This is a lot more trouble than you will usually need to go to.  But I will often advise clients that a formula is warranted in their case, and that candle work is warranted in their case, and so they can work by dressing a candle with oil.  They will often then write back and say "but what spell do I do," thinking, I suppose, that setting a dressed light is not a spell.

Setting a dressed light is a spell.  And setting a dressed light can be extremely effective.  Conjure is not like some ceremonial magic where you have to do a series of complicated actions and speak other languages and do things on a certain day at a certain time.  Just light the darned candle and pray your butt off, seriously.  Some folks make it harder than it has to be.  If you want to use moon phases and days of the week and chants that rhyme, fine, but you don't have to, and not every professional worker does.

But if you want a more complicated spell with multiple moving parts, here's one. Don't ask me what to do if you can't get or don't want to work with animal parts – my advice will be "you aren't trying hard enough" for the first objection and "well, then, light a dressed candle" or "do a google search for stop gossip hoodoo" for the second.  This is "bigger guns" than most cases need, but I figured I'd type it up since I performed it for a client recently, and I feel like I owe a non-complaining, informative post after all that lecturing I was doing 🙂

This is not the Court Case Beef Tongue spell, so won't worry about how you're going to tie the tongue back together after you shred it to pieces, or if you want to eat it after you put alum on it – you aren't going to do any of this stuff.

You need:

• appropriate oil like Tapa Boca, Shut Your Mouth, STFU, Binding, etc. (not all Stop Gossip oils are suitable) – see below)*
• target's personal concern, photo, and/or name paper
• black candle and holder if needed
• airline-sized bottle of whiskey
• alum or aloes powder
• red pepper flakes or hot sauce
• knotgrass or devil's shoe string
• some worms, or if you can manage it and stand it, some maggots or flesh-eating beetles
• a beef tongue (larger), sheep tongue (smaller), or other animal tongue (ox tongue would work)
• a razor blade, box cutter, or extremely sharp knife
• a dish or saucer large enough to hold the tongue

Dress your candle.  Light your dressed candle.  (You can carve a petition on it ahead of time if you like – the emphasis should be on the slanderer rather than you. If you want to work a "protect me" petition, see below, at the end of this post. This is not a "protect me" spell.) 

As you set the candle in the holder, say:
"See what they spew from their mouths–they spew out swords from their lips, and they say, "Who can hear us?"" 

Light the candle and say:
"I can hear you, and the Lord God my protector can hear you.  I can see you, and your heart is transparent to me."

Set the personal concerns in the dish or saucer.  Say:
"I see who devises evil plans in their hearts and stirs up war every day."

Baptize the tongue, using the whiskey to sprinkle it and baptize it in the name of your target.  (Don't be a baby – if you are afraid to touch it, you shouldn't be doing this spell.)  Hold it in your hand, sprinkle it with whiskey with your other hand, and baptize it "name", saying "In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. [Name] I call you, [name] you are to me, and what I tell you, you, [name,] will do."

Lay the tongue in the dish atop the concerns and douse it liberally with whiskey.  Say "No one who practices deceit will dwell in my house; no one who speaks falsely will stand in my presence."

Take your blade and make slow, deep, deliberate, precise cuts along the length of the tongue. You can match up a cut for each sentence or phrase below, or you can just slowly recite the whole while cutting.  (If you think you need or want more things to say, consult Psalm 37 and Psalm 35 for ideas; just about every phrase in this spell comes from the Bible and most from the Psalms – the Bible contains some of the more ancient and powerful curses that have been preserved in writing.  Just don't choose passages that are about the Lord as shepherd for this spell – you want good old-fashioned Old Testament smiting here).

"I am in the midst of lions; I lie among ravenous beasts–men whose teeth are spears and arrows, whose tongues are sharp swords. Not a word from their mouths can be trusted; their hearts are filled with destruction.  I destroy their iniquity.  I seize the weapon of my enemy.  Your throat is an open grave; with your tongue you speak deceit. You use your mouth for evil and harness your tongue for lies. But I see through your lies, and the Lord God my protector sees through your lies.  Your tongue plots destruction; it is like the sharpest razor, you who practice deceit.  I curse the whisperer and deceiver, for you have destroyed many who were at peace."

