Banishing Spell: How to Send Something Away, Step by Step

What a banishing spell is

"Banishing" is used for two different things, and most confusion online comes from mixing them up.

In ceremonial magic, banishing is housekeeping. Before a magician does any other work, they clear the space of whatever is in it, the way you would wipe a table before you lay out a meal. The best-known example is the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, which many practitioners still perform daily. It is not aimed at anyone. It is aimed at the room and at the practitioner's own scattered attention.

In folk magic, banishing is targeted. It means sending something specific away: a bad influence, a stubborn pattern, an unwelcome presence, or a person who should no longer be in your life. When people search for a banishing spell, this is almost always what they mean, and it is what most of this guide is about.

Both meanings share one idea: banishing is subtraction, and so it needs a target. If you cannot say what is leaving in one plain sentence, you are probably looking for a different tool, and we have written a whole piece on when banishing is the wrong tool.

Where banishing comes from

The ceremonial line. The Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram was put together in the late Victorian period by the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a British occult society founded in 1888. The historian Graham John Wheeler describes it as assembled from a bricolage of older materials, some of them very old, rather than handed down intact from antiquity.

The hoodoo line. In African American folk magic, the classic tool for making someone leave is hot foot powder, a mixture built around hot peppers and salt and sometimes sulfur. The folklorist Harry M. Hyatt, who interviewed hundreds of practitioners across the American South for his collection Hoodoo, Conjuration, Witchcraft, Rootwork (1970 to 1978), recorded several ways of using it, including laying it where a person walks and sealing a name in a bottle of the powder and throwing it into a river. Earlier, Newbell Niles Puckett's Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro (1926) documented related "foot track" practices. Scholars trace this work to West African traditions.

The household line. European and American folk practice adds the pieces most people recognize: sweeping dirt out of the front door rather than in, salt across a threshold, and carrying what is unwanted away to running water or a crossroads so that it does not find its way home. Black candles and the waning moon, the half of the lunar cycle in which the moon shrinks, are the customary correspondences for anything meant to decrease.

What these lines have in common is not a single recipe but a shape: name it, separate it from you, carry it away, close the door behind it. That shape is what the spell further down this page follows.

What a banishing spell can honestly do

We sell ritual work, so we owe you a straight answer here. No controlled study has tested whether a banishing spell makes a person move away, removes a presence from a house or ends a run of bad luck. Anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing or selling.

Throwing thoughts away changes how much you use them. In a series of studies published in Psychological Science in 2013, Pablo Briñol, Richard Petty and colleagues had people write down thoughts, positive or negative, and then either throw the paper in the trash or keep it. People who threw their written thoughts away relied on them less when they later made judgments. People who put the paper in a pocket or wallet relied on them more. In another study, dragging a typed file into a computer's recycle bin had a similar effect. Simply imagining throwing the paper away did not.

The physical act, not just the intention, made the difference. A banishing that ends with paper torn, burned and carried off your property does exactly that.

Trying not to think of something brings it back. In 1987, Daniel Wegner and colleagues asked people not to think of a white bear for five minutes. When they were then allowed to think of it, they thought of it more than people who had been free to think of it from the start. Suppression, they concluded, can produce the very preoccupation it is meant to prevent. The same study found that having one specific thing to think about instead reduced the rebound.

Put together, the honest picture is this. A banishing cannot be shown to move the world. It can mark a clear before and after, put the unwanted thing outside your body in a form you can physically get rid of, and, if you plan for it, give your attention somewhere else to go. Whether anything beyond that happens is a matter of tradition and belief, and we label it that way.

First, decide what exactly you are banishing

A banishing aimed at "all the negativity" usually goes nowhere, because there is nothing to separate, nothing to carry away and no way to tell afterward whether it left. Take five minutes with a pen and put your target in one of these rows.

What you want gone	How to name it	The real step that goes with it
A habit or pattern	"Texting him when I cannot sleep." Concrete, observable, yours.	Remove the trigger the same night: delete the thread, charge the phone in another room.
A thought or memory loop	The sentence your mind keeps repeating, written word for word.	Choose in advance what you will think about or do instead when it returns.
An atmosphere in a home	"The heaviness in the back bedroom since the move."	Clean, air out and rearrange that room; follow with a spiritual cleansing.
A person's access to you	"[Name]'s presence in my life and my home." Their access, not their harm.	Block, change the lock or the password, tell the people who pass messages on.
A run of bad luck	Usually not a banishing target. Nothing specific to send away.	Consider uncrossing first; see the right order.

