At the first grey of dawn the world turns forward into light, and against that turning you set your jar spinning backward, sending a thing the way it came.
A banishing jar is a small prison and a smaller road — you gather the trouble, seal it against return, and send it walking widdershins out of your life. What goes in must never come out the same door.
The Working
- Rise before the sun and set a clean jar on a cloth, working while the light is still uncertain.
- Write the name or nature of what you banish on a strip of paper, then turn the paper over and fold it away from you, three times.
- Lay the folded paper in the jar and cover it with salt to bind it and bitter herbs to make the place unwelcome.
- Pour in cold water until the paper is drowned, whispering that its welcome is drowned along with it.
- Seal the lid tight and turn the jar widdershins — against the sun — nine slow turns, feeling the thing wind away from you.
- As the sun breaks the horizon, carry the jar to the far edge of your ground and set it down with its mouth pointing away from the house.
- Leave it in the cold and the wet to work, and never bring it back across your threshold.
The Incantation
Against the sun the jar goes round,
what rose in me is drowned and bound.
Salt to hold and green to spurn,
water for the no-return.
Widdershins and out you wind,
the door you came by, do not find.
Turned away in the rising grey —
go the way you came, and stay.
The sun clears the hedges and the jar sits sealed in the dew, its road pointing only outward. What you turned away turns back no more.