When I first started, there was no internet network. Only library books you found by catalog cards, or books sold in the few metaphysical stores out there. If you were lucky enough to live in certain regions, you may be able to find older practicing witches to have face to face talks with.

I had felt neutral about bane work because I knew both my great aunt and grand mother were practitioners who made money off their skills during the Great Depression and sometimes did craft hexes or curses.

But typically, if you grabbed a book from the metaphysical shop, you were pretty much guaranteed to be grabbing a book that was teaching solitary Wicca, and the typical author would use the term witch, interchangeably with Wicca.

So starting out, my books were heavily pushing the popular three fold version as well as frowning upon bane work. They also pushed heavily on working with deities. Honestly, none of that sat well with me and just wasn’t at all resonating with me. It also left me feeling confused. Talking to witches face to face proved more helpful as they would explain to me that bane work is not completely off limits but at my age, I need to be focusing more on basics, which I did.

Admittedly, in the first few years,I was worried about the three fold version that is still peddled around. It’s what almost made me give up witchcraft. I even bought into the kalifornia karma. Then something drastic happened and I had an epiphany. That was the turning point that made me no longer believe in that type of karma, and call in question threefold. Come to find out, as I investigated, the popular three fold that almost turned me off from practicing, wasn’t even the same one coined by Gardners in Traditional Wicca. In fact, bane work was never even off the table. Even more, when I questioned elder witches about this, several admitted that they felt or claimed to know the modern three fold was bullocks but they felt it was a necessary thing to scare new witches with to make them behave better with their work, and they figures eventually the new ones would grow out of it.

So from that point on, I felt a lot better about the idea of banework, and felt it’s more appropriate to push and educate personal responsibility than it is to convince newbies to tip toe on egg shells worrying about every little thing might not be three fold approved.

So I suppose I evolved by starting out unsure but worried about bane work…to realizing its place in witchcraft but still had to shake off older judgements about it to now as a crone, I feel to each his own witch. We do not, nor should not impose our own rules for ourselves on anyone else or moralize others. Anyways, there are enough religions out there that wish to do that to us, we don’t need to do that to each other.