Types of Spells: A Beginner's Map by Goal and Method

The types of spells in modern practice sort two ways at once. You skim the map, find the row that matches what you are feeling in your chest right now, and follow the link to a full how-to. That is the whole trick.

What "Types of Spells" Actually Means

Spellwork sorts along two overlapping lenses: the GOAL (what you want) and the METHOD (how you deliver it). A goal is the ache or the opening you are working with, like protection, cleansing, attraction, self-love, binding, or release. A method is what your hands actually do: strike a match, seal a jar, tie a knot, stir a pot.

Any goal can ride any method. Protection can be a candle, a jar, a knot, a pouch, or a simmer pot. That is why lists of "the seven kinds of spells" always feel a little arbitrary. They are picking one lens and pretending the other one is not there.

TL;DR: Spells sort two ways at once, by GOAL (protection, cleansing, attraction, self-love, binding, release) and by METHOD (candle, jar, knot, sachet, petition, poppet, kitchen). Pick the goal that matches your need, then pick a method your hands actually want to do.

How to Read This Map (Goal x Method)

Goal answers "why am I doing this." Method answers "how does the intention leave my hands and enter the world."

Modern witchcraft is famously eclectic. Traditions overlap, borrow from each other, and get reshaped by the person actually doing them. Treat the table below as a jump menu, not a taxonomy exam.

The Consent Frame Under All of It

In modern practice, most witches hold that magic aimed at another person without their consent breaks the ethical spine of the craft, even when the intent is loving. That means the workings on this page point at your own space, your own energy, your own choices. Coercive love spells targeting a specific person, hexes meant to ruin a life, forcing a separation on people who did not ask, all sit outside the frame here.

You will still find those things on the internet. You will not find them treated as neutral options in the modern craft, and that consensus is the one I write inside.

Goal Families: Sort by What You Want

Six families cover almost everything a beginner reaches for. Each one has a full how-to elsewhere in the silo; here you get the feel of it and the door.

Protection

Defensive shielding of you, a room, or an object. Most practitioners learn protection first, and there is a reason: opening yourself up energetically without any shielding practice tends to feel, quickly, like leaving your front door propped open in a bad neighborhood.

Salt at the threshold. A piece of black tourmaline dropped into the bag before a hard meeting. A visualized shield the color of steel around your body on the train. Small, unshowy, and the ones you actually maintain. More in protection workings and cleanse a room.

Cleansing and Banishing

Cleansing resets a room or a body to neutral, the way opening the windows resets stale air. Banishing is more forceful. It is what you reach for when something (a fight, a bad guest, a persistent low mood) has already taken up residence and needs to go.

Rosemary steeped hot and used as a floor wash, smoke from a bundle of garden herbs, salt swept from the back of the house to the front door, those are cleansing gestures. Black pepper, red pepper flakes, sharper language, those tilt toward banishing. When it comes to banishing another person, most practitioners reframe it: you are not controlling their body, you are blocking their energy from yours. Full method in banishing rituals.

Attraction and Abundance

Drawing conditions toward you: opportunity, general love, luck, a chance to be seen. The distinction that matters is specificity. Attracting "a partner who is kind and available" stays inside the ethical frame; attracting "my coworker Marcus" walks into compulsion.

Basil in a wallet, mint in a pocket, rose petals on the altar, green candles for money, pink for tender openings. These practices are believed to shift your magnetism, not the other person's autonomy. And they work as pairing: light the candle for the job AND send the application. The call comes because both halves happened. This is not financial advice, and no spell replaces a budget. See magic plus action and honey jar.

Self-Love and Healing Intention

Introspective, restorative, and the one goal with essentially zero consent risk, because you are the only target. A pink candle, rose quartz in your palm, lavender in the bath. Some people layer 528hz audio in the background; in sound-therapy circles that frequency is called the "love tone" and is believed to resonate with the heart.

These practices support how you feel. They are not a substitute for a therapist, a doctor, or medication, and they do not diagnose or treat anything. Please keep that boundary firm even when you love the ritual. More at rituals for anxiety and shadow work.

Binding

The heaviest goal on this page, and the most misunderstood. Binding is not harm; it is restriction. You are tying the hands of someone who is actively causing damage, usually as a last-resort defensive measure when the ordinary channels have failed.

