Grimoire and ritual-magic tradition

1. Introduction

Version followed: the historians' account of the grimoire tradition (Owen Davies, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, OUP 2009, as its reviewers summarise it; Attrell and Porreca's 2019 English Picatrix; Julien Véronèse's work on the Ars Notoria) and T. M. Luhrmann's ethnography of present-day ritual magicians (1989). Clinical procedures follow the International OCD Foundation (IOCDF) for exposure and response prevention (ERP) and the American Psychiatric Association's Cultural Formulation Interview (CFI) and its supplementary modules. [source: see Sources]

What it is. This is not a therapy. It is a tradition of written magic. Grimoires are books that set out the ceremonies, spells and materials believed necessary for ritual magic [source: Hutton, Literary Review]. Davies follows them from the Hellenistic world to the present: across Europe, then into the Americas, Africa, the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean [source: Hutton, Literary Review; Ryrie, Times Higher Education]. This guide gives only a public outline of the tradition: its purpose, structure and context. It gives no operations, words, names of spirits, seals, ingredients, spells or curses. The rest of the guide covers the psychotherapist's work with clients for whom grimoire magic matters.

The tradition in outline (as scholars describe it).

• Picatrix. This is a Latin version of the Arabic Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm, a tenth-century compendium of astral magic attributed to Maslama b. Qāsim al-Qurṭubī. Alfonso X of Castile commissioned the translation in the thirteenth century. It has a prologue and four books. It deals with talismans and with rituals addressed to planetary spirits. It presents this magic as resting on devotion to God and on knowledge of the law God created, not on malevolent spirits. The translators classify the rituals by their goals, and most of those goals concern relations with social superiors. Attrell and Porreca (Penn State University Press, 2019) wrote their translation for students and scholars of the history of science and magic. Like earlier translations, it relies on David Pingree's 1986 Latin critical edition. [source: Franchetto review, Correspondences 8.2, 2020]
• Ars Notoria ("notory art"). This is a Latin text of the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, from northern Italy according to Véronèse's dating [uncertain: secondary, unverified]. It consists of prayers and figures (notae). They are meant to give quick mastery of the liberal arts, memory and eloquence through angelic help, and the text says this is how Solomon gained his wisdom. Students and clerics found it popular, and related treatises grew up around it, among them John of Morigny's Liber Florum [source: Simon & Schuster page for Castle 2023; Clark Library]. Véronèse's Latin edition is L'Ars notoria au Moyen Âge (SISMEL, 2007) [uncertain: secondary, unverified]. Matthias Castle's 2023 English translation, published by Inner Traditions, is based on Véronèse's edition and is marketed to "scholars and magicians alike" [source: Simon & Schuster].
• Key of Solomon (Clavicula Salomonis). This is a Solomonic handbook of ritual magic. A late-sixteenth-century manuscript of it is held in the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic's collection [source: Museum of Witchcraft and Magic catalogue]. Its earlier origins are [uncertain: not verified]. Keep it separate from the Lesser Key of Solomon (Lemegeton), a seventeenth-century compilation that drew on sixteenth-century demonological texts, including Johann Weyer's Pseudomonarchia Daemonum. A UCLA library article calls the Lemegeton one of the most popular books on demonology and notes that the Ars Notoria was printed as its fifth part in Robert Turner's 1657 English edition [source: Clark Library]. Titles are used loosely in sources and online, so ask the client which text they mean.
• How historians frame it. A recurring theme in Davies is that grimoires rarely live up to their reputation, which partly rested on claims of ancient or distant origin. From the early twentieth century, commercial occult publishers such as L. W. de Laurence sold grimoire material widely, including in West Africa and the Caribbean [source: Ryrie, Times Higher Education]. Printing, from the 1450s, spread such books far beyond the circles that had kept them as manuscripts [source: Clark Library].
• Practice today. Luhrmann studied Londoners who call themselves magicians. She describes them as educated, middle-class and often once sceptical, and her book examines how they came to find magical ritual persuasive [source: Stanford Anthropology page for Luhrmann 1989]. Today grimoire texts reach clients through modern translations sold to practitioners, initiatory orders and independent teachers (see XIV 032 (Golden Dawn) and XIV 035 (Thelema, A∴A∴ and OTO)), and online communities [synthesis].
• Evidence status (one line). The tradition holds that ritual acts take effect through divine, planetary, angelic or other spirit agency. These claims have no controlled research base [uncertain: not verified]. The guide neither affirms nor dismisses them.

