How to Write Your Own Ritual: A Step-by-Step Framework

What actually makes a ritual “yours”

Most people who go looking for a spell online are really looking for permission — to know whether the words they would choose, plain and unrhymed and in their own accent, are allowed to count. They are.

A ritual is a sequence of deliberate, symbolic actions performed in a fixed order. That is the whole definition. The formality and repetition are not decoration; they are what separates a ritual from thinking hard about something. What makes one personal is not an exotic procedure.

A generic love spell says bring me love. A personal one names the exact thing you are asking for — the courage to send one message, or the clarity to stop waiting on someone who has already answered. The first is a wish; the second is a decision with a ceremony attached. Rituals of the second kind are the ones people can still describe accurately a year later.

The seven parts every written ritual needs

Ritual texts that survived long enough to be copied tend to share a skeleton. The Greek Magical Papyri — the working papyri from Roman Egypt collected in Hans Dieter Betz's translation — typically name the power addressed, state the request, specify materials and actions, and close. Later grimoire and folk traditions keep roughly the same bones, and the structure is durable because it is useful. Here it is in plain modern terms. Write an answer to each of the seven before you light anything.

1. Intention — one sentence, present tense, specific enough to be wrong.
2. Mode — are you drawing something toward you, moving something away, or holding something steady?
3. Materials — the few objects that carry meaning for this particular ask.
4. Words — what you say aloud, or write, or both.
5. Timing — when you do it, and whether that matters here.
6. Closing — how you end it, so it is unmistakably over.
7. Disposal — what happens to the physical remains.

Seven answers, seven lines. If you cannot fill one in, that is information: the intention underneath is still vague.

Step 1 — Name the desire in one defensible sentence

Most self-written rituals skip this step, and it is the one that decides whether the rest holds together. Write your intention as a single present-tense sentence, then apply three tests.

Specificity. Could a stranger read it and know what would count as this working? “I want more money” fails. “I am steady enough to ask for the raise in my October review” passes.

Agency. Does it describe something you can act on? Work aimed at overriding another person's free choice tends to curdle — practically, because nothing follows from it, and ethically, for reasons most traditions reached independently. Rewrite from the outside in: not make him call me but I know what I want from him, and I can say it or leave.

Honesty. Read it aloud. If some part of you snorts, keep rewriting. The sentence that embarrasses you slightly is usually the true one.

Step 2 — Choose the mode: draw, banish, or hold

Nearly all practical ritual work falls into three modes, and the mode governs almost every later choice: how you fold the paper, what happens to the remains, often the candle color. Trying to draw and banish at once is the most common self-written mistake.

The folding convention comes out of American folk practice — toward the body to draw, away to banish — documented at length in Harry Middleton Hyatt's mid-century field interviews. It is a convention, not a law of nature; its value is consistency.

Step 3 — Choose materials that mean something

Here is the permission most beginners are waiting for: your associations outrank the correspondence table. If a published list assigns green to money and green is the color of the hospital wall where you sat for three weeks, green is not your money color. Use the one that is. Keep the list to three or four elements — short lists are easier to repeat exactly, which matters more than abundance.

• A candle in a color you can defend in one sentence. Conventional color associations are a starting point, not a rule.
• Paper and a pen. Plain paper is fine, and a pen you like beats an expensive one you are precious about.
• One herb or dried plant you have a real relationship with — something you cook with, or that grows where you walk.
• One personal object if the working concerns you: a strand of hair, a photograph, a signature.

Step 4 — Write the words

Rhyme is optional — a memory aid from a period when working texts were transmitted orally, not a technical requirement. If forcing a rhyme makes you write something you do not mean, drop it. A workable spoken section has three movements, and nine lines is enough:

1. Address. Name what you are speaking to — a deity, an ancestor, your steadiest self, the fire in front of you. If you do not know, say so and address the work itself.
2. State. Say the intention sentence from Step 1, unchanged, then what you are prepared to do about it in ordinary life. That second line is the hinge.
3. Release. One line that ends it. “It is said, and I let it go to work” does the job.

Say it aloud once beforehand — words that read beautifully are often unsayable. The written half is simpler: petition writing means putting the request on paper, often repeating the ask an odd number of times, then folding it toward or away from you. It works alone if candles are not practical where you live.

Step 5 — Decide the timing (and how much it matters)

Timing conventions are ancient and well documented. Planetary days — Friday for love-adjacent work, Saturday for endings, Thursday for expansion — are set out in Renaissance sources such as Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1533). The lunar convention is simpler: waxing to draw, waning to release, full for anything at its peak, dark for endings.

