Black magic, curses, spells… they’re like the dark web of spirituality. Most seekers have heard whispers of these things, but very few are willing to take a closer look. And for good reason, I may add.
But are these things actually real?
If light can heal, shadow can also wound. Anyone who is committed to spiritual truth will eventually encounter the dark side of it. The underbelly of spirituality is not pretty to look at, but pretending it doesn’t exist won’t make it go away.
I’m writing this article to show you what black magic looks like in the real world, how it tends to operate, and how you can protect yourself from spiritual attack.
This knowledge stems from my own experience in the shamanic healing space, nearly a decade of living across different cultures and exploring their traditions, as well as stories shared by people I trust.
I will not describe methods for harming others. This is about awareness only.
What Exactly Is Black Magic?
Black magic means using spiritual knowledge or power to harm rather than heal. As the name suggests, it is linked to darkness, malevolent spirits, and the shadow side of spirituality.
You might imagine satanic rituals in the dead of night, a witch doctor spilling blood over bones, or offerings made to dark spirits with the intention of bringing misfortune. And yes, while these sorts of rituals do exist, black magic doesn’t always look like a horror movie.
Often it’s subtle, hidden in jealousy, envy, or a discrete ritual. It might be as simple as a symbolic act carrying harmful intention, or as elaborate as ceremonies to summon darker forces.
Most spiritual practitioners use their knowledge for good, such as to heal, guide, and uplift. But just as not all doctors live by their oath, some misuse their skills for personal gain.
Corruption exists everywhere.
Politics, business, medicine… The spiritual world is no different.
Wherever duality exists, so does contrast.
If love and light exist, so does torment and suffering. If people can use energy to heal, they can also use it to destroy. If there are benevolent spirits, so are there malevolent spirits.
The spiritual realm is a big place, and there’s a lot more happening behind the scenes than many of us acknowledge.
At the most foundational level of existence, there is no separation. But in the dimensions we’re living right now, both in body and spirit, darkness exists, and there are certainly people who know how to harness it.
Where Is Black Magic Used?
Wherever people learn to work with energies or spirits, they can also misuse these abilities. That’s why black magic is not a specific ritual or tradition. Rather, it’s a facet of spirituality that people may learn to tap into.
Every spiritual tradition has its shadow. I’ll share a few examples:
- South America: Brujas and sorcerers use plants, curses, or spirit invocations to cause illness or misfortune. Some shamans misuse their gifts, sending spiritual darts or cursing rivals.
- West Africa: Voodoo, which is often misrepresented, can be used for spell-casting or spirit manipulation to harm.
- India: Certain branches of tantra walk a darker path, involving binding, control, or lower entities.
- Europe: Folk traditions include hexes, curses, and witchcraft lore.
- Middle East: Belief in the evil eye is widespread, with protective talismans like the hamsa or nazar guarding against it.
- East Asia: Rituals of spirit manipulation, ancestral curses, and binding practices are part of some traditions.
The pattern looks very similar, regardless of what the container is: Focused intent, symbolic action, and an aim to cause illness, misfortune, or control.
Some people work with spirits, others with plants, objects, words, or rituals. Some traditions call it witchcraft, others call it sorcery.
The key takeaway is that every culture has its version of harmful spiritual practices, which reinforces that black magic is not superstition from one isolated group, but a universal recognition of the shadow side of spiritual power.
So, Why Do People Use Black Magic?
This all sounds horrible… So why would anyone actually practice black magic? Mostly, it comes down to very human motives such as revenge, power, fear, and desperation.
Hurt people sometimes want to hurt back. Imagine being so resentful that you start to fantasize about making the other person suffer. Now imagine you also have access to spiritual techniques that let you act on those fantasies without ever leaving your house.
That combination can be dangerous.
So, let’s look at a few common drivers of why people practice black magic:
- Revenge and resentment: Old grievances can calcify into a desire to punish.
- Power and control: People who feel powerless in life may use dark arts to gain influence over others or to empower themselves.
- Greed and material gain: Promises of wealth, status, or advantage can lure people into making deals they otherwise would not.
- Wounding and trauma: Deep emotional wounds can make a person resonate with darker energies that promise quick fixes or strength.
- Addiction to the experience: The dark path can feel intoxicating. What starts as one attempt to fix a problem becomes another hit, then another, until the person is consumed.
- Deception and coercion: Some people are tricked or pressured into agreements with spirits or manipulative teachers who promise results.
- Cultural and social pressures: In some contexts, using spirit work is normalised as a way to settle disputes or protect interests.
A spirit might offer everything you think you want.
Wealth, influence, or protection in return for a pact. Whether you call it a soul contract or not, the person trades integrity for temporary gain.
