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CASSANDRA EASON

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Creating an Altar

CREATING AN ALTAR

PREPARATION

Making a Sacred Space

Remember the special places you created in childhood. Mine was under the living room table that was covered by a thick dark green velvet cloth. There I played for hours with the button jar that held pearl buttons, sequins, rhinestone beads and all manner of broken necklaces. My outdoor place in the city centre terrace in Birmingham where I grew up, was the swing attached to a tree that stood in the back yard in a circle of earth and in summer was covered with yellow flowers. As I swayed backwards and forwards, my sturdy little legs pumping like pistons, I wove my fantasies, flying  over the smoking chimney tops to the green hills where bluebells grew wild.

In adulthood our special place can get surrendered to the pressures of communal working and living. The special place is one that we need to recreate inside ourselves as well as an actual physical location and it is worthwhile spending time recapturing that stillness, sitting in a clump of bushes in the garden or making a screen of plants on your balcony so you get used to that wonderful feeling of being invisible to the everyday world once more.

Making an indoor altar or sanctuary

If you share your home, it can be quite difficult to create a place of your own, but this in itself is a first valuable step in reclaiming your psychic and well as your physical personal space, especially if you have children. You can dedicate your space to nature, to your personal god/goddess form or as a personal shrine where the positive energies of special treasures and your private rituals can accumulate, offering a sanctuary from the world and a repository of power and protection.

You can use an attic, a basement, a summer house or conservatory or even a garden shed, a curtained off an area of your bedroom or adapt part of a home such as an office or study. For the latter, turn off and cover all computers etc and temporarily disconnect phones and faxes, when you are working.

Creating an Altar

Though altars summon up images of vast churches with golden crosses or B movies with dark-robed figures sacrificing damsels on a stone slab in the middle of a deserted moorland, an altar is in magical terms simply the term for a sacred working space on which you place your tools, candles, incense and symbols for rituals. It can be something that you can make from objects around you (see below).

In practice many people use their altar every day, as a focus for quiet meditative moments, perhaps at the end of a busy day or early in the morning. Such use does not make it any less special. Indeed by becoming a part, albeit a separate segment of your daily world, it becomes charged with your own essential magical qualities and provides a repository of magical and healing energies, even if you only spend a few moments each evening in personal informal work.

Informal magic using your altar

Each night or whenever you have time, you can explore your inner psychic powers in different ways.

For example, you could gaze into a candle or scry into a bowl of water, on the surface of which you have dripped coloured inks.

You could hold the different crystals you place on your altar and allow impressions to pass through your fingertips that may be manifest as images, sounds or feelings. This psychic art is called psychometry and is one that will emerge spontaneously. To improve your finances you could place a pot of basil herbs, surrounded by golden coloured coins and light a green or golden prosperity candle while visualising golden coins showering upon you.

You could place a photograph of a sick friend and surround it with pink flowers, pink rose quartz crystals and a circle of tiny pink candles; after sending a message of healing or visualised golden light, you could blow out the candles clockwise, sending the healing energies to where they are needed. It is your place and the rituals are limited only by your own desires and ingenuity.

An outdoor sanctuary

You can set up a temporary altar in a grove of trees, create a circle of small stones on a beach or river bank or draw a sacred circle within which to work in sand or soil. However, even with a small garden patio or balcony you can set up a more permanent magical sanctuary that you can illuminate with garden torches, perhaps at the four main compass points. In even a small garden. you can create a circle of stones. I have adapted a filled-in pond as a Native American style medicine or power wheel with stones marking the circumference, paths at the four main directions to the centre where a big stone lion sits as the focus of power. I have flowers and crystals in the four quadrants and use it for meditation and ritual.

You can create your magical outdoor place with a circle of fragrant herbs and perhaps a water feature in the centre, my own favourite idea, for outdoor rituals.

You may wish to leave stone or treated wood statues there, perhaps a creature that suggests to you the power of each of the main four directions, for example an eagle in the east.

Setting up the altar

You need a table or cupboard – you can use the drawers for storage and cover it with a cloth. Circular or square are both sacred shapes and easy to divide into quadrants for the four elements: Earth, Air, Fire and Water that are central to traditional magic and play a part even in informal ritual.

