The Altar

On an Altar you might find all of the following items or just a few: an athame, chalice, pentacle, incense, candles, candle sticks, candle anointing oil, a cauldron, cloth, salt bowl, broom, wand and even a smudge stick and boline. So, where do you start with all of this and why?

Generally speaking the altar is a place where you will work your magic. A place for a spell to be started and completed. The ritual gear just listed can be important but is certainly not essential and it’s also quite a new addition to what altars were originally created for.

Back in Ancient Greece a deity would be given an offering so that they might bring blessings or fulfil the particular need of a practitioner. So homes would have a small place put aside as an altar, just a bit of stone that could be cleaned and here would be a bowl where wine or food was offered to a particular deity.

Today a very similar process is happening but in a more complex fashion. The petitioning, rather than calling upon a deity for help has become more of a force for connecting with universal energies in the form of a spell or ritual which is them performed to bring about a certain result for the practitioner.

So the altar is first created from anything from a stone slab to a proper altar table hand made for the purpose or an old chair, stool or small table. Then an altar cloth is placed over this and the broom can be used to sweep away dust and psychically sweep away any negative energies. On the cloth a salt bowl is often placed to purify the area and an incense burner to burn an incense relevant to the spells purpose is placed there as well. Some people use a cauldron instead of an incense burner and burn a smudge stick instead of incense. Then you need a candle stick or two and a candle. Now the candle itself may be inscribed using the boline, with runic script or some such spell words and the candle might be anointed with an oil.

With the candle lit, the incense burning the practitioner will take the athame an draw a circle around themselves, this is the circle of protection and the athame psychically tears open the fabric of space to create an psychic shield so no evil or negative entities can harm the person within the circle. A pentacle for energy and protection will also be placed on the altar and a wand.

Eventually a prewritten spell will be said while the wand is pointed in a relevant direction to focus the spell energy to it’s intended end - and there we have it, the uses of an Altar.

This is very brief as much of the process is taken from books that you will read and you may have to follow the instructions very specifically. This here just gives you a flavor of what it is to use an altar.

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