Every guide gives you the same list. Bury banishing work away from home. Bury drawing work on your property. Running water for release. Crossroads for endings. North for grounding, east for beginnings.
None of them tell you why, so you cannot work out what to do in a case the list does not cover — and none of them are written for someone in a first-floor flat with a shared bin.
The principle
The disposal should match the spell's direction of intent.
Sending away — banishing, cutting, hex removal, ending. The remains leave. Off your property, downstream, into moving water, out with rubbish that is not yours. You are completing the gesture of removal.
Drawing in — love, money, opportunity, healing. The remains stay close. Buried on the property, kept in the home, potted with a plant you tend. You are anchoring it where you live.
Fixing in place — binding, protection, keeping. The remains stay put and stable. Buried at a boundary, walled in, set at a threshold, weighted down.
That is the whole rule. Once you have it, you can decide any case yourself.
If your working does not fall cleanly into one of the three, bring it to our live chat. Mixed-intent workings are common and they are the ones the standard lists cannot help you with.
Running water is for release because it carries away and does not return. Crossroads are for endings and choices because they belong to nobody and lead everywhere. Fire is for transformation and speed. Earth is for slow work, growth and holding. Nothing here is arbitrary.
If you have no garden
Most people do not. The realistic options:
A plant pot as proxy earth. A pot on a windowsill is genuine earth and works for drawing and fixing work. Keep one specifically for this. For drawing work it is arguably better than a garden, because you tend it.
A bin that is not yours for banishing. A public bin on your way to work, a bin at the station. It satisfies the "off the property" requirement exactly.
Water-soluble remains down the drain — salt water, herbal infusions, bath water. Fine for release work. Do not do this for banishing you want gone from the building; that water is in your own pipes.
The boundary of a public park, for biodegradable remains only. Herbs, ash, paper.
A crossroads is any place where paths genuinely divide. A pedestrian junction counts. You do not need a country lane.
Ash is the great simplifier. If you can burn something down to ash safely, disposal becomes trivial — ash scatters, dissolves, goes anywhere.
What not to put in the ground
The traditional advice predates plastic and predates people burying sealed jars.
Do not bury glass. Jars, bottles, broken candle vessels. It does not break down, someone will dig it up, and it is a hazard.
Do not bury wax in quantity. Paraffin does not degrade.
Do not bury salt anywhere you want things to grow. Salt sterilises soil and the effect lasts years.
Do not throw anything into a river or the sea except things that dissolve. A sealed jar in a waterway is littering, it is illegal in most places, and it is bad practice on its own terms — you have put a working somewhere it cannot complete.
Separate before you dispose. Herbs and paper to the earth, glass to recycling, wax to the bin. The working is in the intent and the organic material, not in the container.
How long can you leave them sitting?
Longer than people fear, with one exception.
Remains from drawing and protective work can sit safely for days while you find the right place and the right moment. Nothing degrades because you waited until the weekend.
The exception is anything from cleansing, banishing or removal. Those have absorbed something, and leaving them in the house is leaving the thing you just took off yourself sitting in the next room. Same day if you can, next morning at the latest. If you genuinely cannot get out, put them outside the living space — a balcony, a porch, a bin outside the door — rather than on a shelf indoors.
And do not leave remains in a car. It sounds oddly specific because people do it constantly, and a car is a small sealed space you then sit inside every day.
Cleansing work specifically
Remains from a cleansing have absorbed. They do not get kept, do not get reused, and do not stay in the house. Out of the building the same day if you can.
Used salt, egg water, bath water, cleansing herbs — all the same rule.
Remains from a spell that worked
Rarely covered. If a working succeeded and has run its course, it is traditionally thanked and retired rather than simply binned. Burn it, bury it on the property if it was drawing work, or keep it deliberately if it was protective and ongoing.
What you avoid is a drawer of half-finished workings from three years ago. Spent workings that are never closed sit in a practice like unpaid bills.
Unsure which direction yours is?
Some workings genuinely are ambiguous — a cord cutting that was also about attracting something better, a protection working that involved banishing a person.
Open the live chat at the bottom of this page, tell us what you cast and what you are holding, and we will tell you which direction it belongs to and a realistic way to do it from where you actually live.
It takes a minute and it is free, and disposing of a working the wrong way is one of the more common reasons a finished spell keeps nagging at someone.
Or browse our full range of workings.