How to Write a Petition Paper (And What to Do With It Afterwards)

What a petition paper is

A petition paper is the written core of a working. The color, the oil, the herbs, the timing — all of that is context. The paper is the sentence: where you say, in your own handwriting, what you are asking for.

In the hoodoo and conjure traditions of the American South, written charms of this kind are old and well documented. Zora Neale Hurston recorded written petitions and name work in her 1931 survey for the Journal of American Folklore. Harry Middleton Hyatt’s fieldwork — conducted 1936–1940 across twelve states, published in five volumes between 1970 and 1978 — contains thousands of accounts in which a name or request is committed to paper and then placed, buried, burned or carried. The practice is not an internet invention. What has changed is the standardization: many of the tidy rules you read today are shop-counter conventions of the last few decades, taught consistently enough to feel ancient. This guide keeps that distinction visible.

Petition paper vs. name paper

A name paper carries only a name — yours, someone else’s, a business’s. On its own it does nothing; it tells the rest of the working who is meant. A petition paper carries a request, and may carry a name as well. Its job is to state the outcome. This is the one most people mean.

Both belong to the wider family of written intentions. If you have read our guide to the bay leaf manifestation ritual, you have met a close cousin: same act, different substrate, different disposal. The petition paper is the most flexible of them, because it is the only one that survives the working intact if you want it to.

What you need — and what you don’t

Paper, something to write with, and a decision. That is the whole list.

The most commonly taught substrate is plain brown paper from a grocery bag, torn rather than cut on all four sides — the reasoning being that a torn edge is unfinished and un-machined, and that kraft paper carries no printing. This is lived practice rather than documented antiquity, but it is what practitioners and supply shops recommend consistently, and it works. Unbleached parchment, plain notepaper, or the unprinted back of a receipt do the same job.

A plain pen is sufficient. Traditional preferences exist — dove’s blood ink for love work, dragon’s blood for power and protection, colors matched to the aim as candle colors are — but these are correspondences, not requirements.

What you do not need: a printed template, a pre-written petition, a specific brand of anything, or a practitioner’s permission. Anyone telling you a petition only works on a product they happen to sell is selling, not teaching.

Step 1: Decide what you are asking for

This is the step people skip, and the one that decides whether the rest is worth doing. Most first drafts are not requests at all — they are complaints with a wish attached. “I want him to stop ignoring me.” “I want the money problem to go away.” Each names a grievance rather than an outcome. Before you write anything, answer three questions on scrap paper you will throw away:

1. What would be different if this worked? Describe the situation, not the feeling. Not “I feel secure” but “my rent is covered three months ahead.”
2. Is this mine to ask? A petition requiring another adult to want something they have not indicated they want is aimed at a person, not a situation. You can still write it — but know that you are.
3. What is the first ordinary step? If there is one and you are not taking it, the petition is standing in for the step. That is the most common way this practice fails people.

Step 2: Write the sentence

Four rules cover almost every case.

Present tense, not future. “My rent is paid” rather than “I will find the money.” A future-tense petition keeps the thing permanently one step away.

Name the outcome, not the mechanism. You need not specify where the money comes from, or which job, or which person. Over-specifying narrows a wide request to the single route you happened to think of at your kitchen table.

One request per paper. If you have three, write three papers. A petition carrying four unrelated asks is a to-do list.

Add a limit if the request touches someone else. Traditional wordings often close with a clause of that kind — “for the good of all,” “with harm to none.” Constraint or self-discipline, it does the same useful work: it makes you notice when you are writing against a person rather than for a situation.

If the sentence is the hard part, the wider framework in how to write your own ritual walks through intention, mode, materials, words, timing, closing and disposal in order — the petition is the “words” stage of it.

Step 3: The 3×3 method

What most people mean by “writing a petition properly” is the 3×3, sometimes called crossing.

