Hexes & CursesAnd the curse-removal con

How to read this page

Part I is the tradition — which is ancient, genuinely documented, and far stranger than the popular version — plus the uncrossing, taught in full. Part II is the con: how the list works, how the sale works, and what it has cost people who are real and whose cases are on record.

The evidence is extraordinary — and not what you expect

Attested Curse tablets — defixiones — survive in their thousands across the Roman world. Thin sheets of lead or pewter, inscribed, sometimes pierced with a nail, rolled up and deposited where they were thought to reach the underworld: graves, wells, springs.

The finest surviving collection is British. Around 130 tablets were excavated in 1979 and 1980 from the Sacred Spring at Aquae Sulis — Bath — during work led by Barry Cunliffe and Peter Davenport. They date from the second to the fourth century, are written mostly in the everyday British Latin of the Romano-British population, and are on the UNESCO Memory of the World UK Register: the only documents from Roman Britain on it. You can go and look at them.

Attested All but one of the 130 concern the restitution of stolen property. Scholars class them as prayers for justice rather than curses in the cinematic sense. Docimedis has lost two gloves. Solinus has lost a bathing tunic and a cloak. Docilianus wants his hooded cloak back and does not know who took it, so he covers every possibility — man or woman, slave or free. The petitioners hand the stolen item over to the goddess so that it becomes her property and therefore her problem, and ask that the thief get no sleep and no health until it is returned.

Petty, specific, human, and slightly aggrieved. Not one generational curse among them. Worth knowing before you accept that something vast and ancestral has settled on your life, because the historical record simply does not contain much of that.

Elsewhere in the record

• Attested Egyptian execration texts — enemy names written on pots and figurines, then deliberately smashed.
• Attested The Mesopotamian Maqlû, meaning “Burning” — a long ritual series, and note what it is for: it is an anti-witchcraft ritual. Even in the earliest written record, the surviving literature is mostly about defence rather than attack.
• Attested The evil eye, near-universal across the Mediterranean, the Middle East, South Asia and beyond — and its mechanism is always the same one: envy. Someone looked at what you had and wanted it.

The historical inversion

Transmitted Living traditions carry this work too, and they should be named rather than gestured at: Hoodoo — crossing, tricks, foot-track magic — an African American tradition with its own history and its own closures; and Latin American practice, where brugería, mal puesto and daño come paired with the limpia that lifts them.

Notice the pairing. In practically every tradition, the removal is at least as developed as the affliction — usually more so.

Attested And here is the correction that matters most, because the popular story has it exactly backwards. The people executed as witches in the European trials were overwhelmingly not practising anything. They were poor, old, often isolated women who had fallen out with a neighbour. The accusation was the weapon.

Meanwhile the actual working magicians — the cunning-folk — were largely tolerated, and made their living removing curses. The demand was never for casting. It was always for the cure.

For five centuries the money has been in the removal. The industry you may be dealing with right now is not new, and it was never primarily about hexing anybody.

The uncrossing, taught in full — and free

Placed here, before the analysis, because some readers need it now and should not have to get through an argument first. This is the whole thing. Nobody has to do it for you and nobody should charge you.

• First, rule out the ordinary. Sleep. A working carbon monoxide detector — CO poisoning produces dread, fatigue, headaches and a sense of presence, and it kills people. Bloods, including thyroid and iron. Any medication you have recently started or stopped. This is not a formality. This is where the answer often is.
• Sweep the house, back to front, and out of the front door. Every room, working toward the exit. Take the dust outside and away.
• Salt bath, washing downward. Hands to feet, over and over. Stay in until the water has fully drained away — the draining is the point of it.
• Write down what you want gone. Be specific and be honest. Then burn it safely, or bury it away from your door.
• Say out loud that it is finished. Use the word finished. Out loud, in your own voice, in the room.
• Open the windows. All of them, for as long as the weather allows.
• Then eat something, and go and be near people. This is not decoration. It is the step that closes the ritual and returns you to ordinary life, and it is the one people skip.
• Change one real thing. One actual circumstance in your actual life — a conversation, a boundary, an appointment, a resignation. This step does more work than all the others combined, and it is always the one left out.

Studied Why it works, honestly: ritual measurably reduces anxiety and restores a sense of control — and it does so even when the ritual is invented on the spot with no tradition behind it. The mechanism is available to you directly. That is the whole of the con in one sentence: they took something you could always have done with your own hands and sold it back to you.

⚠ “The signs of a curse” — read this slowly

Here is the list, as it appears across folk tradition and, today, across every platform you use.

Now read it again and ask what else it describes.

