Eclipse Rituals 2026: A Working for All 12 Zodiac Signs

Twelve Rites for a Vanishing Sun

Eclipse workings for the Total Solar Eclipse at 20° Leo · August 12, 2026 · 12:36 PM CT

Companion piece to Pull Three Cards: The August 12 Leo Eclipse.

Read this before you light anything

Eclipses are not for asking. This is the oldest disagreement in the craft and I’m going to come down hard on one side of it. Plenty of practitioners won’t work at all during an eclipse — the light is interrupted, the channel is unreliable, and traditional astrology treated eclipses as omens rather than opportunities. I don’t think you have to sit it out. But petition magic is the wrong tool here. Do not use this eclipse to ask for something.

Here’s why, specifically. This eclipse falls on the South Node side of the Leo–Aquarius axis. The nodal story is moving away from Leo and toward Aquarius. That’s a subtraction, not an addition. Working *with* that current means release, severance, banishing, cord-cutting, and clearing. Working against it means shouting a want into a room where the lights just went out.

Every rite below removes something. What you want comes later, when the Sun is back.

On charging stones during an eclipse — don’t

You’ll see people setting their crystals out for the eclipse the way they do for a full moon. I’d push back on that. Eclipse light is interrupted light, and interrupted light doesn’t fill a stone — it empties one.

So invert the practice. This is the best window all year for decommissioning: the stone you wore through a relationship that ended, the pendant you bought during a phase you’ve left, anything you’ve been carrying that still smells like an old life. Set those out. Not to charge them — to strip them.

Bury them in dry salt for the duration. Rinse and dry after. If you’re not sure whether a stone is done with you, it is.

 Working stones for this eclipse specifically

Three, and you don’t need all three:

Black obsidian — volcanic glass, made in a moment of interruption. The traditional stone for looking at what you’d rather not. Scrying-grade if you have a mirror or sphere; a raw chunk in the left hand works fine.

Labradorite — the stone that only shows its color at an angle, which is the whole lesson of a South Node eclipse. What you are is not what’s visible straight on.

Black moonstone or hematite — grounding under a chart this fixed and this loud. Right hand, or in a pocket.

Handling notes

Never put malachite in water — it’s copper carbonate and the water becomes unsafe. **Selenite** dissolves. **Pyrite** rusts. When a rite below calls for water, use quartz, amethyst, obsidian, jade, or nothing.

No herb in this post is meant to be swallowed. Wormwood in particular is for burning and sachets only. Mugwort is a dream herb, not a tea here, and should be skipped entirely in pregnancy. Ventilate whatever you burn. Fireproof dish or a kitchen sink — a bowl in the sink is not less powerful than a bonfire, it’s just less cinematic. Nothing outdoors under a burn ban, which in a Gulf Coast August is most of us.

No blood. Nothing living. If a rite asks you to destroy something, destroy a copy.

 Timing

Exact at 12:36 PM Central. Work anywhere from noon to about 2 PM, or wait for full dark — the Perseids peak the same night under a New Moon sky, the best visibility all year. The night working is better if you need privacy, and most of you do.

The base rite — everyone does this one

Cover every mirror and dark screen in the room. Phone face down, off if you can manage it.

Hold your working stone in your left hand — the receiving hand, the one that takes things off you.

Sit in the dark for the length of totality, about two minutes. Don’t meditate. Don’t breathe in any particular pattern. Sit in the interruption.

Then, out loud:

 I am not the light. I am the thing the light was falling on.

Uncover the mirrors. Set the stone in dry salt and leave it there until you’re finished. Now do your sign’s rite.

The Twelve Rites

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ARIES — 5th house

The Rite of the Unwitnessed Work

Stone: carnelian, or red jasper
Herb: dragon’s blood resin, or cinnamon bark
Element: fire, obviously, but the *small* kind — one candle, not a pyre

Your eclipse takes back performed joy. So make something no one will ever see.

Burn a pinch of dragon’s blood before you begin. It’s a sealing resin, and here it’s sealing the room rather than the work — nothing that happens in the next hour leaves it.

Sit down with paper, clay, a guitar, whatever your medium is, and make one complete small thing in a single sitting. No photos. No drafts saved. No telling anyone. Keep the carnelian in your pocket while you work; Mars-ruled and Mars-tempered, it’s the stone for effort that isn’t competitive.

When it’s finished, look at it for one full minute. Then destroy it — burn it, tear it, wet the clay back down.

Say: I made this and no one clapped and it was still real.*

Take the ash or the remains outside and bury them with the carnelian on top. Leave the stone in the ground for six months. Aries buries almost nothing; that’s the discipline of this one.

