My Altar and My Devotional Practice

I thought it would be good to talk about what’s on my altar, which necessarily means talking a bit about my devotional practice. Both the altar and the devotional practice are works in progress. Writing about them will undoubtedly help me think of ways they can be improved.

I’ll start with the altar itself: it is a small, roughly cube-shaped cabinet I bought at Goodwill for like $10 when I was a teenager. It’s particle board with a glass door. There’s a glass shelf inside, giving it two layers of storage space. I have trouble picturing a standard household application for such a short cabinet but it’s just the right height for use when I’m sitting on the floor, and since I like to sit on the floor when I’m doing ritual or magical work, it’s perfect. I’d be open to upgrading it to something higher-quality and more attractive but any replacement would have to be equally functional.

Inside the altar are extra altar cloths, extra candles, extra matches, a couple crystals, the box for the “bell,” my tarot and oracle decks, my tarot books, what’s supposed to be a magical notebook that I don’t actually use because the paper is terrible, some paperwork from a John Beckett class, some materials from old spells, and an old Llewellyn Witches’ Calendar. I do not read tarot or write anything on the altar – a desk works much better for those things – but this is where I store all things related to divination and magic.

On top of the altar is an altar cloth that I made. I have a couple of these. They’re really easy to make: I just hem a rectangle of fabric of the correct dimensions. Eventually, I’d like to have one for each of the eight seasons of the Wheel of the Year. I always choose fabrics that are relatively plain because I don’t want the altar cloth to distract from the objects on the altar.

The candles are all in dishes to catch any wax drips. There’s also a dish in which I set spent matches. All of these dishes are terra cotta plant saucers. Using plant saucers as candleholders was my friend’s brilliant idea. Plant saucers do the job perfectly: the smaller sizes are just right for candles, it’s easy to scrape wax off their glazed surfaces, and I think they look really nice. Plus, they’re easy to find and very inexpensive. I have two slightly different sizes on my altar, which isn’t intentional; at some point I will get some more of one size so they can all match. I had a good candle holder idea of my own but I haven’t found exactly the right thing yet. I’ll write about them when I get them. I figure it will be nice to be able to swap things out occasionally.

In the bottom left corner of my altar is a bell, of sorts. It’s actually a metal bowl with a wooden mallet for striking the edge (it looks like a singing bowl but it doesn’t work that way). It sits on a little cushion. I strike the bowl at the beginning and end of every prayer session, meditation, or ritual. The idea is to use sound to demarcate sacred time and space. I’ve also used Moroccan finger cymbals for this but they’re a bit more fiddly, plus mine need re-stringing. Apparently I don’t own an actual bell. The bowl works just fine, though. It produces a very pleasant ring when struck.

The dish in the bottom right is for spent matches. I use up at least a couple matches during each prayer session and I need a safe place to set them. I haven’t been good about cleaning this dish out when I’m done but I definitely think that needs to change. It’s much better to start with a clean space every time than to let garbage pile up! The photo shows a candle for lighting the other candles but that didn’t work out; it just dripped wax everywhere. I just use matches.

I have a few different types of candles on my altar. I’m not entirely happy with any of them. The pure beeswax candles in the back, which are from a local artisan, are the only candles of decent quality. For the rest of the candles I’ve been using whatever is on hand. That has been votives, plain tea lights, scented and coloured tea lights, shabbat candles I bought by accident (these actually worked the best, but I gave the rest of the box to my Jewish mom!), and cut-up tapers. I’d replace them all with beeswax candles except all the options from my local supplier are too tall or too wide. Candles need to burn for a certain length of time in order for the top layer of wax to melt completely; if you don’t do this, they’ll tunnel and much of the candle will be wasted. The beeswax candles are two inches wide, which means they need to burn for several hours at a time! The reason the shabbat candles worked the best is that they’re both short and narrow – they’re designed to be lit for shorter periods of time. I need to come up with a better candle situation. I want the candles to be high-quality, preferably beeswax, and to be the right width for a burn time of 15 minutes to an hour. I’ve yet to find something perfect.

