If you are stuck when creating a ritual or spell in your witchcraft practice, I recommend coming up with what I will call a “central metaphor,” the action or idea your ritual or spell is trying to evoke and “copy.” Decide what you are trying to achieve and create a metaphor around it, and then use that metaphor to come up with ritual actions. I recommend focusing on a verb that you can make into a ritual action, but common idioms can pack the same punch.

This is a process you might do automatically with common spells like cord-cutting, but I do not often see the idea articulated this way for people interested in designing their own spells and rituals. We do this all the time with correspondences and ingredients, but we witches (or maybe just me?) often stumble on what actions to take for a spell or ritual. (Do I write it on a piece of paper and burn it? Do I put it in a jar?)

An simple example would be burying something in the dirt in accordance with a central metaphor of burying something in the past. If you’re trying to sweeten someone’s feelings toward you, make them a sugary treat.

For an example of a more complicated ritual, I was designing a New Year’s Eve ritual and I decided that my central metaphor was going to be restarting like a computer: powering down and then powering back up again, installing updates and fixing hard drive problems. To do this, I cleaned my bedroom and the bathroom, took a shower, went to bed on New Year’s Eve, and then meditated when I woke up in the morning on New Year’s Day.

If you can’t think of a central metaphor right off the bat, I recommend doing an “I Want” List in a notebook or app. To do this, as I have said in previous posts, start a new page and focus on your ritual or spell, and then begin each sentence with “I want” or “I don’t want” and see what comes up. Refine your results with more “I want/I don’t want” statements until you feel like you’re done.