You are trying to work out which of the two words applies to you.
I will save you the search. In English they are not technical terms, and practitioners use them interchangeably.
My name is Ren Kagetsuki, and I work in a language that cuts this up differently.
The cut that decides what has to be done is not the one those two words make. There are three questions underneath them, and those are the ones that change the remedy.
Where cursed and hexed came from
Hex is the newer of the two. It came into American English from German-speaking settlers in Pennsylvania, from Hexe, a witch.
So it carries a suggestion of someone doing something deliberately, with craft.
Curse is much older and much broader. It covers a spoken word, a wish, a judgement, a family inheritance, and a working.
That is the whole difference, and it is a difference in English rather than in what is happening to you.
Nothing about the remedy follows from it. Which is why you will find long arguments about the two words and no agreement anywhere.
The three questions that do decide it
One: feeling, or work?
Is this someone’s ill will reaching you, or did somebody sit down and build something?
Feeling behaves like weather. It comes in while they are dwelling on you and thins when their attention moves.
Work runs on a schedule and does not care what they are thinking about this week.
Two: is it on you, or on something you are attached to?
On you, and it travels. You take it on holiday.
On a place, and it eases the moment you sleep somewhere else, and it reaches everyone under that roof.
On a family line, and it has happened before, at the same age, to somebody whose name you know.
Three: is the source still open?
Was this fired once, over one event, and then left to run?
Or is somebody still holding it, still angry, still there?
The tell is simple. Something fired once fades unevenly and never returns on a rhythm. Something still being fed comes back at intervals.
Why the answers change the work
Because each one is met with something different, and using the wrong one is the reason people tell me nothing has ever worked.
- Feeling, on you, source closed. Clearing is enough, and it holds.
- Feeling, on you, source open. Clearing buys months. The line has to be cut as well.
- Work, on you, source open. Cut, clear, and then seal, because the same hand can lay it again.
- Anything, on a place. The place is settled first. Work on the person alone will not hold.
- Anything, on a line. The generation above is dealt with, or it simply moves down to the next person.
Notice that not one of those rows depends on whether you called it a hex.
A man wrote to me having spent two years and a good deal of money on hex breaking, none of which held.
Every remedy he had bought was aimed at a person. His was on the house.
How Japanese cuts it instead
We have four words where English has two, and they divide by source rather than by style.
- Noroi. A living person, wanting this, deliberately.
- Ikiryo. A living person’s ill will arriving without their knowing they are sending it.
- Tatari. Wrath from the dead, or from a place that was disturbed.
- Kakei no noroi. Something the family line is carrying.
The second one is worth a moment, because English has no word for it at all.
A great many cases are that. Nobody performed anything. Somebody simply could not put you down, and it reached you anyway.
These people are not villains, and most of them would be horrified to be told.
A mother who cannot accept a marriage. A friend who never said what they felt about your promotion. Someone who was left, and who goes over it every night before sleep.
None of them performed anything. None of them would call it a curse.
It arrives all the same, and it arrives strongest from the people closest to you, because they know you well enough to hold you clearly.
It comes off the same way regardless of whether the sender meant it.
The salt survey, for question two
The second question decides more than the other two, and there is a way to answer it in three nights rather than by guessing.
1. One white dish per room. Small cone of coarse sea salt on each, nothing added to it. Bedroom, living room, kitchen, hallway, bathroom.
2. Place them low and out of the way. On the floor against a wall, not on a windowsill and not near a kettle or a radiator. Damp from cooking is not a reading.
3. Leave them three nights. Look each morning before you touch anything else and write one word per room.
4. Compare the rooms, not the salt. All of them damp means a damp house. One of them grey, slumped or yellowed while the others are clean is the reading.
5. Then sleep one night somewhere else and note how you slept.
One bad room plus a good night away points at the place. Clean salt everywhere plus a good night away points at you, and you took it with you.
Throw all of it outside afterwards, not into the sink.
If you do not know whether you are cursed or hexed
You are not meant to. Naming it is the first part of the work and it is my part, not yours.
What I need is not a word. It is when it started, whether it follows you, and whether it comes in waves: the six signs I weigh heaviest.
If you have already decided it is a hex and want the removal side of it, that is set out here: how a hex is taken off.
Either way it is the same three questions, and I would rather answer them than have you guess at a vocabulary.
Give me the three answers and I will give you the name for it.
