chapter
6

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Specialty Brooms

If you are a witch, there is no such thing as “just” a broom—okay, maybe the one you use to sweep your kitchen floor is. But otherwise, a witch’s broom has a purpose.

What that purpose is—well, that’s up to you. Are you going to have one broom that you use for all your magickal tasks or a few different brooms, each set aside for a specific task? Are your brooms going to be used on a regular basis or will they be mostly decorative? Are you making a broom to give as a gift or use for a special occasion such as a handfasting, a housewarming, or even to celebrate the birth of a child or the passing of a beloved family member?

Whether practical, ceremonial, or decorative, the witch’s broom is a tool that can be adapted for almost any need. You just have to decide what you want and then create (or buy) the perfect broom for that purpose. Here are a few possible types of brooms to consider.

Practical Brooms

At its heart, the broom is a practical tool. After all, consider its basic use: cleaning. There is nothing more practical than that. Unless, of course, you take that basic broom and give it some magickal oomph so that when you clean the house you also clear away negativity, old patterns that no longer work, the nasty residue left behind after disagreements, and all the other unpleasantness that our lives attract.

It is said that a witch should have one broom for housecleaning and another for magickal use, but that doesn’t mean you can’t give your everyday broom a magickal boost. I’m a pragmatic sort of witch, and I don’t believe in wasting anything. So if you’re going to be cleaning anyway, why not make the most of the activity?

There are a couple different ways to supercharge an everyday broom. Probably the simplest is to make up a magickal cleansing wash of some kind. Take a few essential oils or herbs that are especially good for purification, energy clearing, and protection. Any of the citrus oils—lemon, orange, or lime, for example—are great for cleaning because not only do they have cleansing essences, the oils are antiseptic and antibacterial in nature (which is why so many cleaners are either lemon or orange). And they have the added bonus of boosting your energy as you clean! (Who couldn’t use that?) If you don’t like lemon or orange, you can also try grapefruit.

Other essential oils and herbs that are great for magickal cleansing include bay, cedar, lavender, peppermint, sage, rosemary, and geranium. Vervain is particularly magickal if you can find it or grow it. You can also use salt (sea salt is best, but everyday table salt will do in a pinch). Place the herbs or oils in some water, add a bit of salt, and for extra oomph you can put in a cleansing stone such as crystal quartz, amethyst, or jasper, and let the mixture sit for a few hours or a day. You can also let it sit out under the full moon for a night.

When you’re ready to use your cleansing wash, remove the stone (if you used one), strain out any whole herbs, and place the mixture in a bowl or a spritzer (a plant mister works well). Dip your broom in the water or spray a mist of the water onto the bristles, and visualize your broom becoming a tool for spiritual as well as physical cleansing. Then, as you move through each room of your house, visualize the broom glowing with a bright light as it brushes away stagnant and unpleasant energy. (This same magickal cleansing wash can be used on whiskbrooms, dust rags, or sponges.)

As with all other magickal work, remember that your intent is a crucial ingredient. Focus on your desire to clear away anything that no longer works for you as you sweep away the dust and the cobwebs.

Another approach to the practical broom is to have a magickal broom that you dedicate to spring cleaning (which doesn’t have to be limited to spring—I tend to do my big clear-out in the fall, before my house is shut up for the winter). This is different than when you simply give your regular household broom a magickal boost; in this case, you would be creating a broom with the intention of using it only for spiritual and magickal cleansing.

We’ll talk in the next chapter about how to craft a broom that is intended to remove negativity or bring in protection—the idea here is that you will have a broom that can be used for actual cleaning (if you want) but that has a greater purpose. If you can, it is great to have a broom that you only use a few times a year, specifically for the “big clean” that comes with the change of seasons or circumstances, or after a crisis, when the energy of the home needs a special boost.

“Why bother?” you might think. “I can clean just as well with the broom I already use.”

That might be true on a purely mundane level. But think of the focus and energy you can tap into when you go to the closet and take out the broom you know is for magickal cleansing. Each swish of the bristles will waft your intent across the floor, and the feel of the special handle in your hands will tell you that you aren’t just cleaning, you’re working magick.

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real witches,
real brooms:

Melanie Marquis

i hate to admit it, but as a busy of mother of two, my ritual broom sees far less action than my everyday household broom. It’s not that I have an insatiable lust for cleaning; the Martha Stewart of magick I definitely am not. It’s just that it’s much easier to make time to piddle around the kitchen straightening things up than it is to find a kid-free moment in which to bust out all the ritual gear and fully let loose.

For a witch, magick isn’t an option; it’s a passion, a need. I’m simply not happy without it, and I never quite get enough of it. That’s why I make sure to bring a little magick into my everyday mess-chasing rituals. By using my household broom magickally, I’m able to charm my way through the mundane weeks, days, and hours until I can find time for more elaborate and formal ritual.

Some days I decorate my household broom, tying a heart-shaped charm to the handle when I want to infuse the house with love or coloring the individual broom straws to match my current intent. For instance, when money is tight, I color some of the straws green and sweep inward from the front door, visualizing wealth pouring into my home.

When I feel like my family could use some extra cheer, I’ll add a few drops of citrus oil to the broom. As I sweep in an inward spiral, the good vibes are released from the broom, giving the room a happy energy. If there seems to be negative energy lingering around, I anoint the broom with salt water and sweep in an outward spiral, eventually sweeping the bad stuff right out the back door.

These quick charms aren’t as glamorous as an all-out ritual complete with a fabulous homemade witch’s broom and a gorgeous magickal costume, but when my hair is a mess, my clothes are dirty, and I still have half a day’s worth of chores to do, whipping up some in-the-moment magick with the regular, everyday household broom can turn feelings of banality and boredom inside out—well, at least for a minute!

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Melanie Marquis

author of The Witch’s Bag of Tricks •
www.melaniemarquis.com

Ceremonial Brooms

A ceremonial broom is just what you think it is: one that you use for ceremonies. This will probably be your general ritual broom—the one you use to cleanse your ritual space before casting a circle or for any rite that can be improved by the presence of a broom. For some witches, this will be the only magickal broom they will ever need.

Any magickal broom can be a ceremonial broom. If you are a solitary witch, you may wish to carve your initials, your name, or your magickal name (if you have one) into the handle. It can also be decorated with ribbons, feathers, dried herbs, and any symbols that have special meaning to you (a picture of your power animal, for instance). I like to add rune symbols to my tools; I draw them on with marker if the material is too hard to carve (a wood-burning tool works well for this, too). I add Uraz for strength, for instance, or Beorc for new beginnings. See the appendix for a list of rune symbols.

If you belong to a coven, you might want to consider creating a coven broom—one that would only be used for group rituals.

It isn’t necessary to decorate a ceremonial broom at all. You can simply buy or make a broom that feels right and dedicate it for this particular use. If you are going to use it in rituals, you will want to bless and consecrate it as you would any other magickal tool, and keep it set aside from any regular household items. (Unless you need to hide it in plain sight—in which case, just make sure that no one else ever uses it for regular old cleaning.)

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broom lore
never use a broom when there is a dead person in the house

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Decorative Brooms

Many witches like to decorate their homes or apartments with items that are related in some way to their practice of the Craft. God and goddess statues, large wooden pentacles, Green Men, black cats, full moons…there are plenty of decorative symbols available to the witch who wants to be surrounded with touches of magick.

Brooms can be a wonderful ornamental touch, and you can make them obviously witchy by covering them with pentacles, runes, and the like or keep them subtle (lots of people have small cinnamon brooms hanging in their homes, for instance, and most of them aren’t witches). The latter is a good way to go if you share your space with a non-witch or live in an area where being openly Pagan can get you into trouble.

As with most other brooms, you can buy one already adorned and ready to hang on your wall or start from scratch and decorate it anyway you want. The only limits are those of your imagination and crafting skill (and maybe your wallet).

