Sea Salt, coarse

How to Use It

Witchcraft & Folk Magick

• Cleansing bath: dissolve a handful in a warm bath and soak to wash off a heavy day or an unwanted influence.
• Circle and threshold: pour a line across doorways and windowsills, or around a working space, as a boundary.
• Black salt: grind with ash, charcoal or cauldron scrapings to make black salt for banishing.

Hoodoo & Rootwork

• Floor washes: salt is added to cleansing washes, scrubbed from the back of the house to the front door and thrown out.
• Uncrossing baths: used with herbs in baths to strip off crossed conditions, with the water poured out toward the east or at a crossroads.
• Unwanted guests: a pinch thrown after someone leaving keeps them from returning.

Ceremonial & Occult Magick

• Lustral water: the Key of Solomon gives an exorcism of salt and water, combined to sprinkle the place and instruments of the art.
• Altar element: a dish of salt represents Earth on many ritual altars.

A Simple Working

• Fill a bowl with water and add three pinches of coarse sea salt.
• Stir with your fingers until it dissolves.
• Speak over it, naming it as water that cleanses and guards.
• Sprinkle it in each room, starting at the back of the house and ending at the front door.
• Pour what is left over the front step.
• Lay a thin line of dry salt across the threshold to finish.

Pairs Well With

• Rosemary, for cleansing baths and washes.
• Activated charcoal, to make black salt.
• Hyssop, the traditional purifying herb for baths.
• A white chime candle, burned during cleansing.

What You Receive

Coarse sea salt, available in 1 oz, 4 oz, 1 lb, 5 lb and 25 lb.

Origin & Lore

Sea salt is made by evaporating seawater in shallow pans or ponds until crystals form. For most of history it was how food was preserved: meat, fish and butter were salted to keep through winter. Coarse salt of this kind was once called bay salt.

Salt is the one ingredient almost every magickal tradition agrees on. Spirits are said to shun it, and a line of it is still laid across doorways from Europe to the American South.

The Roman rite of blessing holy water includes salt that is first exorcised and then mixed into the water. In Japan, small cones of salt called morishio are set by the doors of homes and shops to purify and welcome good fortune.