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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 of continuity putting the old log in the grate.

So Hestia imbues a house with spirit; her hearth provides the essential link with the Earth. She also provides safety, security and serenity. She brings together the people who live in a house – whether one or many – in an atmosphere of warmth and shelter.

She is a sociable goddess: she presided over the preparation of meals and the first mouthful of the meal was always consecrated to her. In Roman times ‘To Vesta’ was a common grace. But, although she can be seen, in one way, as the representative of Mother Earth, she is not a ‘mothering’ goddess. Hestia always remained a virgin, her own woman, self-reliant and inward-looking. Her mood is one of quiet introspection and absorption which is why she is such an obviously healthy balance when we have too much Hermetic energy whizzing around in our lives.

THE NEGLECTED HEARTH

But Hestia has been abandoned; we have forgotten her place at the centre of the house. Often her hearth has been blocked in and her heat dissipated through a central heating system. The centre of our homes is more frequently the computer than the fireside; the television than the dining table. Those who live on their own often stick a meal in a microwave and eat it on their laps in front of the television. Those with families throw food at children as they disappear through the door to their own activities. How many of us sit and centre ourselves at a table to eat? How many of us sit in front of a living fire to dream? Who, nowadays, sits in a circle and sings, or tells stories, or plays music? And who would confess to doing housework in an almost meditative state of self-absorption? All these are Hestia’s joys. But it is easy to see how Hestia has been lost.

She is simply not flashy enough, not sexy enough, not exciting enough. To early feminists, Hestia was anathema. She represented everything that women should be rebelling against. Hestia was a timid little housewife; an introverted, repressed little stay-at-home rabbit hiding in her warren. Women quite rightly wanted, after centuries of repression, to get out there into the world. We wanted to model ourselves on more exciting archetypes: sexually confident and demanding Aphrodite; wise, intelligent, cool Athena; proud, independent, feisty Artemis. Even earthy Demeter with her children clinging to her skirts, although not always celebrated, kept her place in our thoughts: but we turned our backs on Hestia and she became a forgotten goddess. So we women went out into the world and we have proved that we are as good as men, as capable and, if need be, as ruthless and ambitious. But when we turned our backs on Hestia we lost something monumental. We lost our sense of focus, our powers of discrimination. We also lost our haven. Nowadays women are beginning to notice that something is missing. We have our jobs; we can juggle family and career; but often we have lost our homes. We are too busy, caught in the Hermes trap, to give ourselves the time we need to centre, to focus on what is truly important to us. Interesting, that word focus – it’s a Latin word which means the hearth, Hestia’s domain.

I’m not for one moment suggesting that women should give up their jobs and get back into the kitchen. Far from it. But I am suggesting that many women need to put themselves back in touch with their Hestian values. They need to give themselves the time and space they need for quiet reflection, for musing, for pottering. They need to have a home which renews them so they can rejoin the battle out there in the modern world refreshed and with a sense of vigour and serenity. As social psychologist Ginette Paris says, ‘If we had a feminism that caused us to get out of the house, is there not also room for feminism that would bring us back home, so that our homes would reflect ourselves and would once more have a soul?’

Although it may sound like it, this isn’t an issue just for women. In the old form of patriarchal society, a man could automatically expect to find Hestia in the home. The woman who invested all her life into her home was a natural devotee of the goddess, and the ‘contented husband’ could expect to come home to a warm, welcoming home with fire blazing, everything spick-and-span and a nice hot dinner on the table. All providing the woman was a ‘contented wife’ of course – and many weren’t (too much Hestia is not a good thing either!). But now our society is very different, and while modern women have to rediscover Hestia, modern men have an even greater challenge – of starting their own relationship with the goddess of the home.

