Jasper Reviews: The House Witch

The House Witch: Your Complete Guide to Creating a Magical Space with Rituals and Spells for Hearth and Home

by Arin Murphy-Hiscock

This book was a roller-coaster.

And I mean one of those cheap ones that are set up for one day and disappear the next. One that is built to be quick to put up and take down. One that is low-quality and you’re half-certain you’ll die while riding it.

There are not enough words in the English language to convey just how much this book sucks and how high my hopes had soared for it. The worst part of this book was the squandered potential for a book about one person’s practices. But no, the author must place themself as the sole authority on every subject presented, even when those subjects include four whole pages of out-the-ass appropriation.

I used this book for annotating practice. I went through and I marked it up, down, and sideways with highlighters, shoved in post-it notes, and made many comments on Discord to some friends about it.

Most of my problems with this book can be broken down as follows:

• Insistence of referring to the reader and the house witch “archetype” with solely she/her pronouns, which reads as an attempt to say “women belong in the kitchen” without coming out and saying it in this book.

  • Featuring a part where the author actively changed a well-known phrase (“to each their own”) to be binary in gender (“to each his or her own”).

• The refusal to understand that words have particular meanings, instead saying that you can use two different words with very important differences in definition interchangeably (such as “ritual” versus “spell”; “altar” versus “shrine”; or the entire bullshit in the book about “cleansing” versus “purifying” versus “blessing”).

• Insisting that intent is the most important part of magic work.

• Insisting that communing with the Divine and transcendence is the ultimate end goal of all magic and spirituality.

• Writing out Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs when it would have been much easier to just paste in the diagram itself, as nothing of value was added in the author’s descriptions of the levels and only led to more confusion about how this would be a pyramid.

• Claiming things to be more common than they actually are.

• Lecturing the reader on other cultures (and getting information about those cultures wrong) as someone who is clearly white and not part of these cultures or their related religions.

• Not citing sources.

• Referring to things that are specifically Irish or Scottish as “Celtic” overall, which is a useless blanket term in this context.

• Making the hearth out to be the ultimate source of power, which may be true for the author but is by no means as universal as presented.

• Weird tradwife comments about the cauldron being a solely feminine tool and being aligned only with Greek and Roman chthonic goddesses despite promptly referring to “Celtic” mythology afterwards.

• Rewriting history to put “older women” on a pedestal that simply does not track when you dig deeper than the author clearly did.

• Limiting what it actually is that wards can be used for all the way down to simply protection and defense.

• As mentioned, the appropriation.

• Some bold ass claims about things that are “generally agreed upon” which are most definitely not generally agreed upon.

• Claiming that “the ancients” only knew about seven metals.

• Claiming that the Wiccan ritual tools are “traditional”.

• Claiming that “negative reactions” will impact the energy of a home and your kitchen appliances.

• Putting essential oils on your goddamn skin without a proper ratio of carrier oils to dilute them.

To be completely honest with you, reader, I think this book was a mistake to write. Not only is it not a book about magic or witchcraft (it is instead, by the author’s own words, a book on spirituality), but it’s not even about the house. It’s about the “hearth” (which is often the living room nowadays) and the kitchen. There is next to nothing in here that can be applied to any other room.

The worst part is, there are some actually good parts in here! But I cannot in good practice recommend this book to literally anyone. It’s too basic to be useful to a sufficiently-advanced house witch, warlock, or what-have-you, and it’s too full of bullshit to be useful to a beginner mage of any sort.

1/10

Throw the manuscript out and start anew. Do it better this time.