Lemons. Salt. A particular colour of candle. Words said on a particular night.
You have probably read four versions and noticed that none of them agree.
My name is Ren Kagetsuki. I spent fifteen years building the things these are meant to take off, so I had to know which parts of a working were load-bearing and which were furniture.
Three things do the work. Two of them are spells. The third is not, and it decides whether the other two hold.
What is actually doing the work in a removal spell
Start with something that should be strange and is not.
A hoodoo bath, a Shinto rite and a Catholic blessing have nothing in common. Different words, different objects, different gods, different centuries.
All three take things off people.
So whatever is doing the work is not the lemon, and it is not the colour of the candle, because those are the parts that differ.
What every one of them has underneath is the same three things.
- Intent held steady. One thing wanted, without wavering, for as long as the work takes.
- A form that does not change. The same sequence, the same way, every time. The form is what holds the intent still.
- A link to the thing being worked on. A name, a body, a place, a line.
Everything else is the container. Containers matter, because a form you can keep is better than one you cannot, and a tradition gives you a form you can keep.
But the container is not the content, and swapping lemons for salt changes nothing about whether it works.
The first that works: the washing
Every tradition has one and they are close to interchangeable.
Here it is cold water and coarse salt, in that order, downward.
Downward is the only part people get wrong. You wash from the head down and you do not go back up, because you are moving something off a body and not scrubbing a floor.
Salt goes outside afterwards. Water goes down the drain. Neither goes back into the packet or the bath.
What it reaches: what has settled on you. The weight, the sleep, the mood.
What it does not reach: anything outside your own skin.
The second that works: the severance
This is the one that is genuinely removal, and the one almost nobody writes out in full.
Something is reaching you along a line. The washing cleans what arrived. The severance closes the road it arrived on.
It is the difference between mopping and turning off the tap.
Here is the form I was taught, in full.
What you need
- A sheet of plain white paper, unlined
- Coarse sea salt, nothing added to it
- Running water, or a fireproof dish
The form
1. Wash first. The severance is done on a clean body, the same night, after the salt bath above. Never before it.
2. Sit facing east, after sunset. Avoid the hour between two and three in the morning, which is when this kind of work is sent rather than undone.
3. Three slow breaths. Out longer than in.
4. Write on the paper what has been happening to you. When it started, and what it has taken. Plainly, in your own words, two or three lines.
Do not write the other person’s name. This matters more than anything else on the page, and I will come back to it.
5. Place a pinch of salt in the centre of the writing. Fold the paper away from you, three times.
6. Say one sentence aloud, and use the same sentence every time. Mine is four words long. Yours can be anything, as long as it names the cutting and not the person.
Something like: this road is closed.
7. Burn it, or put it into running water. If you burn it, the ash goes outside onto bare ground. Not the bin, not the sink.
8. Salt at the door before you sleep. Small cones on white dishes, both sides of the door you use.
9. Three consecutive nights. The same words, the same order, the same time. The sameness is the working part.
Why the name stays off the paper
Write a name and you are no longer cutting a line. You are building one.
A name on paper with intent behind it is the opening move of the work I used to be paid for. It runs from you to them and it does not come off by itself.
People do this by accident constantly, because every instruction they have read told them to name the sender.
You are closing a road. A road does not need to know who was walking down it.
Where this one stops
Done by the person it is happening to, a severance is weaker than the same form done from outside. That is not modesty about amateurs.
You have to hold the line in your attention in order to cut it, and you cannot hold a line without holding what is at the other end of it.
So the person most involved is the person least able to keep it clean. Anger leaks into it. So does fear.
It still helps. It will not seal anything, and against work that somebody was paid to build it rarely holds past a month.
The third is not a spell
It is knowing which of the two you need before you do either.
Washing something that is being sent gives you a fortnight. Severing a line that does not exist does nothing at all, and there is no line when the trouble belongs to a house, or to a family, or to a bad year.
Most of the spells people tell me they have cast were competent. They were simply aimed at the wrong thing.
That is the whole of it: the seven methods and which layer each one reaches.
What is decoration
Not worthless. Just not the part that works.
- The colour of the candle. It helps you hold one thing in mind. That is a real function and it is the only one.
- The particular herb. Traditions disagree completely about which herb and all of them work.
- The moon phase. Useful as a deadline. A form you perform on a fixed date is a form you actually perform.
- The exact words. What matters is that they do not change between repetitions, not what they are.
If you find that keeping to a tradition exactly helps you hold your attention, keep to it exactly. That is not superstition, that is how attention works.
Just do not conclude that a spell failed because the herb was wrong.
Why a removal spell stops working after two weeks
Because a washing is not a removal, and almost every spell in circulation is a washing.
You feel it lift. For ten days or so you sleep, and the weight is gone, and you think it is finished.
Then it fills again, because the line was never touched.
People take that as evidence that they are not strong enough, or that this one is unusually powerful, or that they mixed something up.
It is none of those. It is the tap, still running.
The cleansing side of this, done properly and in the right order, is here: uncrossing, and where it stops.
If you have already cast one
Tell me what you did and what happened afterwards. Especially how long the relief lasted.
That number tells me more than the symptoms do.
A fortnight means a line. Months means something lighter. Nothing at all usually means it is not on you, it is on the house.
You did not do it wrong. You did the first of three things, and nobody told you there were three.
Four situations where I would not do it yourself
- It has been running longer than a month and a washing has already failed once.
- Somebody said it to your face. That means a person, still there, still holding it. A severance without a seal buys weeks.
- The same thing happened to a parent. Work done on one person moves the weight to the next one in the line.
- You cannot think about it without anger. Anger is the one thing that reliably ruins a severance, and being furious about this is completely reasonable.
Any one of those and the form above is worth doing anyway. It just will not be the end of it.