Suppose you decide that you want to have a broom to hang in the living room. You can choose between something small that you can tuck into an unobtrusive corner or a full-sized broom to display proudly over the couch. Then decide whether you want it to be all natural—in which case you may glue on dried flowers, leaves, herbs, acorns, etc.—or if you want something more showy, where you might use ribbons that match the colors in the room, glue on glitter and rhinestones, or string colorful beads on it.

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broom lore
if a broom drops across a doorway, you will soon go on a journey

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How you decorate your broom is completely up to you and will depend on your own personal style and desires. No two decorative brooms will be exactly alike, just like no two witches are exactly alike. And isn’t that grand!

Decorative brooms can also have a theme and a purpose. Here are a few suggestions.

Four Quarter/Elemental Brooms

These are brooms you would make in a set of four—one for each of the four quarters and their associated elements. Use some or all of the following supplies to make the quarter brooms that suit your home, your practice, and your tastes. Each broom should feature items associated with the element that goes with that quarter. (If your practice uses different correspondences, feel free to change things around.) These can be as simple or as fancy as you like.

East/Air

South/Fire

West/Water

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A west /water element broom

North/Earth

Obviously, you don’t have to use all of these suggestions—you can pick and choose whichever ones appeal to you most. Once the brooms are made, you can hang them on your walls in the appropriate directions and leave them up all the time to remind you of the power of the elements, or you can put your quarter brooms away for safekeeping and only take them out when you are doing ritual (where you can use them to help you call the quarters or simply lay them on or near your altar).

Seasonal

In much the way you could make four separate brooms to represent the four quarters, you can also create four brooms that celebrate the seasons. These examples are for the spring, summer, fall, and winter seasons of the Northern Hemisphere.

Spring

Summer

Autumn

Winter

These brooms are beautiful seasonal decorations that also serve to remind you of the blessings that come with each different season.

Sabbats

You could take this idea one step further and make eight different brooms, one for each sabbat. If you belong to a coven, this might be a great group project, and you could spend a year creating one broom at each sabbat as part of your ritual celebration.

Simply focus on the aspects of each sabbat that appeal to you: the changing form of the goddess and god, for instance, or the colors and seasonal plants. Here are some basic elements of each sabbat; use your imagination to figure out how to integrate them into a holiday broom. I’ve given you a few suggestions, but the possibilities are limitless.

Imbolc

Spring Equinox (Ostara)

Beltane

Summer Solstice

Lammas (Lughnasadh)

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broom lore
if a single person wishes to marry, they should never let anyone sweep a circle around them

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Mabon (Autumnal Equinox)

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broom lore
when using a new broom, make a wish and it will come true

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A Samhain broom

Samhain

Yule (Winter Solstice)

God and Goddess

The broom is a symbol that is both masculine and feminine, so what would be more fitting than to create a pair of matching god and goddess brooms? Create these brooms with the proper reverence and respect, and treat them especially well.

God Broom

Goddess Broom

Lunar

If you don’t want to have a goddess broom, you may want a lunar one instead. This can be a special full moon broom that you only take out when the full moon is overhead, or it may be a broom that captures all the phases of the moon at once and is left up all the time. Alternately, as with the seasonal brooms, you can make four separate brooms for each of the four phases of the moon, and either hang them by your altar at the appropriate times or leave them on your wall as decorations. (Keep in mind that none of these has to be a full-sized broom, and you can always use whiskbrooms or even miniature brooms if those are more suitable for your needs.)

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broom lore
to protect your bed while you are away for a long time, tuck a broom under the covers with the bristles on the pillow to guard against evil

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Familiar

For many witches, their animal companions (both actual and spiritual) are a major part of their magickal practice. If you like, you can create a decorative broom that celebrates this special connection. If you have a familiar (like my pal Magic the cat), you could make a broom that has a picture of that animal, or a small animal figurine, a representation of a particular god or goddess connected with that animal (such as Bast for cats or Hecate for dogs), or a bag of treats and some favored toys.

For a spirit animal, you might want to adorn the broom with representations not just of that animal but of the things it represents (a bear is strength, for instance). If you can safely and legally obtain them, feathers, fur, teeth, claws, shells, or any other real-life bits might be good as well—but keep in mind that many states outlaw the possession of some feathers (in particular eagles and endangered species, but in my native New York State, even songbird feathers are illegal to pick up off the ground).

