The Hearth Keepers Way serves as an introduction to worship, providing an easy to follow ritual outline, a sampling of prayers for various occasions, High Day workings, kinship with a widespread community, and a sense of ownership and definition of one’s hearth. It should be as satisfying for a newcomer to paganism as it is for someone with years of experience.

The Hearth Keepers Way is part of Ár nDraíocht Féin, and its ritual structure is a simplified version of the Core Order of Ritual, but the Way itself is extremely flexible and adaptable, with only a handful of things deemed “essential” and even then, the wording is adaptable to one’s specific needs. Hearth rites are together but apart: we worship under the same Moon, at our connected flames, but what we do and say may be different. There is a comfort in knowing that others elsewhere are performing the same rite. For a solitary practitioner, that shared ritual pattern can ease loneliness in our worship.

The HKW and the ADF Core Order of Ritual are the liturgical structures that I use when I am sharing practice at my Hearth with others, because it is a legible method of worship that new and experienced practitioners alike can follow without much additional explanation. Additionally, my guests and readers should not have to navigate the private shorthand of my personal practice in order to understand the worship at my Hearth, nor should my personal practice be so edited down to lose its magic to accommodate others.

Further, I have an obligation to the folk of ADF and to the divine patrons of the ADF Clergy to continue worshipping in this way as part of my Hearth practice. As a solitary Priestess with a(n unfortunate) vocation to write, it has become my responsibility to engage fully with this way of worship over the next year, as part of my commitment to return and re-formation in several different areas of my spiritual life.

As I work within this devotional structure, I will be focusing on engaging with the Hearth Keepers Way and our Deities through their titles, or their reconstructed Proto-Indo-European names. I will be observing High Day feasts, and the lunar Hearth Keepers Way rituals in this framework. Through this lived experience of hearth religion, I hope to share reflections, prayers, rites, and miscellanea for your consideration and use.