Finding and Blessing Your Home

 

by Bronwynn Forrest Torgerson

Spring is in the air, and the nesting urge has begun. Here is a light-hearted and airy house-finding and house-blessing ritual for people who know in their bones that it’s time to seek out a home of their own. You’ve long outgrown your parents’ nest and passed the nomadic apartment dweller phase. The new you longs for stability and a place to call home. You want your name on a mailbox, invitations to homeowners’ association meetings. You covet a mantel on which to display Grandma Madison’s china or Grandpa Rossman’s musket. You yearn for trees you can get to know over many seasons and neighbors you can count on, and you have your resources all in a row. This springtime ritual can help sharpen the focus and bring your dream house into the land of manifest reality.

Do your mundane homework first. Check the listings and property values, and listen up for real estate agents that are real wizards at cinching a deal and taking your priorities to heart. Then enter the magickal realms…

House-Hunting Ritual

For the house-hunting ritual, you will need:

• A bird’s nest (Warning: shakest thou not the nests from the trees, but go ye into craft stores instead, where such things await in great bounty!)
• A hollowed-out and dried egg that you can write on with a fine-point marking pen
• A gold candle
• A house representation
• A piece of parchment paper
• A small fire laid of straw and twigs

Make a simple altar outdoors, with those things important to your tradition. For your house representation, many possibilities exist. Do you own a Monopoly game? Pluck a green plastic house from the box. Have a Yule decoration shaped like a gingerbread house? That will do fine. You can also simply draw a house outline on the parchment paper, leaving room for your list of specs. Don’t worry if it’s not perfect. Love and the universe will make it so. On the egg, write “My new home.” You can add your name, date and runes or other magickal sigils if you want.

Now comes your shopping list. Be as specific as you can, while keeping a healthy amount of realism in play. Where should the house be, in conjunction to work, school, culture, family, etc? Envision your ideal floor plan, describing it in words. Is there a yard? A garden space? Is the place environmentally friendly? How big is the garage? What would you like to be within strolling distance of? For price range, you might want to give two figures — the first being what you’d prefer to pay, and the second being the most you can go.

When you are done, roll up your parchment paper so that it’s a thin enough scroll to be inserted through the open ends of the hollowed-out egg. Where else would a dream house hatch? Cast the circle in your way, lastly lighting the gold candle and invoke your patron deity, or whomever you feel most likely to help you in this rite. You may wish to call upon the Goddess in her guise as bird goddess, ancient mother of us all, from whom the egg of the world was laid. Other hearthfire keepers might include Juno, Vesta, Brigit or Hestia. Nordic types may turn to Frigga as queen mother of Asgard, or even to good friend Thor, said to gladly bless a new home and to party with the best. A suggested invocation might be:

By the spark within Your breast,
Feel my longing for my nest.
Grant that I, contented, dwell
By sacred words and ancient spell.
So mote it be!

Holding the egg cupped in your hands, and speak aloud your dearest wishes and desires for your home, including the timeframe in which you hope to find it. Kiss the egg gently and lay it in the nest, thanking Deity for making it hatch with its otherworldly, all-knowing magick. Lay the nest atop the twigs and straw you will use to kindle the fire, then light the spark. As the nest, egg, and your vision burn, know that your mental blueprints are rising to the heavens where your Hallowed House Hunter is seeing them clearly and already beginning to discern where your perfect home might be.

Close the circle in your way, but allow the gold candle to burn out. If that is not possible all in one night, pinch it out and relight it for the next several nights until the candle is gone.

Get yourself a cardboard box and pack some unneeded things away. This signals the universe that you are becoming mobile and can take occupancy of your new home as soon as the closing documents are signed.

House-Blessing Ritual

Huzzah! The Old Ones and your banker have coming shining through! You dance a wild jig, sign a million papers and are petrified and exhilarated. You are now a homeowner! For this house-blessing ritual, you will need:

• A white taper candle
• Blessing oil (your choice of scent)
• Sage or incense
• A crystal dish or clear bowl
• Bells

The first New Moon after you have keys in hand and have unpacked enough things to live sanely from day to day, invite friends over to bless your new home. Ask each to bring you a coin from the happiest place they have visited recently — so that your home might be blessed with happiness and prosperity — and a bell to ring for mirth and to summon the fey folk forth.

Light the candle, and trace an invoking pentagram at every entrance, asking that truth, benevolence and harmony enter in. You may wish to add an extra wish for great sex, creativity, personal growth and new opportunities, or other heart’s desires. Hand your favorite blessing oil to a special friend, and have him or her bless each reflective surface by drawing the same invoking pentagram in oil and expressing the same wish. Burn some sage or your favorite magickal incense, inviting all unseen creatures of goodly heart and helpful hands to come and dwell herein.

After this is accomplished, guests may deposit their coins one by one into the dish, telling of the happy place in which the coin made its way into their pockets. Never spend these coins, but rather look upon this hoard as treasure of the heart and a certain guarantee that you will never be destitute.

Now those guests who have bells should go merrily ringing and dancing through the place, proclaiming lighthearted wishes for you as they do so: “I wish for your cat to love it here! I wish you incredible sexual romps! May nothing you cook in this kitchen ever burn! May there always be wine in your fridge!” Let unbounded imagination bring forth creative, graphic, heartfelt and humorous wishes. Well-wishers may shout “huzzah!” or “so mote it be!”

Now it is time to sing to the house itself, blessing it with your hopes and praise. What better tune than the 1980s classic rock tune, “Our House,” by Graham Nash? Here are some magickally-modified lyrics, penned by yours truly, to serenade your new home:

Oh my/your house is a very, very, very fine house!
With friends in every chair
And love beyond compare.
Yes my/your house is a very, very, very fine house!

Oh my/your house is a very, very, very fine house!
Prosperity abounds
And hearty laughter sounds.
Oh my/your house is a very, very, very fine house!

Oh my/your house is a very, very, very fine house!
Health, wealth, good fortune too.
All blessings come to you.
For my/hour house is a very, very, very fine house!

This would be the perfect time for a toast, to you, to the God/dess, to your new home, and to many years of happiness together.