Instructor: Wayfarer
Date: December 21, 2019 (Saturday)
Seminar: Topic: Intersection of Folk Magic, Curses, and Energy Work (arising from a question in the main chat) — Saturday, 21 December, 2019 at 6:30pm/1830hr New York Time — text format in the PSC #lecture room (Discord) — Instructor: Wayfarer — Search LECTURE109
Wayfarer: @here hello, Internet
Azum’ran: Hello real life
shadowsword: Hello, sensei
Turbo: :waving dog gif:
Six Stellar: ^3((9
Unicornzilla: waves
shadowsword: Chi ignition.
Wayfarer: I got about, idk, an hour? Something like that before this battery croaks. Earlier we had a question about ~cuUuUuUrSesSs~~~ which are very spooky and etc.
Wayfarer: And then we also had a question about folk magic solutions for the same, and how those might work.
shadowsword: spooki
Kate Embers: Hello
Wayfarer: I mentioned before this is not going to be super scientific. That’s because the adults are out of town for the holidays so we’re gonna do magic instead of CIA documents this time.
Chirotractor: beurocrazy is a sort of magic.
Wayfarer: That’s not to say it’s all made up nonsense, it’s just not something we do a lot of science on and I imagine CIA bosses feel goofy funding like, “gee I wonder if the Black Pullet works”
Wayfarer: So, let’s start with… curses??????????
Turbo: Super basic question to start, then. What is a curse
Wayfarer: Curses take a bunch of different forms and have a bunch of different meanings in a bunch of different contexts. We can broadly call these magical or sometimes psychic workings that are meant to fuck on someone.
Wayfarer: My distinction here, between magical and psychic, is merely in how someone’s going about it.
Turbo: Dig a bit deeper into that
shadowsword: Using someone’s states of being against themselves
shadowsword: Causing wayward thought or emotional turmoil into someone given a trigger, for example
Wayfarer: Alright! Cursing someone is a pretty vague thing. If I’m working from a psychic paradigm, let’s say energy working, I might imprint a field around them to make bad things happen, either particular or vague.
Chirotractor: I cast Fuck you!
Wayfarer: For example, a long long time ago on an Internet website far away, a guy used to teach people to try to poke people’s brains so they’d be distracted driving, to cause a car accident.
shadowsword: Oh boy
Wayfarer: You can call this a psychic attack, or you can call this a curse. It doesn’t matter. Who cares? You’re fuckin’ on someone using some kind of magic or psychic influence. A similar result might be achieved by scattering goofer dust on his or her stoop, or by attaching a seal of saturn to the vehicle, or whatever.
Turbo: goofer dust? seal of saturn?
shadowsword: Lol
shadowsword: That would be kinda funny to watch.
Wayfarer: Why do those other ways work? They’re fuckin’ magic. I’m not super into discussing whether magic is just a mechanistic form of energy work. I think it’s more interesting to consider whether psychic stuff is a tool-free way to do the magical stuff. It really doesn’t matter.
shadowsword: I’ve learned to imbue a certain kind of feeling that makes the person that touched the object want to chuck it as far away as possible.. and also deliver a shock of energy that can make then hyper
Wayfarer: Goofer dust is a powder used in hoodoo for hexin’ on people, a seal of saturn is an image that can be made to bring Saturnine energy, and Saturn is often associated with fate and/or fuckin’ on people.
Chirotractor: With psychic stuff it is you who is the tool
shadowsword: Exactly
Wayfarer: Right. Magic stuff generally works along with spirits and/or by attracting or directing energy through principles called sympathy and antipathy, which also relate to spirits.
Wayfarer: Sympathy is when energies/spirits/whatever are attracted to a thing. Antipathy is when they are repelled by a thing.
shadowsword: That’s what I love about being PSYCHIC! I am the tool ||motherfucker,|| don’t need no tarot
Wayfarer: So a seal of Saturn is sympathetic to forces that align with the planetary influence of Saturn, some of those will fuck on a guy.
Wayfarer: Cursing through magic is generally done by… well, using materia that are sympathetic to malign influences and antipathetic to positive influences.
Wayfarer: You might send a spirit after a guy to fuck him up, you might try to drive off the protective influences of that dude’s friend spirits, you might try to attract the kinds of conditions which cause car accidents. You might want to create energetic conditions that create distraction while the person is driving, if you’re being really specific.
Turbo: Is ‘luck’ a thing that can be modified?
Wayfarer: Something like that. What is luck? It’s the probability that things go in your favor across a variety of circumstances, right? It’s the “all other things being the same, does this work out for me or not?” factor. In Tibetan astrology, a person’s “lung-ta” is translated as “luck,” and it talks about the energy that carries their desires or goals out into the world. Someone with good, supportive lung-ta will meet their goals, all else the same, someone with bad lung-ta will have to work that much harder to overcome that.
