Altars

Altars

The earliest spiritual spaces were natural places like caves, groves, and hilltops. As religions developed, people built temples and shrines, turning ordinary spaces into sacred ones with symbolic decorations. The idea of creating altars and sacred spaces for worship and reflection has endured across faiths.

Your Altar

Creating an altar sets aside a space to communicate with the divine, meditate, pray, ask for advice, and petition the gods. There are generally two types of altars:

  • A working altar, usually a permanent altar in your sacred space used during rituals and spells.
  • A deity altar, dedicated to a specific goddess or god. It is a place to commune with that deity and experience their energies outside of ritual.

An altar can be something as simple or as elaborate as you wish. At its most basic, an altar is any flat surface set aside for spiritual or religious practices. It could be the top of a dresser, a low wooden table, a flat stone, or even just a small cleared space on the floor. Many people designate a specific area, big or small, as a permanent altar space in their home.

The items you place on your altar are a personal choice and depend on your spiritual or religious practices. Some common altar tools and decorations include: candles, incense and a burner, statues or figures of deities, gemstones, a bell, a wand or staff, a chalice or cup, a pentacle or other symbolic disk, photos or images of people or deities you wish to honour, sacred texts or books, and symbols of the elements (earth, air, fire, water, spirit).

Your altar does not need to be elaborate or expensive. You can find or make many items yourself. What matters most is that the space resonates with you and provides a place for you to meditate, conduct rituals and spells, or simply focus your thoughts. You can change the arrangement of your altar as often as you like to reflect the changing seasons or phases of the moon. Your altar is a personal retreat, so set it up in a way that feels right for you.

Permanent or temporary

Altars do not necessarily have to be permanent fixtures or remain static in nature. Rather, practitioners can construct temporary altars for a particular ritual or working and then dismantle the altar once the ritual or working has concluded. In addition to indoor altars, individuals may opt to create altars outside in natural settings using found objects such as stones, leaves, flowers, or branches. Some spiritual practitioners like to design altars that reflect the changing of the seasons, adorning them with seasonal colours, relevant plants, and symbolic decorations that represent the current season.

Temporary altars provide a number of benefits compared to permanent altars. They allow for more flexibility in ritual and magical workings. They also enable practitioners to tailor their altars specifically to the purpose and intention of a particular working. Creating seasonal altars is a wonderful way to stay attuned to the cycles of nature and to decorate one's sacred space in a way that shifts along with the progression of the seasons. Whether indoor or outdoor, permanent or temporary, altars provide a focal point for intention, manifestation, and reverence.

Privacy of practice

If you feel unable to openly express your spiritual beliefs with your close ones, you may want to consider setting up a simple private altar. Rather than prominently displaying a statue of a chosen deity which could raise questions from others, you could use more subtle symbols and representations that have meaning for you but would not overtly signify a particular spiritual practice to anyone else.

For example, you might incorporate candles, fabric and textiles in certain colours and patterns, crystals or gemstones that you find spiritually significant, artwork or posters with related symbolism, natural materials from the earth like stones, leaves or flowers, or other items that hold spiritual meaning and connection.

With a bit of creativity, you could design an altar that is uniquely meaningful to you but remains purposefully ambiguous in its imagery and symbols. In this way, no one who enters your space would necessarily need to know that your choice of décor and the assortment of items on display are actually meant to privately honour and connect with your deity or deities in your own spiritual practice. Your altar can be a safe, sacred space where you feel free to express yourself and your faith without openly declaring it to others or raising questions about beliefs you may not wish to discuss.