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

Caring for Those Inside Your Home
A Place to Call Home

The practice of hearthcraft presupposes someone to care for, even if it is only yourself or your pets. Family is one of the cornerstones of hearthcraft.

Members of the family (and/or the residents of the home) are active participants in shaping and affecting the energy of the home. They maintain and continually nourish the spiritual element of the home by being active, communicative, loving, and physically present. They provide energy for the house witch to manage, which is one of the reasons for the practice. The living energy is important to the path. Without it, the home becomes more of a house.

The active, fluid, ever-changing dynamic of family ensures input and activity, essential elements of the spiritual well-being of a home. It is also important to remember that the family’s interaction and support go beyond maintaining the general identity of the home, however: the family supports itself as individuals as well.

Think about Your Values

Increasingly, people are no longer members of a defined religious group, and thus it falls to the family to engage in spiritual support. This can be challenging, especially when you think about all the morals, ethics, and values that an organized religion defines and instills in its adherents. These three terms are slippery and sometimes are confused.

✵ Morals: standards of behavior or principles of right and wrong.

✵ Ethics: the moral principles governing or influencing conduct.

✵ Values: principles or standards of behavior. Value (singular): the regard that something is held to deserve; importance or worth.

Because these three definitions are so closely intertwined, let’s simplify them:

✵ Morals are the principles of right and wrong.

✵ Ethics are the application of morals to one’s behavior.

✵ Values are morals and ethics that an individual or society as a whole considers important and worthy of upholding.

Define what morals are important to you and actively demonstrate them through ethical behavior, especially at the hearth.

If your family is open to discussing spirituality, ask them for their input as well as you define the fundamental values you wish to associate with your hearth. It is only fair to include them and their beliefs, as what goes on at the hearth and in the home impacts and affects them as well. It can be quite illuminating to learn what morals and ethics your partner or children value, and they may surprise you by listing principles that you hadn’t initially thought of.

Define Your Values

Here’s an exercise you can engage in with your family or alone if you live by yourself. With your family, have a brainstorming session in which you talk about morals, ethics, and values, and make an overall list. Once the session is over, schedule another meeting for a couple of days later. Discuss the overall list that was created during the brainstorming session. From the global list, write down the issues that mean the most to the family. Put it on the fridge or pin it to a bulletin board so everyone can see it on a regular basis. For each item on the list, come up with a real-life example. For example, if one of the values is “eco-awareness,” an example might be “taking lunch to work in a reusable lunch bag or bento box.” An illustration for “compassion” might be “making someone a cup of tea and sitting down with them to show that someone cares about them.”

Looking up each word on the list in the dictionary and reading out the definition may be illuminating as well, because the popular idea of the meaning of terms like compassion and generosity may not be what those terms actually mean. The family might discuss the difference between the dictionary definition and their understanding of the term and choose one meaning over the other if it bears more ethical weight with them and has a more positive influence on the way they wish to live their lives.