And the remainder of the list is a Barnum list. Every item is either a normal feature of a hard year, a symptom of something treatable, or so vague that it fits everybody. Then ask who goes looking for information about curses. People having a terrible time. The list is therefore guaranteed to land — it is the Forer effect, aimed precisely at the suffering.

The engine underneath

• Clustering illusion. Bad events genuinely clump when they occur at random. Three disasters in one month is what randomness actually looks like, not what a pattern looks like. Evenly spaced misfortune would be the strange thing.
• Confirmation bias. The moment you suspect a curse, every dropped glass becomes evidence, and the ordinary weeks stop being counted at all.
• Post-hoc reasoning. It all started after I met her. Something always started after something. The mind supplies the joint.

⚠ The con, step by step

This is the most lucrative confidence trick in this library, and it runs the same way every single time. Learn the shape and it stops working on you permanently.

The single most important rule on this page: they found it. You didn't.

⚠ It is documented, prosecuted, and enormous

This is not a theory about what might happen to somebody. These are convictions in federal court.

Attested “Fortune-telling fraud” is a recognised law-enforcement category, with prosecutions in multiple countries. Rare prosecutions and rarer prison terms — which is precisely why the Marks case matters. Almost nobody reports this crime, because the shame of having believed it is worse than the money, which means the true scale is unknown and certainly far larger than what reaches a court.

Where you will actually meet it

• The direct message. I don't normally do this, but I felt something heavy around you.
• The comment-section psychic, and the free reading that finds something.
• The generational curse hook — devastatingly effective, because every family has pain in it and everybody knows it.
• The ex hook — somebody had something done to you, aimed at a wound you already have.
• Marketplace listings — cleansings, curse removal, energy clearing, sold like any other service.
• ⚠ The payment tell. Gift cards, crypto, wire transfer, cash. Irreversible payment methods are a fraud signature in every industry on earth, without exception.
• ⚠ The cash-blessing trick — old, and still working. Bring me your savings so the money can be cleansed. It is then swapped or taken. Never hand anybody cash, jewellery or valuables to be blessed, cleansed or prayed over. There is no legitimate version of this, anywhere, in any tradition.

⚠ The list to screenshot

The steelman — a curse can genuinely hurt you

If the harm operates through belief, the remedy can too. Which means you can uncross yourself — free, today — and it will work for exactly the same reason the curse did.

You never needed them. That is the entire con, stated once.

⚠ Do not go looking for who did it

This is the darkest thing on the page and it is the through-line of the whole library.

A curse belief needs a culprit. Once you are looking for one you will find one, and it will not be an abstraction. It will be a relative. An ex. A neighbour. A friend you decided was jealous.

Look at the Rehmeyer case once more, because it contains the entire page. A man believed himself cursed. He went to somebody who could find the cause. He was given a name. He acted on it. The curse-finder supplied the culprit, and a man who had once healed him died for it.

The moment you begin naming a person, you have stopped protecting yourself and started doing to somebody else exactly what you believe was done to you. That is the line. There is nothing on the other side of it worth what it costs.

⚠ What it actually costs

It is never only the money, and the money is often the smallest part of it.

If this has happened to you: you were targeted by somebody skilled at it, working a method refined over centuries. Being deceived by a professional is not a character flaw, and the shame belongs to the person who did it.

What a new seeker should actually ask

Provenance

✦ For practitioners

• Never be the one who finds it. If a client has not raised it, do not raise it. Everything on this page begins with somebody being told about a problem they had not noticed.
• Never charge for removal. Teach §03 and send them home to do it. If your practice cannot survive giving that away, examine the practice.
• Never name a person, and refuse when asked. “Who did this to me” is the question that leads to §10, and a name from you carries far more weight than you intend.
• Ask the ordinary questions first, out loud. Sleep, a doctor, a CO alarm, what has changed at home. Doing this in front of a client teaches them a standard they will carry.
• If somebody arrives already caught up in this, do not lead with disbelief. Lead with: who told you, when, and what did they ask you for? That question does the work without requiring them to feel foolish.

✦ For those guiding others

• Watch for the isolation instruction above everything else. If someone has been told not to tell anyone, that is the emergency, and it is the same move that appears in coercive control with no spiritual content at all.
• Ask the depression questions gently and early. You are not diagnosing anybody. You are asking whether they are sleeping and whether anything still gives them pleasure, and then making it easy to see a doctor.
• Do not argue about whether the curse is real. You will lose, and they will stop telling you things. Go to what it costs, who benefits, and what would count as it having worked.
• Money already spent is the hardest part. Sunk cost keeps people paying long after they have doubts. Saying plainly that stopping now does not waste what was already lost is often the sentence that ends it.
• Afterwards, address the self-trust. People who have been through this frequently say the lasting damage was to their confidence in their own judgement. That is the thing worth rebuilding, and it takes longer than the money does.