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ou can view this as a recipe book and use it as such, but I hope this book will inspire you to walk the path of the Hearth Witch, which is so much more. While you may begin to learn how to work with natural resources from books like this one, the true teaching only comes when you start listening to the land and its plants and animals. When the sacred within you recognises the sacred that surrounds you everywhere, a deeper spiritual reality opens up in which all space becomes sacred space, all time becomes sacred time, and all acts become sacred acts. This is the true path of the Hearth Witch. Walk it in beauty.
Anna Franklin O
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nna Franklin is a third-degree witch and high priestess of the Hearth of Arianrhod, and she has been a practicing Pagan for more than forty years. She is the author of twenty-eight books and the creator of the Sacred Circle Tarot, Fairy Ring Oracle, and the Pagan Ways Tarot (Schiffer, 2015). Her books have been translated into nine languages. Anna has contributed hundreds of articles to Pagan magazines and has appeared on radio and TV. She lives and works in a village in the English Midlands, where she grows her own herbs, fruit, and vegetables, and generally lives the Pagan life. Visit her online at www.AnnaFranklin.co.uk.
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The Hearth Witch’s Compendium: Magical and Natural Living for Every Day © 2017 by Anna Franklin. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Llewellyn Publications except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
first edition First Printing, 2017 Book design by Rebecca Zins Cover design by Ellen Lawson Interior floral background © Dover Publications Interior floral woodcut © 1167 Decorative Cuts (New York: Dover Publications, 2007) Llewellyn is a registered trademark of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd. Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data Names: Franklin, Anna, author. Title: The hearth witch’s compendium : magical and natural living for every day / Anna Franklin. Description: Woodbury : Llewellyn Worldwide, Ltd, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016045983 (print) | LCCN 2016052034 (ebook) | ISBN 9780738750460 (alk. paper) | ISBN 9780738751900 () Subjects: LCSH: Witchcraft. | Herbs—Miscellanea. | Plants—Miscellanea. | Formulas, recipes, etc. Classification: LCC BF1566 .F694 2017 (print) | LCC BF1566 (ebook) | DDC 133.4/3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016045983 Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd. does not participate in, endorse, or have any authority or responsibility concerning private business transactions between our authors and the public. All mail addressed to the author is forwarded but the publisher cannot, unless specifically instructed by the author, give out an address or phone number. Any Internet references contained in this work are current at publication time, but the publisher cannot guarantee that a specific location will continue to be maintained. Please refer to the publisher’s website for links to authors’ websites and other sources. Llewellyn Publications A Division of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd. 2143 Wooddale Drive Woodbury MN 55125-2989 www.llewellyn.com Printed in the United States of America
contents
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chapter 1
Hearth Witchery 1 chapter 2
The Witch’s Kitchen 7 Food Ethics 8 Ritual Food 8 Food for the Sabbats 12 Imbolc 13 Ostara 21 Beltane 31 Midsummer 35 Lughnasa 40 Autumn Equinox 46 Samhain 52 Yule 59
chapter 3
Wine, Cider & Beer 67 Making Wine 68
Wine from Fruit 71 Wine from Flowers 78 Wine from Vegetables 86 Herb and Leaf Wines 89 Sparkling Wine 95 Mead 98 Ciders and Perries 104 Brewing Beer and Ale 106 Making Liqueurs 112 Cider Vinegar 118 chapter 4
