When the moon is thinning, the house grows crowded with what the weeks have left behind. Old arguments hang in the corners like cobweb; sorrow pools under the furniture where no broom has reached.
A home holds the memory of everything spoken within it. To sweep widdershins beneath a waning moon is to turn the wheel backward, unwinding what has gathered, until the rooms ring clean and silver as a struck bell. This is not tidying — it is asking the house to let go.
The Working
- On a waning moon after dusk, light a single candle and a stick of incense, and carry both to the innermost room of the house.
- Ring a bell once in the center of that room, and listen until the sound has fully died.
- Take up a broom and sweep widdershins — against the sun’s turning — working from the heart of the home toward the outer door.
- At each threshold you cross, ring the bell again and let the incense smoke drift through the doorway before you.
- Sweep all you have gathered into a line of salt laid across the final threshold.
- Speak the incantation, then sweep the salt and everything it holds out over the doorstep and into the night.
- Snuff the candle at the open door, and shut it gently on a quiet house.
The Incantation
Backward turns the paling moon,
backward sweeps this borrowed room.
Out the sorrow, out the sound,
out the grey that gathered round.
Bell and smoke and salt agree:
what is spent, I set thee free.
Silver-clean the house shall keep,
till the wheel turns round to sleep.
The rooms will feel wider by candlelight, the air scoured and still. Leave the salt where it fell until morning, then give it to the wind.