Household Magic

I’ve really gotten into household magic* and the notion of incorporating my spirituality into my home. Call it pre-wedding nesting, or the lack of a project right now, or just one of the many tangents that have diverted me from my DP work, but I’ve been spending a fair bit of time reading about the creation of a magical household and doing the work to make my home a little more magical.

So far I’ve borrowed and burned through The Magical Household by Scott Cunningham and David Harrington and Cottage Witchery by Ellen Dugan, and I’m enjoying Cunningham’s Encyclopedia of Wicca in the Kitchen, of which I’ve actually ordered myself a copy. (Say what you will, I enjoy reading Cunningham’s work, and, yes, I take it with the proverbial grain of salt.)

I’ve started my work in the kitchen. One of my very best friends (and a fellow vegetarian) stocked me up, as a wedding gift, with cast iron cookware.

Cast iron is amazing. It lasts a lifetime, it gets better the more you use it (and how true that is of so many magical tools), and it leaches trace amounts of iron into the food you cook, which is perfect for a vegetarian. Plus… it just *looks* magical. 🙂

With the arrival of this cookware, I’ve cleaned out some of the superfluous, junky cookware from my kitchen. I moved my Brighid’s Cross to hang over the food-prep area, and I’ve started making an effort to “green” my kitchen by refilling old plastic and glass jars with spices and beans and, well, everything, rather than just replacing them.

I’ve also made huge strides on my garden:

I’m so proud of all those plants.

Up next will be improvements to my sewing/jewelry-making/general crafting corner. I’m not brave enough to post a before photo… it’s just appalling.

So, since I do lack a project right now and I am doing some pre-wedding nesting, I’m going to do a few more posts here in the next two weeks about exactly how I’m working household magic. I’d like to write about the following (maybe if I commit to them here, I’ll actually follow through):

• some definitions and descriptions of what I actually mean by “household magic”
• some reviews of the books I’ve read
• creating mini-altars, and the ethics of doing so when you live with a non-pagan
• the results of my work — how I feel spiritually, after I’ve incorporated magic into my daily life

To wrap up, I have a big question for you, dear reader: What other wonderful (or just entertaining) books do you know about incorporating the magical into the mundane, about magical housekeeping, and about daily magic? Feed my addiction: I need more to read!

*I’d really rather not try to define what magic is to me in this post — that’s one of those big questions to which I can’t yet articulate an answer. But in this context, magic, to me, means the manifestation of my spirituality and belief through intentional workings, whether those workings are cooking, cleaning, or just living in a space made sacred through that intent.