She was invoked to sweep away her worshipers’ transgressions. In her rites, priests burned black incense and laid brooms made from rushes across the fire. In pre-Colombian Mexico, the Aztecs worshiped Tiazolteotl who was usually depicted carrying or riding a broom. If rain continues for too long, farmers cut out paper images of brooms and paste them on their doors and fences to bring clear weather and sunshine. She is known as the “Lady with the Broom,” and she lives on the Broom Star where she presides over good weather. In China, the broom is a sign of the goddess Sao Ch’ing Niang or Sao Ch’ing Niang-Niang. This common household tool is so sacred, in some parts of the world there are broom deities. If they wished to dissolve the marriage, one or both would simply reversed the process, jumping backward over the broom, before the same witnesses. The couple would leap over a broom placed diagonally in a doorway without dislodging it.
Gypsies in Wales kept the old custom of the broomstick wedding for some time.
According to Yorkshire belief (and Appalachia and rural country folk), if a young girl inadvertently stepped over a broom handle, she would be a mother before a wife.
For this reason, brooms were long used in handfasting rituals (the broom leap). Though considered primarily a female icon due to its domestic use, it is also a fertility symbol for both sexes –the shaft and the brush denoting the union of both sexes. The broom has long been associated with magick due to its symbolic shape.
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