Banishing spells are the craft’s workings of removal. Where a protection spell raises a wall, a banishing spell opens a door and shows something out of it — a habit that has outstayed its usefulness, an influence that drains a household, a presence that lingers in a room long after the reason for it has gone. The purpose is not punishment, and not revenge. It is subtraction: taking an unwanted thing out of your life and closing the way behind it.
It helps to say what banishing is not. It is not cleansing, which washes a space of whatever has merely settled there, the way you would air a room. It is not release, which is the slower inward work of setting down something you have carried too long. Banishing is more pointed than either. It names one unwanted thing and sends it away in a particular direction — out, down, beyond the threshold — and that directionality is what gives the work its distinctive grammar. Candles are anointed from wick to base rather than base to wick, stirring goes widdershins against the course of the sun, and the remains are carried past the gate by someone who does not look back.
Across the craft, this work takes many familiar forms:
- Candle spells — a black or grey candle dressed downward and burned through banishing herbs, so a thing loses its hold as the wax falls.
- Jar and bottle spells — the habit or influence you are ending named on paper — the pattern, never a person’s wellbeing — sealed into glass with salt and bitter herbs, then buried or set outside the boundary of the house.
- Spoken clearings and incantations — a bell rung widdershins through the rooms, a demand refused aloud at the threshold, words that turn a space out and leave it quiet.
- Knot and cord magic — a cord cut rather than tied, severing an attachment that has become a drain on the one still holding it.
- Washes, sachets, sigils and mirrors — bitter water poured across a doorstep, a modern parting sachet of rue and wormwood stitched into grey wool, a sigil deliberately broken to unmake what it named, a mirror set facing the door as a reflective ward, turning what comes at the house aside and grounding it out.
Timing matters more here than in most branches of the craft, because banishing is sympathetic work: you are asking the world to decrease something, and that is far easier on a tide already going out. The traditional hours are the hinges of the day — dusk, when the light withdraws; midnight, the still turn of the night; the grey before dawn, when a thing can be turned out with the dark. Much of this work names one of those hours, and it is worth honouring rather than treating as decoration.
Banishing answers to Saturn, ruler of limits, endings and firmly shut doors, and to the element of Fire, the driving force that pushes a thing out even when the working itself is cold water and salt. Traditional correspondences include black for endings and clean removal, with grey as a softer second choice; the herbs sage, rosemary and garlic, alongside the bitter herbs of European folk practice — rue, wormwood, nettle, hyssop, mugwort and vervain; black obsidian or black tourmaline to absorb and ground what is sent away; and salt, which binds, seals and marks a boundary in almost every working of this kind. Saturday belongs to Saturn and lends its sober weight to endings. The waning moon is not a nicety but a requirement: as its light decreases night after night, so should the thing you are sending away. All of this is set out in the correspondences guide.
One rule governs the whole of it: the Wiccan Rede, an it harm none. Banishing is the intent most easily mistaken for cursing, and the distinction deserves stating plainly. A banishing spell is aimed at a pattern, never at a person’s wellbeing. You have every right to a quiet threshold and to a life clear of what erodes it, and none at all to reach into someone else’s life and make it worse. Where a person comes into the working at all, what is being addressed is the hold they have on you — the reaching hand, the habit, the fear — not the person behind it, who is left to go their own way unharmed. A reflective ward is held to the same rule: it may turn harm aside from your door and let the ground take it, but it aims nothing at anyone, and sending harm back the way it came is a different intent altogether. If a spell could only succeed by injuring someone, it has stopped being banishing, and it has no place here.
In practice this work rarely stands alone. A house that has been emptied does not stay empty for long, so it is traditional to follow a banishing with a cleansing to settle the room, and then to set something at the door — a ward, a charm, a bottle of salt and iron — from the protection spells. Removal, clearing and guarding are three parts of one motion, and together they hold far better than any one alone.
Browse the full collection of banishing spells below — correspondences, materials, timing and the working itself, ready to copy into your Book of Shadows.