as if he opened up my perception to a whole world I had been completely unaware of until then. (Not quite true, but since my early childhood I had suppressed and forgotten a lot.) 

How did Ridge come across the knowledge of all this other-worldly stuff in the first place? Well, he had recently made a new friend: a man who was a witch. Ridge opened up to him about his clairvoyance. This man introduced Ridge to various of his magically-inclined cronies, including one who was both a powerful clairvoyant and a trained Hermetic magician. One story about this magician concerned his having been charged with ‘fortune telling,’ still illegal in Australia at that time. He was required to attend court to face the charge. One reason fortune telling was illegal was that it was assumed to be deceptive, undertaken in order to gain money by ‘false pretences.’ The story goes that the accused defended himself on the grounds that he wasn’t faking it, and proceeded to tell several people in the court room, including the policeman giving evidence and the judge himself, what they’d had for breakfast that morning, in detail so accurate that his case was thrown out. 

A great story! Was it true? I don’t know, but Ridge certainly believed it, and by then he had had a lot to do with the accused man (and with others who confirmed the tale), so presumably he had reasons for being so convinced. 

Finding himself among like-minded people from whom he didn’t need to hide part of himself, Ridge embarked eagerly on a program to correct his ignorance and develop his gifts. He was drawn more to ceremonial magic than to witchcraft. (A quick and easy way to differentiate is to say that ceremonial magic is more formal and structured; witchcraft is more earthy and organic. However, it’s a generalisation: there are similarities and overlaps.) So began his intensive studies in magic, and his personal relationship with Thoth. 

At that time, as I've said, I had no notion of becoming either a witch or magician myself; the whole realm of magic seemed to have no personal application to me, being rather a source of interest and curiosity just because it was so foreign – like learning about a different country you think you might love to visit but have no interest in migrating to. When my mum was visiting us, she too was interested, in that same kind of way. Ridge didn’t have all the long talks with her that he did with me on my own, but he was still able to be entertaining on the subject. (I realise with hindsight that he gave me more specific and more private details – he must have been teaching me purposefully, even while not letting on that that was what he was doing.)

He actually took Mum and me to his home one day, to show us his magic room. I wonder now if I should I call it a temple. Probably, yet I don't recall him using that term. It was one small room in the townhouse he was renting. (All the rooms were small.) It was pretty much empty. What was striking about it was the circle of thick white rope taking up most of the floor. There was just enough room to choose to stand outside the circle – which is what we all did, as he made it clear that entering to stand within the circle was not to be done without his permission. In that inner space, he told us, various kinds of magic happened. He didn’t, on that occasion, go into detail about this; merely mentioned ‘ritual,’ which to us was a fairly vague term. We felt honoured to have been shown the room. It was not something he allowed many to see. The rope, though usually left in place, could be lifted and hidden away if necessary (for things like landlord’s inspection, I imagined).

Eventually he told me (but not Mum!) that he sometimes worked with demons – that he could summon them into the circle, which trapped them, and they would then have to do his bidding until he freed them again. This shocked me! In all the years since, it’s not a thing I myself have ever done or ever wanted to. He explained that magicians had to be able to work with both ‘light’ and ‘dark’ energies: that both are necessary in order to maintain balance. I can comprehend that; I just don’t choose to act on it in that specific way. 

I think we only have to look at Nature to see that it’s obvious we need both day and night, heat and cold, and so on. In similar vein, I think it’s important to love and integrate one’s own ‘shadow’ in the psychological sense. For whatever reason, we do seem to need the extremes, and need to balance them. So I think that if some being exists, even what we call a demon, it probably has a right to exist. It’s not up to me to judge it, trap it, coerce it or hurt it – unless in self-defence. 

(When it comes to self-defence, protection seems to me easier and more efficient than attack. So I do set up magical protections around myself, my home, my pets, my loved ones – whether against natural events such as severe storms, or against intentional malevolence from a human or other source. It’s completely matter-of-course by now, second nature. I tend to believe that I’m not a very fearful person these days, but if I stop to think about it I have to laugh at myself. I might fairly be considered VERY fearful. The reason I don’t feel afraid is that I have such a heck of a lot of protection around me at all times!)

It was from Ridge that I first heard about the four basic precepts for working with magic: ‘To know, to will, to dare, to remain silent.’ As I understand it, this means: 1) You need to know what you’re doing, undertaking enough study to understand in detail how magic works, and more specifically the particular magic you’re proposing to do; you don’t just go in blithely, based on a mere scrap of information. 2) You need to have and maintain a strongly focused intention. One definition of magic is that it’s an attempt to shape reality by conscious intention. 3) Be brave enough to do whatever it takes and face whatever consequences. 4) Talking about it weakens and dissipates the energy. Furthermore, it could be dangerous! In ancient times you were likely to be tortured and killed, even for suspicion of using magic. Even now … in my lifetime, I have known of people losing their marriages, their jobs, and access to their children, for the same reason.

He also explained that what you put out will return to you. Again, it’s an energy thing, just the way things work: a natural law. That’s another good reason to be very mindful about trying to work magic. You might not like its after-effects on you! Witches call this the rule of three, or ‘law of threefold return,’ on the theory that what you send out will come back to you multiplied by three. That’s usually a bit hard to measure; also there’s no saying when it will come back to you (though I find it’s usually quick). The important thing is that it will come back. By now I have had many occasions to observe this law in action. (It doesn’t apply to cases of unintentional hurt. Those might of course have consequences too, but it’s not the same dynamic.)

These are widely known precepts in magical circles, in both ceremonial magic and witchcraft; since those days, I have encountered them repeatedly. I think they weren’t unknown then (in the 1980s) either. But at that time I personally had never come across them before.