At this point you should have a whole bunch of long, deep slits in the tongue.  It's ok if it is still mostly held together and just looks shredded – it's also ok if you have cut clean through and you have more than one piece now.  (This may depend on the tongue you have and your cutting implement, in other words – a box cutter will not do a quick, clean job on a six-pound cow's tongue.  But it doesn't have to be "just so" – it just needs to be cut up well and good so it would be useless as a muscle.)

Take your herbs and sprinkle them liberally all over the tongue. If you have done the job right, you won't even have to try to get them into the cuts and slits, but you aren't aiming just for the cuts and slits – get your herbs all over it.  As you are sprinkling, say:

"Now I am the sharpest razor, because I am able to cut all evildoers away from me.  I am the strongest sword, because I remove all liars from my presence, and the Lord God my protector punishes your iniquity.  Each day you did unrighteousness with your tongue and were greedy for the blood of the innocent. Now you are dumb and wounded by your own sins.  You pay with your body the recompense for the evil deeds you worked with your tongue." 

Sprinkle the worms or other critters on the tongue, saying:
"Worms shall chew you.  Your tongue is burst open, your teeth divided, your jaws split apart, your throat torn open in the grave that it has become through your deeds.  Your sinews are broken and your tongue is shredded by the worms that thirst for your blood."

Disposal depends on a few factors.  I am a big fan of the old-fashioned method of leaving the ritual remains on the target's property, in which case I might just leave the entire saucer on their doorstep or under their porch, or maybe under a bush in their yard, or I might skip the saucer and hide the tongue in a tree on the property (in which case I might pin or nail any papers or concerns to the tongue first).  If this might get you arrested, however, you can bury it in a cemetery or in the woods (and even do a little funeral ceremony over it – if you want to get fancy, and you are seriously okay with killing work, you can even do a Vigil for the Dead prior to this. Again, this is totally beyond what most cases call for and is not going to be justified in every case – I'm describing a case that was far more serious than usual. The worm thing makes most sense in these cases, since burial enacts the retribution you are describing in the spoken part of the spell. Yes, worms will find it on their own eventually if you bury it, but I wouldn't skip that part just because it required a trip to a specialty pet shop if I were a city-dweller).

Alternately, the more neutral disposal option would be at a crossroads.

Even when work like this is justified, spiritual cleansing afterwards is still recommended.

* I personally advise starting with Stop Gossip work before going as far as a spell like this – mojos, sprinkling powders around your workplace and bathing with Stop Gossip bath, etc.  Even if you do resort to this spell, it's a good idea to pair this work with a protective bath or mojo for yourself, like Stop Gossip.  The difference is that the target for the above spell is the gossiper, while the target for a Stop Gossip bath or mojo is you – you are applying protective elements to yourself in the case of a bath, and those ingredients are designed to get gossip to bounce or slide off you when you carry the bag or bathe in the mixture.  So needless to say, the ingredients for this spell and for a Stop Gossip mojo or bath are not entirely the same. 

Here you are not using slippery elm bark or the like because it's not a protective spell to guard you – it's an active, destructive spell to stop a gossiper. It's presumably justified, and you are presumably free from the sin of slander yourself (if you're not, then don't tempt fate by asking God to smite your slanderer), but you aren't working on yourself here.  You are not the target.  See the difference? Some traditional conjure formulas "work" on two targets, in two "directions," at the same time, like I Can You Can't and Commanding and Court Case, which have stuff in them to work on your success AND make your competition or enemy trip up.  But not all do, and I just want to make sure nobody uses the above ingredient list to make up a stop-gossip bath for themselves, or thinks a Stop Gossip oil is necessarily going to have devil's shoe string in it.  Most Stop Gossip products out there today have protective elements in them and are designed for you to use on yourself, and so they may not be what you want here. Some Stop Gossip spells work in two directions at once, to protect you and to silence your enemy. Some have elements of reversing rather than outright binding.  But not all do.  When in doubt, ask your supplier whether their oil is suitable for what you have in mind. 

