Candles, Candlemas, And The Hearth

Candlemas. Fire festival, like Yule, but no bonfires, no great blazes. Candlemas is domestic flame, the hearth and the lamp and the candle, the fire under the cooking pot. The Romans lit candles for Februata, the goddess of cleaning and purification (my mother refers to her as the cleaning lady goddess), as it was their time of “spring cleaning”.

February is the coldest month of the year, and the one where we spend the most time clustered around the hearth. On our farm, the hearth consists of a brick pad in our kitchen, where resides our antique woodstove Esmeralda, whose mysteries are chronicled in the Fearn chapter. The hearth of a house draws people in, whether or not it is actually an open flame, and not just because of the warmth. The Roman word for hearth was focus, and that is what a good hearth does: it focuses the energy of the denizens of that house....not on the outside world, but on each other. When we gather around the hearth, the heart of the house, it is each others’ faces that we see.

Perhaps that is why the goddess of the hearth is always faceless. Vesta to the Romans, Hestia to the Greeks, and Hertha to the Germanic peoples; she was pictured solely as a flame with no human characteristics. Retiring by nature, she symbolized how a good hearthkeeper isn’t noticed by her small, subtle actions in making the home more livable....until she leaves and her warm presence is missed. Hestia had a thankless role; even the vestal virgins who tended the flame in her temple (the metaphorical center of the city) were required not to marry until their retirement, and if they broke the vow they were simply buried alive, like a flame is covered over by earth.

The earliest hearths were merely firepits in the center of the home under a smokehole. This pit-hearth was supposedly the gate to the world of the ancestors, and they were said to speak through it. Later, during a small ice age, chimneys were invented, and cooking was done in large walk-in fireplaces. The stove came in around the 17th century, and improved itself to the point where Hestia’s flame is now no more than a tiny blue gas flame inside a stove, or even a mere electric current.

The hearth goddess’ functions are sacred - housekeeping, food preparation, and holding fast the center of the clan - in spite of the fact that such work is devalued in today’s society. At one time, they were considered one of the highest of activities. “Housework” is devalued as “not really work”, as opposed to jobs that bring in a paycheck.

Candlemas is traditionally when we set the altar up with as many candles as we can find, usually in jars or sand or some other fairly safe containers that won’t set the house on fire if jostled by crowding pagans. In ancient times, candles made the difference between light and no light throughout the ever-darkening winter, and in northern areas especially they were prized, so to burn so many precious candles was a true offering. Candles are all sacred to Brigid for their flame, and candlemaking is one of Her special crafts.

Almost everyone has seen candles made from stearin, the soft store wax that melts so easily and won’t burn when it splashes on you, but few people have made them the old-fashioned way. We wonder today why our forefathers preferred fatty animals to lean ones - they couldn’t have wanted to eat all that fat, we tell ourselves, it’s so unhealthy - but we fail to realize that every scrap of that fat was precious. It was carefully cut off separately from the meat, rendered (melted) over a fire, strained through fine cloth, rendered and strained again until it was pure and white, and used for candles, soap, and lard to grease pans and make salves. Animal fat was a highly useful household item; no one would waste it by eating it.

You can make candles with almost any kind of fat, although mammalian fat is easier to render and clean. Pig isn’t so great, sheep is better, cow better yet, and goat best of all. The problem is that, even when clean and white, the stuff does smell rather like burning fat when it’s lit, so this is where those essential oils and flower perfumes you’ve been making from your garden come in. Even chopped flower petals such as rose and lavender will help. To harden the candles and make them sputter less, add alum to the tallow while it’s boiling, in the proportion of 1 lb. alum to every 4 lbs. fat. Beeswax is often prohibitively expensive unless you have hives, in which case you’re fine; wrap the beeswax around a wick until it is the desired width, and then seal it by heating the edge in hot water and pressing it against the next layer. Remember that beeswax melts at a much hotter temperature than other types of candle material, and it will cause severe burns, so wear heavy gloves.

To make bayberry candles, you need a large supply of berries from the bayberry bush, which is finicky about soil (it likes acid and salts, like the New England coast where it originates) and prefers part shade. You boil the berries until a greenish layer of oily stuff collects on the surface of the water, skim it off (or siphon off the water under it), reboil and strain it, and pour it into molds. You can combine bayberry wax with fat, or beeswax with fat, and it will only improve it.

Candles are one of the most-used magical implements, to the point where magical supply stores carry more candles than anything else. Magical candle burning is pretty much the first thing any blossoming neophyte neo-pagan learns, because it’s so simple to carve something on a candle or smear on a bit of oil, light it, and start chanting or visualizing. However, if you make the candles themselves, you can add even more power to the charm. While you’ve got the bubbling kettle going on the stove, you can add scented oils, bits of dried herb or flower or spice, grated old crayons in the colors you want, or any small burnable objects (such as bits of paper or wood with symbols on them). Wicks can be made of any undyed natural fiber, such as cotton or hemp or silk or linen (don’t use synthetics; they fume like burning plastic) or it can be twisted out of milkweed floss (if you’re a spinner) or plants such as stripped rushes (use the inner pith), dried mullein leaves, or even straw. (Here’s another place you can incorporate the magical herb of your choice.) Pipe cleaners will work if you’ve got them around. If you use fiber wicking, soak it in salt and vinegar first and let it dry before using; it will burn cleaner.

