it offers us a link between the Mother Earth and the Father Sky; between Gaia and God. Again, this was something our ancestors knew all too well. Thomas Moore notes that throughout the world you will find houses decorated with suns and moons, stars and even a dome to reflect the sweep of the cosmos. By adorning the house in such a way, our ancestors would always remember their links: to the Earth via the hearth and to the cosmos via the representations of the stars.
I hope you can now see why, at its most profound level, a house is always going to be more than a mere structure. Deep in our psyches we recognize that a house stands for far more than mere shelter. Understanding that our home is, symbolically, the world turns even the humblest space into a place full of mythic resonance, of deep archetypal power. No wonder the ancients venerated their homes: a touch of this awe and wonder is the first step to putting the spirit back into your home.
HESTIA, ABANDONED GODDESS OF THE HOME
IF HOME IS SUCH AN ESSENTIAL SYMBOL for our souls, why have we so neglected it in recent years? First and foremost, we simply haven’t had time. We’ve been so busy living ‘out there’ in the world that we haven’t had a chance to turn our eyes, ears, feelings, inwards. The world is getting smaller, and more accessible, by the moment. An exciting holiday used to mean piling along to the nearest seaside town or camping in some wilderness within a day’s drive or so. Now we can travel the world, see places our grandparents could only read about in books. We jump on a plane and land in a different time zone, a different country, a completely different culture – the world is truly our oyster. We needn’t even leave our homes to travel the world. We can log onto the Internet and range over the world, connecting within seconds with people in the opposite hemisphere to our own, jumping from continent to continent as the fancy takes us.
In the last chapter we talked about how we have been ruled by Apollo. Now let’s take a look at the other ruling archetype of our time. We are living in the age of Hermes, or Mercury, the winged messenger of the gods, the expert communicator, who thrives on speed and intellect. Hermes, you could say, is the god of the telephone (and, in particular, the smartphone), the computer (especially the laptop and tablet). He is the god of media, of YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram - the Lord of the Internet. His currency is information, the more of it the better. His mode of transmission is quick, very quick. We have fallen in love with Hermes, with his quick, agile mind, his restless, seeking nature, his charming yet deceptive trickster qualities. Hermes is the god of the fast buck, the conscience of the workaholic, the goad of the person who says more, just a little more. We all need Hermes in our lives (without him existence can become very dull) but we are running the risk of toppling too far into his frenetic realm.
A friend of mine who is in PR says she spends half her weekends reading all the reams of newsprint which fall through her door. She then spends hours on the Internet catching up with all the newsgroups, worried she may have missed something. When she hands you her business card it is crammed with numbers: her two phones; her fax; her answering service; her mobile; her e-mail address; her website. Interestingly, the one piece of information that isn’t on it is her address, her home. Is she happy? She says she was but now she’s not so sure. It feels as though something is missing from her life. She talks wistfully of having some time, some space of her own; of a few days without the weight of information pressing down on her. But then, she shrugs ruefully, she’d be missing out. Wouldn’t she?
We are suffering from information overload. It is not mentally possible for us to take in all the information, the news and views that are thrown at us without a break, day in, day out. When I first went to stay at a retreat centre I couldn’t at first work out why I felt such a deep sense of relief. It wasn’t that I didn’t have any work to do. It wasn’t that I could spend time reading and pondering. So what was it? Then it dawned on me there were no phones, no papers, no television or radio – the frenetic outside world was shut away. I was ecstatic at being cut off, if only for a few days, from the demands of staying on top of all this new knowledge, new information, new trends and fashions.
Now I’m not suggesting you have to live like a hermit. And I certainly wouldn’t want to give up my phone or my computer. But we need to have a balance. And this one-sided worship of Hermes is way out of balance.
HESTIA — THE FOCUS OF THE HOME
Fortunately there is a natural antidote to Hermes’ frenetic information highway. Her name is Hestia. Hestia (to the Greeks) or Vesta (to the Romans) is the classical goddess of the hearth and home. In Hestia we find the balance needed to offset Hermes’ madness. He races around; she stays put. He looks for the new; she revels in the order of the known. He lures us out into the world, stretching ourselves further and further; she urges us back to the centre, focusing on the deep, quiet needs of the soul. In fact, we’ve already met Hestia in her most primeval form, in the preceding chapter. Although Hestia was very rarely represented in figurative form, she was understood to be present in the heart of every home, in the glowing embers of the household hearth. She was the fire at the centre of the home, the spirit of the home, its organizing soul.
Hestia has a long lineage – she is not just a classical goddess. As far back as archaeologists have discovered remains of human life, they have found evidence of a cult of the hearth and the home fire. Stephanie A. Demetrakopoulos, writing in Spring (1979), notes that the nomadic Vedic Indians were celebrating a cult of the ‘world’ fire back in 1000–2000 BC. The fire bound the worshipper to the Earth and to his family; the rituals represented the ties that exist between people, the Earth, their home and the gods. So Hestia has a long and honourable heritage.
By the time the Greek and Roman civilizations came into being, the worship of the goddess of the hearth and home was of the utmost importance. Hestia was not a showy goddess: she had none of the glamour of Aphrodite or Helios, the power and majesty of Zeus and Hera, the mystery of Persephone or the frenetic energy of Hermes. Like Athena and Artemis, Hestia was a virgin goddess but, while her sister goddesses were active in the worlds of both humans and gods, Hestia did not bother herself with politics or the ways of the world. She had her place and was content to be there – not surprising, really, seeing as she was worshipped as the centre of every home, and every town. For while every individual home had its hearth sacred to Hestia so every town had its own Hestia, a central sanctuary where the fire, the living heart, burned to give the town or city its centre, its connection to the Earth. Such places were totally sacred: anyone who sought sanctuary within the temple walls was kept safe as a sacred duty. So you can appreciate how, even at this early time, the ideas of home and sanctuary, a place where you were literally safe from the world, came together quite naturally.
Hestia was central to everyday Greek and Roman life. She gave the house its soul. Stephanie Demetrakopoulos quotes a Homeric Hymn to Hestia which seems to show how keen houseowners were to have her blessing:
Hestia … come on into this house of mine, come on in here with shrewd Zeus, Be gracious towards my song.
‘A house or temple … seems only to be a building until it receives its Hestian soul,’ comments Demetrakopoulos. In ancient Greece the Hestian soul was put into the house in the most literal way. When a young woman married and set up her own home her mother would light a torch at her own household hearth and carry it before the bride and bridegroom to their new house, lighting their new fire with it. Then Hestia was deemed to have come to dwell in the daughter’s house. A similar custom can be found in Russia, where the household spirit of the hearth was known as a domovik. If the family moved house, they would carry brands from the old stove and light the stove in the new house from them. An invocation is spoken over the stove to provide a welcome for the domovik.
This custom has also been retained by modern Western pagans. When we moved to our new house, a friend of mine who is a pagan priestess, said I must take with me a glowing log from our old fire and put it in the fireplace of our new house. She explained that this would serve as a link between our old house and the new. Sadly, I have to confess, our log didn’t stay alight on the three-hour journey to our new home but I did feel a strange sense