I found these old old spells to protect oneself from enemies in a cool old book printed back in 1903. This section reads more like a short primer on black magick, and I’d advise against creating a lot of bad karma for yourself by trying these out on actual people. I do, however, think that it might be interesting to try using them on noncorporeal enemies such as: procrastination, poverty, racism, addictions, etc.

However you choose to use them, be wise and be warned. “If you wish evil to someone, the evil will come to you.” That being said, here they are:

1 – If you tie knots in the willow, you can slay a distant enemy.

2 – If you would bring your enemy to death, pour poison in his footprints.

3 – If you feel fear when you know you are safe, it will prove that when you are in danger you won’t think of fear.

4 – An image made of wax, named after an enemy or a person whom you wish ill, stuck full of pins and set before the fire, will cause the person named to pine away as the wax melts.

5 – Indians charm a piece of worsted and tie it across the path of an enemy or across the door, so that when he passes it, it will surely bring death upon himself.

6 – The Devonshire peasant hangs in his chimney corner a pig’s head stuck with thorns, believing that so doing his enemy will be pierced in like manner.

7 – A charm to be addressed to the spirit of the three winds: “Spirit of the three winds, hear me when I call. Go and make So-and-So go crazy !”

8 – Old Highlanders will still make the “deazil” around those whom they wish well. To go around a person in an opposite direction to the sun, is an evil incantation and brings ill fortune.

9 – Old women frequently cut a turf a foot long which their enemy has recently trodden upon, and hang it up in the chimney, to cause their enemy to wither away.

10 – The Tamils (a race of Southern India and Ceylon) believe that they can kill an enemy at a distance by a ceremony with the skull of a child.

11 – If you make a cut on the wall of the house of an enemy, the members of his household will quarrel. (India.)

12 – Take six new pins and seven needles, stick point to point in a piece of new cloth, and place it under the doorstep of your enemy; when he or she walks over it, they will lose the use of their legs.

13 – The following is a Finnish superstition: The image of an absent person is placed in a vessel of water and a shot aimed at it, thereby wounding or slaying a hated person at many miles’ distance.

14– If you can get a few strands of your enemy’s hair, bore a hole in a tree, put them in, and plug up the hole; you can thus give him a headache which cannot be relieved until his hair is taken out of the tree.

15 – To make trouble for an enemy, take some hair from the back of a snarling, yelping cur, some from a black cat, put them into a bottle with a tablespoonful of gunpowder, fill the bottle with water from a running brook, and sprinkle it in the form of three crosses on his doorstep, one at each end, and one in the middle.

16 – The negroes think that in order to make an evil charm effectual, they must sacrifice something. In accordance with this idea, cake, candy, or small coins are scattered by those who place the charm. The articles thrown away must be placed where wanted, and they must be abandoned without a backward glance.

17 – It is a true charm from the old country, that if you are tired of anyone, you can get rid of that person by taking a bushel of dry peas saying a wish for every one you take out, as from day to day you take out some, and as they go, he will waste and go to his grave.

18 – To cause the death of an enemy, mould a heart of wax and stick pins in it till it breaks. Another charm is to hold the waxen heart before a slow fire. As it melts, the life of the enemy will depart.

19 – To harm an enemy, take salt and pepper and put them into his clothing or his house, and say: “I put this pepper on yon, And this salt thereto. That peace and happiness You may never know.” He will soon be miserable.

20 – A sheaf of corn is sometimes buried with a certain dedication to Satan, in the belief that as the corn rots in the ground, so will the person wither away who is under your curse when you bury the corn.

21 – Another form of malediction is to bury a lighted candle by night in a churchyard, with certain weird ceremonies.

22 – The following recipe for avenging oneself on one’s enemies is given by Kunn, in Westphalia: “When the new moon falls on a Tuesday, go out before daybreak to a stake selected beforehand, turn to the east and say: ‘Stick, I grasp thee in the name of the Trinity!’ Take thy knife and say: ‘Stick, I cut thee in the name of the Trinity, that thou mayest obey me and chastise anyone whose name I mention.’ Then peel the stick in two places to enable thee to carve these words: ‘Abia, obia, sabis,’ lay a smock frock on thy threshold and strike it hard with the stick, at the same time naming the person who is to be beaten. Though he be many miles away, he will suffer as much as if he were on the spot.” All this distinctly depends upon the moon being new on a Tuesday.

23 – To make one die for sleep, dissolve lard and put it in their drink.

24 – You can cast a malefic spell on your enemy by repeating the Lord’s Prayer backwards, all the time wishing some evil upon him.

25 – In Southern Italy, the hearts of onions are scorched over a fire in the name of the victim, to burn up their hearts.

26 – There is a superstition among the natives of Natal, that if the plant called Isanywane is placed on a man’s hearth, it will cause him to become generally disliked.