The point is not the object. The point is proving to your own nervous system that you can create without being seen doing it.

TAURUS — 4th house

 The Mirror and the Inherited Sentence

Stone: rose quartz for the mirror, black tourmaline for the threshold
Herb: rose petals, thyme, vervain
Element: earth and water

Simmer a handful of rose petals, thyme, and vervain in water for ten minutes. Let it cool to warm. This is your wash — Venus-ruled for the mirror work, vervain because it’s the old European herb for breaking what’s been laid on a house.

Get a bar of soap and a mirror you can reach. Write on the glass, in soap, the sentence your family has always said about you. The one repeated at every holiday. You know the exact wording.

Stand where you can see your own face *through* the letters. Hold the rose quartz over your sternum. Look for as long as you can stand it — long enough to notice that you can see yourself and the sentence at the same time, and that the sentence is on the surface and you are underneath it.

Wash it off with the herbal water. Dry the mirror completely with a clean cloth you’ll then wash separately.

Say: That was said about me. It was never me.*

Sweep your home back wall to front door and out. Salt across the threshold, black tourmaline set in the corner nearest the door. Pour the leftover wash at the base of the house on the outside.

GEMINI — 3rd house

The Two Letters

Stone: blue lace agate at the throat, citrine on the writing hand
Herb: lavender, fennel seed, a little dried mint
Element: air — do this with a window open

Write two letters by hand. Not typed. The hand matters for a Mercury working.

The first is to the person you’ve been not-messaging. Say the whole thing, including the ugly part. Never send this one. Read it out loud to a candle flame with a few lavender buds dropped into the wax pool, then burn it in the sink.

The second  is three sentences long, to the same person, and it is the honest opening line only. Not the whole truth — the door to it. This one you send. Today, before midnight.

Between the two, write on a small strip of paper the one true sentence about yourself you’ve been avoiding. Fold it small around three fennel seeds — fennel for courage in speech, and Mercury’s own herb. Carry it in your wallet until the February 2027 eclipses. Don’t reread it.

Say: I have been fluent in everything except this.

Keep the blue lace agate on you for the following week. Yours is the sign that talks itself out of the thing it just decided.

CANCER — 2nd house

The Empty Bowl

Stone: moonstone in the empty bowl, chalcedony or pearl in your hand
Herb: chamomile, jasmine, a pinch of salt
Element: water, and the water should be salted

Two bowls on a table. Ring the outside of both with a thin line of salt.

In the first, put everything you own that has value but no price — a letter, a photograph, a ring nobody appraised, a rock from somewhere. Fill it as much as you can.

The second stays empty except for one moonstone at the bottom. That bowl is the money.

Sit with both. Move one object from the full bowl to the empty one, and as you do, name out loud one thing money has genuinely bought you that mattered. Do this three times. Three objects, three honest answers — no more. This isn’t an exercise in gratitude performance and Cancer will turn it into one given the chance.

Say: I keep confusing what I have with what I’m worth. Tonight I can tell them apart.

Steep chamomile and jasmine in a cup and leave it beside the bowls overnight — an offering, not a drink. Pour it out in the morning and put everything back.

 LEO — 1st house

The Uncovered Mirror

Stone: black obsidian — not sunstone, not citrine, and I’ll explain why
Herb: bay laurel leaves, frankincense
Element: fire and reflected light

You’d expect the solar stones here. Sunstone, amber, tiger’s eye. Skip them. The Sun is what’s being covered this month, and reaching for a solar stone during a solar eclipse is grabbing for the thing that’s leaving. Obsidian instead — the stone made in one interrupted moment, and the traditional mirror for looking at what you’d rather not.

Burn frankincense first. It’s the Sun’s own resin, and here it functions as a farewell rather than an invocation.

Sit in front of a mirror with one candle and nothing else. No phone. Cover the mirror first; uncover it only after the base rite. Obsidian in the left hand.

Say your own full name out loud, slowly, until it stops sounding like a name. Twenty times, thirty, however long it takes to go strange in your mouth. This is a real dissociation of the word from the thing. It’s uncomfortable, and it’s the entire working.

When your name has become a sound:

 *That is what they call me. It is not what I am.

Now take a bay laurel leaf — Apollo’s leaf, the crown they gave winners — and write your name on it in pencil. Burn it in the candle flame. Leo is the only sign getting this instruction: **burn the crown, not the offering.

Sit for one more minute. Blow out the candle. Leave the mirror uncovered until morning.