HERMES AND HESTIA IN HARMONY

For everyone, woman or man, needs the protection of Hestia. Hestia was, and can be, the guardian of the house – it is she who makes the space sacred, who demands that sometimes we close the doors and windows to the world and devote our time to focusing inwards on ourselves, our family, our home. She is the one who says ‘enough’, who could turn off the television and start a conversation; who could pick up a book instead of logging onto the Web; who might insist on shared family meal-times rather than TV dinners. She is the one who can put tricky Hermes in his place. Interestingly, the Greeks understood perfectly the dynamic between Hermes and Hestia. While Hestia governed the house itself, Hermes guarded the door, the threshold. He was often represented by a phallic-shaped stone, known as a ‘herm’. He looked outwards into the world; she focused inwards. In some two-headed statues of door guardians there are representations, not of Janus, but of Hermes and Hestia. One looks out, the other looks in. They are in perfect balance. This is the model we need for our emotional health and well-being. We can’t cut Hermes out altogether; that would be as unnatural as turning our backs on Hestia. We need communication; we need to let our minds expand outwards as much as we need them to expand upwards towards Helios, the sun. But just as we have to balance that upwards striving with a remembrance of our earthly roots, we have to focus inwards as well as out. Bringing Hestia back to her place in the heart of the house can start the healing process.

HEALING HESTIA

There are plenty of simple ways of bringing Hestia back into the home. These are just some suggestions to start you off – once you remember the feeling of the goddess, you will undoubtedly find more ways of reintroducing Hestia yourself.

 If you can have a living fire, then do so. There is nothing like sitting by a fire on a cold day, keeping warm and gazing into the flames. If you cannot have a real fire, there are now many beautiful gas fires which look realistic and give Hestia a symbolic home.

 If all fires are out of the question, then buy a large scented altar or church candle, place it on a mantelpiece or table in the heart of the home and use that as the focus of your home. You could turn this space into a home altar by putting on it representations of you and your family: photos, anything symbolic or special; some fresh flowers; some incense. Light your candle every day for a short while and welcome Hestia into the flame and your home.

 Hestia is the original housewife, in the sense of the word before it became so defamed. But there is no shame in caring for your home and keeping it clean and beautiful. Clean your home with care and pride (more on this in Part Three). Think of it as a kind of meditation; focus on what you are doing; be in the moment. Don’t begrudge your time or look on your efforts as fruitless (dust arriving the moment you’ve dusted); use it as a time for reflection and centring.

 Hestia loves the order of the home. Whether you live alone or share with hordes, make meal-times special and sacred by always sitting down to eat. Lay the table with care and put fresh flowers or something natural (beautiful pebbles, pots of herbs, unusual pieces of driftwood) as a centrepiece. Cook the food, however simple, with care and attention and serve it with love. Be conscious that you are not just feeding bodies but souls as well. Say grace before you eat, whatever your religious beliefs. It needn’t be ‘for what we are about to receive …’, it could be a simple ‘thank-you’ to God, the Earth, the food, the cook. It might even be the old Roman ‘To Vesta’.

 One of Hestia’s prime symbols is the circle, the ancient symbol of Mother Earth, of psychic wholeness, togetherness and unity. Anything that draws people together in the round is wonderful for connecting – think of Arthur’s round table. It doesn’t have to mean buying a new dining room table (although if you need one, maybe try thinking round!), but you could draw people around the fire, or around a coffee table for drinks, around a picnic rug outside: when people are in a circle they automatically talk more and pay attention to each other.

 Try cutting down Hermes’ domination in your house. Perhaps move the television so it isn’t the dominating centre of the room. Then you won’t be so likely to switch it on automatically when you come into the room. Can you cut down on news feeds, on social media, on online groups and chat? Can you live an hour or so (or even a day or two) without checking your email? Can you switch off your alerts, or even switch off your smartphone once in a while and call people back in your time? Just be aware of how much you focus on Hermes’ and his toys.

 Allow yourself a little Hestia time every day, a quiet time for pottering around your home, adjusting something here, moving something there. Give yourself a few moments to watch a shaft of sunlight glancing through a window. That chair looks inviting? Allow yourself some time to sit and muse. Day-dream.

 Don’t race, don’t rush, don’t try to do everything at once. Hestia is the goddess of focus. She teaches that we should become absorbed in one task at a time, working quietly and calmly with inward serenity. Her way may seem boring but it gets things done – efficiently and well.

 If you are one of those madly sociable people who always has ‘open house’, make sure you have times when you or your family can be by yourselves. Explain that you might not always be available if people drop in – maybe you could have a sign to put up if you’re in Hestia space, asking people to drop by another time? Explain to the kids that sometimes it’s nice for you to eat together as a family – not just one or two of you and not with all their friends there either Just the family. Hestia would like that.