Witchy minimalism (and maximalism)

[bloodygranuaile]

What with being largely housebound for the past however many months and likely to continue being housebound for the next year or so, especially when the winter comes and escaping into parks and backyards stops being an option, I have been attempting to read books about domestic space, partly because I have a contentious relationship with the one I’m currently in (I am still not over getting gentrified out of the place in Allston, especially after I had battled so many shitty roommates to keep it), and partly because I thought it would be very funny to write a piece for the PEWG blog about the politics of Silvia Federici’s Revolution at Point Zero, Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and Erica Feldmann’s HausMagick: Transform Your Home with Witchcraft. I am probably not going to get around to actually writing it, but after the politics book club read the first two (neither of which I suggested, actually) I finally got around to reading HausMagick on my own.

 

I’ve been a big fan of HausWitch Home + Healing in Salem for years, and having blown many a money there on candles and rocks, I knew I had to pre-order HausMagick as soon as it was available. That was well over a year ago, because I buy far too many books to actually read. I probably could have gotten through this one a lot earlier if I’d realized what a fast read it is; though it is normal reading book-sized and not what I think of as coffee table book-sized, it is still in many ways a coffee table book (just perhaps for tiny urban apartment coffee tables)--full of glossy pictures of neat rooms and with plenty of white space around the double-spaced text. 

 

Much like the store, this little compendium of modern urban cottage witchcraft dabbles in a little bit of this and a little bit of that, with a focus on small items and easy practices that you can do without requiring too much in the way of time, space, or resources. There’s a bit of astrology and a bit of tarot and a lot of rocks, and some guided meditations and some do-it-yourself cleaning supplies. Feldmann is a witch after my own heart in that she focuses a lot on scent--for example, preferring to pick appropriately scented candles rather than colored or shaped for spells--which does tend to mean that my hauswitchcraft is limited very strictly to my room and cannot be extended to any other part of my apartment. (This is not stopping me from eyeing the LightHaus line of cleaning products’ Solstice Lemongrass and Tea Tree Shower and Bathroom Cleaner for Lightness and Willpower, however.) Possibly the most useful thing for me personally in the book was the discussion of crystals, since I buy nearly all mine from HausWitch anyway and I have a terrible time remembering what they’re all about afterward unless I actually use them, but I don’t use them if I don’t remember what they’re about. So having the official HausWitch word on what they all are good for written down somewhere with big easy-to-find pictures should help. Some of the interior decorating tips are good, too; my own interior decorating style is a lot darker than HausWitch’s--the store is very cute but there’s way too much white and beige for me to be comfortable hanging out there for very long periods of time, even with all the exposed brick; I wouldn’t want my own space to look that light. Apparently this is because I’m a Scorpio. (I don’t generally believe in astrology but I do believe in Scorpios, which is… apparently a common position among Scorpios.) 

 

There are a couple things that I cannot help but find goofy, such as the meditation for community psychically with your pets, and the assertion that HausWitch saves people money (possibly other people it does, but not me) (I suppose technically dropping $100 on candles and room sprays every season in a desperate attempt to block out the scent of your downstairs neighbors’ chain-smoking is cheaper than, say, buying a new couch, but nobody buys a new couch every three months, do they?). 

 

Anyway, it will certainly be a useful addition to my shelf of witchy nonsense, which is unfortunately tucked away in a corner of my room where it’s harder to see and access than I’d ideally like it to be, but unfortunately I cannot figure out how to rearrange things so that it’s more accessible without seriously fucking up my ability to use, like, the doors in my room. (I told you I had a contentious relationship with my space.) Although with so much new homebodying advice in my brain lately, maybe it will soon be time to grab a measuring tape and seeing if I can’t move a few bookshelves around. It may also at some point be time to invest in replacing a few of the more falling-apart storage pieces in here with some stuff with more capacity, but that would require braving some stores in person and there’s only so much of that I’m willing to do mid-pandemic. 

 

I also, I must admit, desperately need more lamps, or to replace my reading lamp at the absolute minimum. I have been trying not to let these sorts of books push me into buying more furniture type stuff but having a clip lamp that continually falls off its post because the clip is broken and it is held in place with duct tape absolutely does not spark joy, no matter how cute and whimsical the duct tape is. 

 

(Someday, I will live alone, and then I will go absolutely nuts with this kind of thing. Someday.)

 

One of the things that I think surprised me a little bit about HausMagick, which probably shouldn’t have, is that I already knew quite a lot of what was in it, or at least it was familiar to me even if I can’t remember it all of the top of my head (see: rocks that aren’t amethyst or howlite; astrology that isn’t Scorpios; plants), which I guess just goes to show for how long I have been marinating in eclectic witchy stuff without ever getting real serious about any of it. Overall I am OK with that, and I will likely just continue dabbling shallowly and paying enterprising young businesswitches to do the complicated stuff.