The Short Guide To Diagnosing Psychic/Magic Attack and Crossed Conditions

When I wrote Protection and Reversal Magick in 2005, most people in the Occult/Pagan community seemed to dismiss the idea of psychic or magical attack as something that was exceedingly rare. Knowing that it was more common than many believed, I wrote the book I felt was needed and laid out ways to diagnose problems and deal with them.

Seventeen years later in 2022, the community has the opposite bias. People seem to think that they are being cursed and attacked all the time. This gets reinforced by Social Media groups which are all too hungry for drama.

There is a new expanded edition of Protection and Reversal Magic coming out in March, and I will have more to say about this in the new introduction, but my position is the same now as it was in 2005 – Magical, Psychic, and Spiritual attacks happen, but not all the time. Crossed conditions happen as well, but can almost always be dealt with easily enough.

We all know that magic doesn’t work like it does in fantasy movies, but some people forget that it doesn’t work like it does in horror movies either. In horror movies, magic and witchcraft exist to get the protagonist into trouble that is almost impossible to get out of. This isn’t how it works. Magic is a real thing, and therefore has real dangers and effects, but there are also real safety precautions to mitigate those dangers, and real procedures to reverse those effects.

I wrote a whole book about it, but given that some of the folks I have seen reporting attacks and crossed conditions are doing so based on almost nothing other than feeling spooked, I thought it might be helpful to have a quick guide to diagnosis.

STEP 1: IDENTIFY SYMPTOMS

Before you think about causes or anything else, you should first list the symptoms. I divide symptoms into External, Physical, and Mental symptoms.

EXTERNAL EXAMPLES: Runs of bad luck and happenstance that are not the status quo. If you get into two fender benders in one week after years of safe driving, that may be a symptom. You may also experience things breaking in your hands, or odd omens like plants dying in your house, or infestations of rodents or insects.

PHYSICAL SYMPTOMS: Unusual headaches, unexplainable fatigue, unusual illnesses, aching bones, blisters or unexplained marks on the body.

MENTAL SYMPTOMS: This is the trickiest bit because paranoia, anxiety, depression, mania, and other mental illness can be symptoms of psychic attack, but they are disorders that might lead one to believe that one is under attack when they are not.

STEP 2: EVALUATE SYMPTOMS

Now that you have a list of symptoms, you can place them into context. Ask yourself the following questions:

Are these symptoms out of the norm? Losing your job is a terrible thing, but if you have been written up three times in the last year, or if your company has been expecting lay-offs, it’s probably not a psychic attack.

Is there a constellation of symptoms or only one? Usually in the case of psychic and magical attack you’ll get more than one symptom, and often from the different categories above. If you are feeling more fatigued than normal, maybe you need a diet change. You aren’t getting any younger…

Are the symptoms actually bad, or are you freaked out because magic worked? That sounds silly, right? Someone does a ritual, something magical happens, and then they get scared. Trust me, it happens all the time. People will do an invocation of Hekate, then feel a cold spot in their room or have a dream about a dark goddess, and immediately start banishing the living shit out their lives. I see people complain all the time about psychic attack, but when they list their symptoms there is nothing there other than signs that their magic is working and that their psychic and magical abilities are growing.

STEP 3: CONSIDER CONTEXT

Is there a reason you think you might be under attack? Magical attacks are a lot like physical attacks. They happen, and thinking about defense and security is good, but they don’t happen all the time for no good reason. Think about why a person or spirit might be motivated to attack you, or why you might be experiencing crossed conditions from some work you did.

Try your best to avoid motivated reasoning while considering context, and instead seek only accuracy. Motivated reasoning is the kind of thinking that encounters information it wants to believe and asks “Can I possibly believe this?” When encountering information it doesn’t want to believe, motivated reasoning asks “Must I believe this?” Strive instead to just ask “Is this accurate?”

A person who wants to believe they are cursed will take any small shred of evidence and use it to prove to themselves that they are the victim of a curse. You might think people would never want to believe this, but it’s actually a very attractive proposition. It effectively gives an excuse and a reason for any problems you have, while making you someone important enough for someone else to have cursed you.

Conversely, many practitioners refuse to believe that they could be cursed because they see themselves as a powerful witch, magician, or sorcerer, and therefore untouchable. I assure you that there is no such thing as fool-proof security.

STEP 4: TREAT THE PROBLEM

If, based upon the above considerations you think you have a problem worth treating, then start treatment. Cleanse yourself and protect yourself, then cleanse your home and ward your home. Make sure you are diligent in your regular practice.

Yes, treatment can be part of the diagnosis. Do things get worse or better? If better, then maybe you had something going on that cleared up, or maybe you didn’t. It doesn’t really matter, though, because things are better. If things get worse, you are perhaps facing an unusually fraught attack and need to jump to more targeted defenses, reversals, exorcisms, and counter magic.

It is at this point that divination can be useful to guide you. Some of you will notice that I didn’t list it earlier on in this process. Unfortunately, this is one area where divinations, even those by others, sometimes especially by others, can be misleading. Every year at least a few people write to me asking why I have cursed them. I haven’t cursed any of them, of course, but since I am somewhat well-known they have decided that I might have, and lo and behold their cards or their reader confirmed their fear. In most cases, I don’t even know who these people are.

You really don’t need to know whether you are under attack or not in order to cleanse and beef up protections. Just do it. Use divination sparingly in these matters and make sure that you use several data points to come up with actionable intelligence. A reading is just one data point.