Home Shrine (again)

I see last time I wrote I mentioned that I was moving. Well, I wound up not moving after all, and so my shrine is still the slapdash temporary thing I set up while expecting to be uprooting my life far too soon. I’m putting down roots now instead, and I’m not thrilled with my shrine. There isn’t enough room for it where it is, so there isn’t really space to add much to it - I have to clear off the rest of the table for ritual. My plant as the Tree was a nice idea, but the scale is all wrong; it doesn’t hold much meaning for me at the moment. And I liked the idea of putting it by the window, but it turns out that, living on the ground floor of an apartment building, there’s too much traffic just outside my window for me to be totally comfortable doing ritual there.

I think I know where I want to move it to, though - to the wall that separates my living room from my kitchen, just about in the middle of the living space in my apartment. I have a cabinet I’ve been meaning to move there for a while, and if I can clear off the stuff that currently lives on top of it, it’d be a nice place for an altar. (A good height, too, to stand at.) And I know what to do about the Tree, too - I’m going to make a gem tree with some old malachite and coral I have lying around.
I’m excited to start work, but it’s a long process. First I have to clean out the sewing cabinet that’s currently where I want to move the larger cabinet to, then I have to clean out the large cabinet, then actually move it (which will be exciting on its own, as it’s MASSIVE), then make sure I’ve got room to store everything there. Fortunately I have some vacation coming up this weekend, and I plan to spend some time on this project.

I’m sorry to say I’ve still not been spending much time in nature. The weather’s been poor (as it will tend to be, in Chicago in February) and when the weather’s been nice I’ve had to spend all day at work, which has frankly been making me a little resentful. Meditation has been going well, when I can sit down to do it - I missed three days this week, but I’m still finding that my average meditation session has stretched to over ten minutes at a time of silent meditation, which used to seem impossible.

I’ve also been saying a prayer from Ceiswr Smith’s Book of Pagan Prayer after I finish my meditation. I flip through until I find something that appeals to me, but I can tell that there are a few that are going to become regulars, and a few more that I can make regular with a little editing.

Also, a reminder to myself - I actually finished my first required book about a month ago, but I haven’t written it up yet. I’ll try to get on that this weekend, too.

Altars

I've had a hellishly busy week, so I was relieved to see that this week's Dedicant Path work was simple: build an altar. I already have an altar; how hard could it be to transition it to an ADF style?

Harder than I thought, actually, and also simpler.

The altar was in the back of my mind all week, churning around, and I could never come up with an image I liked. I knew, though, that I wanted it to be in the living room. I live alone, finally, so there's no reason for it to be tucked away. I want to use my altar for more than just high day rituals, and making it easy to reach makes that easier.

main altar

But what to include? I've been pagan for about fifteen years now, and I've accumulated a lot of Pagan Stuff. You know the kind. Candles in every color, bowls and jars and oils and bits of natural debris, athames and wands and divinatory tools of every kind.

In the end, I went for simple, not only because I was pressed for time in the chaos of this week but also because I just found out I'll be moving by the end of the month. I'm an overdecorator by nature, so in my new home I'll probably end up loading a table down with witchy nonsense, but for now I've settled for using my houseplant as the Tree, my cauldron as the Well, and my tripartate candleabra as the Flame, plus my offering cup. It's the bare bones of an altar, and I like it for now.

traveling altar - packed

traveling altar - set up

And then, since I'm getting ready to move and may not have a new home until February, I decided to overhaul my traveling altar, too. I've had this for years, a carved wooden box full of everything I think I might need to do ritual or magic if I'm away from my home altar. This box was cluttered too, so I stripped it down to the basics: a piece of felt for an altar cloth, a broken branch from the trees where I've been doing my nature practice for the Tree, a small dish for the Well, and a candle for the Flame. I added a tiny clay bowl for offerings, a serpent/flame talisman I made that represents Brigid, and a mini Tarot deck for casting omens. (It's handy to have a divination-tool addiction, sometimes.) On second thought, I'll keep my primary Tarot deck on the main altar, too; it's been out, as I do some studying, but there's no reason it can't rest there instead of on the coffee table.

It's a small thing for me, building a new altar, but I'm glad it's done. I could use an excuse for some peace and quiet in the next month.

Pimp My Altar

As usual, September has been a whirlwind of activity. My best friend and my parents visited, I redecorated my livingroom and bought myself a new bed for the bedroom and I dug more seriously into my Irish Gaelic studies again. And I finished my altar.

This is the first non-formal altar I've ever had; when I started practicing seriously I worked out of fairly traditional books, and that and my love for Victorianism in all its forms meant I had a really, really stiff altar that never did see a lot of use. It was very proper and thorough, though. It had a wand, and an athame, and a Goddess candle, and a God candle, and a pentacle, and a cauldron, and a bowl of salt and a bowl of water, and all those other things it's supposed to have. I'm pretty sure it looked exactly like the diagram in Wicca for the Solitary Practitioner, actually.

So I went a bit more freeform this time. I knew I had to keep the three-pronged candlabra; my grandmother bought it for me, probably without knowing really what it was for, but it was the first piece I acquired specifically for my altar and I love it. And since my patroness is Brighid, one of the Celtic triple goddesses, that suggested a layout. The altar is kind of roughly divided into three sections, for Brighid's three aspects as Poet, Smith and Healer, and everything else I felt needed to go on there got put wherever it seemed right. The candles are in the colors of fire -- red for the warmth of the hearth-fire, blue for the middle heat of a cooking fire, and white for the power of the forge. The gold chain is for Ogma, who according to legend invented the Ogham alphabet which continues to annoy archaeologists to this day.