Use them if they help. They are useful for one reason that has nothing to do with metaphysics: a timing rule creates an appointment. “Friday after the house is quiet” is a thing you will do; “sometime this month” is not.

What we will not tell you is that the wrong day voids the work. Anyone selling urgency on the basis of a closing window is selling urgency. If the situation is live and the next waxing moon is nineteen days away, work now — full attention on a Tuesday beats distraction on the correct Friday. If you want the structure, pick the next phase that fits and put it in the calendar.

Step 6 — Write the closing and the disposal

An unclosed ritual leaves you checking — half-performing it in your head for days, adding a line in the shower. The closing prevents exactly that. Write two things down in advance.

The closing. A fixed final gesture and sentence: snuff the candle, say your release line, wash your hands, leave the room. Same every time. Its only job is to be unmistakable.

The disposal. Decide beforehand what happens to the paper, wax and herbs — deciding afterwards is how remains end up in a drawer for two years. Drawing work is generally kept; banishing work leaves your space entirely. Traditions differ on burning, burying or binning; consistency matters more than which you pick.

One safety note, stated plainly: never leave a burning candle unattended, keep flame away from anything that can catch, and if your ritual calls for a candle to burn all the way down, use a proper holder on a non-flammable surface and stay in the room.

Step 7 — Write it down and keep the record

Write the finished ritual out in full before you perform it, and afterwards add three lines: the date, what you noticed during, and what happened in the following weeks — in ordinary life, not in signs.

This is the habit that separates practitioners who improve from those who repeat themselves for a decade. Memory is generous about rituals: it edits out the ones that went nowhere and inflates the two that seemed to land. A written record does not, and after a year you begin to see your own patterns — that your banishing work is careless, that you write beautifully and then fail to act, that the short rituals are the ones you repeat.

A worked example you can adapt

Here is the framework filled in. The situation is deliberately ordinary: someone who has put off a difficult conversation with a family member for months.

Notice what is doing the work. The ritual does not ask for the conversation to go well — that is not in the writer's gift. It asks for what the writer can deliver, and names a deadline. The hinge is the fourth line: I will choose the day this week.

Where self-written rituals usually go wrong

The intention is a mood, not a request. “I want to feel better” gives the ritual nothing to be about.

It is too long to repeat. Write the version you would still do on a tired Wednesday.

It mixes modes. Drawing love while banishing an ex splits the working in half. Separate nights, in that order — and banishing is not always the right tool, as we set out in when banishing is the wrong choice.

It has no closing. Fix the ending in writing beforehand, or you will keep amending it for a week.

There is no follow-up action. The big one. A ritual that asks for a new job and is not followed by an application is asking the universe to do your admin. Every intention sentence needs a real-world counterpart you have committed to.

Writing your own vs. having one written for you

We sell a service that writes rituals for people, so treat this as an interested party being straight with you: most people should write their own first. The framework above is not withheld knowledge — it is the actual method, on this page for free, because a practice you built yourself is worth more than one you bought. The situations where having one written is the better call are fairly specific:

• The situation is tangled — several people, several goals, or an ask that keeps changing shape.
• You have written three and none felt like yours — which means you are stuck on the intention, not the craft.
• You are too close to it. Grief and acute fear are the two states in which people write the worst rituals.
• You want the timing, materials and disposal decided by someone who has made those calls many times, so your attention goes into performing rather than researching.

If none apply, write your own. If one does, that is what the made-to-measure ritual above is for — written for your circumstances, performed by you. Having someone perform a ritual on your behalf is a different thing again; we set out what to expect when someone performs a ritual for you, including its limits.

And before you pay anyone for any of this — us included — read how to spot a fake spell caster. Anyone who guarantees an outcome, escalates the price after you have paid, or tells you a curse has been detected on you is not someone to work with. That test applies to us too, and it should.

What the evidence actually supports

Norton and Gino, in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (2014), found that people who performed a ritual after a loss — including rituals invented for the study — reported lower grief afterwards, mediated by a restored sense of control. It held for participants who did not believe rituals work. Legare and Souza, in Cognition (2012), showed that people judge rituals more effective when they involve more repetition, more steps and a religious icon. That second study is about perceived efficacy, and it is a useful corrective: elaborateness makes a ritual feel stronger without evidence that it works better. Which is precisely why we told you to keep yours short.

One caution: a much-cited 2016 paper reporting that rituals improve performance by reducing anxiety was retracted in 2024 after the authors' own review of the data. You will still find it quoted confidently across the wellness internet. We are not citing it.

