What a Practitioner Actually Needs From You — and What They Should Never Ask For

Measurements or a file: the distinction that decides everything

Almost everyone approaches this question the wrong way around. They read a list of what some practitioner asked for — full name, date of birth, a photograph, the names of everyone involved — and try to decide whether that list is normal. It is. All of it is documented practice, some of it centuries old. Zora Neale Hurston's 1931 fieldwork in New Orleans and Harry Middleton Hyatt's five volumes of interviews recorded in the American South describe work anchored to named people through exactly these means. European cunning craft did the same. Judged by the list alone, a careful traditional practitioner and a confidence artist look identical on the first day.

So the list is not the test. The useful distinction is about destination. A tailor takes your measurements. The measurements go into a garment, the garment comes to you, and the notebook page is finished. Nothing about that process is improved by the tailor also knowing your bank balance, and nothing is improved by them keeping a growing dossier on you after the suit is delivered.

An intake is a set of measurements. A harvest is a file. The same question — when were you born? — belongs to one or the other depending on where the answer goes. It goes into the work when the practitioner times a working to your chart. It goes into a file when it is the third of four identifiers someone needs in order to become you somewhere else, or when it will be read back to you next week as proof of second sight.

Three properties separate the two, and all three are testable by you, in advance, for free. An honest intake is bounded — a finite list, given once. It is explained — each item has a plain-language job. And it is closed — there is an answer to what happens to your material when the work ends. The rest of this guide is those three properties, worked out item by item.

What genuinely goes into the work

Here is the honest version of the list, as a practitioner who takes commissions actually uses it.

Your situation, in your own words, at length. This is the largest part and the part clients most often want to skip. Not "I want him back" but what happened, in what order, who else is in the room, what has already been tried, and what a realistic good outcome would look like several months from now. A practitioner who accepts a one-line brief has not assessed anything; they have taken an order. Our companion guide on what to expect when someone performs a ritual for you covers what happens after this stage.

Identification of the person the work is for. Usually a full name. Often a date of birth, because a great many traditions time or tune work to it. If the work involves another person, that person's name as well — which is a genuinely heavy thing to hand over, and we have written separately about where the line sits in love work.

Sometimes a personal item. In the folk-magic vocabulary these are called personal concerns: a photograph, a signature, a strand of hair, a small object that belongs to the person. Their use is well documented. It is also the one category where the disposal question genuinely matters, because unlike a date of birth, a personal item physically leaves your possession.

Constraints. Your deadline and why it exists. Whether anyone in your household must not know. What you are unwilling to do. Whether a medical, legal, or safety situation sits underneath the spiritual framing — which a serious practitioner asks about precisely so they can decline the parts that are not theirs to touch.

That is the whole of it. It is a longer list than most people expect and a much shorter one than most scams require. Note what is absent: nothing on it is a credential, a number, or an access route. Everything on it describes your situation rather than your assets.

The Three Columns

When a request arrives and you are not sure about it, sort it into one of three columns before you answer. Almost every ask falls cleanly into one, and the column tells you what to do.

Column A — it goes into the work. The material is consumed by the ritual itself. Column B — it runs the business. Ordinary commerce: a name for the invoice, an address for a posted report. Column C — it opens a door to something of yours. Money, identity, accounts, access, property. Column C is not a matter of degree. There is no tradition anywhere that requires it, and no working that is improved by it.

Sorting a request before you answer it

What is asked	Column	What a straight answer sounds like
Your full name	A and B	"The petition names you. It also goes on the receipt."
Date of birth	A	"I time the work to your chart" — or, honestly, "my tradition uses it to identify you."
A photograph of you	A	"It sits on the altar for the duration. I return it with the report" — or "I burn it at the close."
A named third party	A	"I need to know who is involved to decide whether I will take this at all."
Email or postal address	B	"That is where the report goes."
What you earn, owe, or have saved	C	There is no straight answer. A price is a number they publish, not a number they calculate from you.
Bank, card, or account numbers	C	None. Payment runs through a checkout, like any other service.
Cash or valuables sent to be blessed	C	None. This one has its own police warnings, below.
Government ID, SSN, passport	C	None. No tradition has ever needed a state document.
Passwords or account access	C	None, in any framing whatsoever.