Not everyone who uses these practices is a cartoon villain. Many are ordinary people who made a bad choice in a moment of pain, or began walking a path that they later regret. That moral ambiguity is part of what makes this topic hard and also why it haunts communities for generations.
The Shadow of Spirituality
The idea of black magic, curses, and all of that stuff never really came to mind when I first set foot on this spiritual journey. But the further I step along this path, the more illuminated this world becomes.
Black magic has become less of a vague concept and more of a reality that I am learning to navigate. I’ve encountered dark spirits, heard many unpleasant stories, and had glimpses of the underworld, too, while shamanic Journeying.
As much as I don’t want to go to these dark places, sometimes it’s necessary. I’ve been taught by some incredible teachers that anyone who is training to be a healer needs to see the shadow, because a big part of healing involves illuminating it.
It wasn’t until I began working at an Ayahuasca center in Ecuador that I started to see behind the curtains. While most shamans are true healers who work with the light, there’s definitely an insidious underbelly in the shamanic world.
Shamans always protect the space and ward off dark energies via tobacco smoke, prayer, and cleansings. Curious to learn all about it, I had some interesting conversations, especially regarding Brujas (sorcerers) who work with malevolent spirits, often to attack other healers.
But the attention was in the details.
Healers forbade photos of the ceremony space so Brujas couldn’t send unwanted energies. Some shamans line their property with symbols and regularly perform cleansings. They are all careful about protecting the space and take this work very seriously.
Then regularly came guests who had some sort of spiritual attack or entity attachment that needed to be removed. The healers would remove energies, help the person cut ties, and on occasion, perform an exorcism, which is just about as intense as they sound.
During this time, I was also close to a Shuar woman whose uncle worked with black magic to make people sick. I never met the man, so I can’t say for sure how this all played out. From what this lady told me, he wasn’t a good person, but I’m sure everyone has some redeemable qualities, right?
Needless to say, I didn’t do a ceremony with him to find out…
What About Curses?
I know less about curses than I do about ritual work, but they’re worth a look. Not all black magic results in a curse, and not all curses come from black magic.
Still, there’s a relationship.
From what I’ve seen, curses can run through bloodlines, bind themselves to certain places, or even objects. We’ve all heard stories of Native American tribes cursing land and deeming it uninhabitable for settlers, or fables of cursed airlooms.
But curses take different forms too.
In mid-2025, I was doing Lama Fera training in Nepal. Lama Fera is an energetic healing method influenced by Tibetan practices and used by some healers to remove dense energies. It’s often called on for cleansings and exorcisms in South Asia because it can help loosen possessions or bindings.
My teacher shared one extreme case he had worked on.
A woman was brought to the center by her children one day, and she was incoherent, violent, and out of her mind. When the healer began Lama Fera, the woman spoke in a deep male voice, which he knew to be another intelligence speaking through her.
It didn’t take him long until he realized that the woman was being used as a channel, and he was communicating directly with the person who invoked a curse on her, as if speaking through a human window.
The healer found out that the woman was being prepared for sacrifice, scheduled five days out. He told me that this woman had recently spent some time in Assam, a state of India that is well-known as “land of the Occult” due to its traditions of sorcery, where she must have been targeted.
The ritual took hours, and she did not snap back to normal instantly. She was brought back a few times by her children, where the healer would continue the work on her, and the bond gradually weakened.
As she regained fragments of control, she was able to come on her own. Over a week or so, the binding was sufficiently loosened that the immediate threat passed, and she was no longer under this spell from the Occultist.
The case didn’t prove every superstition about the supernatural, but it did show that experienced practitioners can sometimes shift a person’s state in ways that matter.
How Does Black Magic Work?
I will not provide instructions, steps, or methods to cause harm. I have never tried black magic and never will. What follows is a mix of direct observation, things I was taught, and a bit of theory.
At the most basic level, it comes down to intent. Human attention is powerful, while energy can be concentrated and directed.
When you focus love or gratitude on someone, you are directing that energy toward them in a way that can change moods, choices, and sometimes outcomes.
This is where the whole ‘pray for someone’ thing takes root, believing that the concentrated, directed energy of that prayer, whether that be compassion, gratitude, or love, can energetically affect the person and the resulting outcome.
Black magic is the same basic principle working in reverse.
When someone concentrates dense emotions such as jealousy or hate and intentionally directs that energy at another person, that focused negativity can alter the target’s field.
In shamanic terms, this is often discussed as ‘darting.’
The surrounding practice and ritual act like amplifiers. A spoken name, a carved object, a repeated gesture, or a bitter story focuses attention on a symbol, and the symbol channels the intent.
