10. Magic - Altars

Altars are focal points for our prayers and meditations.

A key piece of designing a personal ritual practice, altars are sacred spaces where you can place, regard, and work with your magical objects, symbols, spells and other written intentions. Altars can be any size, and located wherever suits you – a shelf, dresser top, small table, or plant stand works well. Cover the altar with a cloth that feels appropriate for the season – a scarf, handkerchief, or any pretty piece of fabric. On the altar, place things you hold dear and that you wish to use as intentional, directional seeds – photos of loved ones or ancestors, candles, crystals, shells, beads, bells, coins are all things typically seen on an altar. An altar thus decorated is a focal point for your prayers and meditations.

Altars are most powerful when they are active; that is to say, when there is a representative object of each of the four elements: earth, fire, air and water. These can be represented through many objects, drawn from a variety of traditions: earth – a pinch of soil, sand, or rice, a stone or shell, fire – a lit candle or incense, air – a feather or leaf, bell or other noisemaker, or even the incense smoke itself, and water – a few drops or more in a bowl, glass or other container. If your spiritual practice includes other elements, such as metal or wood from Chinese tradition, you may wish to include these also. Place your elements on the altar in a way that pleases you.

Your altar is a place for centring, grounding, offering, worship and gratitude. No matter how full your everyday life may be, taking a moment or two each day to behold your altar and draw your attention inwards to your energetic body, downwards to the earth, and upwards to the heavens, is a simple yet effective way to remember who you are and what you are doing here. You can write down your struggles and pains and place them upon the altar to encourage their healing. Similarly, writing your desires and wishes and leaving them on the altar serves as a daily reminder of what you are aiming to bring into being.

Before the altar, you might offer prayers of praise and thanks for the day to come, time which has passed, blessings received and lessons learnt. This may be a challenging thing to do at first, especially for those of us who have been indoctrinated in colonial and patriarchal religious traditions which we may have rejected, but still leave a bad taste in our mouths. Many of our ancestors had their spiritual practices stolen, destroyed or tainted by religions forced upon us. As such, we may need to untangle our sense of ritual at the altar from that which we may have grown up with, or at least, adapt it to our current modes of thinking and living.

Worship at an altar of your own making does not mean offering praise to a distant, judgmental and vengeful, white patriarchal God. It means that you are acknowledging your place as a human being on this sacred planet Earth, the only one of its kind of which we are aware, suspended in a gigantic galaxy amongst infinitely many other galaxies. Like the atom, the ant, and the astral bodies, you are both humble and great, minuscule and massive at once. This is a completely different mode of spirituality then that which seeks to tell us we are nothing compared to an Almighty God.

At the altar, we recognise that we are within and part of the creative life force that encompasses all. What we place upon the altar is a reflection of us. Similarly, we are reflected in it: the earth is our bones, water is our blood and in the cells of our flesh, air is our breath, fire is the internal heat, prana or qi, the energy of life. The very miracle of our lives, and the fact that we are made of the same material as the stars, is more than sufficient justification for worship, offering rationale for a mystical approach to life. Filled with this sense of awe and wonder, a natural next sentiment is gratitude for the gift we have been given – the chance to shape this life in conjunction with others and to make of it what we will, to the best of our ability, with the people, beings, and surroundings with whom we share it.