Someone comes to you and says everything is going wrong. Not one thing. Everything, at once, in a pattern, for months. The car, the job, the sleep, the relationships, the health. It feels aimed. That experience is real, it is old, and every folk tradition anywhere has a name for it and a procedure for dealing with it. I want to write about that procedure carefully, because this is the corner of practice where the most harm gets done.

The traditions

  • Uncrossing is the term from Hoodoo and American conjure: removing a crossed condition, jinx or hex laid by another person. It is a specific practice within a specific African American tradition, typically involving spiritual bathing, floor washes, the recitation of Psalms, and burning. Psalm 37 and Psalm 51 are among those most associated with it.
  • Counter-witchcraft is the British archaeological and historical term, and it is the largest body of physical evidence we have for magickal practice in these islands. The witch bottle is a counter-magickal device. So is the concealed shoe. So is the hexafoil cut into a door frame. Every one of those was made by somebody who believed they were under attack.
  • Saining is the Scottish and Gaelic equivalent operating at the household level: water from a liminal source, juniper smoke, spoken charm.
  • Turning the ill eye, droch shùil (droch HOOL), is the Scottish Gaelic frame for the specific injury. In the Highland material, illness in a person or an animal was frequently attributed to the evil eye, and there were named counter-procedures, including the eòlas (YAW-luss) charms and measuring the thread.

Four traditions, four vocabularies, one shared premise: malign attention can be sent, and it can be sent back or dispersed.

Where the harm happens

Before any method, this.

The belief that one is under attack is also, in clinical terms, a recognisable pattern. Persecutory ideation, paranoia and severe anxiety all produce exactly the experience described at the top of this article, including the sense of pattern and the sense of being targeted.

I am not saying that is what is happening to you or to anyone who asks you. I am saying that a practitioner who responds to everything is going wrong and it feels aimed by immediately confirming that yes, somebody has cursed you, may be doing very serious harm to a person who needs something else entirely.

The uncrossing tradition, at its worst, is a machine for escalation. Someone arrives frightened. They are told they are cursed. They pay for a cleansing. The cleansing does not fix their life, because their life has ordinary problems. They are told the curse is stronger than thought. And so on.

So, plainly:

  • Do not diagnose a curse in another person. Ever. If somebody asks you whether they are cursed, the answer is that you cannot know that, and it is true.
  • If somebody's distress is severe, persistent, or accompanied by beliefs that are frightening them, the useful thing you can do is encourage them to see a doctor. That is not a failure of nerve, it is care.
  • Never charge for this. The moment money is attached to a curse diagnosis you have created an incentive to find one.
  • Rule out the mundane exhaustively first, and do it out loud.

Ruling out the mundane

Almost every crossed condition I have ever been asked about resolved into one of these.

  • Sleep. Chronic sleep deprivation produces low mood, cognitive fog, accidents, irritability, physical illness and a pervasive sense of dread. It is by a wide margin the commonest cause.
  • Money. Financial pressure creates a genuine cascade of bad outcomes, because being poor is expensive and being poor removes your margin for error.
  • A person. Not cursing you. Just present in your life and undermining you. This is far more often the real answer than anything magickal.
  • Health. Thyroid, iron, vitamin D, which in Scotland is close to universal in winter, perimenopause, depression.
  • Grief. Which produces an experience of the world turning hostile that is essentially indistinguishable from a crossed condition.
  • Clustering. Bad things genuinely arrive in runs. Randomness clumps. Human beings are pattern-finding machines and we are extremely bad at recognising coincidence when we are frightened.

Go through those seriously before anything else. If you find the answer there, you have helped somebody far more than a floor wash would have.

What the tradition actually does

Notice the shape of these practices when you set them side by side. It is consistent.

  • They cleanse the person. A bath, a wash, water over the body. In Scottish practice, water from a liminal source.
  • They cleanse the place. Smoke through every room, from the far end toward the door, with the windows open. The saining structure exactly.
  • They put up a boundary. Salt, iron, a bottle at the threshold, a mark at the door, rowan and red thread above the lintel.
  • They give the ill somewhere to go. This is the part modern versions leave out and it is the most interesting. The witch bottle is a decoy body. The concealed shoe is a decoy body. The hexafoil is a trap. British counter-magick does not push the thing away, it offers it something else to go into.
  • They mark a boundary in time. A specific day. A specific number of repetitions. An end.