How change happens in the therapist's work. The therapist does not work on the magic itself. They work on what it means in the client's life, and on the distress, impairment, risk or exploitation that may have gathered around it. Change comes through respectful exploration of meaning, through careful differential assessment, through ERP when magical thinking is driving OCD, and through practical protection against paid "curse removers" [synthesis; ERP: source IOCDF].

Clients bring this material in five main ways [synthesis]:

• they practise ritual magic and want a therapist who will not pathologise it;
• they fear they have been cursed;
• they have OCD with magical or superstitious obsessions;
• they show possible psychotic, manic or dissociative features woven into magical content;
• they have been drawn into paying for curse removal.

2. Framework

The sources give no phased protocol for this population. The phases below are a clinical [synthesis] built from the CFI, IOCDF ERP guidance and consumer-protection advice. Session counts are not given in sources and are not stated here.

Phase A: Engagement and meaning. The goal is a working alliance in which the client can talk about magic without being ridiculed or diagnosed for believing. Format: ordinary individual sessions, with the client choosing their own words. Move on when the client has described the practice or fear in their own terms and has said what they want help with.

Phase B: Cultural formulation. The goal is to understand the problem through the client's own explanatory model and tradition. Format: the core CFI, the Explanatory Model module and the Spirituality, Religion and Moral Traditions module [source: APA CFI Supplementary Modules]. Move on when you can state the client's model of the problem, what their tradition counts as normal practice, and where stress or conflict comes from.

Phase C: Differential assessment. The goal is to separate culturally held belief from psychosis, mania, dissociation, OCD and grief. Format: clinical interview, collateral information from the client's community with consent, and medical or psychiatric referral where indicated. Move on when you have a working formulation. If acute risk or psychosis is suspected, this phase ends in referral, not in further exploratory work.

Phase D: Targeted work. Pick whichever applies:

• ERP for magical-thinking OCD [source: IOCDF];
• coping and community support for fear of curses without OCD;
• managing adverse effects of intensive practice;
• dependency on a teacher, group or practice;
• protecting against financial exploitation [source: AARP; WA Consumer Protection].

Move on when goals agreed in Phase A are met or the client chooses to stop.

Phase E: Relapse planning, referral and ending. The goal is to consolidate the work. Plan for setbacks (for example, a new "curse" claim or a new reader). Make sure links to OCD specialists, psychiatry, consumer-protection bodies or the client's community are in place.

Phases often overlap. Exploitation or risk can surface at any point and takes priority [synthesis].

3. Guiding principles

• Belief is not a symptom. Holding that magic works is a cultural and religious position. Assess form, distress, impairment and fit with the client's tradition, never the content of belief alone. [synthesis; supported by CFI design, source: APA CFI]
• The client's words, the client's tradition. Use their terms for practices and beings, and substitute the client's own tradition into CFI questions as the module directs. [source: APA CFI Supplementary Modules]
• The therapist is not a magician, reader, remover or initiator. Never perform, prescribe, check or "neutralise" rituals, judge whether a curse is real, or recommend practitioners. [synthesis]
• Public outline only. In session, discuss what a practice means and does to the client, not how to perform it. You do not need operational detail to help. [synthesis]
• The compulsion is the target, not the faith. In OCD, ERP targets the compulsive and reassurance-seeking function of a behaviour. The aim is to free the client to live by their own values. [source: IOCDF scrupulosity page]
• Consult the tradition on what is normative. Where it is unclear whether a protective practice is ordinary devotion or compulsion, and the client agrees, a teacher or senior practitioner in their own tradition can clarify. [source: IOCDF scrupulosity page, by analogy with faith leaders]
• Exploitation is a safety issue. Escalating fees, threats of harm and demands for secrecy are recognised warning signs and warrant concrete protective steps. [source: AARP; WA Consumer Protection]
• Risk overrides exploration. Suspected psychosis, mania, suicidality or severe dissociation means assessment and referral come first. [synthesis]
• Coding without pathologising. Where a code is needed for a religious or spiritual problem that is not a mental disorder, ICD-10-CM Z65.8 includes "Religious or spiritual problem". The DSM-5-TR wording is [uncertain: not verified]. [source: Unbound Medicine ICD-10-CM]
• Competence and humility. Seek consultation or training in religious and spiritual competencies, for example Vieten et al. 2013 [uncertain: not verified]. Never use the client to learn about magic for your own interest. [synthesis]
• Dual relationships. A therapist who practises magic, tarot or similar keeps it entirely outside the therapy. Self-disclosure about your own beliefs is rare, brief and only for the client's benefit. [synthesis]

