by Royce Radcliffe

Created on: March 30, 2007   Last Updated: May 30, 2008

The greatest story concerning the morality of casting a love spell on someone is Stephen King's "I Know What You Need." It is a classic tale where hot girl meets geek, hot girl detests geek as she makes passionate love to jock, jock dies in car crash and girl suddenly falls for geek... What is that, you say? She falls for him?

Well, this is a fantasy.

You see, he cast a love spell on her. Toward the end she stumbles upon a closet full of voodoo dolls and love spell snippets and clippings. The whole things is quite elaborate and vividly illustrates how he destroyed her boyfriend and made her fall in love with him through the force of his rituals. She is horrified and runs off.

I would think this would be the typical reaction.

That there is even a question like this is comical to me. The issue is very interesting to me but not as an ethical question. There is no real question that controlling someone's will through magic is not ethical. But there is another question...

Do we not all influence and control each other in other ways all the time? A rich man with his car, a sexy lady with her body... and the magician is just using the same ammunition as the rest. Of course the counter is that his methods bypass their consciousness, but the counter to that is the fact that things like attraction usually do as well!

And for those of us who are not sure if magic is real or a hoax, the issue becomes doubly interesting. What if your lover told you that they had cast a love spell on you? Would you really leave them for that?

I think most of us would be flattered.

So I think the ethics of love spells are undoubtedly nonexistent, but that it is an interesting phenomenon nonetheless. And if you ever cast one on me.. I won't hold it against you.

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