House Blessings...

Good luck for the home? Do we think of protecting our spaces?  Episcopalian priests can do a house blessing, going from room to room to ask for protection and blessing each living area.   This art piece is a hand-made piece of art from Peru, meant to be a house blessing.  Charming?  It is a charm, using symbolism to represent ideas.  Flowers for fertility, a cross symbol for the four directions and heavenly blessing, three representing the idea of trinity, a rooster for protection and a heart for love.

A bird nesting by the front entry to a home is supposed to be good luck and bring happiness as well, or so I've been told when I was trying to keep birds from nesting on our porch in Atlanta in the light fixtures.  An immigrant from Mexico thought that I should want to keep the nests there and just change my thinking of them from nuisances to good luck indicators. Now we have two separate nests right above our door in Santa Fe.   

The idea of protecting our homes is a pulsating idea that crosses many cultures.  Think of wreaths and what they symbolize.  Many people put wreaths on the door for decoration, not understanding the symbolism but the symbol of the wreath is more for life, the circle of life, rather than a token of luck.  The Romans used the wreath as a symbol of pride; the women wore them as symbols of fertility. 

The idea of a house blessing as a token is in the sense and symbolism of milagros, physical expressions of hopes for divine intercession, which are amulets and reminders for luck and protection. It can be compared to  somewhat to the idea of milagros in the Hispanic culture and the nazar (the evil eye symbol) in Turkey and the Hamsa hand used by Jews and Muslims.  As a class, they are called "apotropaic" (Greek for "prophylactic" or "protective", literally: "turns away") talismans, meaning that they turn away or turn back harm.

Not that you needed to know all of this but Americans, in general, haven't used tokens of divine protection for houses.  Maybe sayings like "Bless this Mess" are more typical?  Now that the Hispanic population through immigration is becoming more influential, perhaps these charms will make a resurgence in our cultural mash-ups.  I've seen the cultural creep from South to North in Texas, New Mexico and somewhat in Atlanta....
 

Comments

[allison]

We had our home blessed or prayed over, but I don't have any religious symbols on my door. I like the one in the picture. We have a turtle dove that lives on our roof, maybe that's close enough to be lucky!

[Janet]

When we built our house, we asked friends and family members for symbolic objects to put into the foundation blocks. We got a bundle of herbs for fertility (which apparently worked) from Scott's sister, a nail that came from his grandmother's house, a piece of pottery from a potter friend, and numerous other things. And we have an eastern phoebe who nests on the bend of the downspout under the eaves on the west side of the house.