A practiced Santa Barbara psychic weighs in on Lil B’s so far effective curse against basketball superstar Kevin Durant.
By Elena Gooray
Left: Kevin Durant (Photo: Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)
| Right: Lil B (Photo:
Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for Coachella)
The Oklahoma City Thunder were eliminated from the National Basketball Association playoffs Monday night, and a lot of people are chalking it up to a curse. Five years ago, rapper Lil B — known to many as the BasedGod — issued a curse against Oklahoma’s star player, Kevin Durant, who had provoked Lil B by calling him “wack” in a Tweet. By law of the BasedGod curse, Durant — one of the 10 highest-paid players in the league — could never win a championship. (See these detailedaccounts of the feud.)
With his Thunder contract ending, Durant is entering a key stage of his professional life. Some fans (like me) are worried about the reach of this curse. So Pacific Standard turned to an expert: Santa Barbara-based psychic Amy Katz, who has practiced professionally for 13 years (and is pursuing a doctorate in depth psychology, a field that draws heavily from mid-20th century psychiatrist Carl Jung). Thankfully, Katz is optimistic about a possible Lil B-Durant friendship.
How would you describe or define a curse?
This is just my opinion — anyone you ask can only present a teensy glimmer of insight into any of these huge metaphysical questions. With that preface, I think it’s negativity directed at another. It’s anger and hatred and, underneath that, fear and a deep woundedness. All of that is wrapped up in a willful intention to hurt another person.
If you get cursed, what should you expect to come?
It depends on how you respond to it. A myriad of different things can happen. If the person feels the same way about their self as the one cursing them, they are indeed cursed and will feel the negative effects. [A curse] reflects projections, like arrows being shot from another person. If we deflect those arrows by saying, “these are your own projections of your self,” that will stop it.
What has your experience been, consulting people with curses?
Curses take many forms. Sometimes people have been told by the person cursing them that there is a curse, but more often they have gone to other psychics who have not been of integrity and told these people they’re cursed, and want to charge thousands of dollars to remove the curse. So I help remove a lot of damage that’s been done by less scrupulous psychics, first of all either by assuring that the person has not been cursed or by finding really simple remedies — something like lighting a candle, or saying prayers and calling in one’s ancestors.
I have to venture an opinion about this rapper, though I don’t even know who he is — I would love to do some sessions with him. We’d have to find out specifics — the particularities. It’s kind of like working with a dream. And I would love to know what songs in particular evoked this [original tweet from Durant].
What more could we learn from the particulars?
These struggles going on between the rapper and the basketball player, both of them have likely been wounded in different ways and both of them need the same exact thing. They need to be heard, they need to be recognized, they need to be loved.
I think there may be a rapper inside [Durant] that’s mirroring the other rapper, so his own inner rapper is cursing him, and this conflict may be causing him not to be the player he wants to be. He must find a way to stop cursing himself.
How does a curse come back to the person who put it out there?
There’s something in Wiccan philosophy — and other cultures believe this as well, it seems to be almost a universal law—called the threefold rule. It means whatever we put out comes back to us three times stronger. If I get angry at someone and express that, it comes back to me even more forcefully.
When we are dealing with curses, we are entering the realm of nightmares. One of the first steps is to call in our support, our guides, ancestors. We can’t face nightmares alone. We can’t face curses alone. And curses are almost always linked to the transmission of transgenerational trauma. That trauma often goes back to the suffering of one’s ancestors, whether that’s through war, through alcoholism, anything.
What about the fact that this is all took place on Twitter, a very public space?
The transmission of trauma is a societal problem, as well. I would venture to say that this happening in the public domain, in social media, something that millions of people are taking part in, because they are also channeling and giving expression to fear and anger that is in the collective right now. This is a reflection of our times, of our society, and of what is asking to be healed.
When we dialogue in a safe, supportive way, that’s when the cursing figures in us start to shape-shift in a way, and we can start to see our vulnerable selves in them, and they start to lose their frightening power. If we can stay with this long enough, we can actually become allies. There’s a dance that the rapper and the basketball player are doing, and if they can get help in doing it, they could actually end up as best friends, or at least allies who are working for the common good.
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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
