Are curses real? What the Bible says about cursing

When people talk about “cursing” they usually mean “bad words” or “foul language”, but that is a modern perspective. In the ancient world, a curse was a very specific thing, something you did to someone in the sense of “putting a curse on” someone else. But what is a curse? A curse literally means an “evil word”. The idea is that by using negative or ill-intentioned speech, you can actually cause things to happen to other people, or give them bad luck, or otherwise put negative energy in their lives that manifests in real, tangible ways. You might curse someone by saying, “May you never get married!” or “I hope you get fired from your job!” or “may you get hit by a car on your way home!” To put it into the modern language of “manifesting”, instead of manifesting something good in your own life, a curse is when you try to manifest something bad in someone else’s life.

What is a curse?

The principle underlying a curse is that words have real power, not just emotionally – for of course, you can hurt someone’s feelings by saying something mean. The idea is that words can have an effect on the physical world itself. We modern people tend to think of things like this as “superstitious”, but that’s because we assume a certain way of viewing the world. We assume that only physical “laws” – like the law of gravity – are real, whereas things we say or think are less real. A spoken sentence is “just” sound that we produce with our vocal cords, we might say. This way of viewing the world is what scholars call a “disenchanted” view. But on an ancient way of viewing the world, speech is not arbitrary, it has an almost magical quality to it. Words and thoughts are intimately related to the physical world and have a real power to influence it. When you put bad energy into someone’s life, through your words, you might actually cause something bad to happen to them!

What does the Bible say about curses?

You might say that all of this sounds un-Christian, but the reality is that curses are frequently mentioned and discussed all throughout the text of scripture. Depending on the translation, the words “curse”, “cursed”, and “cursing” come up over 160 times in the Bible. Curses, being cursed, and putting curses on people comes up in many different contexts, but there is one important common denominator among all of them, which is an implicit understanding that speech has power to effect the physical world.

This also applies to actions, such as the frequent warnings in the law of Moses that certain kinds of actions cause their doers to be cursed (Deut 27:16-20). The deeper assumption behind both is that words as well as actions have moral or – you might say – cosmic significance to them. Disrupting the cosmic harmony of the universe by breaking its moral laws is going to have physical effects on the world. The chief example being the fall of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, in which God explains that the action’s cosmic significance is that the Earth itself is going to suffer a consequence (Gen 3:17). This is all because – on an “enchanted” view of the world, everything is interconnected and everything affects everything else. If that’s true, then people really do have the ability to use words to pronounce curses on one another.

St. Paul warns the early church about engaging in this kind of practice. In his letter to the Romans he addresses this practice directly. He writes, “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them” (Rom 12:14). This is in the same spirit as Jesus’ admonitions to “love your enemies, do good to those who hate you” (Luke 6:27, see also Matt 5:43-48). In Christianity, the love of God is poured out onto everyone, and so we who are trying to be like God likewise need to pour out that love on everyone we meet, regardless of how they treat us. It is, in some sense a “normal” reaction to say a bad word to someone when they’re rude to you. This includes pronouncing bad speech with the hope (or the intention) that your evil words produce evil in someone else’s life.

Is cursing a sin?

In a sense, sin itself is a kind of self-curse. That’s because sin doesn’t really mean, “something God doesn’t approve of” or “something you ought not to do in order to count as a Good Person”. Sin is something much more cosmic in scope: to sin means to fall short of the moral nature of reality. It’s to disconnect ourselves, even briefly, from goodness itself. The ancient Christian idea – an an idea we see among many pre-Christian, pagan philosophers – is that the one who does evil is in fact the one who comes to the most harm. If your hurt someone else, obviously that person is harmed, but you are actually the person that comes to greater harm, since in doing evil you wound your own soul. One of the most potent examples of this idea is in Oscar Wilde’s famous novel, Picture of Dorian Gray, in which the protagonist makes a magical pact to trade his soul with a painted portrait of him: his body will never grow old or decay, but the portrait changes to reflect the nature of his soul. The more evil he does, the more he sees that the painting changes to become uglier and uglier.

To do evil to others, especially to wish evil on others and try to cause them harm, is therefore obviously sinful! And this isn’t merely an old idea. There’s a 20^th century Christian monk named St. Paisios spoke at length that curses are real and have real power. He writes,

“A curse works when injustice is involved. If someone, for example, deceives a person who is suffering or does him harm and that person curses the wrongdoer, then not only the wrongdoer but even his kindred may be adversely affected. In other words, when I harm someone and that person curses me, the curse will be effective. God allows for this to happen in the same way that He allows, for example, for someone to kill a person.”

St. Paisios affirms that there is a real power to curses, but warns that to do so is equivalent to doing physical violence to a person. When asked by his interviewer about who suffers when a curse is pronounced, he replies:

“...The cursed person suffers in this life. The one who curses, however, will suffer not only in this life, but will also suffer in the next life because there God will treat him as a criminal unless he repents and confesses. All right; it may be that someone may have offended you. However, your cursing that person is equal to your taking a pistol and shooting him. Who gives you the right? No matter what the other person has done to you, you don’t have the right to kill him. Those who curse have malice – malevolence – in their hearts”

Saint Paisios the Athonite, Spiritual Councils, Volume I: With Pain and Love for Contemporary Man, Holy Hesychasterion, 1996. p 109-110

This malevolence, the desire to hurt your fellow man, is obviously sinful. St. Paisios ultimately makes the same point as Jesus and St. Paul: we should not do harm to others. To do harm to others is to harm our own souls. In fact, the title of the chapter from this book of St. Paisios is “Bless and Do Not Curse”.