Anna Franklin - The Hearth Witchs Compendium: Magical and Natural Living for Every Day

Y ou can view this as a recipe book and use it as such, but I hope this book will inspire you to walk the path of the Hearth Witch, which is so much more. While you may begin to learn how to work with natural resources from books like this one, the true teaching only comes when you start listening to the land and its plants and animals.

When the sacred within you recognises the sacred that surrounds you everywhere, a deeper spiritual reality opens up in which all space becomes sacred space, all time becomes sacred time, and all acts become sacred acts.

This is the true path of the Hearth Witch. Walk it in beauty.

Anna Franklin

chapter

Hearth

Witcher y

T he garden is full of roses this week. They flop over the fences and scramble up the trellis, their soft, sensual blooms filling the air with a voluptuous perfume. It is easy to understand why they are sacred to so many gods and goddesses of loveIsis, Aphrodite, Venus, Eros, Cupid, Inanna, and Ishtar, to name just a few. I bless the plants and gather armfuls of flowers.

I take them into the house and lay them on the kitchen table and begin to separate the red flowers from the white. Im reminded that in one Greek tale, when the goddess Aphrodite first arose from the ocean and stepped onto the shore, the sparkling sea foam fell from her body in the form of pale white roses and took root. Later, as she pursued the beautiful youth Adonis, she caught herself on a thorn and her blood dyed the roses crimson red, symbolising innocence turned to desire and maidenhood turned to womanhood. For magical purposes, while my white roses stand for purity, perfection, innocence, virginity, and the moon, the red roses represent earthly passion and fertility. Wound together, they signify the union of oppositessymbolism we use at Beltane to celebrate the sacred marriage of the God and Goddess, an act which reconciles male and female, summer and winter, life and death, and flesh and spirit, and brings about all creation, driven by the most fundamental and powerful force in the universe: love.

However, Midsummer is tomorrow, and roses play a part in our solstice ritual since, like other flowers with rayed petals, they are an emblem of the sun. Like the sun, which dies each night and is reborn each day at sunrise, the rose is an emblem of renewal, resurrection, and eternal life, which is why the Celts, Egyptians, and Romans used them as funeral offerings. I set aside some to make offerings for dead friends later, and others to make chaplets for Midsummer.

Im still left with an abundance of blossoms. I take down two clean glass jars from my cupboard and pack both of them with the scented petals I carefully pull from the stems. One jar I top up with white vinegar and set it on the sunny kitchen windowsill. I will leave it there for two weeks before straining the liquid into a clean jar. My resulting rose vinegar can be used as a delicate salad dressing, an antiseptic wash for wiping down my kitchen surfaces, or be dabbed onto my forehead to relieve headaches. The second jar of rose petals I fill up with one part distilled water to three parts vodka. I label it and put it in a cool, dark place in my pantry, where it will stay for three weeks. When it is ready, I will strain the liquid into a clean jarand lo and behold, I will have made my own rose hydrosol. I will use it as a skin toner just as it is, but I could chill it to make a compress for puffy eyes or use it as a final conditioning rinse for my hair. Next month I will incorporate some into skin lotions and creams.