What is an altar?

An altar is a place that you put items that are special to you, and in this case, will represent the month that we are visiting.

The altar can be a windowsill, bedside table, area in your living room, it can be placed directly on the surface or you can place a cloth or a plate or tray down to hold the items.

Care of your altar is paramount, if you put fresh flowers on as an example, then making sure they remain fresh and discarding them when they wilt and die. When you place things on your altar you are putting representations of what you are honouring, celebrating, or wishing for. Items can be things that you admire, such as a symbol of courage, or strength, or happiness.

In person circle altar

An altar in a group circle is often decorated to be symmetrical so that wherever you are placed you will have a view of the things on the altar. A special item placed in the centre to represent the theme.

Inviting each person to bring something and place on the altar can be a wonderful way of bringing the group together.

Online altar

With an online altar it will be more personal to each person, and more portable. In some cultures they use a portable altar or mesa, which is used to display the items that the person has chosen to display, placed in the cardinal points of North, East, South and West, with a central item. When the meditation, quiet time, ritual or ceremony is over, the altar is wrapped up and put away carefully.

Depending on what culture or belief system you may be attuned to, what hemisphere you are in, can determine the representations of the cardinal points and of the elements.

In the book we follow this:

North is Air

East is Fire

South is Earth

West is Water

Shamanic attitude to altar pieces

In Shamanism, placing something on the altar represents the item as if it is real, therefore placing a shell on the altar is a representation of the actual animal that lived in the shell, a stone is placing a member of the stone people on the altar, a feather is taking on the attributes of the bird it came from.

Therefore consider what each item actually symbolises.

Celebrating different festivals and important seasons

We cover the seaons and the solstices, equinoxes and sabbats in the book How to set up women's circles.

Imbolc is in February, it is the half way point between a solstice and equinox and is midway between winter and summer.