A round altar, the shape of the sacred circle, works especially well.

A piece of unpolished wood such as hazel, ash, rowan or oak one of the magical trees or uncut stone supported on stones or bricks will do, as long as it is high enough so you are not constantly stooping.

If you have a sheltered. private place in your garden or back yard, and good weather, you can adapt a tree stump or tall flat rock as your work space. But perhaps the best altars of all are those impromptu ones you make on top of a standing stone with a circle of your favourite crystals or on rock on the beach with a circle of seaweed and shells to mark the directions. Even today in the local woods I occasionally come across circles woven of branches or a carefully constructed ring of perfectly matching white pebbles that would have dazzled luminous in the moonlight.

During formal rituals when you have cast a circle, you may want to move all the way round your altar and so have the altar in the centre although some practitioners position the altar in the north of the circle and stand in the South facing North.

The altar need not be large.

The central position of the altar/circle represents the realm of Spirit or Akasha in which the other Four Elements are combined to create a greater energy that can transform thoughts into actuality.

Traditionally, in formal magic, artefacts are placed on an altar and candles lit with the power hand (the one you write with), but unless this suits you, it is not vital.

Preparing your Indoor Space

Traditionally, witches would sweep out an area intended for magical work, having sprinkled it with lavender; modern Wiccans have continued this practice. It is especially important in the modern world where there is so much altar and to keep this physically and psychically cleansed.

• First clear out any actual clutter and find a box or cupboard in which you can store any items not on display on your altar that you will use in your work, everything from Tarot cards to pots of dried herbs.

• Cleanse your indoor space of any actual dust as close to dawn as possible so that the new light floods in as you work.

• Open the windows and door of the room.

•  If the floor is carpeted, scatter dried lavender or chamomile flowers (the kind used to make tea) or salt a traditional cleanser. You can also use fresh pine needles or chopped sage.

• Feel free to use a vacuum cleaner, the modern equivalent of the broom, to clean up the flowers making nine anticlockwise circular movements and reciting: over and over:

‘One for joy, two for gladness,

Three and four to banish sadness,

Five and six away with anger,

Seven, eight, nine linger no longer.’

• Alternatively, use a broom and sweep the flowers out of the door, again with nine anti-clockwise movements and chants.

Cleansing an Outdoor Sacred Space with Smudging.

You can of course use smudging effectively to cleanse your indoor place, but it is especially potent outdoors and if you are using smoke inside you should ventilate the room well and avoid using it in the presence of young children, pregnant woman and anyone with respiratory problems .

The smoke from herbs has been central to magic and spirituality from ancient times. Herbs both in their natural state and as incenses (mixed with a resin to create a rich, long-lasting stream of smoke) have been used in many cultures and ages to cleanse homes and the auras or psychic energy fields of people, as well as to make offerings to the deities. Herb smudging or smoke ritual has, however, re-entered the modern westernised world after centuries of decline from the unbroken tradition of Native North American Spirituality. Smudge sticks in cedar or sage are easily obtainable and very easy to use; you just light the top, allow the flame to die down and then blow gently on the glowing herbs to create a steady stream of smoke

• Again work as the sun is rising.

• Walk around the area you plan to use, whether temporary or permanent,  in a large circle, noting any natural boundaries such as bushes and trees  that can form a shield just outside the circumference. Indoors the walls would form the enclosure.

• Light a sage smudge stick, the kind made from sagebrush, from a white candle on a broad metal tray, placed in the centre of the visualised circle. If it is windy, have the candle in a sheltered, safe place so you can easily relight the smudge if it goes out.

• Alternatively use a firm broad pine or mint incense stick with a handle you can hold. There are special outdoor ones.

• Beginning in the east, the direction of the rising sun, make a waist high clockwise circle of smoke until you have created a complete circle. As you smudge chant:

‘Darkness flee, blessed be.

`Keep light always within me.’

You can also say this when you begin work and when you end, in your permanent outdoor space.

If you are pregnant or suffer from a respiratory complaint or other chronic illness you may prefer even for outdoor work to create your circles with a small bowl of spring water in which three pinches of sea salt have been added and stirred clockwise with a silver paper knife or crystal quartz. If in doubt consult a doctor or pharmacist.

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