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

Hearthcraft and Home-Based Spirituality
A Place to Call Home

IF THERE’S SOMETHING ALL PEOPLE have in common, it’s 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 you’ll 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 and Home-Based Spirituality

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 witch’s 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.

Why Hearthcraft?

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. There’s more about kitchen witches later in this chapter.

Hearthcraft, like other aspects of the house witch’s 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

Keep It Simple

The practices suggested in this book are based in simplicity. Here the word ritual doesn’t 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.