The House Witch: Your Complete Guide to Creating a Magical Space with Rituals and Spells for Hearth and Home - Arin Murphy-Hiscock 2018

What Does It Mean to Be Sacred?
Your Home As a Sacred Space

IT IS IMPORTANT TO REMEMBER that in hearthcraft the areas, actions, and times you hold sacred are not isolated from the everyday world; they are very much a part of it, and they lend their sanctity to what and who interacts with them. In other words, we are blessed by interacting with what we consider sacred. This is one of the most important precepts of home-based spirituality: by caring for and maintaining your home, you simultaneously enhance its sanctity while it touches and blesses you.

What Does It Mean to Be Sacred?

The central concept of hearth- and home-based spirituality puts forth that the home is sacred. But what does sacred really mean? Sacer, the Latin root of the term, means “holy.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines sacred as “connected with a deity and so deserving veneration; holy.” Alternatively, it may mean “religious rather than secular.” In plainer terms, it means that if something is considered sacred it is recognized as being touched by the realm of the gods in some way and is therefore something worthy of respect or honor. It is theoretically no longer of this world: it is set apart and revered or honored for this reason. Note that “set apart” does not mean isolated and worshipped. Instead, it means given honor within the context of the everyday world.

Sacred space, then, is a zone where you can touch the Divine, communicate with it, interact with it, or be influenced by it in a way that is clearer (or more easily perceived or felt) than in other places. We generally recognize certain sites as sacred: sites of grave tragedy, such as Auschwitz; sites of great beauty; sites consecrated to a particular religion, such as Chartres Cathedral or the Taj Mahal; sites that are historically significant, such as where peace treaties were signed, battles fought, and great people met; sites of commemoration, such as cemeteries and burial grounds; and sites of ancient activity, such as Stonehenge. Part of the mystery of sacred space is how it is familiar, and yet we can sense that there is something “other” about it. This tension is part of what we recognize when we sense that a place or object is sacred.

To consecrate something means to ritually designate it as sacred. While this action is found in many alternative spiritual paths as well as formal religions, it doesn’t figure largely in hearthcraft. This is mainly due to the recognition that there is a touch of the sacred in all things, and the hearth is especially sacred due to its function. There is no need to formally consecrate the hearth, because it is already sacred.