If you find yourself writing three targets, pick the one that costs you most this month and banish only that.

What you need

• A candle. Black is the customary color for banishing; white works for everything and is the better choice if a black candle makes you uneasy. A small taper or a tealight is enough, because the candle should burn down in one sitting.
• Paper and a pen. Plain paper. You will write, tear and burn it.
• A fireproof dish. A metal bowl, a ceramic plate or a cast-iron pan.
• Salt. Ordinary table or sea salt. Black salt is traditional and you can make your own, but it is not required.
• A broom or a cloth. For sweeping the room out toward the door.
• A bag or envelope. To carry the remains off your property.
• Optional: a pinch of black pepper, chili flakes or rue, the hot and bitter herbs of traditional driving-away work.

Work at a table you can clear completely, keep the candle away from curtains and loose paper, and never leave a flame alone.

A banishing spell, step by step

Plan about forty-five minutes. Tradition prefers the evening and the waning moon; more on timing below. Choose a time when no one will interrupt you and when you can take your real step the next morning.

If you want to write the petition in more detail, our guide to writing a petition paper walks through wording.

Banishing a person: what is fair and what is not

Many searches for a banishing spell are about a person: an ex who keeps reappearing, a toxic friend, a relative, a neighbor. This is where we want to be most careful.

There is a difference between banishing someone's access to you and trying to control what happens to them. The first is a boundary. The second, making someone lose their job, fall ill or suffer, is not banishing at all, and it is not work we do or teach. Traditional hot foot work sits on the line between the two, which is why we describe it here as history and do not give a recipe for putting anything in someone's shoes.

A fair banishing of a person names their presence, not their harm: "I banish ___'s presence from my life and my home." It changes what you will tolerate, not who they are. And it needs the same real step every banishing needs, in this case the practical one: block the number, change the lock, stop answering through third parties, tell the people around you.

If the person keeps coming anyway, a candle is not the next step. Every state offers some form of civil protective order, and many offer orders for harassment and stalking outside of domestic relationships. WomensLaw.org explains the rules state by state. If you are afraid for your safety, call 911. For domestic abuse, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is at 1-800-799-7233.

When the goal is not that someone leaves but that they stop doing harm, a different traditional tool fits better. See our pieces on the binding spell, the freezer spell and the return to sender spell, each with its own limits.

When to do a banishing

Tradition has clear preferences. The waning moon, from the day after the full moon to the new moon, is the customary time for anything meant to shrink or leave. Saturday, the day of Saturn, is the traditional day for endings, limits and boundaries.

None of this has been shown to change the result, and we would not wait three weeks for the right moon if something needs to leave now. The timing that demonstrably matters is practical: banish on an evening before a day on which you can take your real step. More on how practitioners think about timing in the best time for a spell.

The days after

• Do not dig it back up. Do not keep a photo of the burned paper, do not reread old messages "to make sure it is gone," do not ask three people whether they have seen the person. In the Briñol studies, thoughts that were kept close carried more weight.
• Use the replacement line. When the thought or the urge comes back, and it will at least a few times, do not fight it. Notice it and turn to what you wrote on the back of the paper. That is the difference between suppression and redirection.
• Protect the cleared space. Traditional practice follows banishing with protection, so that the empty space does not fill with the same thing. A simple protection spell a few days later completes the sequence.
• Review after four weeks. Keep a three-line note each evening: did it show up, what did you do, how strong was the pull. If it shows up less often and costs you less when it does, the work did what a banishing can do.

When banishing is the wrong tool

• If you are in danger, call 911. A ritual is not a safety plan.
• If you want to banish thoughts of hurting yourself, please call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
• If you hear, see or feel a presence that others do not, and especially if it comes with lost sleep or growing fear, see a doctor as well. Ruling things out is not a betrayal of your beliefs.
• If the habit is an addiction, banishing can mark a decision, but it does not replace treatment. The SAMHSA National Helpline is at 1-800-662-4357.
• If you suspect a curse, start with an honest look at the evidence. Our checklist on how to know if you are cursed is a good first step.