What should never be asked for — and the sentence it hides behind

Column C asks rarely arrive naked. They arrive wearing a spiritual reason, and the reason is the whole trick, because it converts an obviously absurd request into one that sounds like part of a tradition. The counter-move is unglamorous: strip the wrapping and read the request back to yourself in plain words. "Send your savings so the money can be cleansed of the blockage" becomes "send me your savings." If the plain version would be a crime or a joke coming from a stranger, the wrapping was doing all the work.

What you earn, owe, or have saved. The disguise is usually proportionality — the offering must match the weight of the work, the materials scale with the size of the blockage. A real price is a published number attached to a described service. It is set by how long the work takes, not by how much you have. If you want the full arithmetic of what ritual work costs and why, we set out our own pricing and the bands around it in a separate piece.

Cash or valuables handed over or mailed "to be blessed." This is the one Column C ask with its own dedicated police warnings, because it is a distinct, recurring crime pattern. Departments including the San Francisco Police Department and agencies across Southern California have issued public alerts about the so-called blessing scam, in which money or jewelry is gathered up to be spiritually cleansed and returned — and comes back as a bundle of paper. AARP has warned about the same pattern for years. The rule is short: your valuables never leave your hands, for any spiritual reason, ever.

Government identity documents. The disguise is verification — they need to confirm you are who you say you are before committing to the working. No documented tradition of ritual work has ever required a state-issued document. A driver's license photograph is not a personal concern; it is an identity document, and the people who want them want them for what they unlock.

Passwords and account access. The disguise is investigative — they need to see what is attached to you online, who has been watching you, what is following you through your messages. There is no framing in which this is legitimate.

Intimate photographs. Sometimes framed as necessary for love work. It is not, in any tradition, and the request itself is the answer.

Details of a named person's health, or your family's. A practitioner asking whether a medical situation underlies your request is doing their job, and should be declining that part of the work. A practitioner collecting diagnoses is building a file — usually one that will be read back to you later.

Federal prosecutors continue to bring cases in this area. In June 2026 the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Washington announced charges in a fortune-teller fraud case in which, according to the government's allegations, victims were directed to liquidate assets and send the money away so it could be "cleansed," with at least $2.5 million taken from three people. Those allegations remain unproven and the defendants are presumed innocent. We cite it for the shape of the thing, not as a verdict: the money moved because a Column C request wore a Column A costume.

The Echo Test

Everything above is about the asking. This section is about the returning, and it is the more reliable signal of the two, because it is much harder to fake and it costs you nothing to run.

The clearest documented case of the mechanism is not from ritual work at all. In 1986 the magician and investigator James Randi examined the televised healing crusades of the preacher Peter Popoff, who appeared to receive the names, addresses, and ailments of strangers in the audience by revelation. Randi's team scanned the radio frequencies in the hall and found Popoff's wife reading those details into a hidden earpiece — off the prayer cards the audience members had filled in themselves on the way in. The recordings were broadcast on The Tonight Show and the ministry filed for bankruptcy the following year.

That is the shape to hold in mind. Nobody was reading minds. People had written down their own information, and it was returned to them as evidence of a power. The modern version is quieter and does not need an earpiece: a long intake form, or a generous first conversation in which you do almost all of the talking, followed some days later by a reading that tells you, with feeling, what you already told them.

It works even when the return is vague. In 1949 the psychologist Bertram Forer gave thirty-nine students what he described as individual personality profiles based on a test they had taken. Every student received the identical text, which Forer had assembled out of a newsstand astrology book. Asked to rate how well it described them, the class averaged 4.26 out of a possible 5. If a generic sketch scores that high, a sketch built from your own disclosures will feel like being seen to the bone.

How to run the test. Before your first substantial conversation with anyone, write two short lists on paper. List A: three specific facts about your life you have not told this person and that a stranger could not easily find online. List B: three things you have already told them, or that sit on your public profiles. Keep the paper. Then, when they tell you what they see, sense, or have been shown, note which list it draws from. Honest work draws from neither, because honest work does not claim to know things about you — it reports what it did. What comes back at the end of a commission is an account of the working: what was prepared, when it was performed, what was said, what was burned or buried or kept.

One fair exception, and it matters. A practitioner repeating your situation back to you to confirm they have understood it is not running an echo. That is a brief, and a good practitioner does it out loud so you can correct them. The echo is the same material re-presented later as their knowledge rather than yours. The difference is entirely in the framing, and you will hear it. If you have been told a curse is on you and you are trying to think it through carefully, our guide on how to work out whether you are cursed sets out the exclusions to run first.