1. Write the name of the person or thing the work concerns three times, one line under the other, near the center of the paper. Traditionally the pen does not lift — the letters run together so the name cannot be separated.
2. Turn the paper ninety degrees clockwise.
3. Write the request three times across the name, so the two blocks cross at right angles.

If the work concerns only you, your own name goes in the first block; if it concerns a situation with no person in it — a house sale, a court date — the situation goes there instead. Variants abound: names in a circle, seven or nine repetitions, a border of the request written continuously around the edge. Three is most common because three is the most common number in the tradition generally, not because a mechanism has been identified for it.

One honest research finding sits adjacent to this. Legare and Souza, in Cognition (2012), showed people descriptions of formulaic magical rites and asked how effective each seemed. Rites with more steps, more repetition and a specified time were rated significantly more effective — by Brazilian participants familiar with the practice and Americans unfamiliar with it alike. That is a finding about how humans judge ritual, not about whether ritual produces outcomes. It explains why the 3×3 feels more serious than writing a sentence once. It does not tell you that it works.

Step 4: Dressing the paper

Dressing means anointing the paper with a little oil, usually at the four corners and the center — the same five-spot pattern used for dressing candles. The oil is matched to the aim: drawing oils for money and love work, protective blends for defensive work, road-opening blends when something is stuck. Plain olive oil is an entirely respectable substitute and stains less.

Use very little. A saturated paper will not take a fold cleanly, will not burn cleanly, and smokes unpleasantly under a candle. Two or three fingertip touches per spot is plenty.

Some practitioners add a dry ingredient here — a herb matched to the aim, or a little hair if the paper is for someone in the household who asked for the work. Adding anything personal to a petition concerning someone who has not asked is where many people cross a line without noticing.

Step 5: Folding

The folding convention is the most consistently taught rule in the practice, and the easiest to remember:

• To draw something toward you — love, money, work, an opportunity — fold the paper toward you.
• To send something away — an unwanted situation, a habit, interference — fold it away from you.

Either way, keep folding in the same direction until the paper is too thick to fold again. Most practitioners rotate it ninety degrees between folds so it ends as a compact square — clockwise for drawing, counterclockwise for banishing.

This is convention, taught with remarkable agreement across sources but not documented with the same tidiness in the earliest folklore collections. Treat it as a meaningful discipline rather than a physical law. And if you are unsure whether you are drawing or banishing at all, that uncertainty is the real problem, not the fold.

Step 6: Where the paper goes

A folded petition has four traditional homes.

Under a candle — the most common by a wide margin. The paper sits beneath the holder and the candle burns over it. Practical caution: under the holder, not touching flame or wick and not tucked around the glass. Oiled paper near an open flame is a genuine fire risk, and the tradition does not require it.

In a jar or bottle, sealed with the other ingredients — for ongoing situations, since the petition stays active as long as the jar is intact.

In a mojo bag or carried — folded small, kept in a bag, wallet, pocket or shoe.

On the altar, weighted under a stone or dish. Simple, undramatic, easy to review later.

Step 7: What to do with it afterwards

The honest answer is that the ending should match the intention. There is no universal rule, which is why sources disagree.

Four traditional endings for a petition paper, and what each one says

Method	What the action says	When it fits	Practical caution
Burn	Release, transformation, an ending; the request is handed over.	The working is finished; you want a clean close.	Fire-safe dish, ventilation, nothing flammable nearby. Oiled paper flares.
Bury	Rooting, slow growth, keeping the matter close to a place.	Home, household, stability, anything meant to grow.	Your own ground or a pot plant. Not oil-soaked paper in a vegetable bed.
Moving water	Carrying away; distance between you and the matter.	Banishing, uncrossing, ending contact with a situation.	Plain paper only. Nothing that litters a waterway — no wax, foil or plastic.
Keep	The request is still open; the paper stays a live record.	Ongoing protection or work, or anything you want to review honestly later.	Set a date to look at it again, or it becomes clutter with a grievance in it.

