A Circle of Stones: Journeys and Meditations for Modern Celts - Erynn Rowan Laurie 1995
On the Making of Altars
Rites of Devotion
The first step toward creating and doing a devotional rite for Ancestors, land spirits or a deity is the construction of your altar. An altar is not so much a thing, as it is a way of arranging and relating the images and symbols from your meditations and the deities as they manifest and make sense to you. Spatial relationships become important as they express how the various energies and symbols interact.
Each altar you construct will be unique. They will have different purposes and will reveal and relate different complexes of symbols. An altar for your Ancestors will have a very different look and feel than an altar for your personal deity. Your altar will change as time passes, in response to your changing needs and understandings. Other factors will influence your altar construction as well, reflecting your changing seasonal, situational, and magical concerns. Despite the many differing altar components and their changes, all altars will follow a few basic rules of construction.
When designing your altar, start with a theme and structure everything else around it. This theme may be a particular deity, or it might be a season or a particular goal that you have. For devotional rituals, the theme will usually be a deity, the Ancestors, or your local land spirits. The altar should include symbolism that represents the object of your devotional work through its construction, its positioning, and the objects that you arrange upon it. The items that make up your altar space should be related to one another symbolically, reflecting the focus of your devotional work, and the means through which you will accomplish the devotion. An altar doesn't have to be a flat surface. It can be three dimensional or multi-leveled. It can be built on a vertical rather than a horizontal plane.
When constructing an altar for a ritual of devotion to Manannán, you might include triskeles, ocean symbols, a coracle, a basket of apples, cranes, or yellow irises. This can take many different forms. The “altar” might be an alder staff that has been washed in sea water, with triskeles and a coracle engraved upon it which is then set upright into the ground as a focal point for your meditations. It could be a series of stones in your back yard arranged in a triskele formation, with a bowl of ocean water at its center, and ringed by apples. You might have a small table or corner shelf in your room that has a drawing of Manannán upon it, with a sprig of apple blossoms, shells, a small crane statue, a model boat and a container of sea salt. All of these objects are related thematically to the God Manannán, yet each is a different manifestation of the symbols that reflect an Otherworld reality. Each can be used as a focus for ritual in a unique and useful way. Creativity is important for expressing your individual understanding and responses to the symbols use.
You do not have to have only one altar. If you have the inclination, your entire living space and the landscape around you can be filled with sacred places, or become one large sacred space, devoted to recognizing a pattern that expresses your worldview. A few inches of shelf space may become a shrine to a favorite ancestor, or a wall sconce devoted to a particular deity and set with fresh flowers and a bowl of scented water. A few stones in the yard might serve as an altar for land spirits. The nature of altars is such that no one ever need know that you have constructed one. Others may perceive your altars merely as attractive decoration, or unusual artistic touches in your house or personal space.
Altars reflect an understanding of sacred space. The things on your altar represent your inner world and how it relates to both mundane and Otherworld reality as you perceive it. This expression of sacred space brings your inner world into physical manifestation. By placing objects that reflect your inner reality in a physically defined material space, you can work with and manipulate the symbols of your inner world and create changes within yourself, your relationships with deity, or in the Otherworld. The construction of your altar will reflect not only your understanding of your inner world and the Otherworld, but your interactions with and understanding of society at large. An altar can be a patch of ground, a stone, a table, a fireplace mantel, a set of shelves, a stang driven into the earth, or any number of other things. It might be round, square, triangular, or none of these.
Your altar doesn't have to be neat or tidy. It does have to work for you. It can be aesthetically pleasing and even artistic without being anal retentive or gridded into evenly spaced boxes. Break the tyranny of the rectangular altar space. Feel free to have as much or as little on your altar as you like. Arrangements can be orderly or chaotic, so long as you understand how and why you are putting things where they are. If you are more comfortable with a random scattering of twigs and a small statue than with an altar that came from a diagram in a book then by all means use the looser altar setting. Working actively with your altars will result in a constantly shifting series of neatness and chaos reflecting your inner states and moods. Different levels of “neatness” work for different things and you should be flexible enough in your altar arrangements to reflect these varying states.
The altar is a liminal place where our world and the Otherworld meet and interact. In this way, an altar can be thought of as a gateway from one realm to another, and the objects on the altar can be considered “between” places. Your altar is the crann beithadh (KRAHN BEH-thug), the “tree of life” upon which the Gods descend, and which holds up the sky. It is the sacred center that balances all divisions. The altar can be the literal center of the universe, the point where all things meet. Things and symbols upon the altar take on a different level of “reality” and small things may have great significance that belies their size. Your spiritual work and your magic will manifest in those places where the realms meet and overlap.
The altar expresses how things interact. The position of different symbols reflect their importance within the context of your inner world and your understanding of their action in the Otherworld. Cultural and religious understandings are expressed by the division and arrangement of symbols. Placing a thing in the center of an altar will give it a different emphasis than placing it at the back and to the right. Concepts such as sacred kingship, the relationship of humanity to the Gods, and the relation of humanity to the natural world can be expressed by placement of symbols within the sacred space of your altar. Arrangements can be dual/polar, triadic, quartered, or otherwise divided into a number of categories. Each arrangement will change the meaning of the things on the altar, according to where they are placed.
Dual or polar divisions can represent the polarity of masculine and feminine, of summer and winter, of day and night, of Samhain and Beltain. These can be expressed as left/right, up/down or back/front positioning, depending upon the size and configuration of your altar space. Triadic arrangements might express an understanding of triadic deity groupings (whether of the same or mixed gender), or your understandings of the three realms. A quartered arrangement might express movement from or to the directions, working with the winds, or representing the provinces of Ireland. The quartered arrangement is one that should be deeply meditated upon before using, because of its fluctuating nature within the different Celtic cosmologies, and its tendency to suddenly become a threefold or fivefold division without much warning.
Your altar shouldn't have to be dusted. Your workings should be frequent and varied enough that dusting becomes a superfluous act. The more work you do in your devotional rites, the more you will understand the structure of the Otherworld and your relationships to it. This in turn will lead to easier and more successful journeys through the Three Realms. A life of religious devotion need not take place in a hermitage or to the exclusion of your “mundane” daily activities. The symbols on your altar should integrate themselves into your life and allow you to act in harmony with the Gods and your personal goals. Working with these things on a frequent basis means that you are giving attention to the state of your inner life, acknowledging that it is at least as important as bringing home your next paycheck.
The altar is ultimately the place where you kindle the spark of imbas. Your personal energies are reflected and focused here, and the deities, Ancestors, and land spirits will be attracted to this focal point. Act accordingly, showing respect for yourself and for them. Don't embarrass the Gods, the spirits, or yourself around your altar.
