How to Remove a Curse: 7 Methods, Ranked by Someone Who Built Them

Most of what you will find tells you to cleanse.

Cleansing is real and I use it. It is also the shallowest of the seven things on this page, and if it is all you do, whatever you are carrying will be back by the end of the month.

My name is Ren Kagetsuki. For fifteen years I was paid to build these things, which is an odd qualification for writing about taking them off, and the only one that matters.

I know where each method stops, because I know what it has to get through.

What removing a curse actually means

There is no single thing to lift off. There are four layers, and every method reaches one of them and stops.

• The residue. What has settled on you. The weight, the sleep, the mood.
• The threshold. Your door, your rooms, the ground the house stands on.
• The line. The connection running from whoever sent it to you.
• The source. The person, still there, still wanting it.

Clear the residue and you feel better for a fortnight. The line is still open, so it fills again.

That fortnight of relief followed by the return is the single most common thing people describe to me, and it is not a sign that you did it wrong.

It is a sign that you reached layer one.

The seven ways a curse is removed

In the order of how deep they reach. Not in the order of how impressive they look.

1. Cleansing the body

Salt baths, cold water, smoke, incense. Every tradition on earth has a version.

How it is done here. A handful of coarse sea salt into a hot bath. Fifteen to twenty minutes in it. While you sit, hold one idea only: the salt is drawing what is on you into the water.

No bath is not a problem, and most of the world does not have one. Coarse salt in a bowl of hot water, poured over the shoulders and let run down in the shower, does the same work. Or salt held in wet palms and worked over the back of the neck, both wrists and both ankles, then rinsed off from the head down.

Rinse under the shower before you get out, head downward, and do not go back up.

Do it at night and sleep straight afterwards. No screens in between.

Reaches: the residue.

Costs you: almost nothing. An hour and a packet of salt.

Worth doing, always. It is the first thing I do for a client and the last thing I would rely on.

In hoodoo, the deeper form of this is an uncrossing. It is run as a course over consecutive days rather than a single night, and it reaches the residue more thoroughly than anything else I know of.

It stops in the same place, at the line: what an uncrossing reaches, and where it stops.

2. Holding the threshold

In Japan, morijio. Coarse sea salt in small cones on white dishes, either side of the door you actually use, changed every morning and thrown outside rather than into the sink.

Reaches: the threshold.

Costs you: a minute a day.

This one does more than people expect, and it is the only item here that also gives you information. Salt that goes damp or grey in a dry room is telling you about the room.

3. Settling a place

Where the trouble belongs to the building or the land rather than to you. A formal rite for the place, and here that usually means a shrine.

What you can do before that. Open every window in the house for twenty minutes, starting at the room furthest from the door and working towards it.

Then salt in the four corners of the worst room, small cones on white dishes, left for three days and then thrown outside.

This is a holding measure. It does not settle anything, and a place that needs settling will go back to how it was.

Reaches: the threshold, thoroughly.

Costs you: a fee, and the humility to accept that it was never aimed at you.

If you are worse at home and better away, this is your method and the other six are beside the point.

4. A talisman made for you

Made with your name and your birth date, for your situation. Not a symbol chosen off a shelf.

The version you can make tonight. Dry-fry a handful of coarse salt in a pan, medium heat, about five minutes, until it stops crackling.

Let it cool, put it in a small cloth bag, and carry it in a pocket or at the neck. This is yakishio, roasted salt, and it is what people here are given while they wait for the real thing.

Replace it every seven days. Old salt goes outside.

Reaches: the residue and the threshold, and it keeps reaching them while you carry it.

Costs you: an hour of a practitioner’s attention, and your name and birth date.

It holds a position. It does not take ground.

5. Prayer, in your own tradition

I am not going to rank this one against the others, because it is not mine to rank.

Reaches: whatever your faith says it reaches.

Costs you: nothing.

What I will say is that it is not in competition with anything below it. Clients here keep their own altars and nobody has ever been asked to put one down.

6. Cutting the line

Severance. Finding the connection that the thing travels along, and cutting it.

There is a form of this you can do yourself, and I have written it out step by step, including the one thing that turns it from a severance into an attack: the severance, in full.

Reaches: the line.

Costs you: nothing that you have to do.

This is where removal stops being maintenance and starts being removal. Everything above holds a position. This one takes something away.

7. Returning it, and sealing

What came down the line goes back along it, and then the way is closed so the same hand cannot lay it again.

The whole rite is written out here, including what to do with the mirror afterwards: the full return to sender ritual.

The one requirement is a state rather than a skill. Run it while you want them to suffer and you are no longer returning anything, you are sending, and a sending carries your name.

Reaches: the source.

Costs you: the most of anything here, and still nothing that you perform.

You do not face anyone. You do not send anything. Nothing comes back on you.

I remove. I do not send.

The three I would not bother with

None of these are wicked. They are just not aimed at any of the four layers.

Ready-made amulets

An object made for nobody in particular is tied to nobody in particular.

The ones that work carry a name, a birth date and a situation. That is the whole difference, and it is why one costs a few pounds and the other does not.

Binding and freezer work aimed at the sender

Writing a name, freezing it, binding it, burying it.

Whatever you think of it morally, it does not remove anything. It adds a second line, running from you to them, made by you.

And it puts you inside the work, which is the one arrangement I spend most of my time keeping clients out of.

Any removal bought before anyone has said what kind it is

This is the one that wastes the most, and almost everybody does it at least once.

A removal aimed at a person will not lift something sitting on a house. A cleansing will not close a line. Work on you alone will not hold something the family line is carrying.