4. Intervention inventory

The grimoire tradition has no therapeutic interventions of its own. This inventory gives the psychotherapist's procedures for clients involved with it. Ritual operations are never taught, rehearsed, checked or performed in session.

4.1 Opening the topic and client-led exploration of meaning

• Purpose / when: At intake or whenever magic, curses or grimoires come up. The aim is to make it safe for the client to talk and to learn what the practice or fear means in their life. [synthesis]
• Steps:
  1. Ask permission to explore the topic, and ask what words the client uses for it.
  2. Ask open questions about how they came to it, through which books or teachers, and what it gives them: meaning, community, a sense of agency, beauty, a framework for understanding events.
  3. Ask what, if anything, troubles them about it.
  4. Reflect back their meaning in their own words without evaluating whether it is true.
  5. Do not ask for ritual detail. If the client volunteers it, listen for function and feeling rather than procedure. [synthesis]
• Example language (illustrative):
  • "You mentioned your magical work. I'd like to understand what it means to you, in your own words, if you're willing."
  • "I don't need the details of the rituals. I'm more interested in what they do for you and how they sit in your life."
• Watch for: Watch for testing behaviour: the client checking whether you will mock them or be fascinated. Your own curiosity drifting toward the occult content rather than the client is a boundary issue. It is working when the client speaks freely and names their own goals.

4.2 Core CFI and Explanatory Model module (especially for fear of curses)

• Purpose / when: When the presenting problem is framed in magical terms, for example "I have been cursed" or "a working went wrong". The aim is to elicit the client's understanding of the problem, its causes, its effects on body, mind and spiritual wellbeing, its expected course, and the help they expect. [source: APA CFI Supplementary Modules, Explanatory Model module]
• Steps:
  1. Use the core CFI to define the problem in the client's own words.
  2. Then use the Explanatory Model module, in your own phrasing, to cover:
     • what they know about the problem;
     • whether they know others who had it;
     • what they, their family and their community think caused it, and how their view has changed;
     • its perceived effects on body, mind and spirit;
     • how serious they think it is;
     • what help they have sought or expect.
  3. Note who else holds the curse explanation: family, community, a paid reader.
  4. Paraphrase the CFI questions; do not reproduce the published wording verbatim in materials.
• Example language (illustrative):
  • "What do you think is causing this?"
  • "Who else sees it that way?"
  • "What would have to happen for you to feel it had been lifted?"
  • "What kinds of help have you tried so far?"
• Watch for:
  • A curse explanation that first appeared after a paid reading. This is an exploitation flag; see 4.11.
  • A belief that has become fixed, idiosyncratic and unshared by the client's own community. This points to differential assessment; see 4.5.
  • It is working when you can state the client's model accurately enough that they agree with your summary.

4.3 CFI Spirituality, Religion and Moral Traditions module

• Purpose / when: For any client who practises ritual magic or belongs to an esoteric current, or whose distress is framed religiously. The aim is to map identity, role in life, relationship to the problem and related stresses. [source: APA CFI Supplementary Modules, module on Spirituality, Religion and Moral Traditions]
• Steps: Cover the module's four areas, putting the client's tradition in place of the placeholder (for example "your magical practice" or "your order"):
  1. Identity: affiliations, groups, family traditions, more than one tradition.
  2. Role in daily life: how the tradition figures at home, in family matters and elsewhere.
  3. Relationship to the problem: whether practice, texts, teachers or community help the client cope.
  4. Stresses and conflicts: tradition-linked stress, discrimination, or conflict with family or others, for example a religious family that regards the practice as demonic.
  The module directs exploring each tradition the client names. [source: APA CFI Supplementary Modules] The module cited is the DSM-5 (2013) version; any DSM-5-TR changes are [uncertain: not verified].
• Example language (illustrative):
  • "How does your magical practice fit into your everyday life?"
  • "Has it helped you cope with this, made things harder, or both?"
  • "Are there people in your life who disapprove of it, and how does that affect you?"
• Watch for: Watch for conflict with family or a previous religion, secrecy, and stigma. These can be the real stressor rather than the practice. It is working when you can say what is normative in the client's tradition and what is personal to them.

