How to break a curse: prayers, exorcism and self-suggestion

How to break a curse: between exorcism and self-suggestion

A man has racked up two decades of bad luck and blames it on a woman who confronted him at a beach bar in Valencia when he was a child. Since then, he says, bad things keep happening to him; over the past year, almost every week. Housing, health, studies, money and employment have all gone wrong at once. And he asks, without irony, how to break a curse. The answer he receives is a small treatise on Spanish anthropology: exorcists, prayers to Saint Michael, evil eye beads, egg cleansings and plenty of common sense.

The most repeated diagnosis has nothing esoteric about it. The curse is the belief in the curse. If you believe you are cursed, you are cursed; if not, you are not. It is the textbook self-fulfilling prophecy: selective attention turns a statistically normal streak into a malign pattern. Those who argue this propose something as cheap as it is hard: stop dwelling on the bad, stop judging what happens, and wait for the brain to stop manufacturing coincidences.

Does the evil eye exist and how do you remove it?

Here the consensus breaks down. Some defend that the evil eye exists and is fought with amulets: the Turkish nazar on the front door, the eagle for Leos, objects that block other people's negativity. Others warn of the opposite: getting involved in non-Christian rituals may relieve a symptom and open a worse door. The warning has centuries of theological tradition behind it, and also an obvious interest: whoever sells you the solution is selling you the problem.

The institutional route gets the most support. Praying the rosary, going to confession and taking communion comes up again and again as the basic protocol. Added to this is the protective prayer to Saint Michael, consecration to Christ and, if the matter is serious, going to the diocesan exorcist. One specific book is repeatedly cited as a reference: Las seis puertas del enemigo, by the Spanish exorcist Javier Luzón, with downloadable self-exorcism prayers. The curious detail is that the international association of exorcists advised against it, which its defenders read as proof that the Enemy is well entrenched within the Church itself.

The flat, the plot and the war: when the curse belongs to the property

The conversation drifts toward real estate. There is speculation that spiritualism or magic was practiced in the home, that the plot was a war zone before it was built on, and that rapes and murders may have occurred there. The resulting theory: the building is infested with junk from the underworld and the doors are hard to close. The recommendation is to ignore the poltergeists, pray daily and wait for things to fade. If there were black masses and sacrifices, the prognosis is worse.

Some go a step further and scale the curse up to the national level: the one hanging over Spain, they say, dates from long ago, from the serpent that already dwelt here before the Virgin and Saint James, reinforced later by the manuscript of Villafranca. The solution proposed in that stretch of the exchange involves returning Franco's body to the Valle. No one appears to have produced a calculation of the spiritual savings.

The bill for witchcraft: why you shouldn't call a 900 number

The most useful practical warning in the exchange is economic. Occult services on the internet are expensive and never end: first the spell, then the add-on, then the emergency. The pattern is that of any trap subscription. Against that, the cost of the religious route is zero or nearly zero, and so is the psychological one: change your focus, stop feeding the story of misfortune, and wait for the streak to break on its own.

The anecdotal evidence shared points in the same direction. Someone who went through a long streak of consecutive problems placed two evil eye beads at the entrance and, he claims, it stopped. Another case describes three horrible years of family fights, moving out of the family home and the death of his father. No one can prove the amulet did anything; what did change was the sense of control. And that, in mental health terms, is no small thing.

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The prediction, with all reservations: if the person asking trinc the advice he has already tried —kneeling, praying before bed and not dwelling on it— he will notice an improvement, attribute it to prayer and reinforce the belief. If the bad streak returns one day, the explanation will be ready. The hardest curse to break is the one you sign yourself every morning.