27 – Pythagoras says: “That if a flame be put into the skull of a murderer, and the name of your enemy written therein, it will strike the person whose name is so written with fear and trembling, and he will speedily seek your forgiveness and become a steadfast friend.”

28 – “If you wish to harm anybody, read the 107th, 108th and 109th Psalm at 8, 11 and 3 o’clock, and you will then have much power over them.” (Elworthy, “The Evil Eye.”)

29 – The Greeks believed that to measure exactly the height and circumference of the body of an enemy, would cause him to languish and fall away, or die very soon.

30 – If a man hates another and will repeat the 109th Psalm every morning and evening for a year, his enemy will be dead; but if he misses a single time, he will die himself.

31 – In Bombay, if one man puts salt into another man’s hand, it makes them sworn enemies for life.

32 – Bury a dead man’s hair under the threshold of an enemy, and he will soon be troubled with ague.

33 – To repeat certain formulas among the Hindus, is supposed to bring injury upon an enemy.

34 – In West Cork, people spit on the ground in front of anyone whom they wish to have bad luck.

35 – Never let your enemy get hold of your picture. If he should keep it turned upside down, or should throw it in the water, you would sicken and die or meet with an accident .

36 – If you shoot the picture of an enemy with a silver bullet, you will cause the death of your enemy.

37 – In Germany, old women cut out a turf a foot long on which an enemy had trod, and hung it up in the chimney, in the belief that the enemy would shrivel up just as the turf did, and in the end die a lingering death.

38 – When a man of one of the Indian tribes cannot get what he wants, or if he thinks he has been unjustly treated, he will cut or wound himself, or perhaps take the life of some member of his family, in order that the blood of the victim may rest upon the head of the oppressor.

39 – If you wish to bring ill luck to a neighbor, take nine pins, nine nails, and nine needles, boil them in a quart of water, put it in a bottle, and hide it under or in their fireplace, and the family will always have sickness. (Negro superstition.)

40 – The negroes “conjure” by obtaining an article belonging to another, boiling it, no matter what it may be, in lye with a rabbit’s foot, and a bunch of hair cut from the left ear of a female opossum. They say terrible headaches and the like can be inflicted in this way.

41 – The American Indians believe that anyone who possesses a lock of their hair or other thing related to their person, will have power over them for evil.

42 – When the bread is taken from the oven, a few red hot coals or cinders are thrown into the oven by the Magyars, in the belief that it is as good as throwing them down one’s enemy’s throat. Thus, if one’s enemy would partake of that bread, he would come to grief.

43 – Throw a pebble upon which your enemy’s name is inscribed, together with a pin, into the well of St. Elian, in Wales, as an offering to the well, and a curse will come upon the one who bears the name, and in all probability he will pine away and die.

44 – To cause an enemy ill luck, make a heap of stones, cursing him as many times as there are stones, and as every Christian must add at least a pebble as he passes by, his woes and his misfortunes will constantly increase. (Greece.)

45 – Not many years ago, there was a system of cursing in common vogue in Fermanagh with tenants who had been given notice to quit. This was: they collected, from all over their farms, stones. These they brought home, and having put a lighted coal in the fireplace, they heaped the stones on it as if they had been sods of turf. They then knelt down on the hearthstone, and prayed that as long as the stones remained unburnt every conceivable curse might light on their landlord, his children, and their children to all generations. To prevent the stones by any possibility being burnt, as soon as they had finished cursing, they took the stones and scattered them far and wide over the whole country. Many of the former families of the county are said now to have disappeared on account of being thus cursed.

46 – The great antiquity of sympathetic magic, by which a person is destroyed if an image of him is made and then ruined again, is shown by the discovery at Thebes of a small clay figure of a man tied to a papyrus scroll, evidently to compass the death of the person described therein. This figure and papyrus are now in the Ashmolean Museum.

47 – A South Sea Islander persisted in saying he was very ill because his enemies, the Happahs, had stolen a lock of his hair and buried it in a leaf of a plantain to kill him. He had offered the Happahs the greater part of his property if they would bring back his hair and the leaf, for otherwise he was sure to die.

48 – It is a widespread belief that one can injure another person by stepping upon his or her shadow. Any injury done to the shadow would have the same effect upon its owner. To cause an enemy’s death, it is merely necessary to take his shadow away from him entirely.

49 – Anciently, a small bunch of feathers placed in a person’s path was -thought, in Jamaica, to give them a curse. Any piece of coffin furniture hung over the door was also capable of cursing the inmates of the house.

50 – Put ashes from yellow stamped paper, together with ashes from the temple, on your enemy, and he will be sure to be very sick soon. (China.)

51 – The head of a dog and the head of a buffalo, stamped on paper, the paper burned and the ashes collected and mixed with sacred ashes, is also used to make an enemy die, if it can be got into the tea he drinks.

