Altars - Speaking to Self and Spirits

Altar - Marigolds, crystal ball and snakeskin, echoes Magic Land, Virginia

Altars are one of the most readily available man made tools to communicate with spirits, or Spirit, if you prefer. You can use altars to create a bond with unseen powers, to celebrate them, thank them and honor them. In a nutshell, to create a personal relationship with spirits and powers. I use plural because I always want to honor all the beings I work with, or simply want to acknowledge, but to use a singular is of course ok too. I leave the dilemma to find the proper noun to you: Source, Universe, Spirit, God, the All, for example.

When you honor spirits by building altars you also honor the spiritual part of yourself. The part of you that you may have difficulty to define, to fit into the mind-body category; your deeper self, your spirit or your soul. You can use the altar to talk to your own spiritual Self. This is not always an easy conversation and you may do well to have spirits to help you.

It is important to understand that this has nothing to do with man made clammy therapeutic tools or psychoanalysis. They are perfectly fine but are ultimately created to define illnesses of the mind. We can of course have many of those and take the time to rip ourselves apart with whatever tools we like, but not on altar time. Spirits most important job is to make you whole, not to dissects you. There's plenty of time to do that, actually any other time in the day you choose.

Altar - Palo Santo, fire and amulets, echoes Magic Land, Virginia

Thus altars becomes a reflection of your Self, your connection to spirits and your work on earth, whatever that may be. This is nice since man made world unfortunately is made up of endless comparisons of worth. Rather tedious is it not?

An altar can look anyway you choose. The difference between a decorative corner and and altar lies in your intention. It can of course be quite obvious an altar from how it looks and how you approach this says something about you, not anything about Spirit. Though the look of it can also be an indication of how your connection fares. Spirit is always there, you on the other hand, will most likely change as the wind over one single day. 

I personally choose a pagan approach, since it is well tested but don't have the limitations of musts that easily follow more structured spiritual beliefs. Or, to put it simply, I use the label of being a witch because I can do as I please and still enjoy a preunderstanding from my surroundings, and work from there.

To use symbols for the elements is a safe bet for an altar. We know them, they speak to us and if we make sure we use one of each we naturally have balance. Balance being of outmost importance in any spiritual work. Lack of balance is one of the most common reasons for spiritual accidents. Lack of clear intent is another. Anyway, a candle for fire, a small bowl of water, some incense or a feather for air and something representing earth: a rock, a plant in a pot or the like, and there you have it; the basis for the altar is created. The elements representing the basis for "all that is."

Altar - Fossil and glass pearls in water, echoes Magic Land, Virginia

The elements are of course represented in most spiritual traditions, occult ones included, even if occult languages are often quite involved. If you are interested in a very complex but surprisingly clear description of how the elements are spiritual building blocks an excellent source for all kind of esoterica is the alchemist, who has a multitude of fun clips readily available on YouTube. Some spiritual traditions use more than the four elements, adding one or several that represent their significance in the place the tradition grew. For example, Old Norse pagans work with fire, water, air, earth and ice, which make perfect sense in a cold climate, even though ice can easily be included in the water element.

Then of course an altar needs a representation of the the Spirit, or as some call it, the fifth element. For some it is included in the other elemental representations (as they represent "all that is,") some like to have a certain symbol or a multitude of symbols if they, like I do, see the spiritual realm inhabited by spirits, large and small. This is highly personal, but one should choose with respect. There is a saying that goes, "Wherever you build a temple a god moves in." You could also say, "wherever you build an altar spirits gather."

By your altar you can talk to spirits and, for example, ask for help with things you cannot solve with your mind and hard work only. You can talk to your deepest Self and see if you find solace or even some deep seated self irony. If you cannot find the latter many spirits will be more than willing to help out making fun of you.

"Isn't this just a psychological tool?" you might ask. Well, perhaps. Does it matter? "Wisdom is what works," said brilliant Jungian psychologist Clarissa Pinkola Estes once. She got that message early one morning drifting in that in-between wake and sleep, after studying the concept of wisdom for months and months and finding nothing but an overload of fancy words. But in my experience that is what altars can do; work when nothing else does.

More than anything altars have to be alive. A three foot tall gold statue of your favorite divinity can be beautiful but will not add to the altar's power. Your intention, time and efforts will. 

Be careful with your candles. I will cut a twig of oakleaves for my altar vase now, in honor of the oak spirits in New Orleans. They helped me greatly once and that kind of help should not be taken lightly, nor be forgotten. 

Altar - Yellow flowers and sage - echoes from the past, Magic Land, Virginia

California and Aftermath Contemplating

 

A calm spot, Chinatown, San Francisco

I did a small trip recently. To California. It made me think about things, as trips usually do. Mostly it made me think of places and how much I adore the place I live. That is a good thing to realize. New Orleans is so full of life it pours over.

It was a brief trip so I didn't see all that much and certainly put no stamps on a whole state from a a few touchdowns. A lot of what I did see just wasn't my kind of scene. I did enjoy Chinatown, San Francisco immensely (there were real people there and colors. Lots of colors.) and I finally got to see the redwoods, which I longed to do a very long time. Also, there's no question that the countryside we passed through was very pretty. So pretty and scenery-perfect that I at one point gestured towards some rather sizable hills we passed by with suspiciously straight lines in the grass circling the hills and asked my Michael,

"They don't do lawnmowing on those, do they?"

Turned out "they" didn't. There were perfectly normal cows eating the grass and the

perfectly circular lines around the hills must have been a result of some kind of geological phenomena. This comment says nothing about California, or hills, or cows for that matter. It only says something about the state of my mind at that moment.

