Tag: Goddess

Blessing the Hearth

Celebrating Women’s History Month!

The hearth was the center of the home.

A couple of years ago (pre-pandemic, when one still casually opened the front door to an unanticipated knock or ring of the doorbell by a stranger), I was accosted by a salesperson attempting to convince me to sign up for home insect control. Now, I’m not the sort of woman to simply slam the door in the face of some hapless huckster. I know that door-to-door sales work is a thankless job. So I usually allow them to get in a few (very few) words first before saying the obligatory, “I’m really not interested” and firmly shutting my front door.

But I did have a bit of trouble controlling my mirth when this young man gestured to the porch overhang, talking about all the spiderwebs that gathered at rarely-used front doors as family came and went through their attached garages. He pointed directly to the corners where such webs would be expected to lurk.

There were none. I mean NONE. Nope, those corners were free of spiderwebs, wasps nests, cobwebs, or cottonwood drifts from the blooming trees. It sort of put paid to his little demonstration. I grinned only a little as I told him I wasn’t interested and closed my front door on his bewildered face.

The only time I’d had greater enjoyment from a front porch peddler was the spring afternoon near Easter, when I’d opened the door to a proselytizer trying to drum up customers for a local church. He invited me to join with them on Easter Sunday to “celebrate Jesus’ death”. (Yes, he actually said that! I could not make this stuff up.) Now, it’s been a long while since I practiced organized religion, but even in my dim and distant memories of such Easter services lay the notion that we were joining to celebrate Jesus’ resurrection. For this particular porch peddler occasion, I did not even attempt to stifle my astounded chuckles. But I digress….

You see, there were no webs or cottonwood or nests, or indeed, any detritus of any sort on my tiny front porch or its rafters because I regularly practice blessing the entryway to my home. Stepping out armed with a broom, I sweep away anything on or above or around my porch and walkway while repeating the words, “Bless this home and all who dwell therein. This home is surrounded, enfolded, protected, and watched over by the Divine. Bless this home and all who enter here.”

Performing this personal ceremony, I feel empowered. With each stroke of the bristles, I claim the protection of the Divinity in which I believe. The exterior of my house is both cleansed and wrapped in a mantle of security; warded and protected; cocooned within a shelter of psychic defense that I create as I move from my front porch to my back patio, sweeping and safeguarding both entryways.

There was a time when such household protection rituals were common, especially when every home was both lit and warmed by a fire. The hearth was the center of the home; the place where family gathered for warmth, and where women worked to cook the meals or to sit nearest the light to sew and weave. To bless the hearth was to bless the home, and was the exclusive province of women. For centuries women, denied the right to be priests or ministers, or to even participate in any meaningful way in many, most, religions–those women were, nonetheless, the hearthkeepers; the ones who genuinely “kept the home fires burning”. Women swept away the ashes and laid the fresh fires upon their hearths and kindled the logs. Women spoke their blessings over the flames, weaving a circle of protection about their homes and loved ones; blessings woven of love and belief, and as sturdy as any cloth upon their looms. They swept their front steps and dooryards, presenting a clear path for all who came and went. They polished the brass of door handles to a shining surface, reflecting the faces of those who visited.

And so, sweeping my own path and entryway and porch roof beams, clearing the ashes from my wood-burning fireplace before laying a fresh fire to be kindled on another cold night, I feel the shades and spirits of those centuries of women who came before me. I am following, not in their footsteps, but in the path of their work worn hands, as I perform the same rituals they once did. Performing these homely rituals, I am translated, shifting from my merely human form to become the daughter of all those who went before me, themselves Daughters of Demeter, goddess of hearth and home; tenderly weaving words of beneficent protection about my dwelling, while envisioning all those I love cocooned within the warmth and undying fire of my love.

This post originally appeared on December 15, 2021. If you enjoyed it, you might also find other essays from that year to your taste. You can locate them in the Archives by scrolling down.

The Oak King and The Holly King

(This Winter Solstice story first appeared on this blog on December 21, 2017.)

It is a night in prehistory, someplace in the area that will one day be called Britain. Those in this tiny village of mud thatched roundhouses live a precarious, hand-to-mouth existence, eking a few precious crops from the soil each summer season, hunting and fishing, gathering from the wild.  They pray each summer  for a bountiful harvest, that they might have enough to survive the coming winter.

The nights have been growing colder for many weeks now, but, what is even more frightening, they have been growing longer. The elders in the village say that this has happened before; many times, in fact.  The sun rises later and later, sets earlier and earlier, and each successive night lasts longer.  The elders have grown wise merely by the act of surviving so many repetitions of this occurrence.  And so they choose the largest, hardest, longest-burning oak logs and set them aside for what they know is coming: the Dark Night.  The Long Night.  The fearful night when Darkness overpowers the Light.  They set that hardy wood aside for the night when everyone in this little village will huddle together, seeking warmth, and desperately hoping that this time, this time once more, the Darkness will not win.  The unbearable, long night will end, must end, and the morning sun be reborn.

Gathered About the Yule Log
Gathered About the Yule Log

And as they huddle together about the bright light of that long-burning log, stories are told. Legends are born.  For the light of the log is like passion, like the heat of battle, and so surely it must represent a battle – the battle of Light and Darkness.  Perhaps it is two great Kings who are battling ,  or even Gods  (for there must always be kings and gods – someone, after all, must be in charge of all this.)   Perhaps one of these God Kings lives within the oak log itself, the oak twined with ivy, ivy which remains green even in winter, and with mistletoe, that mystic plant which appears growing high in the trees without reason or explanation.  This Oak King must be battling the Holly King, whose sharp, thorny green plant bears red berries like blood.

And what of the sun, the golden sun, the longed-for sun? Drawing perhaps on some misty memory of an ancient  sun-scorched land known only from legend, they recall the myth of  Nuit, starry Goddess of the Night Sky, from whose body each morning the sun was reborn.  Surely a God King must have a wife: a wife pregnant, laboring, struggling to give birth to the Sun.  A family — a family and history remembered even by those who have no memories of that land.  (It will be centuries yet before another small family will fly into Egypt, that ancient land of the starry Goddess…)

And so at sundown, the Great Battle commences: the battle for the very Earth itself. If the Holly King wins, the laboring Goddess will perish in childbirth, the sun never be reborn, and the Earth and all its inhabitants will die.

But the Holly King never wins. Time after time, battle after battle, he is slain, dying as he knows he must die: King, and God, and Sacrifice.  Darkness never conquers the Light.  And at the moment of dawn, the Queen of Heaven once again gives birth to the Child who is the Light.

And so it is that all the ancient legends blend, and twine, and intermingle, into this singular neverending Truth: that though the Darkness may gain sometimes hours, sometimes days, sometimes minutes, its reign upon the Earth and her peoples must always, eventually fade; that sacrifice and courage and wisdom enable one to battle through the long and fearful night; that the pain and toil of women who carry and labor the children of the Earth into existence allows us always to persist and continue.

And now in closing this ancient but always-new tale, I send (as Fra Giovanni once wrote in his Christmas Greeting, quoting the great Song of Solomon), “…the hope that for you, now and forever, the day breaks, and the shadows flee away.”