Preserving 1 19
Equipment Needed 120 Jams 122 Jellies 126 Marmalades 129 Curds 130 Fruit Cheeses 132 Fruit Butters 134 Fruit Syrups 136
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Pickling 138 Chutneys 142 Ketchups and Sauces 146 Drying 149 Fruit Leathers 151 Bottling 152 Bottled Fruits in Alcohol 154 Salting 155 Dry Sugar Preserving 156 Conserves 157 Freezing 158 Fruit and Herb Vinegars 159 Nonalcoholic Cordials 160 chapter 5
The Witch’s Home 163 Natural Alternatives 165 Polishes 167 Bathroom Products 169 Kitchen Products 171 Windows 173 Laundry Products 174 Carpets and Floors 176 Air Fresheners and Deodorisers 177
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chapter 6
Personal Care 181 Equipment Needed 182 Safety First 182 Bath Salts 183 Bath Bombs 186 Bath Tea Bags 188 Milk Baths 190 Bubble Baths 192 Bath Oils 193 Shower Bags 195 Shower Wash 196 Soaps 197 Lotion Bars 200 Bath Powders 201 Natural Shampoos 202 Dry Shampoos 205 Hair Rinses 206 Colouring Rinses 208 Conditioners 210 Dental Care 212 Foot Care 214 Hand Care 215 Body Scrub 217 Aftershave 218
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A Witch’s Guide to Natural Beauty 2 19 Safety First 220
Basic Hygiene 220 Equipment Needed 221 Herbs for Beauty 221 Facial Scrubs 225 Facial Steams 226 Face Masks 227 Clay Masks 231 Facial Cleansers 233 Skin Toners 237 Moisturisers 239 Eye Treatments 244 Neck Treatments 245 Lip Salves 246 chapter 8
The Witch’s Garden 247 What to Grow 248
An Elemental Garden 252 Starting Out 256 Moon Gardening 257 Indoor Gardening 259 Foraging 260
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chapter 9
Herbs for Healing 261 Simples 263
Meeting the Plants 263 Safety First 264 Using Your Plant 264 Internal Remedies 265 External Remedies 268 chapter 10
Home Remedies 271 Anxiety 272
Arthritis and Rheumatism 274 Athlete’s Foot 280 Bloating 282 Blocked Sinuses 283 Boils 284 Bruises 285 Burns 286 Cold Sores 287 Colds and Flu 288 Constipation 291 Corns 292 Coughs 293
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Earache 297 Eczema 298 Gout 300 Haemorrhoids 302 Headaches 303 Indigestion 306 Insect Bites 307 Insomnia 308 Menopause 310 Muscle Cramps 311 Nausea 312 Poor Circulation 313 Sore Eyes 314 Sprains 315 Varicose Veins 316 chapter 11
Essential Oils 317
Is It Really an Essential Oil? 319 Safety First 320 How to Use the Oils 321 Carrier Oils 323 A–Z of Essential Oils 324 Essential Oils By Symptom 351 Magical Oils 358
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chapter 12
Magical Herbalism 373 Gathering Ritual Herbs 374 Identifying Herbs 375 On Correspondences 375 The Elements 378 The Magical Virtues of Plants 379 Using Herbs for Magic 404 Herbal Talismans 405 Potions 409 Herbal Inks 414 Ritual Fumigation 416 chapter 13
Incense 417
Types of Incense 419 The Ingredients 419 Tools Needed 421 Blending Loose Incense 422 Charging the Incense 422 Burning Incenses 422 Times for Blending 423 Collecting Ingredients for Incense 424 Incense Recipes 426
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chapter 14
Vegetable Dyes 443 Why Use Natural Dyes? 444 Equipment Needed 444 Safety First 445 Obtaining the Plants 445 Stage 1: Prepare the Fabric 446 Stage 2: Mordant the Fabric 446 Stage 3: Dye the Fabric 449 Dye Plants to Use 449
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appendix 1
Colour Correspondences 457 appendix 2
Planetary Influences 459 appendix 3
Magical Herbal Correspondences 461 Life Events 462
Moon Phases 463 Sabbats 464
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Elements 466 Planets 468 Rituals 471 Zodiac 473 appendix 4
Weights & Measures 477 Volume (Liquid Measures) 478
Weights (Rough Equivalents) 479 Ingredient Weights (Rough Equivalents) 480 Temperatures 481 Oven Temperatures 482 appendix 5
Your Recipes 483 select bibliography 489 index 493