52 – Lisiansky, in his “Voyage Round the World,” gives us an account of a religious sect in the Sandwich Islands who arrogate to themselves the power to pray people to death. Whoever incurs their displeasure receives notice that the “homicidelitany” is about to begin. Such are the effects of superstition and imagination that the notice alone is frequently sufficient with these weak people to make them waste away with fear, or else go mad and commit suicide.

53 – The Finnish superstition of producing an absent person in the form of an image in a vessel of water and then shooting it, and thereby wounding or slaying the absent enemy, is believed to be efficacious at a hundred miles distance.

54 – It was at the instigation of Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester (for which she was imprisoned), that a figure made of wax was used to represent King Henry VI., the intention being for his person to be destroyed as the figure was consumed.

55 – In British Guiana, it is to this day firmly believed by the negroes and others, that injuries inflicted even upon the ordure of persons will be felt by the individual by whom they were left. In Somerset, England, it is also believed that it is very injurious to an infant to burn its excrement. It is thought to produce constipation and colic.

56– In Australia, the sorcerer has different means of attacking an enemy. He can creep near him when he is asleep and bewitch him to death by merely pointing a leg bone of a kangaroo at him; or he can steal away his kidney-fat, where, as the natives believe, a man’s power dwells; or he can call in the aid of a malignant demon to strike the poor wretch with his club behind the neck, or he can get a lock of hair and roast it with fat over the fire until its former owner pines away and dies.

57 – In Calcutta, a servant having quarreled with his master, hung himself in the night in front of the street door, that he might become a devil and haunt the premises. The house was immediately forsaken by its occupants, and, although a large and beautiful edifice, was suffered to go to ruins.

58 – The western tribes of Victoria, Australia, believe that if an enemy can get hold of so much as a bone from the meat one has eaten, that he can bring illness upon you. Should anything belonging to an unfriendly tribe be found, it is given to the chief, who preserves it as a means of injuring the enemy. It is loaned to any one of the tribe who wishes to vent his spite against any of the unfriendly tribe. When used as a charm, it is rubbed over with emu-fat mixed with clay, and tied to the point of a spear. This is stuck upright in the ground before the camp fire. The company sit watching it, but at such a distance that their shadows cannot fall on it. They keep chanting imprecations on the enemy till the spear thrower turns around and falls in his direction. Any of these people believe that by getting a bone or other refuse of an enemy, he has the power of life and death over him, be it man, woman, or child. He can kill his enemy by sticking the bone firmly by the fire. No matter how distant, the person will waste away. This same belief is found among the American Indians.

59 – It is a common belief among the American Indians that certain medicine men possess the power of taking life by shooting needles, straws, spiders’ webs, bullets and other objects, however distant the person may be at whom they are directed. Thus, in “Cloud Shield’s Winter Count for 1824-1825,” CatOwner was killed with a spider-web thrown at him by a Dakota. It reached the heart of the victim from the hand of the man who threw it, and caused him to bleed to death from the nose. (Mallery, “Picture Writing of the American Indians.”)

60 – In the North of Scotland, a peculiar piece of witchcraft is still practiced, where a cowardly, yet deadly, hatred is cherished against a person. A “body of clay,” called in GaeKc “Carp Creaah,” is made as nearly as possible to resemble the one sought to be injured. This is placed, in great secrecy, in the stream of some shadowy burn. The belief is that as the body of clay wastes away from the action of the water, the victim sought to be cursed will as surely waste away to death.

61 – One of the charms formerly most dreaded by the natives of Madagascar, was called berika. It is said to be most deadly in its effects, bringing about the death of the victim by bursting his heart, and causing him to vomit immense quantities of blood. Even the possessor of this charm stood in terror of it, and none but the most reckless of charm-dealers and sorcerers would have anything to do with it. It was popularly supposed to have an inherent liking for blood, and that it would at times demand from its owner to be allowed to go forth to destroy some living tiling; at one time it would demand a bullock, at another a sheep or pig, at another a fowl, and occasionally its ferocity would only be satisfied with a human victim. The owner was obliged to comply with its demands and perform the appropriate incantations so as to set it at liberty to proceed on its fatal errand, lest it should turn on him and strike him dead. In fact, the charm was of so uncertain a temper, so to speak, that its owner was never sure of his own life, as it might at any moment turn upon him and destroy him, out of sheer ferocity.

62– Another powerful charm is called manara-mody. It is supposed to follow the person to be injured, and on his arrival home, to bring upon him a serious illness or cause his immediate death. For instance, a person goes down from the interior to the coast for the purpose of trade. In some business transaction, he unfortunately excites the anger of a man with whom he is dealing, and who determines to seek revenge. For this purpose, he buys from a charm-dealer the charm called manara-mody. The trader, having finished his business on the coast, starts homeward, all unconscious that his enemy has sent the fatal charm after him to dog his steps through forest and swamp, over hill and valley. At length he reaches his home, thankful to be once more with his family. But alas! the rejoicing is soon turned to mourning, for the remorseless charm does its work, and smites the victim with sore disease, or slays him outright at once.

Found in:
Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences