Ebook - Keeping Hearth: Benedicaria for the sacred household

The day to day keeping of the household is a central part of Earthly spirituality in many cultural and religious traditions.

Home can mean and look like many things; big, small, old, new, a home can be a tent or small cabin, a city apartment or a camper. Sometimes we may have a home we love and sometimes it may be just one that will do for now.

Either way, we will have to tend to it to some degree or another and in our culture that rewards busyness and long hours of work, the importance of creative hearth/home keeping is often perceived as a menial, boring set of annoying chores.

Sacred householding isn’t about keeping a perfectly clean house or to some external standard; just the opposite. It’s about finding the sacred in the process, discovering what we need to feel calm and at ease in our home while creating beauty in our living space.

In Italian folk medicine and Benedicaria, the keeping of the home is a central element of community and family life because the home is the foundation of all outside activities.

Our home is our sanctuary and refuge. Home is sometimes also the center of social life. It’s where we host meals, receive guests, where we rest when we’re sick, where we take each other, where we argue and work through conflicts,and for community healers it’s where they treat folks that come for help.

In my family, when I was growing up, the home also hosted small spaces of prayer and worship. Every room had a corner, wall, or stand with saint statues, small altars, ancestor photos, prayer cards, and so on.

In animistic traditions the home itself is a being, an entity that is dynamic and alive. When we tend our home in a mindful and creative way it enables us to be in conversation with the spirit of our house and the ground it’s on.

In this book we’ll talk about the Roman animistic traditions of householding as well as the practical aspects of householding from an Italian and Italian American folk medicine perspective.