ETA: The Ninjacat has an example of a Stop Gossip spell that is a bit less aggressive (though certainly not from the "turn the other cheek" school of spellwork!) – and it's also an example of a spell that clearly delineates its "directionality," if you know what you're reading for/looking at when you read it.  It is a Stop Gossip spell, yes, but it's not of the same variety as other Stop Gossip spells which also target you as part of the whole framework, versus being aimed solely at the gossiper.  See the difference?  You don't mix up alum and pepper and dust yourself with it.  Note: I don't like to link to blogs or sites or posts when I am trying to make a point about how something is wrong or misleading, because – well, that's verging over into gossip territory! But if you do a search for stop gossip spells, you will likely find one  that says to use cloves, chia seeds, alum, and slippery elm I think, all powered together, to stop gossip.  If you don't know what you're doing, you might come away from this with the idea that both cloves and alum should be filed under "Stop Gossip herbs."  Then you might be surprised later, and confused, to find a spell calling for cloves to be used in friendship or affection.  (Follow the tags for an old post about a similar issue that crops up with sulphur, because people have got it in their heads that sulphur is for driving people away, and this results in even not-neophyte-workers getting confused when they come across an old deep South spell calling for sulphur to bring customers to a fish fry or sidewalk sale.  Such things have caused some folks to decide that a certain Hyatt informant was wrong, or confused, or lying to Hyatt, when in fact, the modern, suspicious reader just has the wrong conceptual categories in his or her head.)  Can cloves be used in Stop Gossip work? Sure!  But it's not because "it's an herb that stops gossip" in the same way that alum does.  Can sulphur be used in Goofering work? Sure! But it's not because "it's for driving people away" as such.

This distinction is often lost on "new converts" to hoodoo, who get the basic idea ("this is to stop gossip") but not the theory or directionality behind the work ("who is the target?") – and sometimes they will advise putting a traditional Stop Gossip formula on a target's belongings to *make them shut up.*  I don't recommend this in most cases – I don't think Slippery Elm bark is a very strong deterrent of backbiting itself, but rather protective so that the effects of gossip slide off of you.   Very often, Stop Gossip is the right approach in the workplace or in a large group of friends or family anyway, since gossip spreads and breeds among and within groups, and stopping one person will not usually stop the problem, just as stopping them from gossiping about you will not usually cure them of gossiping altogether – they'll just find somebody else to talk about.

But this issue of directionality is why you yourself bathe with Stop Gossip bath salts, but why Tapa Boca soap is usually slipped into the company washroom so *other people* will use it, as a sneaky trick.  It all depends on what the ingredients in the formula are supposed to be doing, what "direction" they are supposed to be working in.  Often, it is a good idea to work in more than one "direction," with the "carrot and stick" approach, to sweeten your enemies in general but also put the spiritual choke-collar on them so you can yank a knot in their ass when they overstep their bounds – but often (not always) you need to do this as two distinct workings.  (Commanding alone does not always work like we want – in fact, it backfires on some folks, which is why I think many people are too quick to apply Commanding elements to their typical love situations, but that is another post.)

Magic takes the path of least resistance – if you can *get your target to want to do what you want them do,* that is going to be more successful work than forcing them to do something where they are fighting you every step of the way.  So when Hot Foot isn't working, the next step should often be Attraction work (to draw a new, exciting opportunity that your target cannot resist, so they go happily) instead of busting out all the DUME and Plagues of Egypt work.  Same with Commanding work in love – if you are not wrapping them around your little finger with your Follow Me work, then stop focusing on controlling their every thought, word and deed (which is not usually going to work anyway), and focus instead on working on you – boost your sex appeal, glamor, communication, passion, and general aura of "I am Irresistible and Awesome."  You draw more flies with honey etc.  It's often a better use of your time, money, and energy than is inventing new ways to get licorice root into their food, or in trying a new spell to tie their nature. 

I know not everybody shares my view on this sort of thing and people often want what they want, but I'm not just speaking as someone who wouldn't want a relationship if that relationship had to be maintained through coercive magic being constantly applied, or as somebody who would not sic the Intranquil Spirit on somebody I actually loved.  I am also speaking as a rootworker who has seen hundreds and hundreds of cases and has gotten a pretty fair idea of what tends to work and what does not.  I *will* do all kinds of "heavy" work, IF it's justified AND if it looks like it will ultimately benefit the client, even if it is not work I would undertake for myself if I were in the client's shoes.  But the "heaviest" work is not always the most effective work, and with some of that "heavy" work, it does not always ultimately benefit the client even it is wildly successful.  But that, I suppose, is also another post!