4.4 Practice and context mapping

• Purpose / when: When practice may be linked to symptoms. The aim is to understand intensity, setting and context without asking for operational content. [synthesis]
• Steps:
  1. In general terms, ask about:
     • how often and how long they practise;
     • whether alone or in a group;
     • who teaches or directs them;
     • recent escalation;
     • sleep, fasting or substance use around practice (record qualitatively only);
     • isolation;
     • money spent;
     • whether practice has stopped feeling chosen.
  2. Ask what happens emotionally and perceptually before, during and after practice, and how long any after-effects last.
  3. Chart the timeline of practice changes against symptom changes.
• Example language (illustrative): "Without going into the content, can we look at when and how much you've been practising, and how you've been feeling and sleeping alongside it?"
• Watch for:
  • Escalating intensity together with sleep loss or substance use.
  • Practice used to manage distress that keeps rising.
  • A teacher who forbids outside help.
  • It is working when a clear pattern emerges, or one is reasonably ruled out.

4.5 Differential assessment: psychosis and mania

• Purpose / when: When magical content comes with features that suggest psychosis or mania. The aim is to assess carefully without treating belief as delusion. [synthesis]
• Steps:
  1. Establish whether the belief or experience is shared and recognised by the client's own tradition or community. Collateral information from a fellow practitioner or teacher, with consent, can help.
  2. Assess the form of the experience rather than its content:
     • fixity and imperviousness;
     • idiosyncratic elaboration beyond the tradition;
     • hallucinations outside ritual contexts;
     • thought disorder;
     • functional decline;
     • grandiosity, reduced need for sleep, pressured speech;
     • risk to self or others.
  3. Compare against the client's baseline and their account of what is ordinary in their practice.
  4. If psychotic or manic features are present, refer promptly to psychiatry or a crisis team, and share your cultural formulation so that belief is not mistaken for symptom.
• Example language (illustrative):
  • "In your tradition, would others recognise this kind of experience?"
  • "How is this different from what you usually experience in your practice?"
  • "How have you been sleeping?"
• Watch for:
  • Experiences intruding unbidden into daily life.
  • Commands to harm.
  • Loss of the client's own ability to step back from the frame.
  • Family reporting a marked change.
  • It is working when you can state either "culturally normative, not impairing" or a clear clinical concern with a referral made.

4.6 Differential assessment: dissociation

• Purpose / when: When the client reports trance states, loss of time, depersonalisation or derealisation, or feeling "taken over" in or after practice. [synthesis]
• Steps:
  1. Separate states the client enters and leaves by intention within practice from states that occur involuntarily, persist, or cause distress or impairment.
  2. Screen for trauma history and for other dissociative symptoms outside practice.
  3. Use a validated dissociation measure if trained. Do not reproduce its items.
  4. Agree grounding strategies the client finds compatible with their tradition.
  5. Refer for specialist trauma or dissociation assessment where indicated.
• Example language (illustrative):
  • "Are there times this happens when you haven't chosen it?"
  • "How long does it take you to feel fully yourself again afterwards?"
• Watch for:
  • Persisting derealisation.
  • Amnesia for ordinary life.
  • A trauma history surfacing.
  • It is working when the client can tell chosen states from unwanted ones and has ways back to ordinary awareness.

