The House Witch: Your Complete Guide to Creating a Magical Space with Rituals and Spells for Hearth and Home - Arin Murphy-Hiscock 2018
Modern Appliances and Magic
Magic at the Hearth
This section is not necessarily advocating the use of appliances in magical or spiritual practice, but simply lists them and their alternate uses or energies as they currently exist in many kitchens. If you do not have some of them, you’re not missing out on anything. That said, there are a lot of things in your kitchen that you take for granted, like the coffeepot, the kettle, and the microwave, and while they are not traditional tools, you may not have considered them as possibilities for contemporary magical tools. However, as hearthcraft is about practicality, there’s no reason to avoid things you could be using in your daily practice. Why should only certain kitchen activities or tools be spiritual or creative? Why can’t you employ electric fryers and stand mixers?
The main argument against using modern kitchen appliances for magic is that the use of electricity somehow disrupts or alters the magic. To each his or her own, but I have rarely found that the electricity running through the wires set inside the walls of my home affects the rituals or spiritual work I do within those walls. The second argument sometimes given is that the individual who objects to them feels that it is somehow cheating if an appliance is used. But again, hearthcraft is about practicality! There is no point to making more work for yourself by doing it “the old-fashioned way.”
In a different light, however, if you wish to celebrate something by offering up the time and energy it requires to do a task without the aid of modern technology in the kitchen, more power to you. It can be a wonderful, meditative experience.
There is one caveat to using your everyday appliances for magical and spiritual purposes: you can’t always use them again for cooking if you’ve used them to grind or blend something inedible. Take a small food processor or coffee grinder used to make incense, for example. No matter how much you scrub, essential oils and resin powder might not come out. If you intend to use small appliances such as these for magical and spiritual-related work, invest in a secondhand machine to devote to that purpose only, for the sake of health and safety.
At the very least, recognizing your appliances and kitchen tools as partners in your daily life provides you with yet another opportunity to take advantage of the energies of your environment. Being aware of what is around you and how you use the tools at your disposal allows you to remain more in control of your environment. Becoming familiar with specific energies further provides you with the opportunity to use them with awareness and precision, thereby enhancing your spiritual experience and broadening or deepening the complex web of energies that makes up your hearth and home.
Understanding that every tool you use possesses its own energy is the first step toward gaining a better understanding of how the energy of your kitchen is produced and affected.
How to begin? Well, a good way to start is by blessing each major appliance in your kitchen. This isn’t quite as insane as it sounds. As human beings, we tend to project personalities onto machines because we relate better to things that we perceive as having identities. By recognizing the appliances as participants in your activities at hearth and in home, you formally acknowledge their energies. If you wish to go so far as giving them names, do so. Anything that gives the appliance more of a recognized presence in your kitchen will help.
Your appliances and how they work impact your life in ways you often don’t recognize until you lose the use of them through a power failure or system failure of the individual machine. When this happens your reaction is usually a negative one, born of frustration, which is understandable. That negative reaction impacts the energy of your home, however, and it is regrettable if the only conscious response you demonstrate toward appliances and their uses is a negative one.
Take a look around your kitchen and make note of the appliances you use every day. The refrigerator is always on; the stove is at your disposal; the toaster, coffee maker, and microwave are almost omnipresent in today’s kitchens. What if, when you used them, you consciously applied their energy in a positive fashion to the overall energy of your kitchen, your home, and your life?
By taking a moment to formally recognize an appliance, you are signaling to your mind and spirit that this appliance is a valued element of your everyday life—and you are signaling this to the energy of the appliance as well. This isn’t the place to go into a long discourse about the validity of energy produced by machinery and technological devices as compared to the energy produced by organic and natural-sourced objects; suffice it to say that everything has an energy signature to it, and that energy affects the environment in which the object finds itself. The mechanical-based energy of a toaster oven may be a bit more difficult to grasp and incorporate into your conscious everyday use than the energy of herbs or other symbols, but it is a perfectly legitimate energy. Again, it seems somewhat self-defeating to ignore the modern tools at our disposal when we are seeking to create a spiritually, emotionally, and physically nourishing hearth-centered spiritual practice.
A good place to start is by formally recognizing the major players in your kitchen, the ones that sit on your counters and are used daily or several times each week. One way of doing this is by blessing them (see later in this chapter). Think of blessing the appliance as a way of initializing its energy in a positive manner and weaving it into the overall atmosphere of your hearth.
As an example, let’s look at the stand mixer. I’m focusing on this instead of the oven because it’s a very specific small appliance, whereas the stove and oven tend to be more central in the kitchen. Apart from using electricity, the stand mixer isn’t much different from mixing and kneading bread the traditional way. However, it can also be argued that with less input from you, less hands-on activity, you’re divorcing yourself further from the potential to imbue your resulting bread product with more magic and/or energy. When making bread for specific magical or spiritual purposes, yes, I make it entirely by hand. But for everyday bread, I use a machine, and by blessing the appliance itself and the ingredients as I place them in the bowl, I’m maximizing the potential for hearth magic on a daily basis. As a result of a physical condition I am slowly losing strength in my hands, and therefore I can see that in the near future I will need to use the machine for mixing and kneading even bread for ritual use, and when that happens I’ll be fine with it because I recognize that it’s the intent and the recognition of the machine itself as a participating element within my hearth and home practice that is key.
