All practices

Banishment

Distance, boundaries, and closing a door that keeps opening.

Banishing clears a place rather than a person. It shares an instinct with salt at a threshold and a new broom sweeping the first dirt out of the door: the room is what is worked on, and the room is what changes.

The boundary rituals sit on your side of the line. A limit is drawn, sealed, and made to hold without you having to defend it every time somebody tests it. That is a very different thing from trying to move another person around.

There is a quieting ritual here too, for talk being spread about you. Binding work has been used against loose talk for centuries — aimed at the words rather than at anyone, asking for silence and nothing beyond it.

People arrive here worn down rather than angry. Someone keeps turning up where they are not wanted, or a room still feels like theirs long after they left it.

All of it is symbolic and none of it reaches a person. The rituals ask for distance, quiet and a door that stays shut, and they claim no effect on anybody.