4.7 Differential assessment: OCD and magical thinking

• Purpose / when: When fear of curses, of having "done a ritual wrong" or of invisible harm drives repetitive protective acts, mental reviewing or reassurance seeking. [source: IOCDF scrupulosity page; synthesis for application to magic]
• Steps:
  1. Ask whether protective or corrective acts are driven mainly by distress.
  2. Ask whether they exceed or ignore what the client's own tradition requires, for example repeating a practice until it feels "right".
  3. Ask whether the client seeks repeated reassurance from teachers, readers or online forums.
  4. Ask whether they avoid triggers such as books, places or words.
  5. Ask whether these behaviours cause impairment.
  IOCDF lists rewriting prayers until they feel correct, excessive confession and purification, repeated reassurance-seeking from clergy, and avoidance as markers of scrupulosity, and notes that OCD can "masquerade as religion". [source: IOCDF scrupulosity page] Apply the same markers to magical practice.
• Example language (illustrative):
  • "When you repeat the protection, is it because your tradition asks for it, or because the anxiety won't settle until you do?"
  • "What happens if you don't?"
• Watch for:
  • Rituals that keep growing.
  • Fixation on one detail while central practices lapse.
  • Paying readers for reassurance.
  • It is working when the client can tell their chosen practice apart from what the fear demands.

4.8 Grief-related magical meaning

• Purpose / when: When a death or loss is explained as a curse, or the client turns to magical means to contact or protect the dead or to undo the loss. [synthesis]
• Steps:
  1. Attend to the grief first.
  2. Explore how the curse explanation helps the client make sense of a loss that feels senseless, and what it costs them, such as blame, fear or conflict.
  3. Screen for prolonged grief and for exploitation by paid readers. Grieving people are named as targets of psychic scams. [source: AARP]
• Example language (illustrative): "It sounds like the idea of a curse gives some shape to a loss that otherwise makes no sense. Can we spend some time with the loss itself?"
• Watch for:
  • Mounting fees for contact or protection.
  • Blame directed at a specific person, who may then be at risk.
  • It is working when grief can be talked about directly.

4.9 Exposure and response prevention for magical-thinking OCD

• Purpose / when: When 4.7 indicates OCD. IOCDF describes ERP as two parts: practising confronting the thoughts, images, objects and situations that make you anxious (exposure), and "making a choice not to do a compulsive behavior" (response prevention). [source: IOCDF ERP page] For scrupulosity, IOCDF names CBT with ERP as the primary psychological treatment, sometimes with faith leaders consulted. The goal is to separate OCD from the person's values so they can live by those values. [source: IOCDF scrupulosity page] Deliver ERP only if you are trained in it; otherwise refer.
• Steps:
  1. Psychoeducation. Explain that compulsions are attempts to feel safe, and that doing them reinforces the brain's sense of danger. [source: IOCDF ERP page]
  2. Consent and collaboration. Build the exposure plan with the client. Stopping compulsions is the client's choice, and starting can feel like choosing danger. [source: IOCDF ERP page]
  3. Agree what counts as a compulsion. Do this with the client, if they wish after consulting a teacher in their tradition. Leave chosen, tradition-normal practice untouched. [source: IOCDF scrupulosity page, by analogy; synthesis]
  4. Build a graded list of exposures. For example:
     • tolerating uncertainty about whether harm will follow;
     • postponing, then dropping, repeated "corrective" or protective acts;
     • reading or hearing feared words in ordinary contexts;
     • stopping checks with readers or forums.
     Grading is [synthesis]; the IOCDF ERP page does not describe hierarchies.
  5. Rule out unsafe or tradition-violating exposures. Exposures never involve the therapist or client performing ritual operations, curses or grimoire workings, and never ask the client to break a vow or a sincerely held religious duty. [synthesis]
  6. Coach in session. Help the client stay with the discomfort without compulsions. Anxiety and uncertainty first rise. IOCDF calls these feelings "safe and manageable" and says they decline with repeated practice. [source: IOCDF ERP page]
  7. Shift ownership. Gradually hand over so the client runs their own exercises. [source: IOCDF ERP page]
  8. Fade reassurance, including your own. Do not reassure the client that a curse is unreal or that a ritual was "done right". [synthesis]
• Example language (illustrative):
  • "We're not testing whether magic is real. We're loosening the grip of the fear so that your practice is yours again."
  • "Notice the urge to repeat it. Can you let the urge be there without acting on it for now?"
  • "I'm not going to tell you whether you're safe. That's the OCD asking, and answering would feed it."
• Watch for:
  • Hidden mental compulsions.
  • Reassurance moved from you to online forums or readers.
  • Exposures that conflict with the client's tradition. Stop and renegotiate.
  • Severe distress, suicidality or emerging psychotic features. Pause ERP and reassess.
  • It is working when compulsions and avoidance fall, the urge weakens over repeated practice, and valued practice returns.

