The besom is the one object everyone associates with witchcraft and almost nobody uses properly. It is not a broom you have decorated. It is not for flying. It is not, in the Scottish tradition, for jumping over at a wedding. What it actually does is narrower, older and considerably more useful than any of that.

What it is

A besom is a bundle of twigs bound to a handle. The word is Old English, besema, and it means exactly that: a bundle broom, as distinct from a flat brush.

The traditional British construction is three woods, and each is doing a job:

  • Birch for the brush. Betula, Gaelic beithe (BEH-uh). Fine, springy twigs that sweep well. Birch is the tree of beginnings and of purification, and it is the first letter of the Ogham alphabet, though note that the Ogham letter names are Old Irish rather than Scottish Gaelic.
  • Ash for the handle. Fraxinus, Gaelic uinnseann (OONSH-un). Straight, strong, and the traditional wood for tool handles and spear shafts across northern Europe for entirely practical reasons before any symbolic ones.
  • Willow for the binding. Salix, Gaelic seileach (SHEL-uch). Pliable when green, tightens as it dries.
  • Broom, Cytisus scoparius, Gaelic bealaidh (BYAL-ee), gives its name to the object in English and was used for the brush where birch was scarce. Note it is toxic and should not be ingested.

The materials are chosen because they work. The symbolism arrived afterwards, which is the usual order of events and worth saying out loud.

What it is actually for

One job, and it is not sweeping.

A besom sweeps a space energetically, not physically. The bristles are traditionally held just above the floor. You are not cleaning. If the floor needs cleaning, clean it first with an ordinary brush, because a besom used as a household broom will wear out and lose whatever distinction you were giving it.

This is the whole technique and it takes one line to state: you move what is in a space toward an exit, and you put it out.

Widdershins, tuathal (TOO-uh-hul), against the sun, to strip a space out. Sunwise, deiseil (JESH-al), to settle and gather in afterwards.

Direct with your dominant hand, the sending hand; steady the handle with your non-dominant.

The besom is the dry counterpart of the water and smoke in saining. Same operation, same direction of travel, same destination. Where saining fills a volume, the besom moves along a plane. In a full clearing I use both: sweep first, then water, then smoke, then open everything.

The three things everybody gets wrong

One: flying.

The flying ointment tradition is real, it is European, and it is documented in trial records and in early modern medical writing. What it involved was preparations containing tropane alkaloids from plants in the nightshade family, applied to the skin, producing genuine sensations of flight and dissociation.

Those plants will kill you. Henbane, deadly nightshade, mandrake and datura are among the most dangerous plants in Europe, the therapeutic window is narrow to non-existent, and there is no safe way to do this at home. I am mentioning it because it is genuinely part of the history and because I would rather you heard the warning here than found a recipe elsewhere.

The broom in that context, where it appears at all, was an applicator. It is not the point of the story and I would not build a practice on it.

Two: jumping the besom.

Widely presented as a Celtic or Scottish handfasting custom. It is not.

Jumping the broom is very strongly associated with enslaved African Americans in the United States, who were denied legal marriage and used it to make a binding public commitment anyway. It is also attested among Romani communities in Britain. It is a real, meaningful and specific custom belonging to specific peoples.

There is no good evidence for it as a Scottish wedding tradition, and the phrase "living over the brush" in English dialect referred to an irregular union rather than a ceremony, which is closer to the opposite of what modern pagan wedding writing claims.

If you are Black or Romani, it is yours. If you are neither, and you are looking for a Scottish handfasting element, use the red thread. It is ours and it is well attested.

Three: the phallic and the feminine.

The reading of the handle as masculine and the brush as feminine is twentieth century, largely Wiccan, and entirely a modern synthesis. Use it if it means something to you. Do not call it ancient.

Making one

Genuinely worth doing, and it takes an afternoon.

  • Handle. A straight length of ash or hazel, cut in autumn or winter when the sap is down, about shoulder height. Ask before you cut. Take from a tree that can spare it, and leave something.
  • Brush. A generous bundle of birch twigs, cut long, ideally in winter when they are bare and springy.
  • Binding. Green willow withies, or waxed twine if you cannot get willow.
  • The making. Soak the willow so it bends. Lay the birch round the base of the handle, butt ends up, overlapping the last few inches of the shaft. Bind tightly, working round several times, and bind again a few inches down. Trim the brush ends level. Leave it to dry, and expect to re-tighten the binding once as the willow shrinks. Nine bindings if you want it permanent. Three if it is seasonal.
  • Consecrating it is optional and the tradition is thin. What I would do instead is use it, once, properly, on your own house, and let that be the making.

Keeping it

  • Bristles up. This is the one storage instruction with real weight behind it, and the practical reason is sound: standing a besom on its brush splays and breaks the twigs. Stand it on its handle, or hang it.
  • By the door. Which is where the tradition puts it, and which is consistent with everything else on this site about thresholds. A besom by the door is a ward in its own right, and there is a persistent British custom of laying one across a doorway when the house is left empty.
  • Do not lend it. Widespread, and I keep it. A tool that carries the sweep of your house should not go and sweep somebody else's.
  • Retire it properly. Burn it, or return the wood to the ground. Do not put it in the bin.

The thing worth taking

Underneath the mythology, the besom is a piece of household technology that says something specific: a space accumulates, and it needs clearing, and clearing is a physical act you perform with your hands rather than a state you achieve by intending it.

That is a good discipline. It is also why I would rather people swept their houses than bought another crystal.

Sources

  • Vickery, R. (2019). Vickery's Folk Flora. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, on birch, broom and willow in British use. Free archive: Plant-Lore.
  • Milliken, W. & Bridgewater, S. (2004). Flora Celtica: Plants and People in Scotland. Birlinn, for besom-making and the working uses of birch and broom.
  • Grieve, M. (1931). A Modern Herbal. Full text, on broom and its toxicity.
  • Hutton, R. (1999, rev. 2019). The Triumph of the Moon. Oxford University Press. On which elements of modern besom lore are twentieth-century in origin.
  • Harner, M. (1973). The Role of Hallucinogenic Plants in European Witchcraft, in Hallucinogens and Shamanism. Oxford University Press. The standard reference on flying ointments; read alongside more sceptical later scholarship.
  • Parry, T. D. (2020). Jumping the Broom: The Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual. University of North Carolina Press. The definitive account, and the correction to the Celtic claim.
  • Opie, I. & Tatem, M. (1989). A Dictionary of Superstitions. Oxford University Press, for besom customs with dated attestations.
  • Plant identification and toxicity: Royal Horticultural Society, potentially harmful plants and Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland.

Do not experiment with nightshade-family preparations. Henbane, belladonna, datura and mandrake are lethal and there is no safe domestic dose.

Related: [Saining]; [Burning to Break]; [Liminal Plants]; [Iron, Salt and the Threshold]; [Rowan Tree and Red Thread]