You can pour candles into a mold or dip them. For a mold, use any tall cylindrical heat-resistant thing, and coat it with grease first; then hang the wick from a nail or pencil across the top and pour in the wax. There are still colonial-style candle molds that do several taper candles around; we got ours at a yard sale, so keep your eyes open. For dipping, make your wicks long enough for two candles with a few inches in the middle to hold them with your fingers, tongs, or a stick. Boil up your wax in the stove, and have a pot of cold water around next to it. You dip the wicks in first one, then the other, and hang them on a broomstick, traditionally supported between two chairs, while it dries between coats. It will take something like fifty coats to make a decent-sized candle, so the most cost-effective way to do it is to have several candle pairs going, taking turns with them so that as one dries you’re doing the others.

As you work, since it is a rhythmic, repetitive job, you can be doing a small chant that tells the powers that be what you want done with these candles. If they’re to be for the Candlemas ritual, they should be red or white. Carve a flame or Brigid’s cross or an Ogham B (for Brigid) and/or L (for rowan, her tree).

Certain kitchen items actually have magical/symbolic meanings or deity affiliations. Scales (even little kitchen scales) are sacred to Ma’at, so you might bless your kitchen scale by applying a small feather to the central point. Baskets are all sacred to the Goddess in her aspect as Harvest Mother.....with the exception of winnowing baskets which are sacred to the death goddess, especially the Egyptian Nephthys. Paint their names or a symbol relating to them on the bottom, that they might be filled with bounty.

Bowls, also, are female womb symbols, and in Brazil many women make bowl altars to the Afro-Caribbean sea goddess Yemaya by stacking bowls in decorative patterns that imitate lotuses or flowers. These subtle altars are easily missed by more conservative Catholic visitors. Cups and goblets have the same meaning, but with more emphasis on “water”. They are all sacred to maternal and water deities.

Pots, pans and cauldrons are also symbolic of the Sacred Container or womb. The cauldron especially has come to be one of the preeminent symbols of our faith, as it combines earth (metal), fire (under the pot), water (liquid in the pot), and air (steam). They represented rebirth; it was said that the realm of the Dead had a great cauldron that brought men back to life. Cauldrons are almost synonymous with potions; as they are also quite expensive, you might try keeping your eyes out for an old one at a yard sale or recycling center. We don’t consider those cheap little hand-sized things to be real cauldrons, and neither do we suggest the decorative brass cauldron-shaped containers. If it won’t cook at least a gallon of soup over a wood fire on a regular basis, it does not deserve the name of cauldron. After all, the whole point of kitchen witchery is that everything has a practical as well as a magical usage. Perfectly good tools that only get waved through the air on occasion are a waste.

Brooms have been magical since ancient Rome. I’m not sure which Inquisitor first came up with the idea of witches flying on them, but a broom is still an excellent purifier of space - you can sweep floors, walls, people, anything, in order to remove negative energy. Broomsticks are jumped over at pagan weddings and soaked and waved at the sky for rain spells. Tchipakkan has a custom of naming her broom, usually a female name, and then referring to floor-sweeping as “doing a dance with” her.

Brooms were first made from the broom plant, which gave the Plantagenet royal family of England its name. Broom is a good plant to grow on your property anyway, as it is a good medicinal for kidney problems and urinary tract infections, but it can, of course, also be made into brooms. The New World equivalent, and one which colonial pioneers took to using and exported around the world, is broomcorn; this plant grows and looks just like ordinary maize except that instead of cobs it sprouts a tall brushy head full of seeds, which were combed out and the heads tied to a broomstick. To make a broom using either plant, you will need about fifteen to twenty-one heads (always an odd number, as it’s both luckier and easier to wrap) and a good stout stick of the right length for you. Arrange the heads around the stick, about 8" from the end, and tie a length of twine around them; now you spiral the twine down those 8", leaving about 1/4" between each turn. On each turn you go over one head and under the next, and over and under, and so on. The odd number of heads allows you to keep going with this pattern uninterrupted. Wrap and weave all the way down to the end and secure with three knots.

If you don’t have either broomcorn or broom plant about and need a broom in a hurry, this method can be used with any bunch of sticks and twigs to make a rough, simple broom. Hickory sticks or birch saplings were a common sweeper material. To make a fast mop when you have none and can’t get to town for some time, take a piece of board about 14"x 6" and drill three rows of holes in it, about an inch across. The center hole should be drilled in at an angle, as it’s for the handle. Then take cornhusks straight off the cobs (if they’re dry it’s okay, just soak them first for a while to make them pliable) and force them through the holes until only a little is sticking out the top. They should be in pretty tight. Now insert a stick for the handle - make it slightly bigger than the hole and force it in - and use your mop. It won’t last forever; the cornhusks will need replacing after several uses, but it will work in a pinch.