A broom can also be dedicated to the celebration of your connection to nonmagickal animal companions and decorated in any way that appeals to you…and them.

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real witches,
real brooms:

Linda Raedisch

few people are impressed by the hearth broom nowadays. They may even call it a hearth brush, for that’s how much it’s dwindled over the years. In the United States, a few old-school broom squires are still making broomcorn hearth brooms with wooden handles, but the average homeowner is content with the one included with the set of fireplace tools. It hangs there collecting dust, for its baby-soft bristles and ornate but heavy brass handle make it good for nothing but sweeping up the occasional accumulation of ashes. Well, you ask, what else would you want to do with a hearth broom?

Let’s put the question to one of my ancestors, an ordinary young woman who would have lived two or more hundred years ago in the lowlands of northern Germany. We’ll call her Anna. I’d like to tell you that Anna is the mistress of the north German bay hall house in which she resides, but it’s more likely she’s the maid. As such, one of her jobs is to keep the flett swept clean, and for that she’s going to need something with much stiffer bristles than your newfangled hearth brush.

The Low German term flett can be translated as “fireplace surround,” but that doesn’t do it justice. The raised open fireplace was the heart of the farmhouse, and the flett was the sea of cobbles that surrounded it. Warmed by the cooking fire and lit by glazed windows in the bays on either side, the flett was a multipurpose space. At any given moment, we might find Anna sweeping up cinders, wood shavings, potato peels, and even chicken feed from between the rounded stones.

To this day, the best place to find a north German bay hall house (unless it’s already been taken apart and reassembled at an open air museum) is on the north German moor, or heide. Out on the heide, the local broom squire could find all the materials he needed for making sturdy, stiff-bristled besoms like Anna’s: miles and miles of Besenheide, “broom heather,” the purple-flowered Calluna vulgaris, whose genus name comes from a Greek verb meaning “to sweep.”

Heide, in addition to denoting both “moor” and “heather,” also came to mean “Pagan.” Was this because Pagan witches preferred the heather broom (Low German böhner, pronounced roughly “burner,” going soft on the Rs) or because witches could so often be glimpsed cavorting on the moonlit moor? I suppose we may never know.

We have absolutely no evidence that Anna was a witch, but if she had been, she never would have flown up the chimney on her böhner. There was no chimney; the fireplace was surmounted instead by an openwork canopy. If Anna had lived in the sixteenth century, this canopy would have been constructed of timber; later, of brick and plaster. The idea was for the smoke to conduct itself out through the carved spaces and into the distant rafters, where it would dispel woodworm, dry the grain stored under the thatch, and smoke the meats hanging overhead. In the mornings, it was Anna’s job to wake the sleeping embers under the canopy with the federwedel, a long-handled goose feather fan that looks even more mysterious than a crook-handled besom if you don’t happen to know what it’s for.

If too much smoke billowed out into the workspace, Anna could always lay böhner and federwedel aside and go heave open the groot dör, the farmhouse’s huge double front doors. But so long as there was no more than a thin blue haze hanging over the flett, Anna and her mistress would not have been troubled. In fact, Anna probably had her head down most of the time anyway, digging between the cobbles with the bristles of her broom and sweeping the last bits of barley out for the chickens.

Which brings me to my own little broom—and I do mean little. Composed of four tiny bundles of heather bound to a twig handle, it’s just the right size for sweeping out a dollhouse kitchen. I bought it as a souvenir at a basket-maker’s workshop at the Freilichtmuseum, Schleswig-Holstein’s Open-Air Museum, where it was billed as a tasterbesen. Though it now hangs from the knob of one of my kitchen cabinets, it’s meant for brushing crumbs, dirt, and dust from a surface that bears a marked resemblance to the old cobbled flett. No, it’s not a hearth broom but a computer keyboard brush, and, despite the gulf of centuries between us, I have a feeling Anna would know exactly what to do with it.

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Linda Raedisch

author of The Night of the Witches
and The Old Magic of Christmas

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