4.10 Fear of curses without OCD: belief-respecting coping

• Purpose / when: When the client fears a curse but there is no OCD or psychosis. The fear is distressing and shared within their community or family. [synthesis]
• Steps:
  1. Validate the distress without ruling on whether the curse is real.
  2. Ask what resources their own tradition or community already offers for such fears, and whom they trust there (see 4.14).
  3. Work on sleep, anxiety, interpersonal conflict and avoidance with standard methods.
  4. Explore the costs of the fear, such as suspicion of relatives or withdrawal.
  5. Make a plan for what they will do if a reader or acquaintance tells them they are cursed (see 4.11).
• Example language (illustrative):
  • "I can't tell you whether a curse is at work. What I can do is help with how much this fear is taking from your life."
  • "Who in your community do you trust with something like this?"
• Watch for:
  • Anger or suspicion directed at a named person.
  • Rapid escalation.
  • A new paid helper appearing.
  • It is working when the client is sleeping and functioning again and fear no longer drives decisions.

4.11 Screening for and responding to exploitation by paid "curse removers"

• Purpose / when: Screen any client who has paid, or is being asked to pay, for readings, cleansing or curse removal. Consumer-protection bodies describe a recognisable pattern:
  • a cheap first reading;
  • a claim that the client is cursed or has bad energy;
  • payments for removal;
  • claims that the curse persists, with further and stranger demands and ceremonies costing thousands. [source: WA Consumer Protection]
  AARP lists these warning signs [source: AARP]:
  • guarantees of outcomes;
  • repeatedly finding new problems that need paid help;
  • threats of harm to the client or their loved ones;
  • high-pressure tactics;
  • requests for secrecy.
  Grieving, lonely or struggling people are targeted. [source: AARP]
• Steps:
  1. Ask neutrally about any paid spiritual services, how much has been spent, and what happens if they stop paying.
  2. Name the pattern as consumer bodies describe it, without attacking the client's beliefs: legitimate practice versus a pattern regulators warn about.
  3. Support protective steps AARP advises:
     • talk to someone trusted before paying;
     • get total costs in writing;
     • share no financial details or account access;
     • keep nothing secret at the provider's request. [source: AARP]
  4. Help the client report if they wish. In the US: the FTC (reportfraud.ftc.gov), the BBB Scam Tracker, and the local FBI field office if they were threatened or pressured. [source: AARP] In Western Australia: WA ScamNet. [source: WA Consumer Protection] Elsewhere: the local consumer-protection agency or police [synthesis].
  5. Where the client may lack capacity or be an at-risk adult, follow local adult-safeguarding procedures. [synthesis]
  6. Address the shame that keeps clients silent.
• Example language (illustrative):
  • "Many people pay for spiritual help, and some services are straightforward. What consumer agencies warn about is a specific pattern: new problems keep appearing, fees climb, and there are threats if you stop. Does any of that fit?"
  • "Whatever you believe about curses, you deserve not to be frightened into paying."
• Watch for:
  • Secrecy.
  • Payments disguised from family.
  • Threats against loved ones.
  • The client defending the remover out of fear.
  • It is working when payments stop, the client has told a trusted person, and a report is made if they choose.

4.12 Managing adverse effects of intensive practice

• Purpose / when: When practice is followed by persistent anxiety, insomnia, derealisation, intrusive imagery or a sense of being under spiritual attack. No clinical literature specific to grimoire practice is cited here [uncertain: not verified]. Guidance here is [synthesis] from general clinical practice.
• Steps:
  1. Assess risk (4.5, 4.6).
  2. Agree with the client, respecting their autonomy, on reducing intensity or pausing practice while symptoms settle. Many traditions themselves counsel moderation, and the client's teacher may support this [uncertain].
  3. Restore sleep, routine and social contact.
  4. Agree grounding methods the client accepts.
  5. Write a brief safety plan: early warning signs, whom to call, when to seek urgent care.
  6. Refer for psychiatric review if symptoms persist or escalate.
• Example language (illustrative): "Would you be open to scaling back for a few weeks while we get your sleep back, and then deciding together what to return to?"
• Watch for:
  • The client feeling that pausing practice is itself dangerous. Explore this; it may be an OCD feature.
  • Symptoms persisting after practice stops.
  • It is working when symptoms subside and the client chooses how to resume, if at all.

