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Ready to take your manifestation rituals to the next level? Herbs can be a powerful tool to bring you what you’re looking to attract. 

Whether you’re an experienced manifester or just saw it for the first time on tiktok – make a plan to to add herbs to your manifestation practice to unleash their power for what you’re looking to attract!

In this post, you’ll find an overview of the most powerful herbs that can be used to manifest. I have included the specific intention or intentions that they’re generally used for. The use of herbs appears in various cultures, and there is a right choice for you!

Why use herbs for manifestation?

Herbs pack a powerful punch. 

Today, we think of them primarily in cooking, where they introduce flavor, heat, and brightness to our meals. 

But to our ancestors, herbs were medicine. Without a drugstore around the corner, ancient (and fairly recent, and current!) cultures used herbal solutions to medical ailments. 

Many current mass-produced medications are even derived from herbs. 

In between medicine and magic, we also see herbs used in aromatherapy. There, you might find lavender used to relax you before a massage or patchouli for emotional clarity. 

In the manifestation we’re looking to do, herbs have similar metaphysical properties and power. In the same way they can act on our taste buds or our immune system, herbs can act on your vibration and the energy you’re sending out into the universe. Using herbs in your manifestation rituals brings the natural world into everything you’re attracting. 

Wait, that’s not a herb!

You’re right! I’m using ‘herb’ in this post as a general term that includes herbs, spices, flowers, essential oils, and any kind of plant-based power source. 

Otherwise it would have been a really long title. 

The priority of this post is more about tapping into natural sources for manifestation and magic rather than being super precise about the differences between herbs and spices. (If it’s good enough for green witch Arin Murphy, it’s good enough for me!) So this list of herbs is really a list of herbs and a bunch of other stuff. 

Culture, cultural appropriation, and the magical properties of herbs

Recently there’s been a long-overdue conversation about the cultural appropriation in our communities. That’s the way that mass culture will take away parts of disempowered cultures without actually giving any respect or compensation to those cultures.

That means that their cultural practices are “accepted”, but the culture or community itself doesn’t see their situations improve as a result. And “accepted” often means taken away or diluted.

It’s worth taking the conversation about cultural appropriation seriously. I don’t think that some of the blanket statements about who is and isn’t allowed to do what ritual are too helpful. 

To the best of my ability, I’ve tried to note in this post which herbs are associated with which cultures. It would be impossible to include every culture with every herb because so many appear in many, many cultures. 

But, for example, white sage is used in many Native American practices. 

Does that mean you can’t use sage for anything if you aren’t Native American?

To me, no. Sage appears in many cultures. If you’re planning to use it for smudging, which is a Native American-specific practice, consider trying to buy it from a Native seller rather than from Whole Foods.  You’ll be putting money back into the culture, and you won’t be contributing to overharvesting! 

An additional way to deal with cultural appropriation is to learn more about magic and ritual work in your own culture. 

If you’re not knowledgeable about the spiritual traditions of your own ancestry, you may want to learn more. Those ancient cultures are still present in you! And each magical culture will have its own unique properties. 

That doesn’t mean that you should then engage in only those practices or try to prevent others from doing them! But you can broaden your horizons and understand yourself better by looking into your own history too.

The Manifestation Garden

Nearly every item in this post can be grown in whatever sunny space you have. 

If it’s an apartment balcony, so be it. 

If you’ve got three acres you can use, that’s great too. 

And if it’s a little basil plant near your kitchen window, you are still in the game.

I love the symbolism of the manifestation garden–it is so aligned with the goals of manifestation.

Gardening, like manifestation, is about nourishing the healthy and beautiful parts of life. 

We plant our seeds or set our intentions. 

We nourish them, water them and get them the appropriate amount of sunlight. Or, we visualize and we practice gratitude and we envision. 

And also, we relinquish a little bit of control. We set the conditions for the desire to flourish, and when it’s ready, it flourishes. 

To me, this is the power of herbs and natural ingredients in manifestation rituals. Just as each tiny seed has the power within itself to grow into an entire plant, we have the power within ourselves to manifest the desired life. 

You may not be able to turn around and do this immediately, and if you’ve never grown anything before, you should start small. But when you land on a ritual that feels like “you”, try to grow that herb. 

Believe me when I tell you that gardening will strengthen your powers of manifestation. It will teach you to take action on what you can take action on and to release what you can’t control. 

All that said: here’s a roundup of herbs for manifestation, their uses, and a few rituals from around the web that use them.

Herbs for manifestation rituals

Sage

Sage is probably the herb that people think of first when they’re imagining the use of different herbs in magic. 

It dispels negative energy, clearing space for the positive vibes that you’re attracting in your manifestation. 

The purification that sage brings into your space allows for new beginnings. It works whether you are starting out in a new home or need a positive change in the place you’ve been living for a while. 

Sage attracts positive energy and clarity into your spaces. It’s one of the best ways to shake up your life. Manifestation techniques that use sage are a great way to renew yourself or glow up.

Typically you’ll see this done with a stick of white sage. Either smoke cleansing, or smudging if you’re Native. 

However, there are other ways to use sage to clarify your space. 

You can make a sweeping powder. You dust it on the floor and then sweep up that would capture the negative energy and remove it with the sweepings. (I linked a product there, but you can make sweeping powders yourself with baking soda and salt. Add any herbs you want to incorporate.)

Alternately, you could consider this recipe for sage-based ritual bath salts. There’s also an adjustment in this recipe to make it a body scrub for shower people. 

Bay Leaf

Bay leaves have grown in popularity as manifesting has become better-known! And if you’ve been on TikTok, like, ever, you’ve seen the bay leaf manifestation method. 

Posters have been writing their desires on bay leaves, and then burning them to release them. 

