You have most likely been told already that God does not do this. And it did not help, or you would not still be looking.
So I will not start there.
My name is Ren Kagetsuki. I am a Japanese practitioner, not a priest of your faith, and what is between you and your God is not my business and never will be.
But there is a part of this that is my business, and it is the part almost nobody separates out.
Whether a human being is involved.
The same question in Japan: cursed, or punished?
People ask me this here too, in almost the same words.
Our version has three possible answers, and a practitioner is expected to say which one before doing anything at all.
- Batsu. Punishment. Something owed, and now being collected.
- Tatari. Wrath. Something offended, usually a place or a dead person, and not necessarily by you.
- Noroi. A curse. A living person, wanting this, and keeping it going.
The three feel identical from the inside. All three feel like being singled out.
They are told apart by their shape, not by how they feel.
Three questions, on paper, in this order.
- Can you name what it would be for, in one sentence, without stopping to think? Yes points to the first.
- Is everyone under your roof affected, and does it ease when you sleep elsewhere? Yes points to the second.
- Is there a week you can point at, with something in front of it? Yes points to the third.
Two yeses pointing the same way is usually the answer.
Two yeses pointing different ways means there are two things running at once, which is more common than people expect.
How the three are separated
Punishment has a reason you can name
Ask someone who believes they are being punished what for, and they answer immediately. They have been carrying the answer for years.
And it is proportionate in their own telling. The thing done, and the thing happening, are the same size.
When the answer is instead I have gone over my whole life and I cannot find it, that is worth noticing.
Wrath is attached to somewhere
A house, a plot of land, a grave nobody has visited, an object brought home from somewhere it should not have left.
It reaches everyone under that roof rather than one person, and it eases when you are away from the place.
This is the kind that often began with a move, or with a death in the family, or with a house being cleared.
If you are worse at home and better away, say so early. It changes everything that follows.
A curse has a person and a date
It starts in a week you can point at. It lands on the days that matter to you. It moves to a new part of your life each time you repair one.
And very often somebody said something to your face beforehand.
Those are the marks of a want being held by someone who is still alive: the four reasons people commissioned this.
What I see most often
People arrive certain it is the first kind. Punishment. Deserved.
Then we lay it out on a timeline, and there is a date. And in the weeks before that date there is a promotion, or an inheritance, or an ending.
And when I ask whether anyone said anything at the time, they go quiet, because somebody had.
That is not divine judgement. That is a person.
One man had spent four years believing he was being punished for something he did at twenty-two.
He had confessed it, made amends for it, and gone back to it again and again in his own head.
His run had started nineteen years after it, in the month he took over the family business.
I am not telling you what your God does. I am telling you that a human hand leaves marks, and those marks are readable, and they are on a great many people who came to me convinced they had been forsaken.
Why the answer decides everything
Because each of the three is met with something different, and the wrong one does nothing.
Punishment is not lifted by a rite. In every tradition I know of, including my own, that road runs through whatever your faith already tells you to do, and no practitioner should be selling you a shortcut past it.
Wrath is met with appeasement. In Japan that means the place or the dead are settled, formally, and then left settled.
A curse is met by cutting the line and sending what came along it back the way it came.
Only the third one is my work. If it turns out to be one of the other two, I will tell you so and I will not take the case.
Nothing here asks you to leave your faith
Keep praying. Keep going to whoever you go to.
Japan is not a country that asks you to pick one door. People here visit a shrine and a temple in the same week and think nothing of it.
Nothing I do touches that, and I would not ask you to choose. Clients here keep their own altars and I have never once been asked to change them.
If prayer is the road you want to take with this, take it properly rather than half way: the prayers used against curses, and how they are used.
What is done here for the second kind
If your answers pointed at wrath rather than punishment or a curse, there is something you can do this week, and it asks nothing of your own faith.
In Japan the dead are maintained rather than remembered, and where maintenance stopped, this is how it is resumed.
1. A clean surface. A shelf or a small table with nothing else on it. If you have a photograph it goes there. A written name is enough.
2. Fresh water every morning. A plain glass. Water comes before flowers, before incense, before anything else. This is the whole of it in most households here.
3. Something burning once a day. Incense, or a candle if incense is difficult, for as long as it takes to say what you came to say.
4. Speak plainly. Who you are, which line you come from, and that they were not forgotten. Not a prayer, and not an apology for anybody else.
5. Seven days at minimum. Forty-nine is the traditional span. Do not begin what you cannot finish.
None of that competes with anything you already believe. It is housekeeping, and it is the most common thing that settles a house here.
If you are cursed by a person, not by God
Then there is something to be done, and you are not required to do any of it.
Tell me when it started, what has been happening, and whether anything was said to you at the time.
I will tell you which of the three I am looking at. If it is the third, I can take it off you, and it is done from here.
I will tell you which of the three it is, and I will tell you plainly if I cannot help.
You have spent a long time believing there was nothing anyone could do about any of it.
About this part, there is.
