Canny Crafting Traditional Witchcraft

The Housle or Red Meal is a  key ritual in Trad Craft and is similar to the Heathen Blot. This acts as a sacrifice to whatever Deities, spirits and land wights you are working with to aid your craftings. Things like bread and wine, honey and milk are used. These offerings are consecrated in the name of the spirit etc you are working with then ate/drank and the remains put in the housle bowl then the wine can be used to anoint the body and any sacred items or consecrate a place, they are then given to the land or a body of water.

The Red Meal is in fact exactly that. The dead were said to eat red food and remember that apples are foods of the Gods to some of the Pantheons the witch works with. The red of the apples also represents the colour of the life force, the blood.

To eat the red meal enables us to become in the same place as the Ancestors in the underworld. Red wine and bread are what consists as the red meal and these are blessed and consecrated to the Witch-Mother and Witch-Father, the bread of the Lord and the Wine of the Lady but any underworld forces can be called to send their power to this Rite and when eaten, their powers enter into the partakers of the Rite and then when the libation has been placed on the ground/water, the underworld powers then eat a portion of this thus forming a link with the participants, this can then enhance any crafting we are working.