You can build a perfectly sound working from that structure without borrowing anybody's liturgy.

A Scottish clearing

Here is what I would do, and would teach.

  • Deal with the practical first. Genuinely, and before anything else. If the answer is sleep, the working is a bedtime.
  • Clean the house. Physically. The redding of the house, in the Hogmanay sense. Sweep, clear, take the rubbish out, open the windows. Half of what people experience as heaviness in a room is the room.
  • Wash. A bath or a shower with attention. Salt if you like. Move your hands down the body and off, at the extremities, sending outward with your dominant hand. Say what is leaving. Let the water go before you get out.
  • Smoke the house. Juniper, mugwort or rosemary in a heatproof vessel. Windows open. Move through every room in a consistent direction, widdershins if you are stripping something out. Corners, doorframes, window frames, hearth. Then follow the smoke to the open window and let it go.
  • Set the boundary. Rowan and red thread above the inside of the front door. Salt at the thresholds. A hexafoil where nobody will see it.
  • Give it somewhere to go, if you want the full old structure. A small jar at the boundary of your property: something of yours, iron, something sharp, vinegar. Sealed, buried, never revisited.
  • Close it with a meal. Sit down, eat, with other people if you can.
  • And do not repeat it next week. Set a date, a season away, to review. Repeating a clearing compulsively is the practice becoming the problem.

On the Psalms

The Psalm tradition is genuine and it is central to Hoodoo, to English cunning craft, and to a great deal of documented British folk magick. Psalms were used as spoken charms by people who were, without exception, Christians.

I do not use them, because this is not a Christian practice and grafting on scripture I do not hold would be dishonest rather than syncretic.

They belong in the historical record and they belong to the traditions that carry them. The Scottish Gaelic eòlas charms serve the same structural function in Scottish practice, and Carmichael and Campbell both recorded a great many.

The line I will not cross

No reversal work on a named person.

Traditional counter-magick often sends the harm back to whoever sent it. The bottle torments the witch. The hexafoil traps them.

I do not do it, for a practical reason rather than a squeamish one: you do not know who it is. You have a suspicion, and a suspicion is a story your frightened mind has built out of ordinary evidence. Aiming a working at somebody on that basis is how folk practice turns into the thing that got four thousand Scots accused.

Disperse, do not return. Build the boundary, do not go over it.

Sources

  • Hurston, Z. N. (1931). Hoodoo in America. Journal of American Folklore, 44(174), 317–417. JSTOR.
  • Chireau, Y. (2003). Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition. University of California Press.
  • Long, C. M. (2001). Spiritual Merchants: Religion, Magic, and Commerce. University of Tennessee Press.
  • Davies, O. (2003). Cunning-Folk: Popular Magic in English History. Hambledon. On counter-witchcraft as the main business of the English cunning trade.
  • Hoggard, B. (2019). Magical House Protection: The Archaeology of Counter-Witchcraft. Berghahn Books.
  • Merrifield, R. (1987). The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic. Batsford.
  • Campbell, J. G. (1902). Witchcraft and Second Sight in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Via Internet Archive. For droch shùil and the counter-charms.
  • Black, R. (ed.) (2005). The Gaelic Otherworld. Birlinn.
  • Carmichael, A. (1900). Carmina Gadelica. Full text, for the eòlas charms.
  • The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft — for what happens when suspicion becomes accusation.

If you are frightened, not sleeping, or having thoughts that distress you, please speak to your GP. In Scotland, NHS 24 is on 111 and Breathing Space is on 0800 83 85 87. Elsewhere in the UK, Samaritans are on 116 123, free, at any hour.

Related: [Saining]; [Buried Protection: Witch Bottles]; [Rowan Tree and Red Thread]; [Named and Unnamed: The Scottish Witch Trials]