Turbo: Also, what powers these curses – Can one stick for years?
Wayfarer: A spate of bad luck can just be absolutely random chance, the cards just aren’t working out.
Wayfarer: I’m visiting my in laws and they’re big Euchre players. I also play Euchre and I’m pretty good – it’s a trick taking game, and being able to tell if a person thinks their hand is good or bad is a big advantage! But sometimes, you just get dealt shitty hands, and that’s just what’s happening, and that’s bad luck.
shadowsword: Karma
Wayfarer: It can maybe be modified, of course. Hoodoo has a variety of oils and remedies for gamblers – fast luck oil and Hoyt’s cologne come to mind.
Turbo: So where is the line between the shitty hand that day, and the shitty hand in every game played, every day you play it
shadowsword: @TurboGFF depends on the forces you use to invoke it
Wayfarer: Not karma really – karma is cause and effect. It’s kind of related – if you don’t have the karma for something, it won’t happen, and vice versa, but it’s not really luck
shadowsword: I generally follow a format
shadowsword: Fair enough
shadowsword: I’m just used to calling the whole thing synchronicity
Wayfarer: Well Turbo it depends. The general running advice for curse stuff is to just address what’s going on and do generic remedies for curses. It’s usually a lost cause or at least not worth the effort to try to find the cause or origins of the curse, or to try to counteract it exactly.
Wayfarer: So a long run of bad luck that won’t stop over years? Might as well do some remedies and see if it shakes out, fuck it, what’s to lose?
Wayfarer: Remedies for curses are usually pretty straightforward and use the same principles we discussed. If you’ve got a curse of bad luck, you want to use that fast luck oil, sure. But you might also want to use, sticking with hoodoo, fiery wall of protection oil, or purifying oils of various sorts.
Wayfarer: Baths and floor washes are bigtime easy folk magic remedies, and earlier I linked you to Draja Mickaharic’s book Spiritual Cleansing, which is all about those kinds of folk magic remedies.
Turbo: Alright – Shifting gears a little, placing curses. Is it something that continuously needs to be fed ‘oomph’ in this case? Is it like a battery that’ll run out eventually? Can they be made like constructs attached to an outside source?
PatchesTheCoydog: The Norse type paradigm often used by people involved in rune magic has a lot about luck. The hamingja concept for example(which has been interpreted both as a separate entity and as part of someone), which interestingly the same word is also used to refer to the altered appearance of shapeshifter.
shadowsword: There are ways of imbuing it with conditions to replenish it’s own energy from what sources you give it
Wayfarer: Those remedies usually have two components in their working: one is that the bath, floor wash, or so on is made using herbs that are antipathetic to negative influences and sympathetic to positive influences. You literally wash off the globbed on negative patterns. A similar thing can be accomplished with rattling/grounding/centering.
Wayfarer: So why use washes, if you can just do a psychic energy work? Well one is because you’re using physical materia magicka here that has those properties regardless of whether or not you can focus well and do the energy thing. This is handy if you’re getting clowned on by a distraction curse. The washes work because of the properties of the things involved, in part.
Chirotractor: also a lot of old time ‘curses’ were probably just people getting sick cuz they’re dirty
Wayfarer: The other part is that they often involve some prayers and so on which have a long history of being used in that way.
shadowsword: People need to ground.. I ground like 5x a day at least
shadowsword: Ground before, during, after readings
Wayfarer: It doesn’t matter what your paradigm, they all have explanations. Maybe the prayer works because of an egregore, maybe it works because of an angel that responds to the prayer, maybe it works because it focuses your intent, who gives a shit, just do the thing and see if it works.
Wayfarer: I don’t really care about the how of it working anymore, that often just becomes a way for us to avoid dealing with or thinking about things we don’t want to deal with or think about. “Welp I don’t see how Psalm 97 is gonna help, it probably won’t, I’m not gonna bother with it”
Wayfarer: “I don’t see how allspice can create positive conditions, it’s probably nonsense, fuck it”
Wayfarer: “I don’t see how cinnamon in a mojobag can help this work faster, it’s just superstition, let me instead use my radionics box”
Wayfarer: Do both! But they’re both just some shit yr doing that we don’t understand the mechanisms for.
Wayfarer: Answering the question back up there…
PatchesTheCoydog: It’s usually a lost cause or at least not worth the effort to try to find the cause or origins of the curse, or to try to counteract it exactly.” What about reversing spells? Using these isn’t uncommon(same places that sell uncrossing oil will often sell reversing oil, etc) and many reports of as successful. On energy work/psion side a mirror shield is one of the most common types to learn.