If you want a physical marker, cut your hair or take off a piece of jewelry you’ve worn daily for years. Optional. Not a substitute.

VIRGO — 12th house

 The Dissolving

Stone: moss agate or amethyst in the glass, smoky quartz beside your bed
Herb: mugwort and lavender
Element: water only — no fire in this one

Do not burn anything. Your house this month is water and the hidden, and fire is too declarative for what you’re doing.

Write the private thing — the habit, the belief you’ve never said, the version of the story only you know — on ordinary paper in water-soluble ink. Ballpoint won’t work; use a fountain pen, a soft marker, or pencil pressed lightly.

Fill a clear glass with water. Add a pinch of lavender and one small amethyst or moss agate. Put the paper in.

Watch the words come apart. Don’t stir. It takes longer than you’d expect and the watching is the rite — Virgo does not get to skip to the outcome.

When the ink has clouded the water and the paper has gone soft, pour it out onto soil at the roots of something living. Not down the drain. Retrieve and rinse the stone

Say: I am not hiding it anymore. I am also not announcing it. It is simply going.

Then a small mugwort sachet under your pillow and a notebook on the nightstand for the following week. Mugwort is the old dreaming herb, and your dreams are about to be doing overtime — you’ll want the record before your birthday. Sachet only, not tea, and skip it entirely if you’re pregnant.

 LIBRA — 11th house

The Table of Five

Stone: lapis lazuli at your own place setting, small rose quartz at each of the others
Herb: rose petals, violet, a spoon of honey
Element: air, laid on a table like earth

Set a table for five. Real plates, real glasses, no food required. Scatter rose petals down the center — Venus is your ruler and she is anchoring the entire grand trine this month, so she gets the good treatment.

At each of the four other places, a slip of paper with a name: the four people you talk to most. A rose quartz on top of each slip. You sit in the fifth chair with lapis in front of you — the stone of truth-telling rather than peacekeeping, which is the exact muscle you don’t use.

Go around the table. Out loud, to each empty chair, say what that person actually knows about your life. Not what they’d say at your funeral. What they know *this week.*

When you reach the one where the answer is thinnest — and there will be one — leave that slip on the table. Take the other three and put them somewhere you’ll see them.

Say: I have been counted among many and known by few. I am choosing the few.

Put a spoonful of honey on the abandoned slip and leave it overnight. Not a sweetening jar — you’re not drawing them closer. You’re ending it kindly, which is the most Libra thing available.

Before you sleep, send one real message to the person whose slip you left. Not a check-in. A real one.

SCORPIO — 10th house

The Retiring of the Name

Stone: obsidian and jet, both in the box
Herb: wormwood, myrrh, and a spoonful of dirt from where you built the thing
Element: earth — you release by burial, not by fire

You’re the sign this eclipse hits publicly, and yours is a funeral rite. Funerals have bodies.

Write your professional title — the one on the bio, the one you say at parties — on card stock. Underneath, the dates: the year you took it on, and today’s.

Now write the obituary. Three sentences, past tense, about what that role did and what it cost. Be accurate rather than kind. Scorpio doesn’t need the softening and won’t believe it anyway.

Burn myrrh over the card before you close it. Myrrh is the funerary resin, the one used on actual bodies for four thousand years, and it belongs to Saturn and to endings. A pinch of wormwood beside it — bitter, protective, and the herb for calling something up in order to send it away. Burning and sachet only. Never swallowed.

Into the box or envelope: the card, the obsidian, the jet, and a spoonful of dirt from the place where you built that role. The office parking lot, the driveway, the yard of the house you were living in. If it’s gone, a spoonful from where you live now.

Close it. Not burned — buried, or put in a drawer that shuts. Scorpio keeps what it releases and that’s fine.

Say: It served. It is finished. I am not going in the box with it.

Do not announce anything publicly for three days. Mercury and Jupiter oppose Pluto in your chart this month and there is a second half of the story you have not heard yet.

SAGITTARIUS — 9th house

The Closed Book

Stone: turquoise — the traveler’s stone, Jupiter’s own
Herb: cedar, sage, cloves, honey
Element: fire made into smoke, not flame

Find the object of the belief you’ve outgrown. The actual physical thing — the book, the certificate, the pamphlet, the photo of the teacher, the printout of the plan.

Hold it. Say what it gave you. Out loud, specifically, at least three things. This is not sarcasm and it’s not a eulogy. It genuinely did give you something or you wouldn’t still be carrying it.

