Anna Sayce

Tag: curses

  • Curses, Witchcraft & Psychic Scams

    Curses, Witchcraft & Psychic Scams

    In this article I’m going to answer the following question:

    Can curses cast by malicious people affect us?

    But first, a story to tell you how I even got around to thinking about this weird topic:

    Recently I have been watching a TV series which is based on the fifteenth-century life of Elizabeth Woodville, the wife and Queen of King Richard IV of England.

    Queen Elizabeth was purported to be a witch and in the program, she is often to be seen having visions, predicting her own future and casting spells and curses.

    So when Queen Elizabeth’s father and brother are murdered and the two noblemen responsible for their murder go unpunished by her husband the King, Queen Elizabeth turns to witchcraft to achieve what she was unable to persuade the King to do: she wants the perpetrators dead, and she curses them both.

    And she gets what she was hoping for:

    One of her enemies dies in battle and the other promptly drowns in a barrel of wine.

    While it makes for terribly satisfying TV when the baddies get their comeuppance, in this instance it also perpetuates an unrealistic idea of what spells and curses can achieve — an unrealistic idea that we know has been around for a long time, since people in the Middle Ages believed that witches had tremendous power to do harm. I’m talking: crops failing, people getting sick and dying, livelihoods disappearing, and even storms and bad weather. So there has long been a deathly fear of witchcraft in the collective consciousness.

    If the contents of my inbox are anything to go by, this fear is still alive and well in the 21st century because I regularly receive emails from people who get caught up in psychic scams involving curses. These scams evoke such fear in people that some will part with hundreds and even thousands of dollars, as a result.

    Here’s a typical email I receive about this (this is a composite of several different emails to protect the emailers’ identities)

    Hi Anna,

    I was hoping you can give me some advice. I had a consultation 5 days ago with a psychic in New Jersey and I think I could have been scammed. During the first reading, she told me that a jealous woman had cursed me and my boyfriend, and that our relationship would fail as a result.

    She also told me that there was a generational curse on my family that caused us to die young. This really frightened me because on my dad’s side of the family, a lot of my relatives have died before the age of 50. She was able to tell me all sorts of accurate information about myself and I just couldn’t shake the idea that there was some truth to what she had said.

    She told me I needed to pay $360 for special candles, and she would light these candles for me and remove the curse on me and my boyfriend. Later when that was removed she told me she needed $2000 to buy special equipment to remove the generational curse.

    I was so scared by what she told me that I stumped up most of the cash. I’m supposed to pay her the rest tomorrow.

    The curse removal involved her rubbing an egg over me while saying a few things like “get this evil out of me”, etc.  I also had to throw some salt over my shoulder and prick my thumb so it would bleed onto a special handkerchief while reciting a prayer. I feel so silly for believing her. Could this be true? If I don’t pay her the rest – can she curse me?

    I would really appreciate your help. I don’t know what to do. Giving her this money has cleared my accounts completely.

    Thank you,

    Emily

    I have to confess, receiving emails like this makes me feel depressed about the state of humanity. It is sad that there are people out there, calling themselves intuitives, who exploit the fears of others for personal gain. It gives the rest of us intuitives a bad name, and it is just plain cruel.

    My main reason for writing this article is to raise awareness about this scam…

    So here are some pointers to be aware of when getting a reading

    • If an intuitive reading makes you feel terrified and panicked, or very anguished, you are most likely not working with a genuine intuitive. You are probably working with a scammer who is looking to arouse fears in you, and then exploit them for their own gain.
    • Some people use their very accurate intuitive gifts for nefarious purposes. Just because you were given accurate information, does not mean the person is not a scamming ratbag.
    • There are no special candles, eggs, salt or handkerchiefs that only psychics know about, that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars to source
    • And most importantly, no-one can cause your death, or the death of your loved ones through a curse. No one can cause your relationship to fail or stop you finding love through a curse.

    Yes, there are people who cast malicious spells and curses on others. But these curses do not have the power to affect us in the way some people think.

    I once read for a lady who had curse energy in her auric field. It came from an ex-partner of hers she had been with in her twenties, who was a violent and angry person. She had a terrible time with him and put up with all kinds of abuse, but had managed to escape from the relationship and had since remarried.

    Life was good for her. She was content in her personal life and really successful in her career. He, on the other hand, was still in an angry place, and had been sending malicious energy her way.

    But was she doomed because of this curse energy he’d been sending?

    No, she was not.

    She still thought of him at times, and as a sensitive person, became aware of the angry energy he was sending her, but the curse did not impact negatively on her life or cause anything bad to happen to her. She mostly felt sorry for him. She had moved on.

    The great cosmic web of karmic cause and effect cannot be so easily manipulated by another person.

    Bad things cannot happen to us just because another person consciously wills it.

    The things that happen to us occur as a result of our own actions, words, thoughts, and habits. The rest of the control is in the hands of God/The Universe/our souls — not other people.

    I believe that before we even get here, our souls may put in place certain conditions, events and relationships that we will come across once we’re incarnated, to allow us to have certain experiences and learn certain lessons.

    These lessons and experiences tend to revolve around themes, which can be carried over from one lifetime to the next. For example, I know from all the past life regressions and Akashic Record Readings I have done, that my soul is learning about power. I’ve had lifetimes where I’ve abused power, where I’ve been a victim, and everything in between.

    If someone wrongs me in this lifetime because I give them too much power over me, it doesn’t mean I am cursed — it may mean that I am slipping into old patterns of victimhood that I am here to transcend. It could mean that there was an event related to abuse of power in a previous lifetime, and the karmic effects are reaching into this incarnation, like a ripple in a pond.

    It could be any number of things. But one thing it will not be down to, is a curse.