Wayfarer: There are a lot of different forms. You can make sustaining things. You don’t need them to feed of of anything sometimes – let’s say I decide to curse someone by literally just conjuring up a demon and going “hey, fuck on this guy and I’m gonna make offerings to you daily”
Wayfarer: You do the offerings, the spirit does the work, but there’s no need to like, “feed the curse” or whatever.
Wayfarer: You’re just maintaining the work.
Wayfarer: Reversing spells is usually done generally, not directly, unless you know (via divination, whatever) the nature of the curse/negative spell/whatever.
Wayfarer: It’s certainly a doable thing, but you usually do it generally in the form of “whatever the hell this spell is, turn that shit back” rather than “okay whatever spell is being done by Pete Buttigieg to curse me in particular…”
Wayfarer: It’s a done thing when you have some reason to do it but I’d rather just get the spell off a person than perpetuate some kind of dumb magical spat.
Wayfarer: That is to say, looking at reversing oil – you apply that to yourself (or the client, whoever) to reverse whatever spells are happening, you don’t track down the hostile sorcerer and apply it to them… you would instead go goofer dust that guy or whatever, if you knew who it was specifically. You apply remedies generally because they have a better chance of working that way, vs. specifics where you don’t really know anyhow so at best you’re hitting your target but at worst you’re on a wild goose chase.
Turbo: Make’s sense
Turbo: Kind of like broad spectrum antibiotics
Wayfarer: A lot of curses are just some shmuck who happens to have some kind of vague spiritual authority thinking mean thoughts at someone, anyhow. Someone like a Donald Trump or whoever, that has a big spiritual posse from previous lives which make things easy for them and so on, might motherfuck someone and those spirits just go “yeah hell yeah I’m in”
Wayfarer: And then those spirits come to the person they gave the stink eye to and start fuckin’ them up. There was no elaborate cursing ritual, it was just someone with some spiritual poke thinking bad thoughts at someone and some spirits obliging.
PatchesTheCoydog: usually agrees, reserves for when is persistent to get them to either back off or run themselves. Has seen both forms recommended, the general and the specific-individual as target though-like, slightly different versions for each. A mirror box spell for example is often done regarding a specific individual for example as I understand it
Wayfarer: This is your evil eye or whatever, for example. It’s not someone sitting down with candles or throwing powders or getting a lock of hair to put on the “fuck this guy” altar – it’s just someone thought some nasty shit and some spirit went “okay, cool, yeah fuck that guy I agree, I’m down.” Or someone with a big energetic presence thinks some nasty shit at a person, and the universe obliges because hey, a lot of oomph behind a casual thought, sure why not
Wayfarer: Yeah, a mirror box is not a reversal spell per se, it’s more of a binding ritual? That’s a “anything this person sends out is reflected back” form of conjure, and it’s kind of the thing you do after you’ve taken care of the client if you know who the hostile party is.
Wayfarer: That’s my thinking about it, we’re definitely into the weeds here looking at fine detail and other practitioners might think about that differently.
Wayfarer: And they aren’t necessarily wrong, it’s down to tradition in that case.
Wayfarer: But yeah, a floor wash and a series of baths for spiritual cleansing and some prayers from the psalms or whatnot are your broad spectrum antibiotics. And they usually work!
Wayfarer: The second “series” of antibiotic is the prophylactic to make sure it doesn’t come back, and that’s where your witch bottle and your potted plants and such come into play.
Wayfarer: I’d have to look up the plants off the top of my head, but there are plants people will plant that basically serve to “take the hit” magically – if the plant suddenly dies or wilts, you know it’s taken the bullet and you want to replace it immediately and also redo the baths and washes.
Wayfarer: Witch bottles are stuffed full of sympathetic materials for oneself (one’s own hair, nail clippings, etc.) stuffed in a bottle with barbed wire, razors, nails, etc., sealed, and buried on the edge of one’s property. The idea is when the curse energy / hostile spirit / whatever approaches, it “finds” the bottle first. Since it’s been aimed to something with the same sympathetic properties (you), it hops into the bottle first, and gets trapped.
Wayfarer: Doing these two things in combination usually works pretty well in most cases, and we’d be definitely into the world of specifics to look much closer than that.
Turbo: Interesting
Turbo: And nothing beyond ‘get a bottle, fill it with things and bury it’ works? No chanting. Rituals, Just the bottle of stuff
Wayfarer: As to why those work, it’s been fairly well covered: you’re using stuff that’s antipathetic to the negative influences, sympathetic to the positive influences, and you’re physically washing your body off, while reciting some prayers. The net effect is you physically wash away bad shit, you psychologically refresh yourself by knowing that you’re physically doing something, and you employ those prayers and so on to reassure yourself and so help yourself counteract the influence, and so on.
Turbo: Right
Wayfarer: I mean, you usually do some ritual bits around it but the efficacious part of a witch bottle is the sympathetic connection to you and the iron and razors and such fuckin’ up and you usually put a seal or so on upside down inside the bottle to trap whatever inside.
