I had lunch with a colleague and friend today and she told me a rather disturbing tale. She has been counseling a woman that I shall call M. for a couple of years now on a fairly regular basis. The counseling has, in most respects, gone well until recently. Due to changing life circumstances and a persistent unwillingness to take responsibility for those circumstances M. was becoming more and more resistant in her sessions with my friend, looking for anyone to blame for the tangled circumstances of her life but herself. This would have been nothing more than a passing headache for my friend, but M. also possesses a strong talent for healing, a touch of sight, and a fair gift for magic, the latter of which she refuses to train.
When one has such a gift, an inborn psi-talent, and that gift is open and active, a responsible person has no choice but to train it. Why? The answer is quite simple: like unacknowledged emotions, an untrained gift has the potential to leak and to affect those in its general vicinity. Often untrained psi-gifts are tied into our emotions and when both emotions and gift are unexamined, unacknowledged, and unregulated, disaster can occur. This is what apparently has been occurring with M.
My friend told me that she had been hit with malocchio – the evil eye—by M. She was fairly irritated by the whole thing. Thankfully, being a competent magician, she had strong personal wards and her home was also well shielded. The taint did not penetrate the wards. What it did do was negatively affect anything outside of her house wards: namely lines of communication. That, combined with a warning from her ancestors and an oppressive darkness of mood that was not natural to her at that time, and a feeling of pressure on her shields from without, caused her to do divination to find the cause. She has practiced long enough to know when something is amiss. Her divination told her what spirit allies later confirmed: M. had put the evil eye on her. OH, it surely wasn’t intentional, but there was a great deal of insecurity, resentment and envy on M.’s part because my friend’s life is going very, very well, especially financially. That was all it took. It was the second time this had happened. The first, occurring when my friend was in a vulnerable emotional state (and thus her shields weaker than usual) affected her with physical impairment (mirroring the same impairment in M….M. had literally projected the mirror of her own injury onto my friend). After that, whenever she had to deal with M. she warded specifically against anything that might be leaking or inadvertently projected.
It gets even worse though. Upon scanning the threads of wyrd, doing further divination, and following a hunch later confirmed by one of her allies, my friend realized that M. had also thrown the eye onto a colleague who was causing her frustration at work, one toward whom she felt that same combination of resentment and envy. That is, after all, what really lies at the heart of the ‘evil eye,’ that particular combination of unacknowledged emotions. If one ever needed an esoteric example of why one should own one’s shit, this is surely it.
This is what can happen when one doesn’t self examine, when one doesn’t take responsibility for oneself, when one is spiritually complacent and unwilling to admit to the existence of “negative” emotions: leakage and harm. From what my friend told me, M would never, ever admit to feeling any of these things because to do so would, in her own eyes, make her a bad person. It would also imply that she had to take responsibility for them. So instead of owning her issues, she’d apparently rather spew them onto everyone else for someone else to clean up. Let me just say that passive aggressiveness has no place in magic and no place in spiritual work at all.
For those wondering how to break the evil eye, I’ll tell you what my friend did. She cleaned her house from top to bottom because physical clutter collects negative energy. She took a cleansing bath (dark beer, Florida water, some scented oil a beloved, recently deceased ancestor had given her, and alcohol that had been on the altar of her Patron Deity). She sprinkled Florida water all over the house. She called forth her allies to go and deal with the leakage, to send it back to its source or to devour it – whichever they preferred. She made offerings to all her ancestors and house spirits and asked for their protection. Then she checked over all her wards and worked a banishing charm on the remaining ichor. For a week, she wore protective charms, including one that contained traditional Turkish charm against the evil eye: a blue glass bead with an eye worked into it. She also put the mother of all bindings on M. In all likelihood, she will have to further deal with this client in a way that neutralizes her ability to spew her own venom all over others. Fun times, my friends, fun times.
Sometimes people become toxic. This happens usually when they consistently refuse to take responsibility for themselves and their way of being in the world. Watch out for this. Toxicity is a contagion. There are numerous culturally specific methods to rid oneself of the evil eye, which is really just a blast of emotional toxicity that sticks. Some people have a talent for projecting that way, even though they often won’t allow themselves to acknowledge it. I have found a regimen of cleansings combined with one or two banishing charms to be perfectly effective in removing such taint. Still, it is a bother. This really highlights the need for vigilance and consistency of practice. If one is doing regular energetic cleansings, grounding and centering properly, and maintaining consistent shields, it’s fairly easy to recognize when something is amiss and to nip it in its proverbial bud.
This is why properly maintaining one’s space is so very important. Ideally, one’s dwelling should be so well maintained energetically that negative or malignant energies simply cannot find purchase. This is something that I will be covering in more depth in my forthcoming book “Spiritual Protection: A Handbook for Psychics, Healers, and Energy Workers” from New Page Books.
In the meantime, consider adding a can of dark beer to your bath at least once a week. It’s a very effective means of cleansing one’s aura of taint; and be careful: I’m seeing a lot of this type of aforementioned stupidity lately.
Some good resources on the Evil Eye:
www.luckymojo.com has an excellent archive of essays, at least one of which concerns the evil eye.
“Protection Against Evil” by Henri Gamache
“Evil Eye: A Casebook” by Alan Dundes