4.13 Working with dependency on a practice, teacher or group

• Purpose / when: When the client can no longer make decisions without magical consultation, or a teacher or group controls money, relationships or access to outside help. [synthesis]
• Steps:
  1. Map decisions made through magic or the teacher.
  2. Map money spent, isolation from non-members, and the consequences of questioning or leaving.
  3. Explore the client's own values and wishes apart from the group's.
  4. Strengthen outside relationships.
  5. If the client wishes to leave, plan for practical and emotional consequences.
  6. See XIV 032 (Golden Dawn) and XIV 035 (Thelema, A∴A∴ and OTO) for high-control dynamics and religious trauma.
• Example language (illustrative): "If you set aside what the working or your teacher says for a moment, what do you want here?"
• Watch for:
  • Prohibition of therapy.
  • Escalating fees or demands.
  • Sexual or financial exploitation by a teacher. Follow reporting routes; see 4.11 and local law.
  • It is working when the client makes ordinary decisions independently.

4.14 Involving the client's community or teacher, with consent

• Purpose / when: To clarify what the tradition counts as normative, to support ERP, or to mobilise support. IOCDF notes that faith leaders are sometimes involved in scrupulosity treatment and can clarify their community's position. [source: IOCDF scrupulosity page] Applying this to esoteric teachers is [synthesis].
• Steps:
  1. Only at the client's request, with written consent stating what may be shared.
  2. Choose someone the client trusts, not the person who sold the curse diagnosis.
  3. Keep the question narrow, for example: "Does your tradition require this to be repeated until it feels right?"
• Example language (illustrative): "Would it help to ask someone you respect in your tradition whether this level of repetition is expected?"
• Watch for:
  • A teacher who reinforces the fear or demands money.
  • Confidentiality breaches.
  • It is working when the client gains a clearer sense of what their own tradition expects.

4.15 Referral

• Purpose / when: When the problem is beyond your competence or risk is present. [synthesis]
• Steps: Refer as follows:
  • suspected psychosis or mania: psychiatry or crisis services, urgently where risk is present;
  • OCD: an ERP-trained clinician (IOCDF maintains resources) [source: IOCDF ERP page];
  • dissociation or trauma: specialist services;
  • fraud: consumer protection or police (4.11);
  • medical symptoms attributed to curses: a physician;
  • religious conflict: a culturally competent colleague or chaplain.
  Share your cultural formulation with consent.
• Example language (illustrative): "I'd like you to see a colleague who specialises in this. I'll explain your background so you don't have to start from scratch."
• Watch for: Watch for the client feeling dismissed or "handed off" because of their beliefs. It is working when the client attends and the referral letter conveys the cultural context.

4.16 Holding the therapist's role and boundaries

• Purpose / when: Throughout. [synthesis]
• Steps:
  1. Decline requests to read, cleanse, protect, judge a ritual, recommend a magical practitioner or assess whether a curse is real.
  2. If you practise magic or divination yourself, keep it entirely outside the therapy and do not offer it to clients.
  3. Self-disclose about your own beliefs rarely, briefly and only for the client's benefit.
  4. Seek consultation when your own fascination, fear or scepticism colours the work.
  The boundary points in this section are [synthesis]; check them against your own professional ethics code (for psychologists, the APA Ethics Code, https://www.apa.org/ethics/code).
• Example language (illustrative): "That's not something I do as your therapist. What I can help with is how this is affecting you."
• Watch for:
  • Drift into a guru or protector role.
  • Collusion with fear.
  • Dismissiveness.
  • It is working when the client experiences you as respectful and clear about your role.

5. Handling problems

Sources address only the ERP and exploitation points below. The rest is [synthesis].

