How to Make a Witch's Jar

Repels negativity, protects the home

Jan 12, 2025

The witch’s jar is an old spell designed to entangle, confuse, and filter negative and unwanted energies, to keep them from entering one’s home or sacred space.

Traditionally the jar is stood or suspended outside the most often-entered door.

First, Choose a Jar

The jar can be clear or colored glass. It should have a fitted lid.

You should figure out where you’re going to put it and how. I love suspending them over the entryway. Few ever notice them there. Or you could have a small shelf of interesting jars near the front door, or stand it beside the entryway like a decoration. Use your imagination!

You’ll also need a red candle, and your personal sigil, which is usually your initials or the initials of your magical name formed together into a symbol made of the combined letters. Figure this out before you begin.

Carve your sigil into the red candle with your intent clearly in mind.

You’ll also need red paint and a small paintbrush or a red sharpie to put your sigil onto the front and back, top and bottom of the jar.

Then Choose the Ingredients

Choose them, and set them out, but DO NOT YET add to the jar.

For entangling & trapping negativity:

Spider’s webs
Cobwebs
Tangled string
3 rusty nails
Snarled knots from your own hair
Including a “contagious sample” from your own body stamps your energy over your threshold, claiming your space, and declaring it as such. Like planting your flag.

For repelling negativity:

Salt
Graveyard dirt (especially from ancestors’ graves)
Onyx
Herbs: Angelica, Anise root, Asoefetida (emergencies only! Smells like its folk name, devil’s dung.) Bittersweet, Bloodroot, Burdock, Cactus, Clove, Devil’s Shoestring, Elder, Flax, Fleabane, Garlic

You can look up many more herbs. I recommend The Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs by Scott Cunningham. That’s my go-to source. But basically, strong smelling, foul smelling, astringent herbs, anything with prickers or thorns, anything with tangly vines, anything toxic.

To purify:

sandalwood, eucalyptus, rosemary, pine cones which can both entrap and purify, citrus peels, which could also entrap if you spiral-peel them.

Everything that says PURIFY to you. Anything that would cleanse negativity away and leave all it touches fresh and new, anything that feels this way to you, choose for your jar.

Words:
Write a spell on a piece of paper, roll it up tight and set it with your collection of items.

I might write:

Turn your nasty ass away
You’re not getting through today
Love can enter easily
Hate gets tangled hopelessly
Naught but love shall herein dwell
All the rest can go to hell
So mote it be!

Putting it together

Cast a circle. Call the quarters. Invoke your chosen powers.

Light the red candle with your sigil on it, or carve your sigil within the circle and then light the candle.

Take the jar, which you should have washed thoroughly ahead of time. Hold it in your hands, and visualize it as a trap that will pull in and contain any negative energy, allowing only love and light to pass into your home. It’s like a filtration system.

Now take each item you’ve chosen to go into your witch jar, hold it in your hands, and tell it its purpose.

Creature of thorn, pierce and entrap any dark energy that would pass into my home.
Creature of web, gift of grandmother spider, entangle my enemies and all who mean harm that they may not enter here.
Creature of onxy, repel negativity back from whence it came. (And so on.)

Read the spell, and then roll it up, tie it with a red string, and put it into the jar.

When everything is in the jar, put on the lid, screw it tight.

Take paint or a sharpie and put your magical sigil on the outside of the jar, on the front, on the back, on the bottom, and on the top of the lid.

Now take the red candle and drip its wax around the lid to seal it.

Place the jar into the center of your altar or room, and begin to move around it while chanting, drumming, rattling, or dancing to a recoded magical beat. As you increase the pace, you are raising energy. When you feel the energy peak, direct it into your jar and relax all your body at once. You might sink to the floor and that’s okay.

Press your hands to the jar to release any residual energy into it. Set it down again.

Give thanks and release deities, close the quarters, take up the circle you have cast.

Take the jar immediately to its new place near your most used door, put it in its new permanent spot. (So it’s important to know how you’ll do this ahead of time.)

As you place it, tell it its job.

Witch’s jar, with magic made
Guard this home from renegades
Tangle bad, and trap it too
Only love can pass you through
By the pow’rs of light and dark,
Witch’s Jar, perform this art
So mote it be!

Finally, ground yourself by sitting on the earth or as close as possible, or touching a tree or holding a rock. Have a grain-based snack to really settle back into the world again.

Wasn’t that a rush?