House Magick: How To Leave A Home

Phoenix and I recently moved. We moved for the best of reasons, an upgrade from our old home to something a little bigger, a bit newer, and a LOT nicer. The moving process required lots of boxes to be packed. Decisions about what to keep, donate, or throw away were made. And then there was House Magick to do.

House Magick: Breaking the news to the house

We stood in the kitchen, the epicenter of much witchy activity in our home. We stated out loud, “House, we’re moving”. Phoenix recited a veritable laundry list expressing her gratitude to the house. I launched into a litany of memories. Between us, we spent thirty minutes or more walking through our home and telling the walls and carpets and bedrooms and back garden trees just how very much they’d meant to us over the fifteen years we shared a home.

This house shared with us dizzying highs and soul- crushing lows. Children became teenagers, became adults. Pets lived entire lives in this home and took their last breaths there. Several books took shape here too. It seemed only appropriate to thank this place, our home, for housing all these memories.

We both cried. This too was part of the house magick.

House Magick: Inviting those that would come

For thirty days or so, we chatted with the “old” house. As memories popped up, we shared them with each other and the house. Conversations soon turned to the Good Folk who shared our home. We asked “who of you would wish to stay?” and “Who of you would come with us?”

Most of our Lares and Penates, especially those connected to the kitchen and well-being of the home, decided to come with us. A great number of those folk for whom the place was theirs before we moved in, or before the land even had a house on it, decided to stay. Of course they did. A few remain undecided. Their basic message to us is “Hmmm…put out offerings for us and we’ll see. What’s the new address?”

The house began to feel empty of…something, someone, some ones. This too was part of the house magick.

House Magick: Collecting the Magick

Once our belongings were packed and loaded onto the moving truck, the house was literally and figuratively empty. The house was still ours for a few more days. Walls were spackled, and oven cleaned, toilets and sinks scrubbed to within and inch of their lives. Amazingly, I had the sense I was cleaning someone else’s house. It was no longer my home.

Phoenix and I walked about outside. We collected the magick we’d placed there when we first moved in and bolstered ever since. Guardian stones and protective talismans and happiness spells were cleansed, or moved, or released. Finally, we took down the circle we’d cast so many years before.

All but one tiny piece of magick was gone from the home. There’s a plant in the garden with just a teensy-weensy bit of our magick left in it. We know the people moving in and one of them is a witch. She wanted a bit left there for reasons I won’t divulge. But you know, there’s cauldron we all dip into, and she wanted access to some of the magick we’d worked there.

When the circle came down, the “goodbye” house magick was done.

House Magick: Why this was important to us

There’s a lot of talk in the witch-verse about abundance magick and manifesting magick and getting want we want magick. There’s less talk about how to say goodbye and how to end things well. We loved the home we created in that house and yet it was time to move on. Bringing along the memories of the good times was critical. Acknowledging the hard times and letting them compost in the soil felt appropriate. We recognized the importance of making offerings and giving thanks and leaving goodness and sweetness and gratitude in the soil as well.

Much of the magick we performed as we left was cutting, clearing, and cleansing. Collecting what the house shared with us, and that which was ours take. We left the house in the best possible conditions we could, which felt right.

Phoenix and Gwion, The Witches Next Door, have a book coming out February 2021. The book is filled with everyday rituals and rites of passage like saying goodbye to your house, for instance. We really do these things, so we thought we’d write a book about our practices.

You can pre-order the book here now