• The client wants you to confirm or deny the curse. Decline warmly and state your role (4.16). If the request repeats, consider whether it is reassurance seeking (4.7) and whether answering would feed OCD. [synthesis; ERP rationale source: IOCDF]
• The client wants to tell you ritual details or show you a grimoire. Listen for meaning and function. Do not study, correct or engage with procedure. Steer back to effects on the client. [synthesis]
• The client fears that therapy, or stopping a protective act, will itself bring harm. Acknowledge that starting ERP can feel like choosing danger [source: IOCDF ERP page]. Slow the pace, start lower on the list, and return to the client's values.
• The client resists ERP as an attack on their faith. Restate that the target is the compulsion, not the tradition. Offer consultation with a trusted teacher to separate the two [source: IOCDF scrupulosity page]. If the client still declines, respect that and offer other support.
• Overwhelm during exposure. Return to an easier step and check for dissociation or emerging psychotic features. Never push exposures that involve ritual operations or curse-making; these are excluded. [synthesis]
• Non-adherence: rituals done in secret between sessions. Explore without blame and look for hidden mental compulsions or reassurance moved to forums or readers. Re-agree targets. [synthesis]
• The client keeps paying a remover despite discussing it. Fear and shame often keep people paying. Avoid ultimatums. Identify the threat that keeps them paying, involve a trusted person with consent, and offer help reporting [source: AARP for the protective steps]. Escalate to adult safeguarding if the client may lack capacity or is being coerced [synthesis].
• The family insists the practice is demonic or the cause of the illness. Use the CFI stresses-and-conflicts domain to map the conflict [source: APA CFI]. Offer family sessions with consent. Neither side's metaphysics is adjudicated.
• Ruptures. Ruptures often follow a moment when the client felt mocked or pathologised, for example by a referral. Name the rupture, take responsibility for your part, restate respect for the client's beliefs, and explain the reason for any referral in terms of symptoms, not beliefs. [synthesis]
• Stuck: belief and symptom cannot be separated. Seek consultation. Gather collateral information from the community with consent. Monitor over time; observing course and function often clarifies what one assessment cannot. [synthesis]
• Risk to a third party. This applies when a client believes a specific person cursed them and expresses anger or intent. Carry out a risk assessment and follow local duty-to-protect law and policy. [synthesis]
• Children. Children may be exposed to adult ritual practice, or labelled cursed or possessed within a family. Follow local safeguarding procedures. Seek assessment of the child's own symptoms rather than accepting a spiritual label in place of it. [synthesis]
• Your own reactions. Fear, fascination or contempt toward occult material is common in clinicians. Take it to supervision rather than into the session. [synthesis]

Sources

• Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (review by Alec Ryrie), Times Higher Education
• Hocus Pocus (Ronald Hutton reviews Owen Davies), Literary Review
• Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, collection catalogue entry
• Franchetto, review of Attrell and Porreca, Picatrix, Correspondences 8.2 (2020)
• Ars Notoria: The Notory Art of Solomon (Castle 2023), Simon & Schuster
• Ars Notoria, Wikipedia [uncertain: secondary, unverified]
• Clark Library (UCLA) blog on the Lesser Key of Solomon and Ars Notoria
• Persuasions of the Witch's Craft, Stanford Anthropology
• Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), International OCD Foundation
• What is OCD scrupulosity?, International OCD Foundation
• DSM-5 Cultural Formulation Interview Supplementary Modules, American Psychiatric Association
• ICD-10-CM Z65.8 (Unbound Medicine): Z65.8 "Other specified problems related to psychosocial circumstances" (includes: religious or spiritual problem)
• Psychic Scams, AARP (2022)
• Commissioner's blog: Beware the misfortune tellers, Consumer Protection WA (2020, updated 2024)

Books cited:

• Davies, O. (2009). Grimoires: A History of Magic Books. Oxford University Press.
• Attrell, D., & Porreca, D. (trans.) (2019). Picatrix: A Medieval Treatise on Astral Magic. Pennsylvania State University Press.
• Véronèse, J. (2007). L'Ars notoria au Moyen Âge: Introduction et édition critique. SISMEL–Edizioni del Galluzzo [uncertain: secondary, unverified].
• Castle, M. (trans.) (2023). Ars Notoria: The Notory Art of Solomon. Inner Traditions.
• Luhrmann, T. M. (1989). Persuasions of the Witch's Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England. Harvard University Press.
• Vieten, C., et al. (2013). Spiritual and religious competencies [uncertain: not verified].