I am the seventh generation of an inherited line.
My name is Ren Kagetsuki. My family are ogamiya, village practitioners on Shikoku, and the work came down to me the way a trade or a debt comes down to anybody.
So when somebody tells me their family carries something, I am not hearing it as a theory.
I was five when I first saw something that was not there. I did not tell anybody for a long time, and when I finally told my grandmother she said only that it had reached me as well.
Not that I was special. That it had arrived.
What a line hands down is a position. Not a fault, and not a sentence.
Somebody stands in it, and then they stop standing in it, and the next person is in it whether or not they asked.
What a family line actually transmits
Three things, and only two of them can be cut.
Something that was sent at the house
Aimed at the line rather than at a person, which is why it outlives everybody who was alive when it was made.
This one can be cut cleanly. It is work, and work can be undone.
Maintenance that stopped
A grave nobody visits. A branch that ended and was never formally settled. Pregnancies that ended and were never given rites.
This one is not cut. It is resumed. That is a much better position to be in than people expect when I tell them.
What an ancestor actually did
Land taken. A person ruined. A debt walked away from.
This one cannot be deleted and I will not pretend otherwise. Nobody can reach back and make an act not have happened.
What can be done is settle what is still travelling from it. The act stays where it is. The thing it set moving can be stopped.
Putting the line on paper
Repetition with structure is the whole marker, and you cannot see structure in your head. It has to be written down, and it takes one sitting.
- One line per person, going back as far as you can name them. Yourself, your parents and their brothers and sisters, your grandparents and theirs.
- Against each name write three things. The age at which their life came apart. What came apart, in one word: money, health, marriage, mind. And whether it ever resolved.
- Leave a blank where you do not know. Do not fill it with what you assume, and do not leave out the ones nobody talks about. Those are the rows that matter.
- Now read down the age column, then down the one word column.
The same age appearing twice is the strongest single marker there is. The same word appearing three times is the second.
Ages scattered across four decades with four different words is a family that has had a hard time, which is a different thing and is not treated the same way. I will tell you which one you have written down.
Keep the sheet. It is the first thing I ask for and almost nobody has it.
Who has to be in the work
Everyone currently on the line, and this is the part that makes it the longest work I do.
Take it off one person and the weight settles on the next. I have watched it move to a younger brother inside a season.
The client did not connect the two events until I asked him directly, and then he went very quiet.
So I ask for the living members by name and birth date, and I read each of them separately before anything is done.
Siblings. Children. Anybody the same blood, whether or not you are speaking to them.
None of them has to know, agree, or believe any of it. Nothing needs to come from them at all.
A household usually arrives as a household, and that is how it should arrive.
How a curse on a family is actually removed
Four stages, over several nights rather than one, and it takes between two and four weeks.
- Read the line. Not you. The shape of it across the generations you know about, and which of the three things above it is.
- Settle what was left. Rites for whoever was not attended to. Most family cases are actually resolved here rather than anywhere dramatic.
- Clear, then cut. What has settled on the living, then the route itself if there is one.
- Guard the descendants. So it does not simply move down when you are no longer the one standing in the position.
The fourth stage is the one people are most tempted to leave out, because it is the only one that is not aimed at them. It is aimed at whoever comes after them.
The order for any removal, family or not, is set out here: the seven methods and the layer each one reaches.
What to tell the rest of your family
Nothing, until it is finished.
Not because it is shameful. Because families argue, and an argument about whether this is real will cost you more than the thing itself.
There is also an old reason. Spoken about while it is running, a working loosens. Take that or leave it.
The practical one stands on its own. You are already carrying this. You do not also need to defend it at a dinner table.
What you can do while you decide
Stage two is the oldest domestic practice we have and it needs no practitioner at all.
Find out who in the line was never attended to. Set a clean shelf with a name or a photograph on it. Fresh water every morning, and once a day a stick of incense, or a candle lit for a few minutes where incense is not sold, and say plainly who you are and that they were not forgotten.
Do not apologise on an ancestor’s behalf. An apology from the wrong person settles nothing.
Forty-nine days, and do not start it unless you can finish it.
The full version, with the marks that tell you whether your family is carrying something at all, is here: how a pattern passes down a line.
If it has happened to more than one of you
Then say that first, before anything about yourself.
Tell me the ages it happened at, the shape it took in each generation, and the old story your family does not discuss.
That last one is held back almost every time, because it belongs to somebody else and it is usually shameful.
It is also, very often, the entire answer.
You inherited a position. Nobody consulted you about it, and you are allowed to put it down.
