 Hello people. I'm Ginny Metherill. I'm a fourth generation witch. I'm here today to talk about the trusty tools that a witch might use in her craft. This is the Halloween special and today's video, of course, is all about the rather magnificent witch's broom. Now there's been so much discussed about the trusty broomstick and therefore I'm here to set the record straight. I want to give you the traditional rites and ritual uses, not all of them, but an overview and also a little spell that you can do at Halloween with your friends and families, part of your festivities to celebrate that wonderful Sabbath. So there's been so much written about the broomstick and so much speculation and quite frankly, in my humble opinion, most of it is guff. All that stuff about male and female parts of the broom. I think it is more wicked to have a male, female aspect to the things that you use, but for me as a traditional earth magic witch, I just, it's a broom and I use it as a broom. I use it to sweep my yard, I just sweep out my stables, I use it to sweep. I also use it as part of my craft and one of the things I want to talk to you about today is the ritual use of broomsticks for a traditional witch. Witches were eager at home with this style of bursam or a traditional broom. It didn't really matter because it's not what it looks like or how it behaves. The reason why these became so associated with witches is because these brooms are the country brooms. They are what could be made pretty much immediately by any country folk from the wood and the willow around them and that's what they were normally made from, willow. Now willow as a tree is beloved by the moon. I think it might be something to do with the rather silvery moonlit willow flowers that they produce in the spring which are so beautiful and then float about making my house look so magical when they spread their seed. Willow has great propensities for guardianship. It was planted in ancient Britain by the people over their burial chambers to guard the spirits from harm. Willow is known to have this aura around it which is the energy that it produces from its inner bark and wood and this aura is known as blessing everything that the willow touches which is a lovely thing to have when you're sweeping out your home that blesses your house as you go. And a willow broom is a very traditional part of a witch's craft because of course what do you do with a broom? You sweep. Now you might think what can you do with just a sweeping but a sweeping gesture can be used for so many different things. Traditionally these are how they were used. Broms were used to sweep out negative and bad influence and so here is a little spell for you to do on Halloween with your friends and family. Let each of you sweep out an area of the room that you're in. So then get the lead person to use the broom and sweep the ill luck and the bad influences over the threshold of your door and this will ensure that you have swept everything bad from your house in preparation for the start of the new year. The best time to cast this spell is just before sunset because as soon as the sun has set on Halloween that is the start of the new year. So that's quite a fun thing that you can do as part of your festivities meanwhile serving pumpkin seeds if you haven't seen my pumpkin video which I'll put here because that is another one of my Halloween shorts. If you look at any old magic books they will talk about the sweeping magic. It can be used in so many different ways you can adapt it however you feel it would work for you. Quite often traditional witches would have the right hand for sweeping it in and the left hand for sweeping it out. I personally don't find that that rings true for me however I do know quite a few other witches where it rings true for them so it is very much a personal preference whether you feel that with your right hand you're sweeping in the good stuff and your left hand you're sweeping out the bad stuff or it might be the other way round depending on you really personal preference here. The Halloween is obviously the end of the old year and the beginning of the new year and so with your broom you can use it to richly clean everywhere. If you were casting a circle on Halloween I would certainly use a broom to sweep out the negative and bad energy from within the circle so that you richly cleanse your working area before you begin. Another great aspect of the broomstick was it was used for healing magic. Now this is not something that I'm particularly good at it is not my skill set I mean I can do it but I do find it quite difficult and it's not something that comes very naturally to me there are other people I know who are brilliant at this sort of healing magic. So sweeping magic can be used to cure ailments and I always advise people go to a doctor anyway but in addition to going to your doctor or your vet because it's really good for animals this one a lot of witches would use a broomstick to sweep over the affected part of the body that needs healing they would use whichever hand was their banishing hand it could be the left could be the right depends and they'd sweep the ailment away from the body and then they would use their right hand or their healing hand to sweep in the healing influences so left hand to cast out right hand to cast in likewise sweeping magic could be used to produce curses and to bring ill intent by sweeping it over the threshold of those wrong doers or enemies of the witch now I'm not going to go into detail about how you would do that it's not something that I would do being a white witch however there is the propensity to use evil if you're going to go down that path be warned it's not a path I can recommend because it is very difficult to control the reaction that you're going to get from causing ill intent now there are lots and lots and lots of stories about witches flying on broomsticks of course there are and I wanted to just briefly talk about ergot poisoning now ergot was a fungus that grew on the rye grain which they used to make bread out of until they discovered that wheat had a much more strong resistance to ergot and so now we have wheat-based bread that many people thought that ergot was literally part of the bread it was so common that ergot poisoning causes all sorts of mental aberrations hallucinations psychotic episodes belief in the ability to fly and a lot of people said that the witches used to rub their broomsticks with ergot so that they could get a sexual thrilling hallucinogen through their feminine parts uh through their broomstick but to me to my mind this is ridiculous if you're going to do that surely you'd use a brush it's a bit more useful anyway it was written about by a lot of people but every single person who wrote about this was a witch detractor so it was in their interest to say that these were very evil you know overly sexual women who were using you know household crafts in an evil way quite frankly this sounds all like anti-witch propaganda to me anyway I don't know it was first only ever written about by people who were anti-witch and wanted to burn them at the stake now the ergot poisoning of course has led people to saying that witches would use their broomsticks to fly now everybody knows that you can't fly on a broomstick however I personally think that there might be a way if you look at all the monks in Tibet who are levitating there is no reason why you shouldn't be able to levitate on a broom something that I will work on I think it's going to take me a good 10 further years to get it right in my head I have the theory of how you would fly on a broom so we'll see shall we watch this space you of course will be the first person to know should I ever fly on a broom but I personally believe that you can I really hope you enjoyed this video do let me know in the comments below whether you're going to do the ritualistic sweeping out of your household on Halloween it's a really fun spell to do especially with young children especially with a besam broom because they do love a broom that looks like this it makes them joyful it makes me joyful actually it's very good broom and I'll see you flying about in my next video