Blog o' Gnosis

The Pile o’ Books challenge was fun. (Now that I can do WYSIWYG editing in WordPress, putting photos on my blog has gotten much easier.) Today a few folks on a Pagan bloggers list were tossing around ideas for new and exciting challenges, and I came up with the idea of photographing something at our homes that is an altar but doesn’t look like an altar.

I might be at an advantage here, because I’ve lived in this house for less than two years and have had the wonderful opportunity to decorate it from the ground up. There is very little in my home that is where it is by chance. Sometimes I think that the definition of an altar is anything special that is put somewhere on purpose. I have no idea what the actual definition of an altar is, nor do I care to look it up. It’s been too nice a day to start consulting dictionaries.

Anyway, I decided to stay inside my house—there are too many little altar spots outside to enumerate—and photograph some of the more subtle altars. This one is actually pretty obvious, it’s an ancestor altar. Situated on top of my poetry bookshelves, it has a bronze naga candleholder from Indonesia with three beeswax candles. Above that are photos of almost all my great-grandmothers (there’s an empty space for the fourth, to be filled soon), and above those is a beautiful painting by Carole Watanabe called “Crossing the Magic Waters.” This is a very flexible altar: I can light the candles and bring my ancestors in, put little objects on the dragon’s back to carry them over, read poetry, and any number of other variations.

Any work of art I consider a potential altar, in that it is a point of focus and intention with lots of layers of meaning. Here’s a painting on canvas by my friend Inanna McGraw, which I had framed and placed over my CD shelves. It seems innocuous enough, unless you know that it is actually a design from ancient Sumer, where it was found in the temples of Enki, God of the Waters. And here is another painting by another friend, Morgan LeFay, of a Cretan labyrinth. If you passed it in the hallway you might walk on by, unless you had need for a labyrinth meditation at that moment.

Just a couple more examples here while I’m at it. This is my all-important songwriting altar. Cleverly disguised as a guitar and a music stand (with tuner, pick, and capo on the table next to it), it is an altar partly because if you’re trying to write songs you need all the help you can get, and partly by virtue of being watched over by the Rainbow Serpent. This painting is by a young Australian artist and was given to me by my friend Georgia, who knows about these sorts of things.

And last but certainly not least, the altar which probably gets the most use of any of them in my house: the morning tea altar. Patron saint of this enterprise is the rooster potholder hanging over the stove. Active ingredients: Peet’s Black Currant tea and a French press I picked up at a thrift store. Oh, can I make a large and delicious cup of tea with this rig. (I’d include my special teacup in the picture, but that would be divulging too much.) Too bad it’s evening already. In fact, it’s the longest damn evening of the year, at least four more hours of daylight to go, and I have a long, long time to wait before my next morning cup of tea.

Happy Summer Solstice, everyone, and may art and beauty flow with abundance through all our lives.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 4:50 pm and is filed under Ritual, Spirit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.