Murphy-Hiscock - The house witch: your complete guide to creating a magical space with rituals and spells for hearth and home

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Dedication

For Ada and Audrey, who are discovering magic as a way to help the world around them and heal those they care about.

Your home is a place of refuge, renewal, and creativity, where you begin and end each day. It is also the primary root of your energy and spirituality. The house witch works to honor and strengthen that sacred space, making it as simple, peaceful, and nourishing as possible.

Unlike green witches who focus on nature-based practices and kitchen witches who concentrate on food and cooking, the house witch explores and uses the magic of the home. While other spiritual paths often look beyond the home to focus on the natural world, the house witch creates a solid and supportive place to work froma literal (and magical) home base.

In The House Witch , youll explore the energies of hearth and home and learn how you can create a spiritual haven for yourself and your loved ones in todays busy world. Inside these pages youll learn how to:

Locate and enhance your homes spiritual hearth

Perform rituals to protect and cleanse your home

Build a kitchen shrine

Prepare recipes that blend magic and food

Master the secrets of the cauldron and the sacred flame

Bring the ancient house witch practices into modern times

Produce hearth-based arts and crafts

In essence, the role of the house witch is to serve as a facilitator for the spiritual well-being of herself, her family, and her welcomed guests. Her home is her temple, which she tends in order to keep energy flowing smoothly and freely, as well as to honor the principles she upholds. She seeks to support and nurture her family (and extended community) in both a spiritual and physical fashion. So if you are ready to explore the magic that may be found or created in your home and use it to better your life, then lets get started.

IF THERES SOMETHING ALL PEOPLE have in common, its the need for shelter, nourishment, and a place to call home. That place is somewhere to return to for refuge, renewal, relaxation, and rejuvenation. In this chapter youll learn about the concept of home and its place in a spiritual life.

Spirituality comes from within, and the spiritual path or practice you choose gives it context. One of the most common of those contexts is the hearth, the spiritual center of the home. No matter what your current spiritual path is, rooting it in your hearth makes a lot of sense and can nourish the rest of your spiritual life.

Hearthcraft is a spiritual path rooted in the belief that the home is a place of beauty, power, and protection, a place where people are nurtured and nourished on a spiritual basis as well as a physical and emotional basis. Hearthcraft describes the home-based portion of the spirituality associated with the path of the house witch. It is not kitchen witchcraft, although that can play a role within a house witchs practice. It is also not green witchcraft, although that, too, can influence and enrich a hearth- and home-based practice.

Hearthcraft argues that spirituality, like many other things, begins at home. It is not enough to attend an out-of-home spiritual gathering at specific intervals; the home itself is an essential element within a nourishing, vibrant, ongoing spiritual practice. Once upon a time organized religion was depended upon to be the source for spiritual fulfillment. With increasing dissatisfaction being felt within organized religious institutions, the relocation of the spiritual focus to the home, either as the central element or a supportive one, makes sense. Honoring the hearth means honoring your origins, where you come from each day, and where you return each night.

The word hearth is of Old English origin meaning the floor around a fireplace or the lower part of a furnace where molten metal is collected during the smelting process. Throughout the ages the hearth has come to symbolize domestic comfort and the entire home, perceived as the heart or center of the living space. Therefore, someone who practices hearthcraft is someone whose spiritual practices revolve around the hearth and home, as symbolized by the fireplace and the fire that burns within it.

Perhaps a more familiar term, kitchen witch is used popularly to mean someone who practices magic through cooking, baking, and/or through everyday activity. Hearthcraft differentiates from kitchen witchcraft by primarily emphasizing the spiritual aspect that runs through the practice, as opposed to the primarily magical practice of the kitchen witch. Theres more about kitchen witches later in this chapter.

Hearthcraft, like other aspects of the house witchs path and other forms of kitchen and green witchcraft, revolves around practicality, with little ritualistic guidelines or necessary formality. Here are some keywords to keep in mind when you think about hearthcraft:

Simple

Practical

Family-related

Domestic

Everyday

Household

The practices suggested in this book are based in simplicity. Here the word ritual doesnt mean something full-blown and complicated; instead, it means an intuitive ceremony or something set apart from everyday action by mindfulness and conscious intent. Also, the word magic means the conscious and directed attempt to effect change by combining and directing energy toward a positive goal. The rituals and magical workings included in this book are only guidelines to give you an idea of how you can structure your own hearth-based spiritual practice.

Hearthcraft functions on a very basic truth:

Living your life is a spiritual act.

Having said that, it can be hard to isolate exactly what constitutes spirituality and, by extension, how to actively support it in the home.

What makes hearthcraft so special is that the principles of it dovetailin fact, arethe things you do every day in your home. In essence, this book is designed to help you recognize those things and lend awareness to them so that you can appreciate them all the more. It also offers some ideas on how to enhance those everyday actions and objects in order to facilitate or deepen your experience.

Nurturing the spiritual element of the home is key to the path of the hearth-based house witch. How can you do this? The answer depends on how you define spiritual . Youve already read some basic definitions, but what is crucial to this practice is defining the term for yourself. Think about these questions:

What constitutes a spiritual experience for you?

What are the characteristics of a sacred object?