Maqlu treated witchcraft as a real and specific harm rather than a vague misfortune, and its structure answers a real accusation point by point. The client, never named as the accuser of any particular person, described symptoms, typically illness, insomnia or social ruin, that the exorcist diagnosed as the work of an unknown witch or warlock. Across roughly a hundred incantations recited through the night, the rite built a legal case in ritual form: it named every possible method a witch might have used, image magic, poisoned food, contaminated clothing, so that whichever method had actually been used was covered, then addressed the witch directly in the second person, cataloguing her or his crimes and revoking their power clause by clause.
The figurines stood in for the witch's body. Burning them enacted the same fate the witch had allegedly intended for the client, on the principle, common across Mesopotamian ritual, that a substitute object could carry a person's fate in their place. The series closes at sunrise with the client washed, dressed in clean garments and reintegrated into ordinary life, the ritual night itself functioning as the boundary between affliction and cure. Some incantations within the series address specific methods of harm the exorcist evidently regarded as most common, poisoned food and drink chief among them, suggesting real anxieties about domestic betrayal shaped which forms of alleged witchcraft the text bothered to name at length.