The House Witch: Your Complete Guide to Creating a Magical Space with Rituals and Spells for Hearth and Home - Arin Murphy-Hiscock 2018
The Power of the Kitchen
The Kitchen As a Sacred Space
IN TODAY’S HOMES, often the only place that approximates a hearth is the kitchen. This isn’t surprising when you consider that the kitchen plays a central role in everyday life, being the place where food is prepared and eaten. House witch spirituality incorporates domestic activity of all kinds, and most domestic activity is based or originates in the kitchen, so it makes sense to establish a spiritual element there.
The Power of the Kitchen
It can be hard to shake the mindset drilled into North American culture by the technological improvements in the mid-to-late twentieth century. Advertising dating from the 1950s and 1960s repeatedly targeted wives and mothers as people who deserved to spend more time out of the kitchen to live a “real” life. Inventions and prepackaged foods to shorten time spent in the kitchen and reduce energy devoted to kitchen- and domestic-related activity have somehow led us to believe that the kitchen is a place where we ought not to be.
In a way, this is sad. It suggests that the kitchen is a place to avoid, a place where we ought to spend the least amount of time possible. We have come to regard food preparation and domestic activity as things that have to be done before we get to do the other rewarding things in life. As a friend said to me the other day, “We have to learn to understand that running a household is not only work, it’s valid work. It’s not something that gets squeezed in after six o’clock. It’s not taking away from other things if we do it between nine and five.” And she’s right. The feminist revolution of the latter half of the twentieth century succeeded in opening the workplace to women, but, unfortunately, in so doing it suggested that domestic management was somehow inferior to work done elsewhere. When establishing a home-based spirituality, it’s important to examine your feelings about the kitchen and the work done there. Even if you choose another room or area to be your symbolic hearth, the function of the kitchen doesn’t change, and so much of domestic activity is based there that your feelings about it will certainly influence home-based spiritual work.
Kitchen History
The kitchen hasn’t always been a separate room in the house. Originally it was nothing more than a cooking fire brought indoors, with the other shelter-based activity carrying on around it. As the kitchen evolved into a specialized area it became its own room, with separate areas for storage of food, equipment, and activity. The room became further separated into a hot kitchen and cold kitchen where space permitted, the hot kitchen containing the fireplace and hearth for roasting meats and making hot foods, and the cold kitchen a place of lower temperature where foods such as pastry, jellied foods, and dairy were kept or prepared.
Older kitchens were larger than the ones we use today, as they encompassed a wide variety of pursuits. Apart from cooking, activities such as eating, washing laundry, taking baths, candle-making, spinning and weaving, sewing, food preserving in all forms, nursing the sick, childcare, lessons, and countless other pursuits all took place in the kitchen of the average home.
As the twentieth century saw the invention of time- and labor-saving devices, the kitchen began to shrink in size as less time was spent there and activities were relocated to specific activity-associated areas. The trend in downsizing began to reverse in the late twentieth century. Today’s kitchen designs feature layouts that have returned to an open-plan arrangement, allowing families to congregate in a larger room and share time together. There’s a reason we see kitchens being designed with large work or relaxation spaces adjacent and open to the actual kitchen area and computer nooks in the kitchen itself. With less time spent in the home in general, families seek to make the most of their time together. It makes sense that families come together in the kitchen or adjacent open-plan rooms while a meal is being prepared.
The Heart of a Home
Kitchens have always changed in size and equipment according to the needs of the era. And yet throughout it all, they are continually associated with domesticity and the heart of the home. The kitchen is a key communal area in most homes: it is a meeting place; a social area; a point of communication; a place where food is stored, prepared, and consumed. All the related equipment for these activities is stored here as well.
Don’t dismiss this chapter if your physical analogue or your spiritual hearth is located elsewhere in your home. The function the kitchen serves in a family’s everyday life links it strongly to your hearth- and home-based spirituality.
The kitchen is the one room in the house that sees a constant stream of activity. It is seen less so nowadays, what with the use of appliances that can store and prepare food in a fraction of the time once necessary, as well as the widespread use of preprepared and prepackaged food. Historically, however, the kitchen was in constant use. It served as the headquarters of the home, a staging place for maintaining the running of the household: it was the location of the pantry and was adjacent to the storage place of foodstuffs; it was where the cooking fire resided, which required constant supervision; it was where food preparation and preservation took place; and in many cases, it was where the food was consumed as well.
In terms of hearthcraft, the kitchen as a place of physical nourishment is a logical parallel to the spiritual center of your home. If this is true for you, then setting up an altar or shrine to represent your spiritual hearth in the kitchen makes perfect sense. If your kitchen is poorly laid out or a place of stress for you, thinking about what creates an atmosphere more conducive to a spiritual environment or setting up an altar or shrine there can help you redirect, purify, or otherwise make the energy of your kitchen more appealing and make your experience there a happier and more rewarding one. If you hate your kitchen, anything that might help should be tried at least once! If in the end the kitchen is just absolutely not the heart of your home, no matter how you look at it, don’t fight it; go with wherever you feel drawn to. Do your best to open yourself to the spiritual aspect of the work done in the kitchen by employing some of the techniques in this book.