If you pay someone to banish for you

Banishing, especially of a person, is one of the most exploited services in the spell-casting market, because people looking for it are often frightened, hurt or desperate. The pattern is well documented. In 2013 a federal jury in Florida convicted Rose Marks, a self-described psychic, on all fourteen counts of a fraud scheme prosecutors put at about $25 million; her clients were told that curses and spirits stood between them and their lives and that money would be returned after the "work."

1. They contact you first, offering to banish "the person or energy blocking you."
2. The price appears after your story, and it is sized to how upset you sound.
3. A result is promised, often with a date: they will be gone, the rival will leave, the presence will not return.
4. Something new is discovered. The banishing "revealed" a deeper curse, a second spirit, a family line that needs cleaning. Each costs more.
5. Payment moves somewhere unrecoverable: gift cards, crypto, wire transfers, payment apps. The FTC warns that money sent this way is hard or impossible to get back.

An honest practitioner works the other way round: you know their name first, the price is fixed before your story, nothing is promised except the work, and you receive a record of what was done. We have written a full guide to how to spot a fake spell caster and a separate one on vetting online spell casters.

What we do not promise

We do not promise that a banishing, ours or yours, will make a person leave, end a habit, or clear a house. What we can say from practice is that people who work a banishing properly tend to finish it knowing exactly what they are done with, having already closed at least one door it used to come through, and with somewhere else to put their attention.

If you would rather build your own banishing from scratch, how to write your own ritual gives you the structure.

Frequently asked questions

What is a banishing spell?

A banishing spell is a ritual for removing one named thing from your life or your space: a habit, a recurring thought, an atmosphere in a home, or a person's access to you. In ceremonial magic, banishing also means clearing a space before other work. Most folk versions follow the same shape: name it, separate it from you, carry it away and close the door behind it.

What do you need for a banishing spell?

A candle, traditionally black (white works too), plain paper and a pen, a fireproof dish, ordinary salt, a broom or cloth, and a bag to carry the remains off your property. Black pepper, chili flakes or rue are optional traditional additions. The part you cannot substitute is one specific target written in a single plain sentence.

Can you banish a person with a spell?

No study shows that a spell can make a person leave. What a fair banishing can do is mark your decision to end someone's access to you, and it should name their presence, not wish them harm. It works together with practical steps such as blocking, changing locks and, if they keep coming, a civil protective order. If you are in danger, call 911.

When is the best time to do a banishing spell?

Tradition favors the waning moon, between the full moon and the new moon, and Saturday, the day of Saturn, for endings and boundaries. None of this has been shown to change results. The most useful time is an evening before a day on which you can take the real step that goes with the banishing.

How do you know if a banishing spell worked?

Keep a short daily note for about four weeks: whether the thing showed up, what you did, and how strong the pull was. If it shows up less often and costs you less when it does, the banishing did what a banishing can do. Avoid checking obsessively in the meantime; research on thought suppression suggests that constant checking keeps the thing in mind.

Sources & further reading

• Briñol, P., Gascó, M., Petty, R. E. & Horcajo, J.: "Treating Thoughts as Material Objects Can Increase or Decrease Their Impact on Evaluation", Psychological Science 24(1), 41 to 47, 2013; summary: Association for Psychological Science, "Bothered by Negative, Unwanted Thoughts? Just Throw Them Away"
• Wegner, D. M., Schneider, D. J., Carter, S. R. & White, T. L.: "Paradoxical Effects of Thought Suppression", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 53(1), 5 to 13, 1987
• Wheeler, G. J.: "A Microcosm of the Esoteric Revival: The Histories of the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram", Correspondences 8(1), 2020
• Hyatt, H. M.: Hoodoo, Conjuration, Witchcraft, Rootwork, 5 vols., 1970 to 1978
• Puckett, N. N.: Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro, University of North Carolina Press, 1926
• U.S. Attorney's Office, Southern District of Florida: "Jury Convicts Defendant in $25 Million Fraud Scheme", September 2013
• Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Advice: "How To Avoid a Scam"
• WomensLaw.org: protective and restraining orders by state · National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233 · 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: call or text 988 · SAMHSA National Helpline: 1-800-662-4357