Bounded, explained, closed

The three properties from the opening, now with the question that tests each one.

Bounded. An honest intake is front-loaded. Everything the practitioner needs is asked before the work begins, because that is when it is needed — you cannot design a working around information you do not have yet. The failing pattern is the drip: a new requirement surfacing after payment, then another, each one presented as something the work has revealed a need for. Note carefully that this is not the same as the escalating fee pattern, which is a separate problem covered in our piece on cost. This one escalates information rather than money, and it usually runs ahead of the money by a week or two. The question: "Is this the complete list of what you need from me?" Ask it early, and hold them to the answer.

Explained. Every item should survive the question what does this do in the work? — answered in one plain sentence, in ordinary language. "I time the work to your natal chart, so I need the date and, if you have it, the hour" is an explanation. "It is required" is not an explanation; neither is a reference to what the spirits demand, which relocates the authority somewhere you cannot question it. You are not owed the whole of someone's method. You are owed a sentence per item.

Closed. Anything of yours that physically leaves your possession has to have an ending. A photograph, a signature, a lock of hair, a written petition in your own handwriting: ask what happens to it when the work is finished. Returned with the report, burned at the close, and kept on file until you ask for it back are all legitimate answers, and they differ by tradition. Having no answer at all is not a tradition. It is an absence of one.

What happens to your information afterward

There is an uncomfortable fact underneath all of this that the trade does not discuss often enough, so we will say it plainly. When you commission ritual work, you hand a small business a detailed written account of the worst month of your life. That file exists somewhere afterward — in a notebook, in an email thread, on somebody's laptop.

The reasonable questions are the ordinary ones you would ask any professional. Is it on paper or on a computer. Does anyone else in the practice read it. Is it kept after the work closes, and for how long. Will any part of it ever appear in public, in a teaching example, or in a post, even anonymized. Every one of these has a good answer available, and asking for it is not rude.

And one honest limit, because you should not learn it later: a ritual practitioner is not a licensed therapist, an attorney, or clergy in the legal sense, and no confidentiality privilege attaches to what you say. Whatever discretion you get is a promise from a person, not a protection under law. That is not a reason to avoid commissioning work. It is a reason to prefer practitioners who volunteer the limit before you ask about it — and it is a good reason to keep the most sensitive details of other people's lives out of the account you give.

When an uncomfortable question is the right one

An article like this risks teaching people to flinch at the wrong things, so here is the other side of it honestly.

Some legitimate intakes are long, and some of the questions in them are genuinely uncomfortable. A practitioner taking on protection work will want to know who the other party is and what has actually happened between you, because the answer decides whether the request is a spiritual matter or a safety matter. A practitioner working astrologically may push for a birth time and be annoying about it. One who declines medical situations has to ask about medical situations in order to decline them. Somebody assessing whether to take your case at all may ask what you are hoping for in a way that feels like being tested, because you are being tested — for whether the work you want is work they will do.

Being asked something you did not expect is not the red flag. Not being able to get a plain answer to what is this for is the red flag. A practitioner who cannot explain their own list, or who becomes evasive or offended when asked, has told you something regardless of what the list contains. If you are still weighing up a specific person, our twelve red flags of fake spell casters runs through the rest of the pattern in the order you usually meet it.

Voices from practice

We do not publish invented testimonials, so what follows is described in general terms — patterns practitioners and consumer advocates report, not quoted individuals.

Practitioners who take client commissions often report that the clients who ask the most questions at the intake stage are the easiest to work with afterward, because expectations were settled before anything was paid for. The same practitioners tend to report the opposite about clients who want to skip straight to the working: those are the cases where disappointment arrives later, over something that was never agreed.

Consumer-protection caseworkers describe a recurring sequence in the fraud cases they handle, and the order is consistent: the information comes first, the diagnosis second, the money third. Victims frequently recall that the early conversations felt unusually generous with time and attention. That is not incidental — it is where the material is gathered.

A pattern reported often enough to be worth naming: people who were defrauded commonly say, afterward, that they had noticed something odd at the time and talked themselves out of it, usually because they had already paid something and did not want the first payment to have been wasted. That is an ordinary and well-studied feature of how people reason about money already spent, not a personal failing.

