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

The Ethics of Magic in the Kitchen
Magic at the Hearth

Cooking in itself is a creative activity. It’s also one of the most common activities in the modern kitchen, and therefore is one of the most natural methods through which you can express your spirituality and practice your hearthcraft for the good of your family and home.

This brings up the issue of ethics. The subject of ethics was raised in Chapter 1 with the discussion about values and how they can help you define your home-based spirituality. Here we’ll discuss the ethically sticky and confusing issue of cooking for others with spiritual and/or magical intent.

In modern religions such as Wicca, it is generally accepted that attempting to affect someone else through magical or other means without their knowledge or consent is an infringement upon their privacy and expression of free will, and that spells or rituals designed to change someone’s status or outlook without their okay is a bad thing. There are other magic-based paths that do not operate under this particular moral restriction. Hearthcraft, however, is not specifically magic-based, nor is it a religion. It does not seek to deliberately alter an individual’s position or status for the gain or benefit of the practitioner or even for the individual being affected. What hearthcraft does do, however, is take full advantage of the open-ended opportunity to generally pass along wishes for peace, health, and happiness.

How does this differ from attempting to manipulate someone with magic? Well, first of all, infusing your kitchen activity with positive energy through channeling Divine love via your spiritual hearth or inviting positive energy into your home isn’t manipulating those who live in your home or who visit it as guests. If you prepare food with nonspecific love, then those who consume the food and that love benefit from it in their own way. The key thing to remember is that by serving food made with love, those who eat it have the opportunity to absorb the energy that is enhancing it along with the energy provided by the physical component of the meal. They do not automatically do so. Their personal energy has the choice to accept the loving energy in your food and home or not.

If you bake a cake for someone you like with the intent of creating a love-spell to make them fall in love with you, that classifies as manipulation and interference. If you make a cake for someone you like with the intent of baking the best cake you possibly can, with the hopes that the display of your culinary skill impresses them and perchance may contribute to their overall feelings of admiration for you, that qualifies as noninterference.

Perhaps this feels like splitting hairs. What it comes down to, however, is that you are not seeking to manipulate anyone by making food with love.

So how do you use spiritual or magical intent in the kitchen? Well, for a start, you can use rituals (and here the word ritual is used in the sense of short mental and spiritual preparations before you begin) to help improve your ability to cook. You can attract as much successful and encouraging energy from your hearth as possible and direct it into the food you prepare. You can use mindfulness (see Chapter 6) and invocations to improve your ability to plan, prepare, cook, and serve meals (see Chapter 10). And above all, you can cook mindfully, keeping the goal of caring for those who will consume your meal clearly in your mind. Chapter 9 looks at the relationship between food and spirituality in greater depth.