    Just as people in medieval times blamed witches because they didn’t understand why their crops were failing, a curse is a deceptively simple and false answer to what is actually quite a complicated question.

    So beware of this scam. Please share this article with anyone who gets psychic readings and has a tendency to think the best of other people.

    To sum up, this scam tends to follow a pattern:

    • You go for a reading with a psychic who doesn’t charge much money — in my experience, it is often a psychic who works out of a new-age shop or a psychic hotline
    • She makes some extremely accurate observations about you and your life, and you start to trust in her and her abilities
    • She picks up on a curse, supposedly cast by someone else that is affecting you, and will tell you that the curse is affecting your ability to have happy relationships, find love, earn enough money, stay alive, etc.
    • She’ll ask for a ridiculous sum of money for candles/crystals/special salt that she needs to purchase to release the curse for you. She’ll frighten you with all kinds of things that might happen if you don’t stump up the cash to get the curse removed
    • She may even come back to you at a later date, saying the curse removal didn’t work and ask for more money.

    And yes, I know that this article mostly contains extremely basic common sense, but it is amazing the power of fear on the human mind — scare someone enough and common sense can go out the window.

    So a reminder of our own power doesn’t hurt…here it is:

    Curses don’t work. We are the ones who have a great deal of power to affect the course of our own lives, through our actions, habits and words. We co-create our reality with God and our souls. And when we tune in to our intuition to co-create consciously, we can magnify that power.

    He knows the power is within him…
  • Are Curses Real?

    Are Curses Real?

    A small portion of the inquiries I receive are from distressed visitors, who are convinced someone has cursed them because they’ve had a series of unfortunate events happen to them recently. In this article, I want to talk about what curses really are and how they can happen.

    Are curses even real? Or are you just paranoid?

    First of all, yes, curses are real. People do place them on one another (although it is fairly rare and nowhere near as scary as people tend to think).

    In this article, I will talk about some common scenarios of how curses get placed.

    What are curses and how do people place them?

    Have you ever felt so angry or mistreated by someone that you wanted some kind of revenge? In our darkest moments, we can utter words like ‘I hope he suffers like I have’. Any time we wish ill on another person and when we put energy and emotion behind it (even if it’s only in that moment), that is curse energy.

    Creating curses isn’t rare. After all, people get in conflict with one another, hate one another, have moments of anger and get resentful about things that happen. Curse energy goes out to people. That’s no big deal.

    But here’s when it starts to affect people…

    …When the person who has been cursed decides to take on that curse energy into their energy field.

    That doesn’t happen that often, but it can happen in one of two ways:

    1. When the cursed person feels they deserve the curse because they feel guilty about something.

    Here’s an example: let’s say Mary is dating a guy called Rob. They have been in a relationship for six months and Mary is crazy about Rob and Rob seems to be crazy about her. She is convinced that she has found ‘the one’. He seems to feel the same way. Then a few months later by chance she finds out he already has a fiancée and has had one the whole time they were seeing each other. She is gutted, but above all, angry that he deceived her.

    Rob is a bit of a ratbag so although he feels a bit guilty, he doesn’t do much to say sorry. He just disappears off the scene, which makes Mary even angrier. She wants revenge. At her angriest, Mary wishes Rob a very unhappy married life with his fiancée.

    Rob feels guilty that he deceived Mary and that he never really apologized to her, and on an unconscious level, accepts the energy of that curse into his energy field.

    If he’s very sensitive or perceptive, he may actually have some conscious awareness of having taken the angry curse energy from Mary somehow. He may notice it weighing on him.

    His sense of guilt and responsibility for her anger acts as a receptor for the curse energy she sent him.

    So that’s one common scenario for curses. There is one more receptor for real curse energy and that is fear.

    2. When someone is really scared

    Let me give you an example of this:

    Let’s say Mary joins an evangelical church that is very controlling. The people in the church want to dictate how she dresses, who she spends time with, the work she does. It’s all a bit cultish. She decides it is not for her and she is going to leave. The people in the church attempt to keep her in their church, saying that God is angry with her and that she needs to do as they say (this is a true story and actually happened to me.)

    The next bit is not a true story though… 🙂

    Let’s say even though Mary is really scared. She decides not to have anything to do with the church again and ignores their calls and invitations. One of them gets angry and asks God to curse her for her sins. God doesn’t oblige so he goes ahead and curses her himself. Mary is at a real all-time low in her life – she is scared of these people, she is vulnerable and her defences are down. She has a panic attack. That fear acts as a receptor for the curse energy because she doesn’t have much control over her own energy field at that moment. The curse energy attaches to her simply because she believes it has real power over her.

    That is really the key here – curses can only affect you if you believe they can OR if you believe you deserve the curse.

    BUT the thing to remember about curses is that they don’t really affect you in the way the person intended. No-one can ruin your life through a curse or make bad things to happen to you. If you do receive curse energy, it usually just makes you aware that the other person hates you or is angry with you. 

    When You Are Probably Not Cursed

    Sometimes people write to me because a ‘psychic’ has told them that they have been cursed and that they need to pay a fee to remove it. This happens a lot online, especially when free readings are advertised – you hand over your email address and the person gives you a general cold reading that is sent out to everyone. You think it might be real. Then the intuitive starts to harass you day after day, telling you that you’re cursed and for $50 they’ll remove the curse. These ‘psychics’ are scammers. This has happened to me online several years ago (I got hounded every day by a psychic who wanted to convince me I was cursed) and it’s what often happens when you enter your email address into a form for a free reading.

    Helpful Links:

    I’ve written more about curses here:

    And if you would like more advice on choosing a reputable psychic, check out this article: 4 Tips for Choosing an Intuitive.