Your Cookbook
Another essential kitchen aid that you probably overlook when you think of tools is your cookbook or recipe file. This does not mean a published cookbook but rather the binder or folder of recipes you’ve collected over the years, with the notes scribbled to yourself in the margins or the back of the papers, photocopies and hastily handwritten scraps of paper, pages torn from magazines, recipes printed from websites, tattered recipe cards stained with vanilla extract and coffee and tomato paste. If you stuff these recipes inside the front cover of your main published cookbook or have them loose somewhere, treat yourself to a scrapbook or a sturdy three-ring binder and a set of transparent sheet protectors. The latter is ideal, because the sheet protectors can not only be wiped off when you stir the soup a bit too enthusiastically; you can also slip notes inside them.
Your cookbook is paralleled by a Book of Shadows or a grimoire in exclusively spiritual practices. A Book of Shadows is a place where you can note down things you’ve tried, changes to spells, records of rituals, recipes, and so forth. Your cookbook is another form of this. Arrange it in a way that makes sense to you. Generally recipe collections are organized by type of dish—appetizer, main dish, one-pot meals, beverages, desserts, and so forth—but if you have another method of organizing your recipes, by all means use it.
Keep a kitchen journal as well, one in which you can note down prayers, invocations, information, or nonfood recipes related to your spiritual practice.
Blessing Your Appliances
This is a simple and straightforward act that can be done on a regular basis to help maintain the positive charge to the appliance’s energy, tie it into the harmonious energy of the kitchen, and keep it happy. No supplies are needed for this, although if you feel it necessary or preferable, you can use a small bowl or cup of plain water, or water with a pinch of salt added to it.
Note that this isn’t a cleansing or a purification, simply a blessing. If you sense that it is required, do a purification before the blessing. You may feel the need to do a purification the first time you do this blessing and not again.
The following instructions use the refrigerator as an example. To perform the blessing on another appliance, simply replace the name and the purpose/use.
1. Stand before the appliance. Touch it with your hands and allow yourself to sense its energy by opening yourself to whatever feelings or sensations the appliance may raise in you. The appliance may “feel” hot, cold, active, passive, slow, fast, eager, aloof, or anything else.
2. When you feel that you have a sense of the appliance’s energy and/or personality, say:
Refrigerator,
Thank you for keeping our food fresh and cool.
Thank you for being part of our lives.
I bless you.
3. If you wish, you can draw a symbol on it in plain water, water with a pinch of salt in it, or with a dry finger. The symbol can be anything you feel is appropriate. A good default symbol is a circle, representing harmony. Or perhaps you may wish to use something like a stylized flame to represent the energy of the hearth of the home.
If you have difficulty sensing the energy of the appliance, consider what each one does in the kitchen and consciously associate it with a similar energy. For example, ice cream is sweet and thus an ice-cream maker may be associated with friendship, harmony, and love. Why not try it with a stand mixer? It combines separate ingredients into one harmonious entity of dough, so perhaps you may associate it with community, harmony, and active work. Cake tins may symbolize pleasure, celebration, and so forth. Your teapot may represent health, love, support, comfort, and peace.
If you wish, you can do the same for the areas of your kitchen: breakfast nook, pantry, cupboard, and so forth. Don’t overlook the contents of your kitchen cupboards. Cleaning supplies, china, dinnerware, and silverware are all easily blessed and/or empowered for harmony and other positive things such as health. Bless the entries into the kitchen, too, the doorways and arches or passages into the rest of the house.
On the Magical Nature of Everyday Items
As you have learned in this book, hearthcraft is a practical practice. Here is a small selection of modern kitchen appliances and utensils with comments upon their use in the modern kitchen and their impact on spiritual practice. Look at your major appliances, small countertop appliances, and other kitchen tools and utensils. What kind of energy do they carry? What sort of things do they symbolize for you? Here are some suggested associations to help you out if you can’t pin down a definable energy.
✵ Knife sharpener: focus
✵ Can opener: removing barriers, moving past obstacles
✵ Bread machine: comfort, foundation, abundance
✵ Coffee grinder: focus, heightened awareness, energy
✵ Handheld mixer, stand mixer: gentle but firm blending of disparate thoughts or energies
✵ Espresso machine: intensity
✵ Milk frother: play, thought, lightheartedness
✵ Mandoline: evenness, precision
✵ Slow cooker: slow and steady union
Explore your kitchen cupboards and drawers, and see what you can assign to the utensils and small appliances you find.