The usual answer to this question is spiritual scolding. You did not believe enough. It was not meant to be. You have blockages.
None of that is diagnosis. Here is an actual one.
First: three different things get called failure
Before anything else, work out which one you have.
Not yet arrived. The window has not elapsed. Simple workings move in one to three weeks; anything involving another person's decision takes longer; anything involving institutions, money or law takes longer still. If you are asking on day five, you are asking too early.
Arrived unrecognised. You asked for money and got an unexpected refund, a cancelled bill and a friend repaying an old loan, and you are still waiting for "money." You asked to hear from someone and they liked a photo from two years ago. Results arrive through available channels, and available channels are usually smaller than the picture in your head.
Genuinely failed. Full window elapsed, nothing in any form, no movement of any kind.
Only the third needs the list below. The first needs patience and the second needs you to go back through the last month honestly.
Working out which of the three you are in is the part people get wrong, and it is worth asking before you read any further. Our live chat will tell you in a couple of questions.
The nine reasons
1. The intent was phrased as a negative. "I don't want to be broke." "I want him to stop ignoring me." Workings need something to move toward, and a negative gives them the wrong thing to hold. Name the state you want, not the one you are leaving.
2. There was no channel. You cast for a job and applied for nothing. You cast for clients and contacted no one. Magic moves probability and probability needs somewhere to move. The workings that produce stories are almost always the ones where the person also did something — often small, often something they had been putting off.
3. The target was vague. "Someone" is nobody. Even a general working needs specificity somewhere — a full name, a date of birth, a described situation, a named channel.
4. You are working against yourself. Some part of you does not want this, and it has considerably more hours in the day than the ritual did. The test: imagine it arriving in full, right now, and notice whether any part of the picture produces dread. That part is the problem and no amount of recasting outvotes it.
5. You kept checking. Constant refreshing, rereading, reaching out to see if it worked. This is the most common single cause and the hardest advice to take. Cast, then leave it for the whole window without looking.
6. The target had something in place. People who are warded, or who have their own ongoing work, or who are simply very settled in their position, are harder to move. This is not failure; it is resistance, and it needs a different approach rather than a stronger version of the same one.
7. Something needed clearing first. Drawing work landing on top of an unresolved attachment, an active drain, or a heavy house tends to underperform or produce distorted results. Clear, then open, then draw. Most people do it in exactly the reverse order.
8. It was the wrong category. Attraction cast at a situation that needed reconciliation. Binding cast where there was nothing to bind. A cleansing where what was actually needed was cord cutting. The most consequential decision in any working is which kind it is, and it is made before anything is lit.
9. Bad conditions. Cast while furious, drunk, exhausted or in the middle of the crisis itself. Workings take on the state they were made in. A spell cast in panic tends to produce more of the thing you panicked about.
The physical problems that get read as omens
Two very common ones worth naming separately, because people treat them as messages.
The paper would not burn. Damp paper, thick cardstock, or a deep narrow vessel starving the flame of oxygen. That is all. Use thin paper, and a wide dish.
The candle tunnelled or went out. Container candles need their first burn to reach a full melt pool edge to edge — roughly an hour per inch of diameter. Cut it short and the candle tunnels for the rest of its life and self-extinguishes. Physics, not refusal.
What not to do next
Do not recast the same working harder. Three castings of the same spell into the same obstacle produces three obstacles, plus a person who is now considerably more anxious than when they started.
If something did not land, the answer is to find out why, not to repeat it with more candles.
Work it out with us
Nine reasons is a lot to self-diagnose, and the two that matter most — working against yourself, and the wrong category — are exactly the two you cannot see from the inside.
Open the live chat at the bottom of this page and tell us what you cast, when, how you phrased it, and what has happened since. Three or four questions is usually all it takes to find which of the nine it was.
Often the answer is that it has not failed at all and you are three weeks early. That is free to find out, and it is a considerably better outcome than casting it again.
Or browse our full range of workings.