Hearthcraft and the various practices that comprise it – kitchen witchcraft, cottage witchcraft, herbalism, protection and prosperity magic, and many others – is a growing topic of interest, to my delight. I first came across the term in 2009 in Arin Hiscock-Murphy’s The Way of the Hedge Witch, later updated as The House Witch. My own copy is quite battered and peeling a bit in odd places, partially because I went through a phase of trying to read in the bath. (I know, I know, bad librarian!) Since then I’ve poured over many books and blog posts about this style of witchcraft. Many of them discuss various hearth-and-home deities as potential patrons of hearthcraft work, which makes sense. The Big Three – or the Big Three-and-a-Half, because Vesta is often grouped in with Her Hellenic counterpart – tend to be Brighid, Frigga, and Hestia. These are all great Ladies, of course. As a Brighid kid, I can’t recommend highly enough that you reach out and say hello if you’re even the least bit curious. I have less experience with Frigga and Hestia, though I have called upon Them in passing before as part of larger Norse or Hellenic rituals.

However, hearthcraft itself, like many other forms of witchcraft, doesn’t require working with deities, and devotional hearthcraft is specifically left open for the practitioner to decide Whom to work with and how that work plays out. As the previous post in this series stated, you are the sacred center of this practice, which includes any and all people or People who connect with you. Maybe that’s Brighid, one of the most popular deities in modern Paganism. Maybe it’s forming a relationship with the genius loci of your home or with guardian ancestral spirits of your blood, heart, or spirit. Maybe it’s connecting with a concept of your Higher Self or aspects of your soul. But what happens if you’re, say, a diehard Lokean, or a Dionysos kid, or your devotion is aimed at Someone Who just doesn’t traditionally vibe with hearth-and-home stuff?

Well, you include Them, of course.

You don’t have to work with a deity traditionally associated with the hearth, or Anyone else for that matter, if you don’t want to. Your devotional relationship with your Beloved is unique and so is gestalt of your home and family life. Your attitude toward historicity and tradition is your own. I like to be inspired by what came before, the same way I like to hear about my spouse’s life before we met. The devotional relationship, however, is built in the present, and I believe the gods have just as much agency and personhood as mortal humans. They can and do change; They have hidden aspects of Themselves you wouldn’t expect; They adapt to the modern world with all its technological progress and mishaps. In other words, UPG – “Unverified Personal Gnosis,” that is, beliefs you hold about the gods that aren’t backed up by historical evidence – is more than welcome here.

The reverse is also true: your hearthcraft does not have to look like whatever “stereotypical” home-based or kitchen witchcraft is. My home is never going to look like an HGTV showroom. It’s not instagrammable, full of cutesy DIY projects, 2.5 kids and a dog, or a heterosexual cisgender married couple. I wouldn’t consider myself edgy by any means but I’m also not a fan of the love & light aesthetic, either in spirituality or decoration. I’ll write more about this in a future post, but I felt it important to emphasize now. The bottom line is you are unique and your devotional hearthcraft will also be unique. This is a feature of you existing in the world, not a bug.

Now, how might one build a devotional hearthcraft practice around a deity that is unlikely to be included in a list of hearth gods? I’ll use Dionysos as an example. I’ve been a fan of His for years, way back when I started practicing Paganism in high school. Dionysos is a complicated deity, to say the least. There have been Mystery cults dedicated to Him, ancient and modern. If people know anything about Him, it’s usually boozy festivals, frenzied maenads devouring impious kings, creating theater, and a really cool story some dolphins and a pirate ship. What the Erebus does any of this have to do with hearthcraft?

First, let’s take a peek at what I call a deity’s Work in the world. The capital-W is important. I use it to talk about the virtues, values, influences, and passions They have for the world we share. (Obviously this is subjective and deities can care about whatever they want whenever they want it, but this post is already getting pretty long so once again, we’ll leave that topic for another time.) Instead of talking about deities as “god of communication” or “goddess of the forge,” which is already a reductive understanding of how ancient religions understood their gods, talking about Their Work reframes our thinking. The gods are no more a stagnant list of attributes than we are. So instead of just saying “Dionysos is a god of wine and raucous parties in the woods,” I might instead say, “Dionysos’ Work in the world is liberation, ecstasy, and challenging boundaries.” What might that look like in devotional hearthcraft? Well, our homes are ideally our sanctuaries. We should be able to be free from outside worries and burdens. Our homes give us space to recharge and regain our power that is often lost when interfacing with the rest of the world. Focusing on creating a hearth that values freedom from danger and freedom to exist safely is one example of Dionysian Work. We might also think about challenging boundaries as an emphasis on treasuring the parts of yourself, your home, and your family that don’t meet societal standards. For trans folks, living as our authentic selves is itself a challenge to traditional boundaries. So is prioritizing our safety, wellbeing, and happiness. (The true could be said of anyone suffering under kyriarchy; I just picked trans identity as an example because it’s the one I know best.) When we think of Dionysos in these terms, it can feel much more natural to consider Him as the devotional focus of one’s hearth.

In both devotional polytheism and hearthcraft, we are bringing our entire selves to the practice. This is even more so in the synergistic devotional hearthcraft. All of those bits of ourselves are worthy of contemplation and reverence. Yes, even that bit. Yes, that one too. Likewise, our Beloveds are also bringing Their entire selves to the equation as well. Whatever you create together will be all the stronger because it is yours, and that’s not something anyone can replace.