Pass it through cedar smoke — cedar is a cleansing wood but also a preserving one, and that’s the distinction that matters here. You’re not destroying this. You’re sealing it.

Close it, wrap it, put it on the highest shelf you own. Not the trash. Out of reach.

Say: You were true. You are not true now. Thank you, and up you go.

Then the crossroads. Any real four-way, ideally at dusk. Take honey with cloves pressed into it and pour it out at the center. Cloves for Jupiter, honey because you are leaving on good terms. Turquoise in your pocket for the walk there and back.

Leave the offering and do not look back at it. Nothing plastic, nothing that stays.

CAPRICORN — 8th house

The Severing Thread

Stone: jet, onyx, or black tourmaline — Saturn’s stones, and yours
Herb: vetiver oil to dress the candles, cypress and comfrey
Element: earth, worked with fire

Cord-cutting, done properly, and yours is the most literal rite here because your house is the most literally entangled.

Two candles, unlit, about a foot apart. Dress both with vetiver oil — Saturn’s root, the one that holds soil together and is used for binding and for boundary. Stroke it downward, away from the wick, on both. Downward is banishing. On the second candle do it twice.

Wind a single black thread between them, tied at each end. One candle is you. The other is the arrangement — the debt, the account, the person, the merge.

Name what each end holds. Out loud. Say the amount if there is one. Say the name if there is one.

Cut the thread in the middle. One motion. Scissors, not your hands.

Burn each half separately in the same dish, but not at the same time, and in this order: theirs first, yours second. With each half, a pinch of dried cypress — the graveyard tree, the one for what does not come back.

Say: What was joined is being counted. What is mine returns to me.

Set the jet between the two candles and leave it overnight. Keep the candles. Do not light them again tonight.

AQUARIUS — 7th house

The Two Cups

Stone: aquamarine or labradorite — and keep both out of the water
Herb: star anise, one whole star, floated
Element: water held in three vessels

The eclipse is sitting directly across from your sign, so your rite is about the seam between you and someone else.

Three vessels: two cups, one bowl. Fill both cups with water. Float one whole star anise in the bowl — the eight-pointed seed, used for clear sight and for closing what’s been left ajar.

Pour some of the first cup into the bowl and name what you brought to the partnership. Pour some of the second and name what they brought. Alternate until both cups are half gone and the bowl is full.

Now try to take yours back out of the bowl.

You can’t. That is the working. Sit with it for a full minute before you do anything else — the whole rite is the moment you understand the water doesn’t separate.

Hold the labradorite up to the candle and turn it until the color catches. That’s the second half of the lesson: you’re only visible from certain angles too, and that isn’t a flaw in you.

Say: What we made cannot be divided. What I am can. I am taking myself back and leaving the water where it fell.*

Pour the bowl onto soil. Refill both cups to the top from the tap. Dry the star anise and keep it.

PISCES — 6th house

The Consecrated Hour

Stone: amethyst tonight, aquamarine on the 28th
Herb: jasmine and salt, with mugwort held back until the second night
Element: water, in two parts, two weeks apart

You get two eclipses this month, so yours is a rite in two parts, and part one is deliberately small.

Tonight: choose one ordinary repeated action. Making coffee. Locking the door. Washing your face. The most boring one you can find.

Do it once, tonight, with your full attention. Every step narrated in your head. No music, no phone, no rushing. Amethyst in your non-dominant hand or your pocket while you do it. It will take three times as long as usual and feel faintly ridiculous. Stay with it.

When you’re done, write the action on a slip of paper and put it under your pillow or in your shoe.

Say: This is the hour I actually live in. Not the plan. This.

Then wait. Nothing else ritually until August 28, when the lunar eclipse at 9° Pisces lands near your Moon.

That night: a salt bath, a real one — a full cup of salt, jasmine flowers on the surface, water as warm as you can stand, aquamarine on the edge of the tub where you can see it. Read what you wrote tonight while you’re in the water. Mugwort sachet under the pillow after, not in the bath and not in a cup.

The rite completes there, not here. Two weeks of nothing is part of it.

After

None of these rites asked for anything. That was the design.

The wanting belongs to the North Node in Aquarius, and to the eclipses on the far side of this axis — the ones arriving in February 2027. What you clear this week is the room those will need.

Take your stones out of the salt in the morning. Rinse the ones that can be rinsed. Dry everything.

And one instruction for the months between: when the thing you released tries to come back — it will, around the time Jupiter finishes crossing Leo — you are allowed to say no, I already did that funeral.

Keep your candles. Keep the strip of paper. Don’t reread it.

— Healthy Wealthy Witch