Wayfarer: But you’re working on a lot of layers with those things, from the physical to the psychological to the spiritual. The construction of the bottle is the efficacious part, for the same reasons – you have physical, psychological, and spiritual effects, so you’re covering a pretty broad range.
Turbo: Right
Wayfarer: The same is the case with curses, incidentally. The nice thing about the washes and so on being used as broad range treatments is that it doesn’t really matter if there’s a curse or not. If there is, you’ll cancel it, if there’s not, no real harm done, and the affected person might feel better anyhow just because they’ve done something.
Wayfarer: It’s like when you are dreading doing a job and you finally take that first step.
Wayfarer: You suddenly feel psychologically just a lot of freedom towards working on it and once you get started you’re feeling much better off. And then the answer to “what if there is no curse” is “who gives a shit?”
Wayfarer: There are unethical psychics and sorcerers and so on who make their entire industry hustling people by telling them their cursed and then offering cures, and I’m not suggesting doing that – but if someone comes and says “hey I think I’m cursed” I’m generally gonna go “huh, weird. You’re probably not, but do these things just in case”
Wayfarer: And that works out.
Wayfarer: Cursing does happen, but it’s kinda like everyone who comes in these communities like “oh my god I’m under psychic attack by a cult of battle mages” or whatever dumb shit. It’s not usually actually the case, but … shield???
Wayfarer: Like, fuck it, you’re probably not being cursed or psychically attacked by Internet Cults, but … shield? Use a wash? Then it doesn’t matter.
Turbo: There seems to be many subjects where the specifics matter less than the general idea
Wayfarer: And like chiro said, a lot of times the negative stuff is just something going around – but on a societal level assuming the cows going dry was because of a witch instead of a drought condition at least gives you something you can do about it, and the thing you do about it also serves as a form of positive magic to try to help fix yr cows, so fuck it.
Wayfarer: Probably should draw the line at killing people tho, imo
Wayfarer: It’s a very similar thing though. I think it’s Steven Skinner?? Is that his name? Who hypothesizes religion came from magic by way of explaining why the magic didn’t work.
Wayfarer: “We tried to make bountiful crops and it didn’t happen, uh, maybe our gods are pissed”
Wayfarer: There are a lot of things where the principles are more important than the specifics, yeah.
Wayfarer: It’s just as true of math as it is of magic though. How “multiplication” works is more important to understand than what “10*3” is.
Wayfarer: Knowing 10×3 is 30 helps in one case, but much better to just understand what multiplication is and how to do it.
Wayfarer: Knowing how to counter a specific curse can help if you happen to have that specific curse on you, but better to understand some basic magical principles in general. You don’t need to know a specific floor wash if you know the properties of herbs and know some of them have properties that help with curses.
Wayfarer: Okay that’s the obligatory hour, and the in-laws have come down here where the router is, so I’m gonna head out I think. I will check in through the night to answer some questions using the phone if there are any.
Wayfarer: But I’m gonna call this the formal end. I am happy to go a bit more in depth on this topic in the future, as well, and get into the specifics a bit more.
Turbo: Thanks for taking the time
PatchesTheCoydog: Thanks for lecture.
Wayfarer: To recap: Curses, broadly defined, are just negative magical or psychic works being done to someone. Usually they are bound to objects or circumstances or books or so on and written down, but that’s a super specific niche use which would make a distinction between a curse and a hex and a binding and a… and we don’t need to do that really.
Wayfarer: Curses work based on the same principles of magic as everything else – you send a nasty spirit, create a nasty energy pattern, or associate materials sympathetic to bad shit and antipathetic to good shit to the target.
Wayfarer: Stopping curses uses the same principles, and they should be applied in a holistic way that involves the physical, psychological, and spiritual level for that broad-spectrum defense, and because human beings work on all those levels, so we should try to have our magic involve all those levels.
Wayfarer: Yeap. Incidentally I do this stuff ~professionally~~~ and like to discuss it and so on, I am also happy to consult with people who might be cursed~ professionally, buttttt I’m probably gonna tell you to do a couple baths and a floor wash as a first step so, you know, that one’s free.
PatchesTheCoydog: One thing have to note is if you know someone tried to curse you(because you actually heard it or similar) be sure not to freak out over what’s likely nothing. I did this and it was embarrassing for me personally(damned emotions and damned having personality type that’s pretty manipulatable some ways) even though really had nothing to worry about. Though doing above-mentioned cleansing stuff is generally a good idea(also, mint and marjoram two herbs associated with cleansing of I like).
Wayfarer: Yeah it’s a pretty silly thing to worry about and that’s kinda mostly how they work
Wayfarer: Like medieval book curses probably worked at least in part because people believed in them