What we don't promise

We do not promise that a ritual produces a specific outcome, and no honest practitioner does. We cannot promise that a correct intake means correct work, only that an incorrect one is a reliable early warning. We do not claim that the tests in this guide identify every fraud — a patient and disciplined operator can pass all three properties and still be dishonest, which is why they are a first filter rather than a verdict. We do not offer legal, financial, or medical advice, and nothing here treats a health situation as a spiritual one. And we do not claim our own intake is the only correct one: other traditions ask for different things for good reasons, and a list that differs from ours is not thereby wrong.

Practically: your first pass

Quiz: is this an intake or a harvest?

Frequently asked questions

Is it normal to be asked for my date of birth?

Yes. A great many traditions of client work identify the person the work is for by name and date of birth, and some time the working to a natal chart. It is one of the most ordinary requests there is. What matters is whether the practitioner can say in one sentence what it does in their work, and whether the request sits alongside other identifiers that would let someone impersonate you — a date of birth on its own is an anchor, but a date of birth together with a government ID number and an account detail is something else entirely.

Someone asked for a photograph and a lock of hair. Is that a scam?

Not on its own — these are personal concerns, and their use is documented across hoodoo, European cunning craft and many other traditions. The questions to ask are practical rather than suspicious: what it is for, whether it is returned or destroyed at the close, and whether the list of what they need is complete. Anything that physically leaves your possession should come with an ending attached to it.

Why would anyone ask for my income before quoting a price?

There is no working reason. A price reflects what the work takes — the hours, the materials, the practitioner's experience — and it can be published in advance because it does not depend on the client. When a quote is calculated from what you have rather than from what is done, you are not being quoted. You are being assessed.

I have already sent information I regret sending. What now?

Separate the two kinds. If what you sent was situational — your story, names, a photograph — the practical step is to ask for it back or for confirmation it has been destroyed, and to stop adding to it. If what you sent could be used financially or to impersonate you — account details, an ID document, a password — treat it as an identity-security matter rather than a spiritual one: contact your bank, change the credentials, and consider a credit freeze. Where money has moved and the mail was involved, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service takes reports at 1-877-876-2455, and the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov.

Can a practitioner work with no information at all?

Some offer to, and it is worth thinking about what that means rather than dismissing it. Generalized work — a blessing, a house cleansing performed at a distance for whoever asks — genuinely does exist without a personal anchor. But work described as tailored to your situation cannot be tailored to a situation nobody has described. A very short intake attached to a promise of individual work is a mismatch, and the mismatch usually means the work is a template.

What does Temple of Desire ask for?

Your situation in your own words, your full name, your date of birth, and the names of anyone directly involved. A photograph is optional and returned or destroyed as you prefer. We do not ask what you earn, we do not ask for account details or identity documents, and nothing of yours is ever posted to us for blessing. Questions about any of it go to 28@templeofdesire.com.

Sources & further reading

• Forer, B. R. (1949). The fallacy of personal validation: a classroom demonstration of gullibility. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 44(1), 118–123.
• Hurston, Z. N. (1931). Hoodoo in America. Journal of American Folklore, 44(174), 317–417. — documentation of work anchored to named people through personal items.
• Hyatt, H. M. (1970–1978). Hoodoo — Conjuration — Witchcraft — Rootwork, 5 vols., from fieldwork conducted 1936–1940.
• Randi, J. (1987). The Faith Healers. Prometheus Books. — the 1986 Popoff investigation, the earpiece, and the prayer cards.
• U.S. Postal Inspection Service, Psychic Scam (consumer guidance, last updated 2019). Reports: 1-877-876-2455.
• Federal Trade Commission v. Access Resource Services / Psychic Readers Network ("Miss Cleo"), settlement announced November 14, 2002 — the action concerned billing and price disclosure.
• U.S. Attorney's Office, Western District of Washington, press release of June 10, 2026, on a fortune-teller fraud prosecution. Allegations only; the defendants are presumed innocent.
• San Francisco Police Department public warnings on the "blessing scam" (2025); earlier alerts from Southern California agencies and AARP consumer reporting.
• Arkes, H. R., & Blumer, C. (1985). The psychology of sunk cost. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 35(1), 124–140.

One number we have left out on purpose. Aggregate dollar figures for psychic and romance fraud circulate widely and, in the versions we were able to check, do not reconcile with each other — including within a single agency page. We would rather cite the case records and the agency guidance, which are solid, than a headline total we cannot stand behind.