Recipe Index 507
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he garden is full of roses this week. They flop over the fences and scramble up the trellis, their soft, sensual blooms filling the air with a voluptuous perfume. It is easy to understand why they are sacred to so many gods and goddesses of love—Isis, Aphrodite, Venus, Eros, Cupid, Inanna, and Ishtar, to name just a few. I bless the plants and gather armfuls of flowers. I take them into the house and lay them on the kitchen table and begin to separate the red flowers from the white. I’m reminded that in one Greek tale, when the goddess Aphrodite first arose from the ocean and stepped onto the shore, the sparkling sea foam fell from her body in the form of pale white roses and took root. Later, as she pursued the beautiful youth Adonis, she caught herself on a thorn and her blood dyed the roses crimson red, symbolising innocence turned to desire and maidenhood
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turned to womanhood.1 For magical purposes, while my white roses stand for purity, perfection, innocence, virginity, and the moon, the red roses represent earthly passion and fertility. Wound together, they signify the union of opposites—symbolism we use at Beltane to celebrate the sacred marriage of the God and Goddess, an act which reconciles male and female, summer and winter, life and death, and flesh and spirit, and brings about all creation, driven by the most fundamental and powerful force in the universe: love. However, Midsummer is tomorrow, and roses play a part in our solstice ritual since, like other flowers with rayed petals, they are an emblem of the sun. Like the sun, which dies each night and is reborn each day at sunrise, the rose is an emblem of renewal, resurrection, and eternal life, which is why the Celts, Egyptians, and Romans used them as funeral offerings. 2 3 4 I set aside some to make offerings for dead friends later, and others to make chaplets for Midsummer. I’m still left with an abundance of blossoms. I take down two clean glass jars from my cupboard and pack both of them with the scented petals I carefully pull from the stems. One jar I top up with white vinegar and set it on the sunny kitchen windowsill. I will leave it there for two weeks before straining the liquid into a clean jar. My resulting rose vinegar can be used as a delicate salad dressing, an antiseptic wash for wiping down my kitchen surfaces, or be dabbed onto my forehead to relieve headaches. The second jar of rose petals I fill up with one part distilled water to three parts vodka. I label it and put it in a cool, dark place in my pantry, where it will stay for three weeks. When it is ready, I will strain the liquid into a clean jar—and lo and behold, I will have made my own rose hydrosol. I will use it as a skin toner just as it is, but I could chill it to make a compress for puffy eyes or use it as a final conditioning rinse for my hair. Next month I will incorporate some into skin lotions and creams. The gorgeous fresh petals I have left could be baked into cakes and cookies, made into a delicate jam or a wine for next year’s Midsummer solstice, or crystallised for cake decorations. Tonight I will drop some petals into my bath to make a relaxing soak after a hard day in the garden, and before I go to bed I will put a handful into the teapot and infuse them
1 Jennifer Peace Rhind, Fragrance & Wellbeing: Plant Aromatics and Their Influence on the Psyche (London: Singing Dragon, 2013). 2 Miranda Green, Gods of the Celts (Stroud: Sutton Publishing Ltd, 1986). 3 Roger Phillips and Martyn Rix, The Ultimate Guide to Roses (London: Macmillan, 2004). 4 Laurie Brink and Deborah Green, Commemorating the Dead: Texts and Artifacts in Context; Studies of Roman, Jewish, and Christian Burials (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008).
