Condition

A condition is what a worker finds when they read a case: the state a person, a house or a business is in, named and located before anything is done about it. The word is the tradition's own, and it carries a whole method inside it - the reading comes first, the naming comes second, and the work follows from the name rather than from a general recipe. 'What is the condition?' is the first question a root doctor asks, and the answer decides everything after it.

Conditions are named in the tradition's vocabulary - crossed, jinxed, hoodooed, tied up, blocked, not clean, heavy, hot, turned around - and each name implies a different course of work and a different prognosis. A condition belongs to a place as well as to a person: a shop has a condition, a house has one, a marriage has one. The naming is a diagnosis, and the worker's standing rests on getting it right, because a wrong name means a wrong course and a client who does not come back.

Naming a condition is an act with consequences - it can start a feud, end a marriage or accuse a neighbour - and the tradition's own practice surrounds it with caution, a second opinion, and, in the better accounts, a refusal to name a person without evidence. The corpus keeps the vocabulary because a reader cannot follow the collections without it, and marks that a diagnosis is a claim and not a fact.