Origin 1940 to 1960
A broom used to sweep a space clean before ritual, sweeping out the ordinary rather than the dust. It is stood by a doorway, laid down as a boundary, and jumped over by a couple in a handfasting.
The flying broom is a construction of the witch trials rather than of any practice. It first appears in fifteenth-century trial material and illustration, and the confessions that produced it were extracted under torture. The suggestion that it records the topical use of a psychoactive ointment is a modern hypothesis built on later herbal sources, and it is offered with more confidence in popular writing than the evidence carries.
Facts
Use
Who May Handle ItAdherents of the tradition 1 ConsecrationNot consecrated; an instrument, not a consecrated object 1 Attributions
TraditionWicca, modern Paganism, European folk custom 1 Physical Form
MaterialAsh or birch with birch twigs 1 Origins
Origin Period Learn More
The Broom That Sweeps Out the Ordinary
The besom is a broom used in modern Pagan and Wiccan ritual to sweep a space clean before a working, and what it sweeps away is understood to be not dust but the ordinary and the unwanted.
Ritual cleansing
Before a rite the space is symbolically swept with the besom, clearing it of mundane and negative influences so that it is fit for the working, a cleansing that is of the atmosphere of the place rather than its floor. The broom is also stood by a doorway, laid down as a boundary marker, or used in particular ceremonies, and in some traditions a couple jumps the broom together as part of a wedding, a custom drawn from folk practice. Its function is to mark and to purify the threshold between ordinary space and sacred space.
Folk roots and reclaimed image
The besom draws on European folk custom, in which the household broom carried protective and cleansing associations, and on the folkloric image of the witch broom, which the modern traditions have taken up and turned to their own use. Modern Paganism and Wicca, largely shaped in the twentieth century, gathered such inherited objects and gave them a place in a reconstructed ritual practice, so the besom carries both a genuine descent from folk custom and a meaning assigned to it within the modern revival. As with the cauldron, its use in the circle rests on that double inheritance of old association and recent ordering.
A Farm Craft Long Before It Was a Ritual Tool
A besom is built the way any working broom is built, birch twigs bound tightly around the base of a handle, traditionally ash or hazel, using flexible withies of willow or hazel to lash the bundle on, a genuine rural craft with its own specialist makers, historically called broom squires in parts of Britain, who supplied ordinary farm and household brooms centuries before any Pagan ritual use of the object existed.
From working tool to ritual object
Because the besom was a common household item, its adoption into modern Wiccan and Pagan practice reused an already familiar shape rather than inventing a new one, and most besoms used in ritual today are either bought from the small number of surviving traditional broom makers or built by hobbyist practitioners following the same basic binding technique on a smaller, lighter scale than a working farm broom.
Ritual use and retirement
In ritual practice a besom is generally used to symbolically sweep a space clean of unwanted influence before a rite begins, a gesture rather than actual cleaning, and it lends its name to the custom of jumping the broom at a handfasting. A besom worn down through use is often burned deliberately, at a Beltane fire in particular, rather than thrown out with household rubbish, a small act of respect for an object that has done its job.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Belongs to Tradition
Disciplines That Use This
The broom, used to sweep a space rather than to fly.
Implement Of
Sources
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
Choose a year to see this entry's facts and connections as the atlas records them at that moment: what it held then, what it held instead, and what it had not yet adopted. Choose Present for the current record.