Little Altars Everywhere

Beltane altar

My religious background is very complicated. I was born Jewish, because my mother and her mother and her mother were Jews, albeit secular ones. My mother used to say they were just Jewish enough for Hitler to want them dead. I don’t identify as a Jew though, because I don’t practice Judaism, and I do practice some other religions. In fact I believe that according to orthodox Jewish law, I stopped being a Jew at the age of eight, when my father had me baptized into the Mormon church. 

While my parents were married, which they weren’t anymore very shortly after said baptism, we used to go to Mormon services fairly often. After the divorce Dad would still take us once in a while during our weekend visits, while we were still small. I remember long boring services and lots of cookies.  But he fell away from the church, and he fell away from his kids, and stopped taking us to church, or anywhere else. Mom never set foot in a Mormon church again, as far as I know. I myself haven’t been to a Mormon church - except for my cousin’s wedding - in thirty five years. 

In fact I didn’t set foot in a church of any kind for over twenty years, unless it was as a tourist in Italy or Mexico. But I nonetheless had a spiritual life. It was centered, as most of my life has always been centered, around books and learning. In community college when I was sixteen I took a class called the Power of Myth, that used Joseph Campbell’s work as a textbook, and I’m here to tell you it blew my mind. 

Litha Altar 

The year I was twenty-one I was pregnant with my first child. I spent months that year reading the White Goddess by Robert Graves. Among the many things I learned in that book was the sacred tree-calendar of the Druids, and I named my daughter Rowan, after the tree that ruled her birth-month of February. Since then, I’ve more or less considered myself a solitary witch.

It’s true that I attend my local church, a tiny ELCA congregation called Zion. After many solitary years I felt the need to worship with others, and I wanted a deeper connection with my neighbors. I was attracted by the aesthetics of Zion, I admit: a small, whitewashed building with a steeple and a real bell, and a real graveyard, sitting alone in a green valley near my house.  It took me years to screw up my courage and attend a service. 

It so happened that at that first service, the young woman who was pastor (a good sign!) gave a sermon in which she said “a church is not a place where a bunch of people sit together all believing the same thing” which was auspicious. At coffee hour afterwards I introduced myself. I wanted to come back but I was very conscious of the fact that I wasn’t actually a Christian. I wanted to ask if I could come as an interfaith visitor - but of course I didn’t know those words and what came out of my mouth was “is it okay if I come here as a Pagan?” 

But although I go to church two or three times a month, and I find it nourishing, I’m still a witch. The main way that I practice my path is through observing the sacred calendar of the earth - the solstices and the equinoxes, and the cross-quarter day’s in between them. The names that I attatch to these holy days are Celtic or Neo-Pagan, but it really doesn’t matter to me what they are called. If I knew the names in Ancient Greek or Mayan, I might use those names. 

Samhain Altar 

Observing the holy days means laying an altar for them. Over the years in this blog, I’ve shared pictures of my seasonal altars many times, and I’ve shared observations of various holy days such as Mabon and Imbolc. But I haven’t talked about the practice of keeping an altar. 

Some people are very formal about their altars. They have set places for them, with well-demarcated boundaries and lots of rules for which items belong on the altar at which seasons. You can probably guess I’m not one of those people. I do have certain icons that I like to use for certain holidays - usually my own paintings that evoke the season or a particular deity. One of my very long term goals is to eventually paint enough icons to have an entire set for all seasons. But for the most part, I play loose and fast with the idea of an altar. 

The shelf above our hearth is my main altar, and I have a smaller space in the kitchen for a kitchen altar. But an altar has no fixed position. As Black Elk said, “the sacred mountain is everywhere.” And so, wherever you lay your altar, you are really laying it on your heart. And if it isn’t laid in your heart, then it isn’t laid anywhere and you are just playing with leaves and stones. Not that there’s anything wrong with playing with leaves and stones. 

Altars even spring into being all by themselves, and I think these may be my favorite and most sacred type of altar - the ones that emerge organically from the life of the household. When I notice that my ordinary life, the simple repetitive rythyms of my days, creates little altars everywhere, then I feel especially blessed and feel that I must be doing something right. Then I feel that Hera, Goddess of hearth and home, at once the royal Queen of heaven and humble housewife, has come to visit me and is incaranate in the work of my hands. 

Spontaneous altar that emerged on a side table