Peggy Arthur

By Peggy Arthur

Greetings!

Let’s reframe the way we view brooms.

For too long, the broom has been dismissed as a mundane domestic object, reduced to cleaning floors and women’s labor. But when we pause, close our eyes, and listen inward, we make room for intuition to take root. That intuition awakens spirit. Through this mythic tissue, where memory, folklore, and imagination meet, we begin to see what has always been there.

The broom is a threshold object. A spiritual tool. And in many traditions and tellings, a feminine instrument of power, protection, and passage.

Across cultures and centuries, brooms have moved quietly through rituals, homes, and communal memory. In the world I am building, one shaped by ancestral rhythm and lived myth, these meanings are not metaphor alone. They are active. They are practiced. They are remembered.

Let us begin there.

The Sacred Sweep: West African Spirituality

In West African traditions, particularly within Yoruba, Akan, and Vodun systems, brooms are not merely cleaning tools. They are instruments of spiritual order.

In many communities, a woman may rise before dawn to sweep the yard or threshold not only for cleanliness, but to clear away negative energy, spiritual debris, or lingering presences. Within folk belief and spiritual imagination, sweeping becomes a conversation with the unseen, a silent chant of intention enacted through motion.

“Ritual sweeping maintains cosmic balance between the seen and unseen realms.”
— Dr. Adebayo Oyebade

These brooms, often made of palm fronds or bundled twigs, may be consecrated or placed near doorways to guard the home. To sweep is to assert dominion, to call in peace, and to align the self with ancestral rhythm. Order is not imposed—it is restored.

Jumping the Broom: Love, Liberation, and Legacy

In enslaved African American communities, where legal marriage was denied, couples jumped the broom to mark their union before spirit, community, and ancestors.

This act echoes threshold rituals found across cultures, including parts of West Africa and Wales, where crossing a boundary signifies transformation. The broom becomes a vessel, not only of love, but of survival. A declaration made in the absence of permission.

“Merged cultural memory, survival, and resistance.”
— Dr. Tyler D. Parry, Jumping the Broom: The Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual

To jump the broom is to cross into a new life and say: We choose each other. We name ourselves. We endure.

The Witch’s Broom: Besoms and the Power to Stand

In European Pagan and Wiccan traditions, the broom, often called a besom, is a tool of sacred preparation.

Used to energetically sweep ritual circles, the besom clears space before spellwork or ceremony. Traditionally handcrafted from woods such as birch, ash, or willow, it represents balance: focused will joined with receptive power.

The image of the witch flying on a broom is often misunderstood. At its core, it reflects untethered feminine agency—the refusal to remain bound. In many folk tellings, the broom is less about escape and more about orientation: knowing where one stands and claiming that ground as sacred.

Intuition, Boundaries, and Protection

Symbolically, the broom teaches us how to move through space with intention.

To sweep is to clear what lingers unseen.
To place a broom by the door is to guard the threshold.
To jump it is to cross into becoming.
To turn it upright or inverted is to disrupt what does not belong.

From Hoodoo traditions to Latinx Curanderismo, brooms appear in limpias, spiritual cleansings that move over bodies and through rooms. These practices, often carried by women, preserve intuitive knowledge and ancestral continuity. The broom remembers what the body already knows.

Reframing the Broom: Ancestral Technology

Let us reclaim the broom, not as a relic of labor, but as ancestral technology.

A wand disguised as wood and twine.
A boundary-marker held by the steady and the watchful.
A tool for clearing, protecting, binding, banishing, inviting, and renewing.

In the mythic world I am building, such tools are not ornamental. They are functional. They respond to rhythm, intention, and lineage. Power does not come from spectacle, it comes from alignment.

Final Reflection: Sweep. Stand. Reclaim.

In your own space, consider:

What are you ready to sweep away?
What threshold are you standing before?
What parts of you have been dismissed as ordinary, yet carry quiet divinity?

Whether you are sweeping a floor, guarding a doorway, or crossing into something new, know this: you are participating in something ancient and alive.

And for those who wish to step further inside this world, subscribers will receive a behind-the-scenes glimpse into one of its keepers. Her name is Lexi. And her broom does not fly.

It listens.

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