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in boiling water to make a subtle, fragrant tea that is mildly sedative and good for tension headaches. I spread out more petals on a tray and put them to dry in the airing cupboard. These dried petals are not only good for rose tea later in the year and the usual potpourri, but can be employed in magical talismans, charm bags, and incense—red for love; yellow for Midsummer, renewal, and the sun; and white for moon rituals. So many virtues in just one plant, and I’ve only scratched the surface of what the rose has to offer. Each day Mother Nature has a different gift for me. I’ve worked in this way for decades now. My kitchen is hung with drying plants, and my pantry contains jars of dried herbs to use for magic and healing tinctures and salves, as well as for brewing wines and making jars of jam. I am a hearth witch. Though there are many paths to magic, this is the term I invented some years ago to describe my own.5 I consider my house to be a sacred place, a temple of the gods, where I live, work, and worship. As I make a fire in the hearth or light a candle, I honour the living goddess of the hearth fire (known as Brighid in Ireland, Hestia in Greece, and Vesta in Rome) and her presence in my home. On the shelves beside my hearth is a shrine to my household gods, and as I clean and tidy I think of it as honouring them. With intent, a physical cleansing can become a psychic cleansing, sweeping away negative energies. I as prepare food, I try to do it with intent—to make my body healthy, to thank Mother Earth for her bounty, and to share it with love. Each ingredient is honoured for its individual life force and its inherent physical and spiritual properties. All the vegetable peelings and scraps go on to the compost heap, which will nourish my garden plants, and I think that recycling and composting are much more powerful ways of honouring Mother Earth than muttering a few words in a ritual now and again; the hearth witch not only believes that the earth is sacred, she treats it as such. My garden teaches me more about the magic of nature than any book, as I try to understand how each plant grows and what it needs, and how to work with it so that it will give me food; ingredients for wine, dyes, and magical potions; or help me with my healing work. Season by season I collect its wealth, along with the wild bounty of the fields and hedgerows around my village. In this way, the hearth witch sees the sacred within the physical, the magical in the mundane, and uses this knowledge to incorporate spiritual practice into everyday life. I suspect that most of us feel we should make a lot more time in our lives for spiritual practice, 5 Anna Franklin, Hearth Witch (Earl Shilton: Lear Books, 2004).
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chiding ourselves that we really must put aside that thirty minutes for daily meditation or that evening for ritual, then struggling to fit it in and being left with feelings of guilt and failure. This approach is a reflection of a culture that sees the spiritual and physical as separate. Traditional Pagan societies have always recognised that the spiritual and the physical are indivisible and that one is a reflection of the other. When we bring our attention and intent into cooking a meal, lighting a candle, or just being aware of our feet meeting the earth as we walk, it becomes a spiritual practice and opens up a deeper reality, the great matrix of Nature connected in a unified, sacred whole. We recognise that the land beneath our feet is not merely dirt but a fountain of energy that sustains animals, plants, and people.6 When this realisation dawns, all space becomes sacred space, all time becomes sacred time, and all acts become sacred acts. Paganism is not a man-made religion created by a human prophet or guru but one that continually evolves out of a spiritual relationship with the natural world. As well as providing shelter, food, medicine, and all that is necessary for life, Mother Earth is the basis of our spiritual existence.7 Paganism’s many gods and goddesses represent the diversity of the natural world with indwelling divinity present in all things—from a blade of grass to a stream, from a mountain to a galaxy. When we open our souls to nature, we touch our gods; but when we turn our backs on it, we feel a sense of alienation, of spiritual and emotional loss, because we are cut off from our divine source. In bygone ages, of course, most of us lived much closer to nature than we do now. Once every woman had to be something of an herbalist and healer, responsible for her household’s health, since professional medical help was either unavailable or too expensive (and possibly dangerous to boot). Every home kept some drying herbs and flowers to make herbal infusions, powders, oils, and poultices; brewed wine and ale; preserved fruit; made jams and jellies, pickles and chutneys; and many also made inks, dyes, soaps, and household cleaners. A girl would be initiated into the secrets of these family formulas by her mother, who would also pass along her knowledge of folklore, stories, healing potions, minor surgery, gardening, brewing and wine making, spinning, weaving, dyeing, childcare, home management, animal husbandry, beekeeping, fortunetelling, and cookery know-how. And then there were those in the community who knew a little bit more: the village wise woman or cunning man. When I joined my first coven, our high priestess, Julia, told us stories of the herb wives of the past, who cared for the bodies and spirits of those around 6 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). 7 Larissa Behrendt, “Aboriginal Urban Identity: Preserving the Spirit, Protecting the Traditional in Non-Traditional Settings,” Australian Feminist Law Journal 4, no. 1 (1995): 55–61.