The honest position: there is decent evidence that performing rituals changes how people feel and how much control they experience, and no evidence that a particular wording, moon phase or ingredient causes a particular external outcome. Both are true at once, and a practice built on the first is sturdier.

Voices from practice

We do not publish invented testimonials, so what follows is described generally rather than attributed to anyone. The quieter complaint we hear is from people who performed something beautiful, felt lifted for two days, then did nothing differently — which is not a failure of the ritual but of the missing action.

Practitioners who keep written records commonly report the same three things: that their earliest rituals were far too long and the ones they still use are the short ones; that the writing itself changes the ask, so people sit down to write about a relationship and finish writing about their own courage; and that what they value in a ritual afterwards depends less on what happened next than on whether they honestly named what they wanted at the start.

What we don't promise

We will not tell you that a ritual you write will make a specific person act a specific way, that it will produce money, a job or a reconciliation, or that any wording is more powerful than another in a way we could demonstrate. We do not sell curse detection, and we will never contact you to say we have sensed something wrong with you. Ritual is not medical or psychiatric treatment and is no substitute for it — if you are unwell, frightened for your safety, or in crisis, please involve a doctor or a crisis service first.

What we claim is narrower: a well-written ritual gives a difficult intention a shape, a deadline and a witness.

Practically: your first ritual this week

1. Tonight. Write the intention sentence, and only that. Leave it where you will see it in the morning.
2. Tomorrow. Read it again and rewrite until it passes all three tests.
3. Then. Fill in the other six lines on one page, mode first.
4. Say it aloud once, alone, beforehand. Fix anything you stumble over.
5. Choose the day — by moon or planetary day if you like the structure, otherwise the next quiet evening.
6. Perform it exactly as written — no improvising, no additions — and close it properly.
7. Do the real-world thing you named, within the deadline you set. Then write your three lines in the record.

Frequently asked questions

Does a ritual have to rhyme?

No. Rhyme is a memory aid from traditions where working texts were passed on orally, and it survives because rhymed lines are easy to hold in the mouth. If it forces you into words you do not mean, it costs more than it gives. Plain speech you believe beats a couplet you contorted to reach.

Can I write a ritual with no tools at all?

Yes. The seven parts require no object. A written petition, folded in the direction of your mode and kept or disposed of deliberately, is a complete working. Candles, herbs and stones make an intention physical; they are not ingredients a ritual fails without. If your home rules out open flame, work with paper, water or breath.

How long should a ritual be?

Short enough to perform from memory, which for most people means ten to twenty minutes. Research on how people judge rituals shows that more steps and repetition make one feel more effective, which is why elaborate first attempts are tempting and rarely repeated. Write the version you would still do when tired.

Do I have to wait for the right moon phase?

No. The waxing-to-draw, waning-to-release convention is old, widespread and useful as a scheduling structure, but nobody can show that working off-phase voids anything. If the situation is live now, work now. Treat anyone who says a closing window requires urgent payment as a warning sign, not a deadline.

Can I write a ritual to make someone love me?

You can write love work, and people have for as long as there are records of it. We would steer you away from anything aimed at overriding another person's choice — partly for the ethical reason most traditions reached independently, partly because work aimed at someone else's decision leaves you nothing to do but wait and check. Work aimed at your own clarity or courage gives you a next step. We make no claims about what any love ritual will produce.

How do I know whether it worked?

Decide what would count before you begin — that is what the specificity test in Step 1 is for — and write it down. Review the record a few weeks later against ordinary life, not against omens. Memory reshapes rituals generously; a record is the only reliable defense against remembering the two that landed and forgetting the eight that did not.

Sources & further reading

• Norton, M. I., & Gino, F. (2014). Rituals Alleviate Grieving for Loved Ones, Lovers, and Lotteries. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(1), 266–272.
• Legare, C. H., & Souza, A. L. (2012). Evaluating ritual efficacy: Evidence from the supernatural. Cognition, 124(1), 1–15.
• Retraction notice to “Don't stop believing: Rituals improve performance by decreasing anxiety.” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 185 (2024). Original article: 137 (2016), 71–85.
• Betz, H. D. (ed.) (1992). The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, Including the Demotic Spells, 2nd ed. University of Chicago Press.
• Agrippa, H. C. (1533). De Occulta Philosophia Libri Tres (Three Books of Occult Philosophy) — planetary days and hours.
• Hyatt, H. M. (1970–1978). Hoodoo — Conjuration — Witchcraft — Rootwork, 5 vols. Western Publishing — field interviews documenting petition-paper practice.

Last reviewed August 2026 by the Temple of Desire editorial team.