'The Evil Eye' ... and other curses

The Evil Eye is a curse. It matters not the detail of exactly what the evil eye is ... more importantly is the nature of the evil eye and other curses ....

Curses are the magical things that people fear the worst. They are not diseases in the sense of the germ theory, but they act a lot like them sometimes. It's more like a malaise, actually. It's a feeling of discomfort that seems to have no specific cause or location. It just hangs around you like a cloud.

A curse works because the recipient or recipients are influenced to interpret reality differently than before. They are now attuned to the bad things that the curse will do them and believe that such things will occur. Subsequent events that resemble the curse effects are attributed to that nebulous cause. As more of these events are collected, the victim begins to act as if the negative effect is more and more inevitable. The whole thing becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, after you start the ball rolling. Curses build over time until a crisis point is reached and some drastic action is taken, resolving the tension.

Curses are best dealt with by exchanging the victim's belief in the curse for a belief in a cure. This breaks the cycle of expectations and begins a new cycle of less unpleasant expectations, those of a blessing.