Anyway they say you’ll get the best results if you burn them, but others will tuck them under their pillows or on their altars in order to get a result. 

Bay leaves are associated with prosperity and manifestation, so this is quite a direct ritual – write, burn, wait.

If you need to get into a headspace of gratitude, you can also write something you’re grateful for on that leaf. 

Many rituals involve cleaning – symbolically, cleaning allows us to modify or change the space so that we’re able to make it the way we want it. So some cultures will have you steep bay leaves in water and use it to mop your floors. 

While this may not be the type of fun and exciting ritual you imagined when you pictured witchcraft, it’s the kind that works. It shifts the control of your spaces away from external forces and puts it in your hands. Then, your manifestations can be more powerful.

Basil 

I try to think of myself as a lucky girl (aka moderately delusional) so I really value basil in my rituals. Basil is associated with good fortune, good luck, and financial success. 

What I love about basil for rituals is that when you call for luck in your life, you take power but relinquish control. 

If you are trying to manifest an exact specific set of circumstances, then you’re putting a lot of control on that, and it may not be realistic for all of those numerous circumstances to work out for you. 

Or, you get what you thought you wanted, or technically what you wanted, because that’s what you put in your manifestation spells, but the outcome wasn’t actually too good for you. 

As a reformed control freak, basil-based manifestations and spells help me to keep an open heart and a spiritual connection to the universe while remembering I’m not going to have everything my own way. I can get the life I want without necessarily getting the circumstances that I think I want. 

My main goal as a manifester isn’t to have an exact specific life — it’s to be a happy person and feel fulfilled. And framing some of that as being “lucky” means the right things for me will come for me. (I’ll take the money too though!)

Basil is easy to grow fresh and starts quickly from seed, so it’s a great place to start experimenting with homegrown herbs. I really enjoyed the list of rituals in this post from Art of the Root that talks about the different uses of basil. 

They suggest a ritual bath with basil, eucalyptus and rosemary added to espom salts that will bless and purify you. (Dehydrate the leaves first if you want to make some of this to store or give as a gift!)

To attract money, they suggest a floor wash of basil, cinnamon, and chamomile (and you mop with it as above!), or keeping a basil leaf in your wallet. I haven’t figured out how to do the wallet one yet…I don’t want to clean crumpled basil dust out of my dollars! Maybe next time.

Cinnamon

Cinnamon is also associated with good luck and prosperity, but its primary symbolic meaning is power, heat, and acceleration. It invokes the power of the sun into a ritual. Adding cinnamon to a ritual adds power to it or speeds results along. 

​A classic and commercially available use of cinnamon is the cinnamon broom! They sell them in many places in the fall. In the US, Trader Joe’s reliably has a large and mini broom. 

The broom can be used, like many other rituals, to sweep negative energy out of your sacred space, your home, and make way for positive thinking. 

Within your manifestation process, you can use it to add power to any ritual, whether that’s manifesting with a cinnamon stick alone, or adding it to other herbs, oils, or mopping waters. 

I really like the look of this ritual from The Magick Kitchen that uses cinnamon in addition to basil to supercharge a prosperity spell. 

In whatever context you decide to use cinnamon, take a moment in your ritual to visualize the cinnamon “charging” the other herbs. This might look like a bolt of light, a warm, growing glow, or the items growing in size. 

Rose petals

Not a herb! But a powerful way to bring romantic energy into your life, whether that’s in the form of a new lover or a new passion in your current relationship. 

Dried rose petals are popularly used in a beauty bath ritual, where they’re dropped in a warm bath to enhance the beauty of the bather. If you can get the lunar cycle right and make this happen under a full moon, you’ll get even better results. 

But within manifestation rituals, rose petals, especially from red roses, can be used to strengthen manifestations of love. 

A current popular use on TikTok is in the form of rosewater — this creator has a purchased item, but you can make it yourself if you buy organic roses. Make it exactly like you would make tea. 

What’s important, if you choose to use the rosewater or the bath, is that before you begin visualizing your desires, you visualize the powers of the rose petals entering you and conferring power onto you. This is what draws additional power towards your manifestations. 

Rosemary

This is a less popular herb for manifestation, though it’s one of my favorites. You’re more likely to hear about rosemary oil for hair than rosemary oil for manifestation, but I promise that if you need it, rosemary can be life-changing. 

Rosemary is associated with memory, clarity, courage, and confidence. (Some people also say it can help you manifest psychic abilities, if that appeals to you.) 

Rosemary is easy to grow if you buy a plant, and because of the shape it grows in, it’s very easy to make your own DIY rosemary broom. 

I’m an anxious person, and I tend to experience a lot of self-doubt. I use a rosemary broom to sweep my workspace. (yes, I keep it in my classroom! Though I want to make a second one for the space where I write this blog. It’s amazing how much self-doubt I feel in this space too!) When I do it, I visualize sweeping away uncertainty and anxiety to create space for my confidence and abilities to bloom. 

The herbs are powerful but the work is yours

I think a lot of the social media content out there suggests that if you have the right herbs, the universe will take care of everything for you. But anyone who knows even the basics of manifestation should know better. 

What the herbs do is charge what’s already there, or the visualization that you’re putting out. If you’re not using your personal power to direct the energy from the herbs towards your own manifestations, you could even see your attempts backfire. 

The last thing you want to do is use cinnamon to power your manifestation of a goal, only to get distracted by self-doubt and end up empowering that instead. 

So while this kind of green magic is available to everyone and is very much beginner-friendly, remember that it’s an amplifier, and it can amplify your mistakes, too. Adding herbs to your very first attempt at manifestation may not go too well for you. 

But if manifestation is already part of your daily routine and you know what you’re doing, try adding herbs in a few different ways. You may find that using herbs for manifestation brings a new energy to your practice. 

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