People write to me having tried a great deal and having been given the right method for the wrong layer.

One case, through all four layers

A woman wrote to me having spent two years and a great deal of money.

She had done baths. She had done smoke. She had bought two amulets and a cleansing kit, and had a removal performed for her at a distance by somebody who never asked her a single question first.

Each time she felt better for two or three weeks.

By the time she reached me she had decided the problem was her. That she was unusually weak, or that it was too strong, or that she had done everything slightly wrong.

She had done all of it correctly. Every single method she bought worked on layer one.

What she told me in the first message, without knowing it mattered, was that it started six weeks after her divorce was finalised, and that her ex-husband’s sister had said something to her at the time.

A person. A date. Words said to her face.

Two years of clearing residue, with the line open the entire time.

That is not an unusual story. It is close to the median one.

The order matters more than the method

If you take one thing from this page, take the sequence.

• Identify which layer it sits on
• Clear what has settled on the person
• Cut the line, if there is one
• Seal, so the same route cannot be used again

Almost everyone does the clearing and then stops, because it is the step everybody writes about and the one that feels like something happened.

Clearing without cutting is why it comes back. The residue goes, the route stays open, and the route refills it.

And sealing is the step people skip when they are feeling better, which is exactly when it matters.

Identifying the layer, tonight

Before any curse removal, there is a question to answer.

Is it the house, or is it me? Is it a person?

Four questions answer most of it. Write the answers down rather than holding them in your head.

• Is it worse at home and better when you sleep somewhere else? The threshold, or the place itself.
• Did it start within weeks of a particular person, a date, or something said to you? A line, and most likely a source still holding it.
• Has the same thing happened to a parent or a grandparent, at about the same age? The family line.
• Has cleansing given you two or three good weeks, and then it came back? The residue was reached and the line is still open.

Then one physical reading. A thumb-sized cone of coarse salt on a white dish, on the floor beside the head of your bed, left overnight.

Grey, yellowed or collapsed flat in a dry room means the room is carrying something. Photograph it, then throw it outside.

Spotless salt with a yes to the second question means the opposite. The work is tied to you, and it goes where you go.

The other two tests, and how to read them, are here: the salt, water and rice tests.

More than one yes is common. It is the reason a single method so rarely finishes the job.

What you can do without buying anything

Two things, and they are worth doing whatever else you decide.

Put salt at the door. Coarse, on white dishes, both sides, changed each morning and thrown outside.

Write down when it started, and what happened in the weeks before that.

That second one is not a small thing. It is most of a reading, and it is the first thing I ask for.

Do not sit and wait to see whether the salt was enough. It holds a threshold and it was never going to reach a line.

The one case where none of the seven is enough

When it is carried by the family line rather than aimed at you.

The same failure in a parent and a grandparent. The same age, the same illness, the same collapse of money or marriage.

Here, work carried out on one person does not hold, and in my experience it does something worse than fail.

Take it off one person cleanly, and the weight settles on whoever is next in the line. Usually a sibling. Sometimes a child.

So the line itself has to be dealt with, and the generation above you is part of the work whether or not they are still alive.

If anything on this page is true of your parents as well as of you, say that first. It changes everything that follows.

How long each layer takes

People expect a moment. There is no moment, and knowing the order stops you thinking nothing happened.

• Sleep moves first, usually within three nights. You wake and the hour has changed.
• The weight across the shoulders goes next, over a week or two.
• The house follows. People notice a room they had been avoiding without having noticed they were avoiding it.
• The timing is last, and it is the one that convinces people. Things stop failing on the days that matter.

There is also a thing that happens first and alarms people, so it is worth knowing in advance.

For a few days after a removal, some people feel worse. Heaviness, sleepiness, a mild illness that arrives and goes.

Here that is called kouten hannou, and it is understood as what leaving looks like rather than as a setback. It settles within a few days.

The damage already done still has to be lived through. Money that was lost does not come back because a line was cut.

What stops is the adding to it.

Checking whether it has come off

The changes above are the real measure. There is also a plain physical check, and it is the same salt as before.

Set the cone beside the head of the bed on the night before the work begins, and photograph it in the morning.

Do the same on the night after the work is finished. Same dish, same place, same salt.

Grey before and white after tells you the room has settled.

It does not tell you the line is closed. Salt reads a room, and a line travels with the person.

If the salt goes grey again after it had come clean, you did not do it wrong. Something is refilling it, and that is the part worth telling me about.

What I do, and what it costs

I read the case first and tell you which layer it sits on. There is no charge for that, whether or not you go on.

If there is a line, I cut it. Then I clear what has settled, then I seal the route.

It is done from Japan. You perform nothing, you buy nothing to perform it with, and you do not go near the person.

The prices are fixed and written down, and they do not go up once we have started: what the work involves and what it costs.

One rule while any of this is running

Do not tell anybody it is happening. Not the person you suspect, not a friend, and nothing online.

Two reasons, and only one of them is about the work.

Spoken about, a working loosens. That is the old reason and you may take it or leave it.

The other reason is ordinary. Telling the sender that something is being done informs them it landed, and people who send these things respond to that.

Keep it to yourself until it is finished.

If you do not know which curse you have

That is the normal situation and it is not something to apologise for.

Naming it is the first part of the work, and it is my part.

Tell me when it started, what has been happening, whether it follows you or stays in the house, and whether anything was said to you at the time.

From that I can usually tell you which of the seven you need, including when the answer is one you can do yourself: the whole of curse removal, from the beginning.

You have been guessing at the method on your own for long enough. Let me tell you which one you need.