When I’m doing a basic devotional ritual, I start by lighting the central candle. This is another way of creating sacred space: I use the act of lighting the candle and the sight of the flame as a way of drawing my attention to the present moment and the ritual at hand. I use the flame of this candle to light all the other candles (I dip the matches in the flame rather than striking them). It is the first candle I light and the last one I extinguish.

My first prayer is to the spirits of the elements and the directions. I call the spirits and then light the elements and directions candle as I say a prayer to them. The spirits of the elements and directions are represented on my altar by a candle in the south, a wand in the west, rocks in the north, and a pot of water in the east. I know these associations aren’t traditional! My thinking on this topic comes from Jailbreaking the Goddess by Lasara Firefox Allen, which suggests that you conceptualize the elements in whatever direction makes most sense for your locale. I have placed fire in the south because that is the direction of the sun; air in the west because that is the direction from which the prevailing winds come; earth in the north because the Canadian Shield is to the north; and water in the east because Lake Ontario is to the east of my home.

The fire candle is in a special etched glass candle holder made for me by my sibling. I made the wand from a fallen branch of a beautiful ancient pin oak tree that used to stand in the park behind my house (the tree has since been cut down). One of the rocks is a rhodochrosite crystal from the Sweet Home mine in Colorado; I bought it when I visited my sister in Fort Collins, where she was living at the time. The other is a nearly spherical rock I found as a child in the Swift River in New Hampshire. The ceramic water vessel is also from Colorado; I know, it’s supposed to be a joke about marijuana, but it is a nice ceramic piece and perfectly in scale with the rest of the altar.

While I will most likely keep these same associations between elements and directions, I’m open to switching out their representative figures on my altar. In particular, I’m not sure why a wand represents air; I suspect that comes from Scott Cunningham. However, it seems to me like a wand has its own function – directing energy for casting a circle, etc. – and having to borrow it for that purpose from the elements and directions setup just feels weird.

My second prayer is to the spirits of the land and my third prayer is to the ancestors. I currently have no land spirit or ancestor representations on my altar except the candles I light as I say their respective prayers. There’s no good reason for that; I just haven’t figured out what I’d like to use to represent land spirits and ancestors.

My final prayers are to the Gods. The Gods to whom I pray are Brigid and Cernunnos. In no way do I intend them to represent a generic “Goddess” and “God” here; they are simply the two deities with whom I have a connection at this time. It’s likely that I will form relationships with additional deities in the future, at which point I will add statues and candles to represent them. The statues are from Blagowood, a Ukrainian artisan whose work can be found on Etsy. I love these statues and would gladly purchase from Blagowood again.

I have Brigid’s crosses on my altar in these photos. I made them out of paper and they were on my altar for a while but I eventually removed them because they weren’t really serving a purpose.

These photos are all older. They were taken when my altar was in a different room, which used to be mine and is now my daughter’s. My altar is now in a ground-level room that also holds all my hobby stuff. The room is cluttered and disorganized to the point that I don’t want to spend time there. It was supposed to get fixed up nicely before my daughter was born but she arrived six weeks early, and it was left in a state of chaos. Eighteen months later, I’m at a point where I can start to chip away at the mess. I am determined to clean up to the point that I feel comfortable resuming a daily devotional practice. Saying that a daily devotional practice is important to me is an understatement; rather, I’m not sure who or what I am without it.

Writing this post helped me clarify what needs to change about my altar and my practice. While there is certainly stuff that could be improved, the main issues are with the ritual format and especially the prayers, which on the whole are lacking. My goals for the coming days are to clean up the altar (and the space around it as best I can); think about what items can be immediately swapped or added to make improvements and what new items I need to make, search for, or shop for; actually write down my ritual format to make sure everything makes sense and flows well; and really focus on adding meaningful prayers. I suspect I will be memorizing some that were written by other people and writing some myself, but we’ll see.