Most witches keep an altar at home. It is not a display to be admired but a place to be used, and the best of them look it: a little worn, often changed, and visited every day.
A coven's altar stands in the circle and is laid afresh for each rite. The household altar is something else. It is the small, permanent place in a witch's own house where the practice of the day is done: a candle lit morning and evening, a few minutes of stillness, a greeting to the moon, the first flowers of the season brought in and set down. It is the hearth of a private religion, and it needs no permission from anybody.
Three kinds of altar
- The household altar
- The everyday one, which this page is chiefly about. It stays up, and it changes slowly.
- The working altar
- Laid for a particular rite, an esbat or a working of magic, with the tools that the rite requires, and cleared away afterwards. A solitary may use the household altar for this, or may set up a separate table in the middle of the room.
- The seasonal table
- Laid for each of the eight Sabbats with the things of that season, and kept until the next. Many households with children have one under another name, and it is the same thing. See the Wheel of the Year.
In a small house all three are usually the same table, and that is perfectly proper.
Where to put it
Anywhere you will see it every day and can stand or sit in front of it for a few minutes undisturbed. A shelf, a windowsill, the top of a chest of drawers, a corner of the bedroom. People in a single rented room have kept a fine altar on half a bookcase, and moved the furniture against the walls when they needed floor. Those with a garden sometimes keep one out of doors as well: a flat stone under a tree, a corner by the hedge.
If you can, let it face, or stand in, the north, which is where many Gardnerian covens set their altar, or the east, where the sun rises. If you cannot, do not worry about it. The direction matters less than the use.
Think about who else shares the house. An altar is no place for things that a small child or a curious dog can pull down, and a lit candle is no place for anybody's elbow. If you live with people who do not share your religion, a household altar can be very discreet indeed: a candle, a stone and a jar of flowers, which nobody need remark on.
What goes on it
Very little is required, and almost nothing is forbidden. A sensible beginning is something for each of the four elements, and something for the Goddess and the God.
- For earth: a stone, ideally one you found yourself, a dish of salt, or a pentacle.
- For air: incense, a feather, or a small bell.
- For fire: a candle, which is the one indispensable thing.
- For water: a bowl of clean water, a shell, or a cup.
- For the Goddess and the God: two candles, or an image, or a symbol of each: a shell and an antler, a moon and a sun, whatever speaks to you.
To these, add what the land is doing: the first snowdrops, a sprig of holly, a handful of corn at Lammas, a conker in October. One winter when snow came early to the hill, a member of our outer court brought a bowl of it in and set it on her altar for the solstice. It had melted by morning, which she said was rather the point: it stood for the winter while it lasted, and then for the water.
If you have no working tools, improvise. A stick from the garden will do for a wand, a wine glass for a cup, a knife from the kitchen drawer for a blade, and a pentacle drawn on card for the pentacle. The tools do not make the witch.
Laying it out
Lay your altar slowly, one thing at a time, and think about each as you set it down. A useful set of questions for anything you mean to place:
- Does it belong to one of the elements? If so, put it in that element's quarter: air in the east, fire in the south, water in the west, earth in the north.
- Does it belong to the Goddess or to the God? Many witches set the Goddess's things on the left and the God's on the right, or the other way about.
- If neither, where does it look right? That is where it goes.
As each thing goes down, say aloud what it is for and why it is there, in a few words of your own: this stone is for the earth, and I set it in the north. It sounds a little self-conscious at first. It is the habit that turns a shelf of objects into an altar, because it makes each one stand for something in your own mind, and the mind is what an altar works on.
When it is done, sit in front of it for a while. Then write down in your diary what you placed and why. In a year you will be glad to have it.
These positions follow the British tradition. Witches in the southern hemisphere often place fire in the north and earth in the south, for reasons explained on the page about the Wheel south of the equator.
Cloths and the seasons
A cloth marks the altar off from the furniture it stands on. It need not be anything special: a clean tea towel or a pillowcase will do perfectly well, and many altars began with one. People who sew often make a cloth for each season, and the colours do most of the work: dark and rich for Samhain, white and green for Candlemas, the colours of the hedgerow in May, gold and brown at harvest. The correspondences suggest others, but your own sense of the season is a better guide than any table.
Keeping it
An altar that is never touched becomes a shelf of ornaments. Keep it clean. Change the water. Throw out flowers before they rot. Light the candle, if only for a minute. Move things when they no longer feel right, and take things away when they have done their work.
Every so often, clear it entirely, clean the surface, and lay it again from nothing. Imbolc is the traditional time for this, and the page about Imbolc says why, but any new moon will do.
The house as sacred space
An altar is a concentrated form of something that can be true of a whole house. A few questions are worth asking now and then, of the room the altar stands in and of the rest:
- Is it clear, or is it full of things that are only there because nobody has moved them?
- Do I need, or love, what I can see from here?
- Can air and light get in? Are the windows clean and the doorways clear?
- Are all four elements present in the house in some form: living plants, open air, a flame, water?
- What would a stranger learn about me from this room, and is it true?
None of this is magic in any special sense. But a witch's house tends, over the years, to become a calm and well-kept one, and those who visit it often notice the difference before they notice the altar. The page on protection describes some older ways of looking after a home.
In our coven
Hesper's household altar is the windowsill above her kitchen sink. For forty-five years it has held a candle, a stone from the top of the hill and a jam jar of whatever is in flower. She says it is the most used altar in the coven, because she washes up in front of it twice a day, and nobody has ever argued.