Wax and ash follow the same logic; the practical side of clearing up is covered in what to do with leftover candle wax after a ritual. One point worth stating plainly: if the paper does not burn cleanly, that is a fact about paper, oil, oxygen and wick height, not a verdict on your request. A great deal of anxious content online is built on reading failure into ordinary combustion.

A worked example

A situation with no other person in it, so the ethics stay simple: a freelancer whose income has been unreliable for four months.

The three questions. What would be different? Two steady clients instead of scattered one-off jobs. Is it mine to ask? Yes. First ordinary step? Sending the six proposals drafted and never sent — scheduled before anything else.

The sentence. First draft: “I want the money worry to stop” — names a feeling. Second: “I will get more clients” — future tense, vague. Final: “Steady, well-paid work comes to me and stays.”

The rest. A three-inch square torn from a grocery bag. Own name three times in an unbroken line, turned ninety degrees, the sentence three times across it. Five small touches of a drawing oil. Folded toward the body until it will not fold again, placed under the holder of a green candle burned over three evenings — the proposals going out on the first. Buried in a desk plant, rooting rather than releasing, dated on the back with a calendar note to review in eight weeks.

Nothing there is exotic. The whole discipline is in the second draft and the first ordinary step.

Six mistakes worth avoiding

1. Writing a petition instead of doing the obvious thing. The petition belongs alongside the ordinary step, never in place of it.
2. Naming a specific person as the required source. It narrows a wide request to one route — and where feelings are concerned, moves the work from your life into theirs.
3. Stacking six requests on one paper. Write six papers, or pick the one that matters this month.
4. Restarting the working every few days. Repetition within a working is traditional; rewriting from scratch weekly is usually anxiety.
5. Letting the paper touch the flame. Under the holder, not against the wick. The one genuinely dangerous mistake on this list.
6. Reading the burn. Soot, a stubborn flame, paper that will not catch — combustion, not commentary.

What the research does and does not say

No study shows that a petition paper causes an outcome, and anyone citing one is misreading it. Two adjacent findings are real; one widely circulated claim is not.

The real ones: the Cognition study above establishes that structural features of a rite — repetition, number of steps, a specified time — predictably raise how effective it is judged to be, across cultures. And a meta-analysis by Gollwitzer and Sheeran, covering 94 tests and more than 8,000 participants, found that forming a specific plan for when and where you will act improves follow-through on ordinary goals by a medium-to-large margin. Neither is evidence for magic. The second is a decent argument for our first question: a petition written with a real situation and a real first step attached behaves differently in your week than a wish written in the abstract.

The claim that is not real: a much-quoted 2016 paper reporting that rituals improve performance by reducing anxiety was retracted in 2024. It is still cited constantly in wellness and manifestation content. If you see it used to sell you something, that tells you how carefully the seller reads.

Voices from practice

We do not publish invented testimonials, so what follows is described in general terms — patterns that recur in correspondence and in the wider practitioner literature, not quotations from named individuals.

Practitioners commonly report that the wording stage takes far longer than beginners expect, and that the working itself feels almost anticlimactic afterwards. That order is normal: the paper is short; arriving at what should be on it is not. A second recurring report is that people who keep and re-read their petitions revise how they write them — usually toward fewer conditions and less specificity about mechanism.

A third, less comfortable pattern: petitions written in acute distress are often described later as the ones the writer would not write again — not because anything went wrong, but because the request had more to do with the state they were in than with what they wanted. A petition written on the worst evening of a bad month deserves a second look on a calmer one.

What we don’t promise

We do not promise that a petition paper will bring you money, a partner, a job, a verdict, or a person’s change of heart. We cannot promise it, nobody can, and a seller who does is telling you something about themselves rather than about the practice.

We do not diagnose curses, and we do not sell a fix for a problem we told you that you had. We make no health claims: a petition is not a treatment and is no substitute for medical or psychological care.

