The House Witch
“It can be hard to shake the mindset drilled into North American culture by the technological improvements in the mid-to-late twentieth century. Advertising dating from the 1950s and 1960s repeatedly targeted wives and mothers as people who deserved to spend more time out of the kitchen to live a ‘real’ life. Inventions and prepackaged foods to shorten time spent in the kitchen and reduce energy devoted to kitchen- and domestic-related activity have somehow led us to believe that the kitchen is a place where we ought not to be.
In a way, this is sad. It suggests that the kitchen is a place to avoid, a place where we ought to spend the least amount of time possible. We have come to regard food preparation and domestic activity as things that have to be done before we do the other rewarding things in life. As a friend said to me the other day, ‘We have to understand that running a household is not only work, it’s valid work. It’s not something that gets squeezed in after six o’clock. It’s not taking away from other things if we do it between nine and five.’ And she’s right. The feminist revolution of the latter half of the twentieth century succeeded in opening the workplace to women, but unfortunately, in so doing it suggested that domestic management was somehow inferior to work done elsewhere. When establishing a home-based spirituality, it’s important to examine your feelings about the kitchen and the work done there. Even if you chose another room or area to be your symbolic hearth, the function of the kitchen doesn’t change, and so much of domestic activity is based there that your feelings about it will certainly influence home-based spiritual work.”
“Older kitchens were larger than the ones we use today, as they encompassed a wide variety of pursuits. Apart from cooking, activities such as eating, washing laundry, taking baths, candle-making, spinning and weaving, sewing, food preserving in all forms, nursing the sick, childcare, lessons, and countless other pursuits all took place in the kitchen of the average home.”
-The House Witch, by Arin Murphy-Hiscock
Even the complete and total pagans are starting to see that we have lost something by leaving our homes. If they know that and see that, then we as believers should be on the front line to reclaim our homemaking and our hearths.
I tend to be attracted to earthy things like gardens, herbs, animals, fireplaces, like very earthy domestic things. I enjoy the Old West and Viking Myths which make me yearn for land, cottages, open fires, potbelly stoves, and the less technological forms of HearthKeeping. I like the image of chickens, split wood, cast iron pans. I like forests and wild places. A homesteader lives deep inside me. Sometimes these aesthetics brush me up against certain forms of paganism. Not in a bad way. I’m not practicing magic or even tempted to go down those paths. I do enjoy long dresses, bottles of herbs, black cauldrons, and myths and magic and fairy tales. I do like natural healing and things of the earth. But I seek to see all of that in light of the gospel and through Christian-colored glasses. I don’t want to lose Christ for some misplaced worship of something He created. I want to embrace and enjoy all that He created including herbs tied up in bundles burning, and skulls, and crows, and plants, and hearths.
One of the things I’ve noticed in brushing up against this witchy culture is their willingness to point women back home. We’ve seen a resurgence in interest in the occult as people realize they’re spiritual, and women realize they want to grow and nurture things. Unfortunately, because man is sinful, instead of coming home to Christ, they are turning to self-salvation and self-worship found in the occult. They know they’re spiritual, but they want to live by sight instead of faith, so witchcraft. Unfortunately, instead of standing in the front line of supporting the hearth, Christianity is tripping over itself to join hands with the feminists and get women out of the home. Thus, women who realize they’re unfulfilled working outside the home, women who want to come home, don’t find home in Christianity, they find it in the occult. The occult reminds them of the magic of cooking, of the hearth, of the cauldron, of healing, of being a woman, of being a creature who is both fully human but not at all a man. Something different, unique, and special. We are women. We should be embracing the beauty of gardens both wild and tame, of children running and children reading, of stories and photos and people, of welcome and warmth. The occult is teaching women that they can regain what they’ve lost, while Christians are scrambling to put women in the worship service, in leadership, and out of their homes. Is it any wonder women are becoming witches? Witches are telling the truth on some level, and they are telling women they can be what they were made to be: homemakers.
And so I brush up against witchcraft and find this amazing observation about the home. About how little we value the work done in the home. This valuing starts with us. We women, we Christian women, need to believe that the home is valuable and that what we do in it is valuable. Magical not in a way that pushes everyone else out, or denies our sisters who have jobs outside the home, or that says only this is magic, for there is much magic in this world, but that says homemaking is viable valuable magic. That says it isn’t a waste to invest ourselves, groom ourselves, train ourselves in this work. We can’t let the witches be the only ones who want to throw up their hands and say that the job that promised fulfillment isn’t fulfilling, and that loving a man and growing things and children and homes is fulfilling. We need to be able to say with full confidence that this is the hardest job and the biggest job and the roomiest job and the most comfortable job we’ve done. We can’t let jokes and the world and the lies in our hearts tell us this isn’t worth doing. We can’t let the world tell us that we can only find fulfillment in a 9-5 job. That just isn’t true. (In fact, we can’t truly find fulfillment in our homemaking. It only comes from Christ. He is our identity, and then from there, we go to work in this fallen, temporary world. But there is some built-in connection between being a woman and tending a hearth, that is a song deep in our souls, a built-in song.)
RC Sproul always said that all truth is God’s truth. No matter who said it or why, if it is true then it is from God. The witches are calling women home to their hearths, back to the cauldrons, ready to form places of safety, comfort, beauty, creativity, and hospitality. This, these things are ours as believers, daughters, and creatures. They aren’t pagan truth, but it is the pagans who are preaching it. They’re the ones lifting the burden the world puts on women and saying it’s okay, go home, raise your children, love your husband, cook your meals, grow your herbs, tend your hearths. They’re saying that and we’re not. We’re trying to be just like the world while this brave band of sisters is saying they’re done. We should be ashamed. And we should use this point of connection to share the gospel.
These are lost pagans. They want to worship the creation instead of the Creator. They want to live by sight instead of faith. They want to be special and separate from the world by their unique beliefs: ‘we understand something you don’t.’ They are broken, lost, believing a lie of the evil one, that they don’t need salvation, they aren’t sinners, and this world is not temporary but eternal. And yet they’re bravely calling women home. They’re doing it naturally. From the perspective of Natural Revelation. The truth we can see and discern from the world around us. And look, they see women in the kitchen, tending their hearths.
I’m starting to see more and more and more of this. I saw it back when I had my own business and was a Mary Kay Consultant on the side. They’d had a resurgence of new consultants because women wanted to be home with their kids. They didn’t want to be away from their homes so much. They weren’t as fulfilled as the world promised them. I’ve seen young women on YouTube talking about how they were told tending their homes was boring, but that’s not what they’re finding and they’re feeling lied to and robbed. They’re finding out that they can’t do it all. Why else would we see this growing movement of simplicity, minimalist, and homesteading if people weren’t realizing that value isn’t only based on income? There is a quiet song that is slowly growing from both pagan and Christian, worldly and believing women who are returning to their homes. The song is slowly getting louder.
This is not to say we should go join Wicca or a coven. We need to stay firmly in our trench of the Church. This is an observation. Something I find interesting and that makes me think. It also girds my courage to tell other women when they ask what I do, to say “I’m a homemaker.” I’m not as alone in loving this job, this vocation, as the world would like me to believe. That is what I’m trying to say. The feminist would have us feel isolated and alone, aberrant, fearful. They don’t want women going home. They don’t want to turn around and admit that there is something that has been lost along this path to freedom. They don’t want to see the temporary, worthwhile, glory of home. And they don’t want women going back to their hearths. They think this makes us weak and stupid. But whether they like it or not, witches, pagans, millennialist, modern, and post-modern women are starting to think that the hearth is not as boring as they were told, and I find that to be an encouraging thought.