A concrete example lives in recent memory: the mass binding ritual organized by magical activist Michael Hughes in February 2017, aimed at U.S. President Donald Trump. Practitioners across the world repeated the working at midnight on waning crescent moons, and the framing was explicit: not to injure the target, but to bind him from taking actions the participants deemed destructive. Whatever you think of the politics, the intent frame is the point. Restraint, not injury. That is what binding is asking to be.

Interrogate your motives before you touch this one. Petty revenge dressed up as self-defense is a well-known trap, and most practitioners will tell you the working turns on you when the framing was really about ego. If the working still fits after that check, the full rite and how to undo it are at binding spell.

Release and Cord-Cutting

Severing YOUR OWN draining ties: after a breakup, an estrangement, a job that hollowed you out. Two candles connected by a length of string, scissors, a fire-safe bowl, and a plain declaration of what you are letting go of.

The catch practitioners actually run into: if you keep texting them back, the cord reattaches. Cord-cutting only works when the physical action lines up with the magical one. And doing this working for a friend who has not asked, or forcing a separation between two people who both still want the connection, is both invasive and largely futile. The community reads it as one of the clearer ethical lines. See shadow work for the inner half of this work.

Method Forms: Sort by How Your Hands Want to Work

Some people think through candles. Some through kneading. Some through cord in the hands. Pick the vehicle your body wants and the intention will ride it more cleanly than the "correct" method you have to talk yourself into.

Candle Magic

The most accessible method in the craft. A dressed candle burns your intention into the room over minutes or hours, and a dollar-store birthday candle is as real a tool as a hand-poured pillar. Color-coded (green for money, red for passion, black for banishing), sometimes carved with a word or a sigil, sometimes anointed nib to base with an oil.

Fire safety, once, because it matters: never leave a lit candle unattended, keep it away from anything that can catch, and snuff with a snuffer rather than blowing (blowing scatters both wax and, in the belief frame, intention). Full walkthrough in candle magic how-to, and the color correspondences chart lives on its own page.

Spell Jars and Bottles

Encapsulation. You build a microcosm of what you want inside a jar (herbs, a stone, a slip of paper, sometimes a small offering), seal it, and set it somewhere it can keep working just by being present. The 16th-century English witch bottle sits under this method, filled with sharps and personal effluvia and buried at a threshold to catch curses aimed at the house. Modern sweetening jars use honey or sugar around a name; protection jars pack black tourmaline and rosemary and get sealed with a puddle of black wax across the lid. A freezer jar seals a problem behavior in water and puts it on ice, the containment method laid out in the freezer spell.

The magic of a jar is that it does not go away. It sits on your bedside table and reminds you every morning what you asked for. See spell jars, witch bottle, and honey jars.

Knot Magic

Tactile, rhythmic, and old enough that we cannot date its start. A cord tied with intent locks the working in; untied later, it releases what was stored. The classic sequence walks nine knots up a cord with a rhyming chant ("by knot of one, the spell's begun") that builds pressure with each pass. The woven variant, a Witch's Ladder, adds feathers, beads, and small charms into the length so the cord becomes an object as well as an act.

The reason knot magic lands so well for anxious beginners: your hands have something to do. Full guidance in knot magic.

Sachets and Charm Bags

Portable jars, essentially. A breathable pouch of herbs, a small stone, sometimes a scrap of paper with a written intent, carried in a pocket or a purse or hung from a rearview mirror. In practice they are a "mobile shield" for the moving parts of your week.

Regional forms and names differ across culturally distinct traditions, and some of those names belong to closed practices with initiatory lineages. Stay in the general "charm bag" register unless you have been taught otherwise. More on which vocabulary is not yours to borrow in what to keep out of your pouch, and symbols and marks for what to draw on the pouch itself.

Petition and Paper Spells

The magic of exact wording. You write your request in specific, unambiguous language, check it for loopholes (the "ham sandwich" problem is real: ask vaguely for "more food" and the universe will happily hand you a sandwich you did not want), and then place the paper under a candle, fold and burn it, bury it, or carry it in your wallet.

Petitions clarify. Half the work is done by the time you finish writing, because you have finally been forced to say what you actually want. Retiring a spent petition, once it has done its job, does not undo the magic. Deeper method in how to write a spell, and the visual cousin lives at sigil magic.

