You want it off. Not a history of the word, not a debate about which one it is.
My name is Ren Kagetsuki, and the short answer is that it makes no difference which word you use. Hex and curse are the same thing in English and practitioners use them interchangeably.
What follows takes about twenty minutes and needs nothing you would have to buy.
Tonight, in twenty minutes
This is first aid. It does not finish anything, and it is worth doing before you decide anything else.
1. Open the house. Every window, five minutes, starting at the room furthest from the door and moving towards it. Doors open in the same direction.
2. Wash downward. A handful of coarse salt in a hot bath, or if there is no time, cold water over the back of the neck and both wrists with salt rubbed in the palms and rinsed off.
Head downward. Do not go back up. You are moving something off a body, not scrubbing a floor.
3. Salt at the door. Two small cones on white dishes, either side of the door you actually use.
4. Put anything that came from them out of the house. Wrapped in white paper. A shed, a car boot, a friend.
Do not burn it, break it, or return it in anger. Destroying somebody’s object with feeling behind it is a sending, and you would be starting one.
5. Write down the date. One line, on paper. Today, and what state you were in.
That takes ten seconds and it is the part that turns this from a gesture into a measurement. You will need it in a fortnight.
That is the twenty minutes. Sleep after it rather than doing anything else.
The three things people get wrong in a hurry
- Salt down the sink. You have collected something and put it back into the house through the pipes. Outside, onto ground or into the street.
- Writing the sender’s name. Almost every instruction says to. It turns a clearing into a sending, from your side, in your handwriting.
- Telling somebody you are doing it. Especially the person you suspect. It reopens the contact and confirms to them that it landed.
None of those are superstitions about etiquette. Each one of them undoes the twenty minutes you just spent.
What the twenty minutes reaches
What has settled on you, and the doorway. That is all, and it is genuinely worth having.
It does not reach the person who is sending, and it does not touch the route running from them to you.
So the honest forecast is this. If nobody is feeding it, that may be the end of it. If somebody is, you will get about a fortnight.
The fortnight is not a failure. It is the diagnosis.
People take the return as proof that they did it badly, or that this one is unusually strong, or that none of it works.
It is none of those. It is a tap that is still running, and a tap is a specific thing that can be found and turned.
The escalation ladder
Each rung reaches one layer further than the last.
- The twenty minutes above. Residue and threshold.
- Three nights of it, with roasted salt carried. The same, held.
- A severance. The route itself. This is where clearing becomes removal.
- A seal, and a return. The source. Not done from inside the situation.
Most people need the first two and stop. Some need the third. The fourth is only for something a person is actively maintaining.
Do not skip rungs. A severance run on a body that has not been cleared and guarded is the commonest wasted night I hear about.
All four are set out in order here: the seven methods and the layer each one reaches.
Does it matter whether it is a hex or a curse
Not for any of the above.
Three things do change what has to be done, and none of them is a choice of vocabulary.
Whether it is somebody’s feeling or somebody’s constructed work. Whether it is on you or on the place you live. Whether the person is still holding it.
Those three are worth ten minutes before you try anything else: the three questions that actually decide it.
If the fortnight runs out
Then something is being fed, and you now know that for certain rather than suspecting it.
Tell me what you did, when the quiet started, and when it ended.
Those three dates tell me more than a list of symptoms ever does, and you already have them written down if you did the twenty minutes.
Do the twenty minutes tonight. Then write to me tomorrow if you want to know what you are actually dealing with.