My Michael and I went for a New Life Expo to help a friend who in return helped us with making the trip happen. Good deal. New Life Expo present itself as a holistic Mind-Body-Spirit expo which places it under the umbrella term of New Age, and it was, in no uncertain sense. The so-called New Age movement, which for a large part is modernized old age, which I and the majority of my friends and contacts are part of, have levels and levels. This was what I usually refer to as High New Age. The expo was a mix between commerce and general New Age hysteria sprinkled with some real nice people with good ideas. Think over representation of purple in general and make over booths dressed up as spirituality side by side with a few serious practitioners of for example herbal medicine and writers of interesting books on spiritual concepts. 

The man in the booth next to me was going to hold a lecture and practiced the opening part on me. It was the only time in the three days of the expo I felt compelled to lie. Not because his presentation was bad. On the contrary, it was overall well put together and he was a charismatic man so there was no question he was going to do great, which is what you need to hear when you're about to do public speaking. It was just that his words at that moment didn't work for me. He said, and I'm paraphrasing,

"Now that you feel inspired by everything you experienced here at the expo, you're probably wondering; how can I bring some of this home with me to my everyday life? I will tell you."

Flawless speech opening. I had absolutely nothing to critique. The reason I lied was that I didn't feel inspired nor did I need more information about every day spiritual practice, but that was far to complicated to explain. There's a time for everything and this was not a time for lengthy personal outpourings.

Mural - Chinatown, San Francisco

Once back in my beloved New Orleans, the very next morning I was met by not one but two especially obnoxious ads with New Age themes. I use YouTube a lot for mellow soundtracks and usually start the morning with part of one of my personal playlists. As I have YouTube with ads and listen to a lot of music categorized an New Agey I get a lot of New Age themed ads. Enjoying the pleasure of free entertainment I'm not complaining about having ads in the first place, I've become quite the expert on muting the volume, letting the ad run, put volume up after a bit and getting back to the music. I almost do it in my sleep. Not so this morning. I was fumbling and found myself staring at a young guy yelling at me,

"You are doing your manifestations wrong! That is why they're not working. I will tell you the secret how to do it right!!!"

"Ok ok, calm down, calm down," muttered I, jumped the ad, got my music and went back to morning coffee. 

I must have chosen a more popular tune than usual which, of course, generates more ads, cause soon thereafter my music stops and a young, attractive woman with Las Vegas hairstyle and tight yoga pants appears and breathlessly begins blabbering about manifesting a husband in just two weeks at a yoga retreat.

By then I found myself becoming slightly irritated by the general hysteria and bad New Age rep so I found myself hissing at the woman in the ad,

"That is NOT manifestation dearie, that is simple cause and effect. Showing off your ass at a yoga retreat wanting to find a partner and finding a dude who is there for the same reason is CAUSE AND EFFECT!"

Now, a moment of reflection. Manifestation as a concept has its roots in religious and spiritual thinking with the idea that if something in the spiritual is made real it is a manifestation. This concept has grown to mean that you can move things from the theoretical realm and make it real with the right intent and mindset. It is widely popular in New Age circles and as the previous examples show, can sometimes take ridiculous forms. Which apparently had the power to upset me. The ridiculousness that is. But then I thought for a moment. If I'm upset it means I care. Which, for me, usually means there's something I'm not doing. What if I use this irritation more creatively? It is, after all, one way to avoid getting high blood pressure. 

I do believe that manifestation can happen during the right circumstances, though the circumstances are usually a bit more complex than Mr. and Mrs. Hysterical mentioned above would like you to think. I also believe in spirits, the power of prayer and everything in between. Instead of shouting at people in ads that are trying to make a buck - who doesn't, we all have to live on something - why not write about magic and spirituality a bit again? Everyday, simple things that I do right here, right now. Perhaps throw in some explanations of concepts that are highly misused and misunderstood. I'll start right now.

When it comes to spirituality at large there is only one thing that sets spiritual people off from those that are not spiritual. We believe that the worlds contain also Spirit. That's it, nothing else. It's not a feather in your hat and it certainly does not make life easier. It is simply the belief that there is something more than a physical reality. 

Furthermore, when it comes to spiritual matters there are no secrets. There is only knowledge. There were a lot of esoteric secrets once, when people risked getting body parts chopped off, or worse, for expressing beliefs about things like the nature of the divine that wasn't in accordance with ruling religions. Today you can find esoteric knowledge with a click of your finger, if you're interested. The biggest challenge is sorting through information and choosing forms that suits you. Because we do need some kind of form, otherwise we're lost in space. This doesn't make one form better than the other. It's just a matter of preference.

So, how about cause and effect? Well, sometimes material cause and effect are quite obvious. Why make it into something else? But I believe that cause and effect can also be so complicated that it can only be explained in esoteric terms, rather than leaving everything that cannot be explained to coincidence. Nobody has to agree, which is the brilliance of free choice. Someone said, "Magic is just science that isn't understood yet." I think there's a lot to that, but who has the time to wait for all that to be revealed?

So, I will write more about magic upcoming; very basic, everyday practices from my life and concepts related to them. What it is and what its not from my viewpoint. It defiantly beats shouting at YouTube ads. In addition, the Voices of the Norns' offer is still open. I just haven't gotten any more questions. Which is good, because they are rather grumpy ladies and are best left alone if you don't want to know. But, if you do, feel free to ask. We just might wring something out of them. Meanwhile, I'll wring myself a little harder and see what happens.

Tiger roses, Baywater walk, New Orleans