Sympathetic and Poppet Magic

A stitched effigy as a stand-in. The word "poppet" comes from Middle English and simply meant "small doll" long before Hollywood dressed it in a voodoo costume. Historically these are at least as often used for healing and protection as anything else, and one of the most common poppets a witch makes is of herself, filled with soothing herbs and set in a safe place on the altar.

The link between the doll and the person is called a taglock: hair, a fingernail, an item worn against the skin. The ethical line is clean and non-negotiable in modern practice. Poppets of yourself, or of someone who has explicitly asked you to work for them, sit inside the frame. Poppets of anyone else do not. Related discipline in closed practices to respect.

Simmer Pots and Kitchen Workings

The pot on the stove, low heat, water and citrus peels and cinnamon sticks and rosemary. It scents the whole house while it shifts the room's feel, and even the "just aromatherapy" reading of it does real work: your nervous system genuinely responds to warm cinnamon and fresh orange in a way that stones on a shelf cannot match.

Kitchen magic more broadly makes cooking itself the ritual. Garlic wards, rosemary carries clarity and memory, salt purifies, honey sweetens, and, in the belief frame, the cook's mood seasons the meal. Wholesome, low-risk, and one of the fastest routes into the craft for someone who already cooks. See simmer pot recipes and kitchen witchcraft.

The Cross-Reference: Any Goal, Any Method

One goal can be built through several methods. One method can carry several goals. This grid is a jump menu, not a rule set; every cell routes to a page that teaches the actual working.

How a Spell Actually Comes Together (Order of Operations)

Most workings, across most traditions, follow the same four beats. Naming them takes the mystery out without taking the depth out.

1. Cleanse and ground. A salt sweep, a wash, a breath, a moment of feeling your feet. You are clearing the room and clearing yourself so the day's static does not ride into the working. Drills in grounding drill.
2. Set the goal in exact language. Write it down. This is where the petition lives, and where the "ham sandwich" gets caught.
3. Marry it to a method. Dress the candle, fill the jar, tie the cord, stir the pot. The physical act is where intention becomes something that has left your head.
4. Close, thank, walk away. Snuff the flame, thank whoever you called in, and step back. Sitting on top of a working and checking it every hour is like digging up a seed to see if it sprouted. Ritual planning template at plan a ritual, and the fuller container in cast a circle.

Picking Your First Working

If you are staring at this map wanting someone to just tell you what to do, three prompts.

What is the ache today? Safety, stuckness, grief, a specific opening you can see coming (an interview, a hard conversation, a move). Match the ache to a goal above. Do not overthink this. The first honest answer is usually right.

What is already in your kitchen or your bag? Herbs on the spice rack, a candle from a birthday cake, a length of ribbon from a gift, water from your tap. If the working needs something you would have to buy tonight, pick a different working. Zero-cost options in no-cost starter kit.

How much time do you actually have? Twenty minutes on a Tuesday is enough for a simmer pot or a candle. A weekend afternoon is enough for a full jar. Match the working to the container you have, not the one you wish you had.

What honestly bears out for most beginners: candle magic and simmer pots reward you fast because they engage your senses (smell, sight, warmth) and give your hands a clear sequence. Heavier workings (binding, layered petitions, complex jars) tend to land better after you have a few reps in and know how your own energy behaves. First things to try live at beginner spells and the wider walk-in is at starter guide.

A Word on Materials, Sourcing, and Respect

Modern practice is becoming more careful about what it burns and buys. White sage (Salvia apiana) and palo santo (Bursera graveolens) are both under real ecological pressure from over-harvesting, and both come out of Indigenous ceremonial contexts that were never asked before the industry started shrink-wrapping them. Garden-grown rosemary, pine, cedar from a tree you actually know, mugwort, lavender: all of these do the work of smoke cleansing and are within your right to grow, cut, and burn.

The broader conversation about which practices are open, which are closed, and which vocabulary is not yours to borrow lives at closed practices. If you want the plain list of supplies that get oversold, overpriced, or misrepresented, what to avoid gets specific. Foraging responsibly is its own small discipline in ethical sourcing.

Where to Go Next

If you found your GOAL on this page, follow it down: protection, banishing, honey jars, shadow work. If you found your METHOD, that door is open too: candle magic, spell jars, knot magic, simmer pots.

You do not need to master the map. You need one working that fits your week. Start there. More at first spells to try, write your own, and the mechanics under it all at how spells work.