How to Write a Petition

Every working on this blog, every candle, jar, and bath, has the same thing at its center: the petition. The petition is the stated ask, the words that tell the work its job. Scripture says the tongue holds the power of death and life, and the tradition took that literally. This post teaches the skill everything else depends on.

The four qualities of a strong petition

Specific. Name the condition and the outcome. Not money but the eight hundred by the fifteenth. Not love but the qualities of the person and the shape of the life. The work honors specificity because specificity is how you will know when it arrives.

Plain. Your own mouth's words, the way you would ask your grandmother for something across the kitchen table. The tradition has no required script and no reward for sounding fancy. It rewards sounding like you.

Honest. Petition for what you actually want, not the respectable version of it. The work reads the want underneath the words, so the words might as well match.

Spoken aloud. Written petitions get spoken too. The voice is the oldest instrument in the practice, and an ask that has never left your mouth has never fully been asked.

The paper practice

Petitions are often written as well as spoken: the ask set down on plain paper in your own hand, then placed with the work, most commonly beneath the candle carrying it. The old teaching on folding is simple and public: fold the paper toward you to draw something in, away from you to send something off. Beyond that, the paper practices go deep, and the deep end stays at the table where it was taught.

What to do with the paper after

When the flame is done, the paper still has a job. If the ask was to draw something toward you, keep it. Bury it in the yard or tuck it wherever your important papers live. If the ask was to send something off, the paper goes off with it, carried clear of your property to a crossroads or to moving water. The logic that governs the folding governs this too. What you are drawing stays close to you. What you are sending goes away from you.

The asks this house will not work

Two of them, stated plainly. Petitions to dominate, meaning bending a specific person's will, because this house draws and never forces, the ethic that runs through the whole sweetening and love work lane. And petitions to harm, which belong to a different conversation than a shop blog. If your petition is really one of those wearing a costume, sit with Never Work Love Angry before you write anything.

The petition meets your effort

A petition is a job description, and you are on the crew. Ask for the eight hundred and send the invoices. Ask for the love and leave the house. The full theology of that pairing lives in Pray, Work, and Anoint, and it applies to every condition equally.

Where your petition goes to work

Match the ask to the tool: the candle chosen through 10 Types of Hoodoo Work, the jar for the slow sweet work, the psalm that carries money asks in Working the Psalms for Money. Every product in this shop ships with a ritual card, and the petition is the part of the card only you can write.

Petition templates, condition by condition, go out on the email list at the bottom of this page. Write yours plain and mean it.