What ritual work honestly offers is structure, attention, and a way of holding a difficult intention in your hands rather than only in your head. That is worth something — but not a guarantee, and we will not print one.

Practically: how to work with this

1. Answer the three questions on scrap paper; throw the scrap away.
2. Schedule the ordinary first step before you write anything ritual.
3. Draft the sentence three times. Present tense, outcome not mechanism, one request.
4. Tear the paper to roughly three inches on all four sides, and write the 3×3.
5. Date the back, small, in a corner.
6. Dress lightly if at all — five touches, barely damp.
7. Fold toward you to draw, away to send off; then place it.
8. Choose the ending in advance — burn, bury, water or keep — and note a review date if keeping it.

Which petition are you writing?

Three questions. This will not tell you whether a working will succeed — nothing can. It will tell you which kind of petition your situation is asking for.

Questions people ask

What kind of paper should I use for a petition paper?

Plain brown paper from a grocery bag, torn rather than cut on all four sides, is the most widely taught choice. Unbleached parchment, plain notepaper or the unprinted back of a receipt all work. The consistent preference is for paper that is plain, unprinted and small enough to fold repeatedly — lived convention rather than a documented requirement, so use what you have.

Do I have to use a specific ink or color?

No. Traditional preferences exist — dove’s blood ink for love work, dragon’s blood for power and protection, colors matched to the aim as candle colors are — but they belong to a correspondence system, not a mechanism. A plain black pen is sufficient. Handwriting matters more than ink, because the point is that the sentence came from your hand.

Which way do I fold a petition paper?

Toward you to draw something in, away from you to send something off, folding in the same direction until the paper will not fold again. Many practitioners turn it ninety degrees between folds — clockwise for drawing, counterclockwise for banishing. It is one of the most consistently taught conventions in the practice, though not documented with the same tidiness in the earliest folklore collections.

What do I do with the petition paper after the candle burns out?

Match the ending to the intention. Burn it for release or a clean close, bury it for rooting and slow growth, place it in moving water to carry a situation away, or keep it if the request is still open. If you keep it, set a date to read it again, otherwise it becomes clutter. There is no single correct method, which is why sources disagree.

Can I write a petition for another person?

You can, and practitioners routinely do so for people who have asked them to. Writing a petition aimed at an adult who has not asked — particularly one meant to change how they feel or what they choose — is a different act, and worth being honest with yourself about. Wording it around the situation rather than around the person’s will is how practitioners usually handle this.

Does a petition paper have to be burned to work?

No. Burning is one of four traditional endings and suits release and closure; burying, moving water and keeping the paper are equally traditional and suit different aims. If the paper refuses to burn cleanly, that is a matter of oil, oxygen and wick height rather than a verdict on the request.

Sources & further reading

• Hurston, Zora Neale (1931). “Hoodoo in America.” Journal of American Folklore 44(174), 318–417.
• Hyatt, Harry Middleton (1970–1978). Hoodoo — Conjuration — Witchcraft — Rootwork, 5 vols. Fieldwork 1936–1940 across twelve states; roughly 13,000 recorded spells and beliefs from some 1,600 informants.
• Yronwode, Catherine (2002). Hoodoo Herb and Root Magic. Lucky Mojo Curio Co. Widely used modern reference for petition and name-paper technique.
• Legare, Cristine H. & Souza, André L. (2012). “Evaluating ritual efficacy: Evidence from the supernatural.” Cognition 124(1), 1–15.
• Gollwitzer, Peter M. & Sheeran, Paschal (2006). “Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes.” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 38, 69–119.
• Norton, Michael I. & Gino, Francesca (2014). “Rituals alleviate grieving for loved ones, lovers, and lotteries.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 143(1), 266–272.
• Do not cite: Brooks et al. (2016), “Don’t stop believing: Rituals improve performance by decreasing anxiety,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 137, 71–85 — retracted in 2024, and still widely quoted.