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them, telling their fortunes, treating their bodily ailments with herbs, dowsing their lost property, and physicking their farm animals. She held them up to us as examples of powerful, magical women in an age when women otherwise had little influence. They were the midwives who brought new life into the world, she said, and who laid out the dead at the end of life. Though such stories have often been wildly romanticised, folklore records and accounts do show that virtually every village seems to have had a wise woman or a cunning man of some sort. These village shamans had different names in different places, including handywomen, blessers, witches, conjurers, herb wives, wild herb men, snake doctors, fairy doctors, and currens.8 In some parts of England they had the title Old Mother Redcap, since the red cap was a badge of office amongst wise women. There was often some oddity of dress among wise women and cunning men, such as odd socks or a garment worn inside out.9 These practitioners didn’t use athames and magic swords but everyday objects— stones, keys, shears, sieves, pitchforks, brooms, divining rods, wax, bottles, paper, and anything that came readily to hand from the kitchen or farm. It wasn’t only the poor that resorted to their services either. When the then-Prince of Wales bought Sandringham in 1863, he expelled “several wise women” who lived in a group of cottages there, which he had torn down and replaced by modern ones for his servants. Only one old wise woman was allowed to remain at Flitcham, for it was said that the prince’s agent dared not remove her. She was endowed with a vast knowledge of herbal cures and was known to wander miles in search of a certain herb needed for a specific cure. When the prince was taken ill, he was advised to use the herbal remedies of the old wise woman, who made him drink mandrake wine for his cure.10 11 Guided by some of my early teachers in the Craft, I began to study the ancient wisdom of the grandmothers, the wise women, once passed down from mother to daughter and crone to apprentice, and then improved by a lifetime of study and the daily observation of the patterns of nature. I certainly wasn’t brought up in this way or taught any of those things as a child, and as an ardent feminist, for years I refused to do anything traditionally defined as “women’s work.” However, I gradually realised that such expertise had formed the pattern of women’s lives for thousands of years and that women had developed highly
8 Nigel Pennick, Secrets of East Anglian Magic (Milverton: Capall Bann, 2004). 9 Ibid. 10 C. F. Tebbutt, Huntingdonshire Folklore (St. Ives, Huntingdon: The Friends of the Norris Museum, 1984). 11 Pennick.
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skilful methods in all these areas, even though no contemporary historian wrote about them or accorded women due status for their invaluable work. Indeed, any woman practicing fortunetelling, midwifery, or herbalism could be executed as a witch, while male doctors, astrologers, and alchemists were left unscathed. Following the fifteenth-century Council of Trent, the church specifically forbade women from having anything to do with medicine,12 a profession they were not to be readmitted to until the late nineteenth century. While male university-trained doctors were sanctioned by the church, if any woman stood before a tribunal accused of practicing medicine or healing it was automatically assumed that she must have achieved any cure by witchcraft, and she was put to death.13 According to the infamous Malleus Maleficarum (“Hammer of the Witches”), the inquisitor’s handbook, “If a woman dare to cure without having studied than she is a witch and must die.” Male doctors were trusted implicitly by the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum: “Although some of their remedies seem to be vain and superstitious cantrips and charms…everybody must be trusted in his profession.” 14 Women’s knowledge has been derided and ignored for most of our history, and this is just as true today in Western culture, in which knowledge is “owned” by experts (mainly men) and can only be passed on through state-approved academic institutions, and where those seeking to follow traditional or alternative paths—such as herbalism—are dismissed as uneducated, naïve, or even dangerous. But this is our knowledge, our heritage—as women and as witches, both male and female. Discovering it and practicing my Craft has been a marvellous adventure for me, and it never ceases to fill me with wonder and awe at the power of Mother Nature. It makes me aware of the magic that flows throughout the world in every uncurling oak leaf in spring, every blushing rose petal, every humming summer bee, every rutting stag, and every misty shore.15 This is the reward of the path of the hearth witch, and this is what I want to share with you in this book.
R 12 Brian P. Levack (editor), New Perspectives on Witchcraft, Magic and Demonology: Witchcraft, Healing and Popular Diseases, Volume 5 (Routledge, 2002). 13 Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, trans. Montague Summers, Malleus Maleficarum (London: Bracken Books, 1996; first edition 1486). 14 Ibid. 15 Anna Franklin, Pagan Ways Tarot (Atglen: Schiffer Publishing Ltd, 2015).
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