This is how we got that creepy image of a Voodoo priest poking a doll with a needle and causing harm. It’s not that simple, and that’s mostly a misconception of what Voodoo is really about, but you get the idea.
There are several layers at work, working together:
- Psychological amplification: If you believe you are cursed, you may behave differently, become stressed, and weaken your health. That reaction feeds the problem.
- Social reinforcement: Communities that accept a story about harm make it harder for the target to shake loose. Gossip, exclusion, and fear all help the effect spread.
- Symbolic tuning: Objects, words, and images concentrate meaning. Symbolic acts make the intention more persistent and easier for the mind to return to.
- Ritual and practice: Repetition, ceremony, and focused attention amplify the operator’s intent and create habit-based momentum.
- Energetic or archetypal layers: Many traditions describe spirits, entities, or archetypal forces that can be engaged. I do not pretend to prove that empirically, but experienced practitioners report these interactions, and some rituals appear to shift a person’s state in ways that matter.
None of this is linear or guaranteed.
Prayer does not automatically heal everyone, and concentrated hate will not always succeed. Many variables matter, including the strength of the target’s boundaries, how energetically vulnerable or exposed they are, and the skill of the person directing the intent.
And that’s surface-level stuff.
Yes, I’m sure there are elaborate ceremonies and rituals too that involve some real nasty stuff, probably a whole lot of suffering, and intent to leverage darker energies.
As people can connect with all sorts of energies and deities, if you really put your intention to it, you can probably connect with dark spirits too, which could be directed to invoke curses or spiritually attack people.
When you understand how these dynamics operate, you can better protect yourself by interrupting the attention, changing the symbols, strengthening your boundaries, and calling in community.
What’s the Cost of Black Magic?
The short answer: It’s not worth it.
Working with dark energies carries real costs, whether the bargain is deliberate or accidental.
There are serious karmic repercussions to working with black magic too. People who trade in harm usually pay later in ways that are not fair. They may gain a short-term advantage, but the long-term price is often emotional, relational, and spiritual.
People who tangle with dark spirits often find themselves more anxious, isolated, and addicted to the feeling of power. Relationships, reputation, and livelihood can be lost.
In extreme cases, there are legal and safety risks when actions escalate into threats or violence.
Then there is the subtle entanglement.
Some people connect to difficult energies by accident. Things like being overly sensitive to energies without knowing how to navigate them properly, making desperate pleas due to grief or vulnerability, or sloppy practice can open unwanted doors.
And once a pattern forms, it can be hard to step away.
I once worked with a client who connected with a dark deity. It was not overtly malevolent at first, but it did not feel safe. She gradually got pulled into drama and choices she later regretted. That slow erosion of agency is a cost most people do not foresee.
Finally, there is spiritual toxicity.
Darkness correlates with suffering. Habitually feeding it shapes your mind and heart in narrower, harsher ways. Even when a person tries to stop, they often need serious moral repair, community accountability, and steady practice to rebuild their life.
Bottom line: The temporary gains that come from shortcut deals are almost always outweighed by long-term damage. If you value your freedom, your relationships, and your spiritual growth, the dark path is a bad investment.
How to protect yourself from black magic
Every tradition has its own protection tools and rituals. It shows people across time and place learned how to hold safe ground against harmful intent.
Protection works on three levels: Your body and nervous system, your social network, and the symbolic or ritual field you deliberately create.
Treat all three.
Practical, immediate steps
- Check basics first. Rule out medical or psychiatric causes for sudden illness or strange behavior.
- Document what you notice. Dates, symptoms, witnesses, and any patterns.
- Strengthen your boundaries. Reduce contact with people who drain or exploit you.
- Ground the nervous system. Sleep, food, breathwork, and time in nature lower reactivity and make you less porous.
- Simple clearing. Smudging with certain plants like White Sage or Palo Santo can help, as with ringing bells or singing, a salt bath, or a short protective visualization (white, gold, or purple light) can reset your field. These are stabilisers, not cures.
- Avoid risky plant work if you suspect an attachment. Plant medicine requires careful containering. Do not take strong entheogens if you feel bound, disoriented, or under pressure from a practitioner.
- Legal and safety steps. If threats are real or physical harm is possible, involve local authorities and keep records.
Symbols and objects can help create focus and a sense of safety.
Rudraksha beads, protective stones like black tourmaline, prayer, bells, or talismans are useful because they anchor your intention. Use what resonates for you, the belief is a key driver.
Dark work exists, and there is a way back.
The strongest protection is your clarity and community. Name the pattern, seek accountable help, and prioritise practical safety alongside spiritual care. Stay grounded. Stay awake. Stay kind to yourself.
