(also, “Law of Return”, “Law of Three”, or “Three-fold Law”)
Metaphysical idea that “Any energy you send out will return to you three-fold”, commonly believed in by Wiccans (and possibly some New-Agers). Its basic phrasing is fairly well known, but beyond that phrasing there is widespread disagreement and a great diversity of opinion on how it applies to any given, specific situation.
Some people (apparently misled by the same monotheistic emphasis on sin, guilt and judgement that leads to widespread discussion of “karmic debts” and “karmic burdens”, with nary a word of “karmic rewards”) seem to take the Three-fold Law solely to mean that only negative energies (curses, maledictions, etc.) will rebound on their casters. Whether the energies will actually strike their target before rebounding or not is occasionally somewhat unclear – some people seem to believe that all curses, psychic attacks, etc., will necessarily fail.
Some have shown that they’re not unwittingly making assumptions like those mentioned in the last paragraph – they explicitly state that the Three-fold Law only applies to “negative” energy, though how they define what’s “negative” and what isn’t usually seems to be rather subjective. Others claim, with their bare faces hanging out, that the rebound will only occur “if the target doesn’t deserve it.” It should be no surprise that members of this particular camp, despite claiming to be “white” or “right-hand” practitioners, throw at least as many curses as any dyed-in-the-wool Satanist, since they can always find a good reason why their target du jour “deserves it”.
Most believers, however, consider the Three-fold Law not to be such an unbalanced “cosmic spanking”, but rather to be more of a statement of magickal physics – essentially a version of Newton’s Third Law for spellcraft. More sophisticated commentators point out that “energy” does not simply mean spellcraft (and certainly not just negative spellcraft!); rather, it includes any energies or forces you add to the Cosmos (by mystical means or not). In essence, this makes it an amplified version of karma.
Nonetheless, though the theoretical backing for this more sophisticated view is reasonable and sensible, it is still completely untestable, and hence quite unproven. This does not stop its partisans from believing in it quite fervently.
Those who believe in the Three-fold Law have no good way of explaining why Satanists, Chaotes, ceremonial magicians, and even fellow Pagans on warrior paths (or in religions that don’t espouse a “turn the other cheek” ethic, such as most Druidic paths) can get away with firing off all sorts of magickal nastiness at anyone they like, with few if any ill effects. They also have the classic problem that goes along with belief in an omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent deity: the problem of explaining why bad things happen to good people. This is a metaphysical question that most Pagans seem happy to avoid: removing any of those three “omni-” attributes allows evil to flourish in the world. But if the Law of Three is a law of nature, like Newton’s Laws of Motion, then they should be just as inescapable. The stock answer that “really, it does all work out, you just have to wait” is no more satisfactory an answer than the usual Christian line that “God works in mysterious ways.”
On the other hand, the Law of Three’s untestability is also no proof of its falsity, either. Those who do believe in it have ample evidence to point to, in myriads of cases where some Left-Hand Path practitioner cast a curse at someone, and then the occultist’s life went to hell in a handbasket. The fact that Left-Hand workers tend to lead messy and unstable lives is usually enough to account for such problems, but not always.
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