Spirits of Hearth and Home

Houses have spirits. If your faith is something you live full time then recognising spirit within your home is part of that. As discussed with regards to other places, look for the ways in which nature manifests in and around your home – you may have all kinds of wildlife in the garden, the attic, and even inside the house (spiders etc).

Wherever your house is, the odds are you have land beneath it, and that land was once wild. Those land spirits may still be felt, although they may not be an immediately obvious influence. Honour them by leaving some wild space in your garden, by encouraging birds and by meditating on what occupied the land before your house.

As with ritual spaces, houses often come with ancestors of place – those who occupied a house before us leave their own echoes and ghosts. As do builders and designers, and anyone else who has lived on the land back through time. You might want to research your house a little and learn its history as a way of honouring and better understanding these spirits.

Then there are the entities that come to dwell in houses. I’ve heard them called brownies, in my house they are pookas, for some they are poltergeist. Beings who are not ghosts, nor part of the land, but very much belong to and in the house. Invisibles who startle animal companions, move car keys, randomly creak floorboards in the middle of the night and otherwise make their presence felt.

I won’t try and claim to understand them, but I’ve been living with them for years and currently my little crowd of pookas spend a lot of time being extra cats. I’ve felt them on the bed at night and seen them out of the corner of my eye. Modern houses seem less likely to have such inhabitants. They turn up over time, moving into empty bedrooms, making off with small items. They can be a blessing or a curse, and that depends a lot on how you treat them.

Being afraid of the thing under the bed turns it into a fearful thing. Children are unhelpfully adept at this, but an adult alone in a house at night, remembering too many horror films can feed fear to a spirit in just the same way. If a space is treated carelessly, the pookas will very likely do the same, thriving on the chaos, and playing as they please, throwing books about late at night and terrorising the cat. An overly tidy, sterile house tends to discourage them. They inhabit the dusty corners, and the muddles. Very tidy houses offer them no spaces.

They like attention – candles and incense lit for them, flowers brought in, little offerings of food and cake. They like to be talked to (or at least mine do.) If something goes missing, I ask the pookas if they can help me find it. When high winds are tearing tiles off roofs, or the ice is threatening to freeze water pipes, I talk to the pookas then, too. They might be playful and capricious, but it’s their home too, and they’ve not let it come to any significant harm so far.

Taking your home seriously as a spiritual place where other entities may be present does radically change how you relate to it, and how it feels to live there. Every space becomes an altar, every act of care for the house an offering. Listening to the house and finding out what it needs is an interesting activity. Rooms know if they aren’t laid out right. Energy flows, or does not, depending on how we shape our spaces, and a home that is cared for on more than a material level is a far better place to live.