The petition paper is the most underrated tool in folk magick. It costs nothing. It requires no supplier, no consecration and no equipment. And it does something no other component does: it makes the intention into an object, so that the intention can then be treated like an object.

You can seal an object. You can bury it, burn it, feed it, hide it, carry it. Once the words are a thing, everything you know about doing things to things becomes available.

But there is a grammar to it, and most modern instruction gives you the vocabulary without the syntax. So here is the syntax.

The three questions

Every element of petition work answers one of three questions.

  1. Which way is it going? Toward you or away from you.
  2. How many times are you saying it? And what does that number claim.
  3. What happens to the paper afterwards? Sealed, burned, buried, carried, fed.

Get those three right and the details matter far less than you have been led to believe.

One: direction

This is the core mechanic, and it is beautifully simple. Fold toward yourself to draw energy towards you. Fold away from yourself to send energy away from you

The paper is a physical model of the working. Every fold is a movement, and the direction of the movement is the direction of the intention. If you want something to come in, the paper travels in. If you want something to leave, it travels out.

The standard drawing fold, as it appears across a great deal of container magick, (Container Magick is a form of spellwork where a vessel; such as a jar, bottle, box, or charm bag; is filled with curated ingredients to hold, sustain, and amplify magical energies.) runs like this:

  1. Write, then fold the paper toward you.
  2. Turn it ninety degrees clockwise.
  3. Fold toward you again.
  4. Turn ninety degrees clockwise again.
  5. Fold toward you a third time.

Three folds, two turns, all inward. The paper ends up as a small tight packet moving in the same direction as the wish.

For banishing, everything inverts. Fold away from you, turn anticlockwise, and the packet moves out.

Which way is clockwise, actually? Clockwise, sunwise, deiseil. In Scottish Gaelic practice deiseil (JESH-al) means with the sun, and it is the direction of blessing, increase and right order. Tuathal (TOO-uh-hul), anticlockwise, is the widdershins direction: against the sun, associated with undoing, unwinding and, in the older sources, with ill intent.

I would flag one thing that most instructions skip. The clockwise turn is not merely conventional. It ties the petition fold to the whole body of Scottish circumambulation practice, where you walk sunwise around a person, a well, a house or a cairn to bless, and anticlockwise to unmake. The fold is a miniature of the walk. That is a much older and more coherent piece of reasoning than "turn it right because the instructions say so".

A note on handedness. Direct the folding with your dominant hand, the hand that sends. Hold and steady the paper with your non-dominant hand, the hand that receives. This is true regardless of which hand that is for you. If a source tells you the right hand sends and the left receives, that source is describing right-handed people and has forgotten that other people exist.

Two: repetition

Writing a name once identifies it. Writing it repeatedly does something else: it makes a claim about the nature of the working.

The numbers are not decorative, and different traditions weight them differently, so I will give you what I use rather than pretending there is a universal key.

  • Three. Beginning, middle, end. A completed statement. The most common and the most general. Three does a thing and finishes.
  • Five. The elements, the senses, the human body with its four limbs and head. Five is embodied and is good for workings concerning a physical situation.
  • Seven. The classical planets, the days of the week. Seven is the cycle number, and it suits anything that must run its course through a period of time.
  • Nine. Three times three. The completed statement, completed, and completed again. Nine is where I stop and pay attention, because in my own practice nine carries a specific weight and it is not the same weight as the others. Nine is not a request. Nine is a statement of permanence. Where three asks and seven waits, nine declares. It does not petition a situation to change, it asserts that the change has already been established. Use nine when you mean this is now how it is. Do not use nine casually, and do not use it for anything you might want to reverse.

A layered structure. The other person's name written across the paper, your own name written over the top of it at ninety degrees, so the two are crossed. Your name goes on top when you want to be the one directing; theirs goes on top when you want to be received by them. It is a simple visual grammar and it is legible at a glance.

Three: what you do with it afterwards

The disposal is not a tidying-up step. It is the second half of the working.

  • Sealed in a vessel with a sweet base. Held, warmed and slowly worked. This is the sweetening structure: the intention is kept, continually softened, and revisited. Long, slow, cumulative.
  • Sealed in a vessel with a sour or sharp base. Vinegar, iron, pins. Contained, immobilised, kept where it cannot move. This is the witch bottle structure. Note that it is the same technology in the opposite key, and note that the two must never share a vessel. Sweetening and binding are different shapes and putting them in one jar produces a working that argues with itself.
  • Burned. Fast, complete, irreversible. Release, banishing, transformation. The petition goes up as smoke and there is no way to retrieve it, which is exactly the point.
  • Buried. Slow, rooted, permanent. Growth workings, foundation workings, anything that needs to develop over a season. Bury a drawing petition close to the house; bury a banishing petition off your land, downhill, and walk back by a different route.
  • Carried. The petition folded small and kept on the body. Contact, continual, personal.
  • Fed to water. Flowing water carries away; still water holds. Choose deliberately.

The paper itself

Less superstition here than you might expect, but a few things genuinely matter.

  • Use unlined paper if you can. Lines are somebody else's structure imposed on your words.
  • Write in one continuous motion where possible. Do not lift the pen between the repetitions of a name if you can avoid it, and do not cross anything out. If you make a mistake, start again with a fresh sheet. The point is not perfectionism, it is that a petition should be one uninterrupted act.
  • Write it in your own hand. Never print a petition. The handwriting is a personal concern in its own right, which is precisely why handwriting samples appear so often in the historical record of container magick.
  • Traditional inks include dragon's blood ink for power and dove's blood ink for love work, both of which are resin-based and neither of which involves any actual blood despite the names. A good black or a colour matched to your intention is entirely sufficient.

What the petition is actually doing

Here is the reason I think this tool is so powerful, and it is not a metaphysical reason: Writing a thing down forces you to decide what you actually want. Most failed workings fail at this step. The intention was vague, or it was three intentions wearing a coat, or it was a feeling rather than a request.

The moment you have to fit it onto a piece of paper in a specific number of repetitions and fold it in a specific direction, the vagueness has nowhere to hide.

The petition paper is a clarity device before it is anything else. Everything it does afterwards depends on that.

Sources

  • Hoggard, B. (2019). Magical House Protection: The Archaeology of Counter-Witchcraft. Berghahn Books. For written charms and petitions in the archaeological record.
  • Davies, O. (2009). Grimoires: A History of Magic Books. Oxford University Press.
  • Davies, O. (2003). Cunning-Folk: Popular Magic in English History. Hambledon.
  • Carmichael, A. (1900). Carmina Gadelica. Full text, for deiseil and tuathal circumambulation in Scottish Gaelic tradition.
  • Campbell, J. G. (1900). Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Available via Internet Archive.
  • Merrifield, R. (1987). The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic. Batsford.
  • Dictionaries of the Scots Language — for deiseil, widdershins and tuathal.

Related: [Naming and Speaking: Words as Ritual Instruments]; [Buried Protection: The Archaeology of Witch Bottles in Britain]