The House Witch: Your Complete Guide to Creating a Magical Space with Rituals and Spells for Hearth and Home - Arin Murphy-Hiscock 2018
Protecting Your Home on a Spiritual Level
Using Hearthcraft to Protect Your Home
ONE OF THE MAIN FOCI of hearth magic revolves around protection, both of persons and possessions. The home is the root of your family’s energy and spirituality. If you are working to honor and strengthen it, and to make it as peaceful and spiritually nourishing as possible for you and your family, it only makes sense to protect it from harm or attack. Protection and purification are two of the most important concepts in home-based spirituality. This chapter focuses on how to maintain a clear and balanced energy within the home, how to cleanse and purify the atmosphere, how to handle threats, and how to build up magical defenses.
Protecting Your Home on a Spiritual Level
Common sense dictates that you defend your home physically by using secure locks, high fences with locking gates, security systems, locking windows, and so forth. Once this is done, however, there are many other things you can do to protect your home on a spiritual level.
Keeping track of your home’s energy is important. The best way to do this is to be familiar with your home’s regular energy, to be better able to identify shifts or changes or problem areas that need to be dealt with. Being aware of your home’s energy is crucial. Being familiar with its natural fluctuations, its cycles and responses to natural and environmental stimuli, is an important factor in identifying and handling disruptions and problems.
Make a point of knowing every corner of your home, even (or perhaps especially) areas you don’t frequent, such as storage areas, garage corners, the attic, and so forth. Don’t forget the crawl space, if your home has one, or partial attics accessible through trapdoors or hatches in the ceiling of a closet somewhere. If you have a shed or outbuilding built onto the side or back of the house, get to know its energy as well. Physically walking through these areas allows you to touch their energies with your own, which in turn gives you a better sense of what they feel like and allows you to interact directly with the energy there.
Evaluate Your Home’s Energy
This is an exercise that you can do to get a good overall sense of what your home’s energy is like. It is a good idea to do this exercise yearly or more frequently if your home is in a busy neighborhood, if you have a lot of people moving in and out, or if you experience a lot of emotional upheaval.
First make a list of all the rooms and connecting spaces in and directly adjacent to your home. Physically walk through the house and make note of all these places. Doing the physical tour will help you see and remember all the little places you might otherwise forget. You might list the major rooms in your home off the top of your head—kitchen, living room, bedrooms, bathroom—but if you walk from one to another you may realize that you’ve forgotten the hallway, the stairs up to the second floor, or the entryway between the front door and the hall, among other places.
Don’t forget storage cupboards, pantries, and linen closets either. All these spaces are separate and serve separate functions. If you have an open-plan home or a large room that is separated into zones by function such as a family room that has a desk, a craft table for sewing, and a TV area, break the room down into those zones on your list (write down “family room: TV,” “family room: sewing area”). It’s important to understand the function each room in your house serves because it affects the energy produced and held within the room. A mismatch between the room’s envisioned function and the purpose it actually serves can create a skewed energy too; exploring this can help you refocus the energy in your rooms and remove what negatively affects the desired energy.
Make a chart like this:
1. Room name:
2. Date:
3. Adjacent rooms:
4. Cardinal position:
5. Use:
6. Energy observations:
7. Suggestions or recommendations:
8. Miscellaneous:
When you’ve got your list, pick a room and go back to it. Go through the chart item by item and make your notes.
Room Name and Date
This sounds obvious, but you’re going to be keeping these notes to refer to later, and while things may seem fresh in your mind now, I guarantee that after you’ve done this you won’t necessarily remember when you did it. After the date, write down the weather, moon phase, day of the week, time of day, or any other associated information that you think interesting or that you believe may affect the energy readings you will take. This is as much a way to evaluate how you interact with your home’s energy as it is an assessment of the house energy itself. It can be helpful later to go through these papers and realize that you can’t do a clear energy evaluation when the moon is full, for example.
Adjacent Rooms and Cardinal Position
When you write your notes, don’t forget to include what rooms are above and below the room you are in. The energy of these rooms impacts the room’s energy as well. The cardinal position helps further situate the location. Does the room face west or northeast? This can be important if there is something such as a large shopping mall or a body of water in one direction or another. These things have large fields of energy that can affect your home as well and often have a greater effect on the rooms closer to them. When you’re done, look at what rooms adjoin one another and see what kinds of energy are interacting through the wall or floor. If you live in an apartment, chances are good your next-door neighbor isn’t going to allow you into his or her home to “sense the energy” of the room adjoining your wall. Apartments are a different kettle of fish. Assume the energy on the other side is on the bad side of neutral and create wards and shields accordingly. Better to be safe than sorry.
Use
What is this room used for? Rooms have an interesting habit of adapting to a family’s needs, and the original use of the room is often modified as the family’s needs change. First, list what it is supposed to be used for (library? den? office? playroom?). Then list what actually happens in the room (video games? TV watching? ironing? homework?). Sometimes the energy in a room is more conducive to something else rather than what you slated it to be when you moved in.
Energy Observations
How does the room feel to you? If you walk into the middle of it and close your eyes, how does it affect you emotionally? Do you feel relaxed? Tense? Angry? Sleepy? Now open your eyes and sense how it feels to you with the added visual information. Write both down. Walk through the room and see if your feelings change from location to location. Within the overall energy of a room there are very often several pockets of energy stronger in one sense than another. Draw a rough map of these energy sensings.
Suggestions or Recommendations
These can be spiritual, magical, or physical in nature. Should you move the furniture around? Remove a piece? Add a piece? Change the color scheme? Switch the room with another to make better use of the energies in each location? Should you add a certain elemental energy to balance an excess or lack of a certain element? Is an immediate purification indicated to cleanse the energy of something negative?
Miscellaneous
Use this category to write down anything that doesn’t fit somewhere else. Is there something in the room that needs repair? A reminder you want to set for yourself? Look back over your notes. You should have what is in essence a snapshot of your home’s energy as it stands at the present moment. This reference can be used as a baseline when you sense something odd or different in your home.