Altar-ation

Part 1 in my series about the spiritual toys and tools that have remained a part of my practice (or are part of it again, or have become important to me since I’ve started getting my groove back).

For most of the last decade my principal altar has been a sawed-off and refinished organ bench that was once my grandmother’s. I love the piece, and have had it in my all the incarnations of my bedroom since my last apartment, situated within view of the bed so I would see it upon waking in the morning.

It’s been a touchstone for me all that time, even when my spiritual life had dried up and fallen off the vine. I still kept an altar even if all it did was gather dust. Having that space dedicated to what I felt was important in my life was essential to me even if I only ever touched it to clean off all the cat hair.

Over the last few years however I’ve realized something that, while distressing, wasn’t really something I could keep denying: Getting up and down off the floor in front of my altar was very difficult. I have bad knees, a bad back, and my general state of decrepitude has increased as I’ve aged. I had to finally admit that no meditation cushion or mat was going to change the fact that I needed to do something different.

I had already started doing my meditations on my bed anyway; my knees were far better supported there, and I was a lot more likely to meditate if I didn’t have to worry about injuring my rickety self. What I needed was a working space for readings, magic, and whatnot, as well as a shrine for all my Goddess figures, tiny deities, crystals, and natural objects I’ve gathered over the years.

Then I was watching a YouTube video by one of my favorite Witches, Molly Roberts, in which she was repainting her altar table…which basically was a kitchen table. A lightbulb went on! I could sit at an altar in a chair!

Well, online shopping, Target.com, and my COVID hush money pooled their resources to point me toward a lovely little Campaign-style folding desk about the same width as my bench but deeper. I eventually found it in a dark walnut finish that would look nice in my little sacred corner, and behold:

I was hoping the drawer would be big enough for a dragon (those long-necked lighters for barbecue and camping) but alas, it was pretty tiny, but sized beautifully to hold my Light Seer’s Tarot deck and probably some other things.

One of my favorite spiritual activities is removing everything from my altar, cleaning and cleansing the surface, then placing things back one by one and seeing if anything needs moved, replaced, or stored away for a while.

This took that practice to a whole new level, as I first had to decide which items were most important. I don’t have a whole lot of tools, in the magico-ritual sense; I stopped using most of the traditional Wiccan tools long ago. What I do have are objects imbued with meaning and a few important things that get regular use.

In fact, this will be the start of a new blog series discussing my most valued tools and toys, both because I like talking about them and because they are an excellent measure of just how much my beliefs and practice have changed since I last wrote much about either.

Here is what my new altar looks like at the moment, all decked out with her sacred tchotchkes. It’s still evolving as I decide how to use the different spaces. I also ordered a pretty vintage knob to replace the boring wood one.

Just a quick look at some of the items, starting on the left lower shelf. If there’s something you see you want to know about that I don’t cover on the list below, drop me a comment and I’ll try to explain myself. I’d like to eventually do a video tour where I can talk about each item.

1. Inside the cubby is a bowl that is holding the pieces of a project I’m working on – making my own set of prayer beads. I’ll be talking about those in depth once I have all the parts.
2. Also you can see the pin a friend gave me showing Carrie Fisher (in glitter) with a quote about mental health.
3. The set of beads in the front left is my current go-to, and I bought them from an Etsy shop.
4. Up on the shelf on the left is of course my newest candle, one for the second facet of my sort-of-homemade Patroness. You can also see a tiny tiny Ganesh that is actually a French Fève, or, one of the tiny trinkets found inside a King Cake in France.
5. The fluorite bowl is where my beads are supposed to live, but when this was taken the bowl was still setting up after I glued it back together. It fell the heck apart when I picked it up a while back.
6. My practice involves pop culture to an extent, and any Pagan who saw Moana and didn’t go all gooey-souled when they saw TeFiti, well, there’s just something wrong with you.
7. There are also redwood cones I found on my last trip to the Pacific Northwest, and some needles of the same tree that I keep in a jar (over on the lower right).
8. In the center top is a newer Goddess that used to belong to my roommate; she’ll be getting a bit of a makeover as her paint is all chipped. In front of her is my Flaming Chalice from Live Oak Unitarian Universalist Church, a new member gift that I light at the start of religious endeavors (including at the beginning of our virtual services these days).
9. The pomegranate-shaped trinket box, meant to be a wedding favor, came from Turkey, and I keep my set of prayer beads for the darker half of the year inside it.
10. On the lower right you can see the one shrine I made that I never sold, Artemis. I’m not devoted to Artemis but I loved how that piece turned out so much that, when nobody bought her, I decided she should live on my altar.
11. There are little frogs doing yoga because…frogs doing yoga.
12. And of course in the front center is my Book of Moonlight and Shadows, where I keep important info, magical records, and diagrams of important readings for future reference.
13. Oh! And on the wall is a ceramic pig, a gift from a dear friend who got it for me on a trip to the UK. I use it as a sort of charm to help me recenter my vegan practice, and a while back, it broke. HAHAHA thanks Universe. I repaired it, then painted in the cracks with gold paint, in an echo of the Japanese tradition of Kintsugi.