And most of the rest of it just feels right. I no longer really remember where the shell came from, but it's always been on my altar and it wanted to stay there. I always buy new pencils in September, it's like a disease; I'm using them for wands. And...I'm wandering over and touching it every day, not necessarily working with it in the way I used to think of working with my altar, but just going over and saying hi. And that's great.

Starting Over (part two)

Last month, in a fit of frustration, I tore down my old altar. (The fact that I haven't much missed it in a month is not a good sign, I think.) Today, I got me a new altar table.

It didn't cost me anything; I got it from Freecycle, an amazing email barter system. Have something you don't want, you send an email to the list. See something you want, you email someone about their post. Need something in particular, send an email, go out two days later to pick up your brand-new altar table. My old altar table is getting scrubbed down and moved to the living room, and the table it's replacing will go back on Freecycle. It's the new urban ecosystem -- take something out, put something back in.

It's round! I've never had a round altar before; I'll have to rearrange some things. I've always had quite a formal-looking altar, actually, and I think it's time to mix it up a bit. And what shall I do with the top? Shall I paint it? Finish it? Engrave it? Cover it with an altar cloth? Oh, I have so many options, for my current plan is to have it ready for its first dedication on Samhain. It will (hopefully) see use before then; I see no point in making a commitment to something you haven't tried out first.

I'm looking forward to remaking it immensely, actually. I remember the first time I put an altar up properly, and how wonderful it was, and how it felt like an entirely different world from the rest of my bedroom in my parents' house in the middle of nowhere. But I'd been basically moving that altar around ever since; I'm far from the same person I was when I was sixteen. It's definitely time for a change.

Salt of the Earth

When cleaning off my altar to move it, I discovered something of a problem. I'd set this particular altar up in a phase where I was quite into ceremonial magic, everything laid out properly according to all those Wicca 101 books I'd picked up in my first years. Candles, altar cloth, pentacle, goblet, check; some scattered pinecones and summer flowers, check; and...a bowl of salt. Okay, the good tools are obvious, pack them up and go. Most of the natural materials I returned to the garden. But the salt? I couldn't just throw it in the trash; it had been on my altar, and it deserved better than that. I couldn't bury it, as I did the other bits and pieces which wouldn't be coming with me; salted soil is barren, and that's hardly what I intended to leave behind. Eventually I washed it down the sink with water from the bowl on the altar, but it set me thinking.

Salt. Who the hell thought that one up? As a symbol of earth, it hasn't got a lot going for it, other than just sort of generally being a mineral. Lots of other things do that. It's a consumable, yes, and associated with hospitality, but the reason for that is also its rarity -- salt was expensive, for a long time, and it was a sign of hospitality because giving away something that expensive is damn impressive. (Come to think of it, looking at what I paid for the jar of sea salt I've kept on my altar, salt is still expensive.)

So it's supposed to represent Earth. In that case, why not use...earth? Dirt's free. It's plentiful. And when you don't need it anymore, when you've cast something with it and it needs to be properly disposed of, when you just need something fresher, there's an obvious place to put it. This seemed so logical to me that I had to go look in all those Wicca 101 books that I'd kept around and see if they had really told me to put a bowl of salt on my altar. Except they were all packed already. Today I remembered that I was going to do that, so now that my books are all unpacked, I went and looked. And yes, that's exactly what they told me to do, universally and without explanation. (Although Cunningham's Wicca For The Solitary Practitioner says salt or earth can be used, it's salt in all the diagrams.)

Well, who really expected Wicca 101 books to have explanations anyway? Ephilias Levi was slightly more helpful -- in the conclusion to A History of Magic he devotes about a page to alchemical understandings of the elements, although they are other elements in question: alchemists, he tells us, associated spirit with sulphur, fire, and the Father; the 'mediator' (which I do not know enough alchemy to sufficiently explain) with mercury, change, and the Mother; and base matter with salt -- "because of the fixed salt which remains after combustion" -- and the Child, or that which is "subjected to education by nature." In a similar sort of vague Victorian language there is a tenuous connection to Earth mentioned in there as well, but hardly in the Four Elementals sense of the word. So. The Better Magick Through Chemistry crowd associated earth with salt because it's what's left over after you burn up sulphur. (Of course, I have no idea if these apocryphal alchemists did any such thing, but Levi thinks they did, and if a Victorian wrote about it you've probably found its origins in modern practice.)

A quick google through hermetic.com turns up the fact that Crowley and most other hermeticists also seem to follow the salt-for-earth rule, with a couple of glancing references (sadly unsourced) to the Sulphur-Mercury-Salt triad that seems to affirm my suspicion that the source for this practice is in alchemy. There's also a couple of references to anointing with earth and water in the form of salt water, which makes a little more sense, particularly if one lives in the sort of place where one doesn't have to manufacture salt water. In the American Midwest, well.

Unfortunately, that's about the limit of my useful research at the moment; not necessarily because I've run out of resources, but I'm not quite sure where else to look. (This has been my eternal frustration in researching modern Paganism; Llewellyn books don't have bibliographies, and while I'm moderately familiar with Victorian occultists, there's a huge gap in the middle there, not to mention trying to figure out where the Victorians got it in the first place.) Is there anyone out there with some experience or research in early Wicca who can help explain this somewhat baffling phenomenon?

Symbolism is all well and good, after all, and I'll steal drama and Latin and ripped-off yoga from the ceremonialists quite cheerfully, but as for me, the salt is going back in the kitchen cupboard and I'm digging up a piece of the back garden to put on my altar.