Curses, Part 3: Breaking Curses

Guest post by Kyros

Breaking a curse is often the most straightforward element of dealing with a curse. In order to flesh out how to break a curse we must divide curses into two informal categories.

Giving curses
A giving curse is one in which you attach the curse to an object and then give it to the person, either directly or, more commonly, by hiding it in their yard.  Most curses take this route, such as hex bags, witching bottles, and some impromptu curses.

To break this sort of curse we must first locate the cursed object. Frequently this will be buried.  Look for freshly dug ground or something that doesn’t belong in the ground, such as a small bottle, a bag, or even objects such as nails.

Next, while wearing gloves, a mask, and while working in a well-ventilated area (Giving curses often involve fecal matter, rusty items, or other hazards), open the object, remove any contents, physically clean all the objects, and then magickally clean and purify everything.

Remote curses
Remote curses curse someone from afar. A popular conception of these are voodoo dolls, even though entrapment curses, binding spells, and general bad energy are much more common forms.

Despite the lack of physical objects to remove, remote curses are much easier to break.  Any number of purification and shielding rituals will do, but one of the easiest is a ritual salt bath.

Draw a warm bath. Stir in several ounces of sea salt or kosher salt.  Ask for purification from your deity and slowly enter the bath. Soak thoroughly. Then wash away all the salt water — leaving any behind will cause the purification to fail.  Get out and thank your deity for the purification. The ritual is now complete. Couple with a good shielding spell for best results.

Part 1: What is a Curse?

Part 2: Detecting Curses

Curses, Part 1: What is a Curse?

Guest post by Kyros

Curses can be an unfortunate reality in life.  Sometimes they’re cast on purpose, other times they are purely misapplied intention.  First though, let’s define what a curse is:

A curse is a magickal force working to do harm.

That’s a pretty simple, basic, and open definition.  A curse can be an elaborate spell designed to trap and torture someone in a specific way, or it could just be someone with power who’s angry and directing that anger at you.  A curse can even result from a spell gone badly.  Curses range in power and in effect, from incidental curses that fade in a day to curses that follow a bloodline for generations.

Before we can analyze if we’re being cursed, we need to look at the effects of a curse. To do this, we can divide curses into two distinct categories:

1. Entropy Curses, or the “stuff just goes wrong” kind of curses
2. Targeted Curses

Let’s look at the first type, which is the more common.  Entropy Curses don’t require elaborate rituals or much power to cast, and can be easily cast by accident, or by simply directing bad intentions.  They’re the sort of thing you may suspect if you have a long run of very bad luck, or if a lot of unlikely unfortunate events occur.  Of course, sometimes unfortunate events do occur just in life, and sometimes even in strings, so you’re looking for a very extreme case before you want to consider that it may be a curse.  If your house gets robbed one day, and then two days later all your pet fish die, and the next day your favorite sneakers go missing, only to have your grandmother pass the next week, well, then that’s possibly a curse.  (But do keep in mind, it doesn’t have to be a curse– it could just be plain unmagickal bad luck.)

The second type of curse manifests itself in more interesting ways, and usually requires some pretty specific intentions and some power behind it to work.  Targeted Curses tend to occur in a specific way, and do a specific sort of harm.  Say you’re dating someone magickally talented and you slip up and cheat on them, only to have your next three lovers be unfaithful to you: that would likely be a targeted curse.  Or, say you break up with someone magickally talented in a bad or harsh way, and then start experiencing heart problems: that’s also potentially a targeted curse.  Targeted curses involve ritual, power, and usually are related to the original problem: you broke a lover’s heart so they’re breaking yours, in a physical sense; or you cheated on a lover, so now all your lovers cheat on you.  It’s important to note that they aren’t always related to the original problem–your injured lover could curse knee pain on you, but that’s not the usual case.

It’s important to understand the nature of a curse.  Curses can happen easily, as easily as being cutoff in traffic by a rude driver and directing bad intentions under your breathe, “I hope you get in an accident.”  That’s definitely a form of cursing, and like all cursing, it’s dangerous. Cursing is at heart a tool of hate, and like all tools of hate, magickal or not, they ultimately damage the user more so than the target.  Curses create bad karma for the caster, regardless if the caster feels the curse is “justified”.  More so than just bad karma, curses make you weaker, they wear down your power, and they make you a target for darker things.  When faced with a curse, the worse response is to counter-curse, as that only leads down a road of attrition.

Curses are dangerous, both for the caster and the target.  Curses can be cast easily, and still result in harsh consequences.  There is no “right time” or justified time to cast a curse.  It’s always wrong, plain and simple.  Curses are also complex, and can take many different forms. There isn’t always a rhyme or reason with curses.

Part 2: Detecting Curses
Part 3: Breaking Curses