Hearth and Home Witchcraft: Rituals and Recipes to Nourish Home and Spirit

Feeling comfortable in your own home is part of good self-care, and as an inveterate home body, I’m always up for a book about better house-keeping—especially if it has a lot of enticing recipes. This one does, along with plenty of pagan, goddess and herbal lore, and tips for invocations and spells.

Author Jennie Blonde calls herself the “comfy cozy witch.” She has a podcast by that name, and she says she wants her readers to “feel as if they’re chatting with a witchy friend at the kitchen table over a cup of hot tea.” She proposes that “witchcraft in and of itself is comforting,” and yet, she acknowledges that there are what she calls the “not-so-comfortable parts as well,” such as shadow work and learning to let things go. She finds that in recent years, there has been a focus on the aesthetics, or what witches supposedly look like, in terms of make-up and clothing. She says that what she wants to do with comfy, cozy witchery is to “make the craft accessible.”

This she does. Through her focus on home life, she introduces a lot of information about holy days and how to observe them, deities and how to honor them, herbs, stones, altars, gardening, and meditation.  She says that the first step in cozy, comfy witchcraft is to see the home as a sacred space, a place for “bringing together the natural world and the mundane to create magic in a comforting, calming way.” For many people, it may be that enhancing comfort at home is a key to grounding and relaxing enough to be able to go deeper into spiritual practice. As in: Be here, now.  

Bringing together mundane activities and a reverence for nature is no small feat given how busy everyone is these days. What Jennie Blonde is pointing to is how to integrate awareness of the divine into as much of one’s precious time as possible. One example from her book that I am taking to heart is to say a protection prayer over my dogs when I leash them up for walks. This means slowing down and connecting with them rather than just rushing them out the door.

I find a lot of value in this book.  It is full of reminders about small, good, daily rituals like stirring one’s morning coffee while stating intentions for the day.

I do have a quibble, though, and it’s this: Given the subtitle that this is a book about how to nourish home and spirit, I would have loved it if the author had delved into witchcraft’s role with some of the edgy, uncomfortable aspects of home life.

For example, preventative health care with herbs and nutrition is a given, but home is also where people stay—and are even forced to stay-- when they are sick and bedridden. Home is where most people, when asked, say they want to be when they die, and many people do, often with elaborate hospice set-ups and home visits from religious chaplains. Witchcraft has a potentially big role to play for people who are dying at home. The other area that comes to mind is that for many children and adults, home has been a decidedly unsafe place. It’s where family conflict and abuse happen. Many adults live alone, and not by choice. The mere fact of chronic loneliness makes getting comfortable at home not that easy.
These are whole other subjects, not the topic of this book. But given the author’s focus on protection and cultivating good vibes at home, it needs to be said that this is not always possible.

For those who do have the wherewithal to really get comfy, this book has a lot of great ideas for enhancing one’s feelings of peace and quiet at home.

~review by: Sara R. Diamond

Author:  Jennie Blonde
Weiser Books, 2022
211 pp., $18.95