Altar for Healing and Wellness

Find a pure white square of fabric to drape over your table, just touching the floor. Take two candles in matching holders and place them on the two farthest corners. Place your incense burner exactly in the middle. If you don’t have a favorite incense yet, start with the ancient essence of frankincense. Select objects that appeal to you symbolically to place on your altar. I have a candlestick of purest amethyst crystal, my birthstone. When I gaze on the candle flame refracted through the beautiful purple gemstone, I feel the fire within me. This inculcates your altar with the magic that lives inside you, that lives inside all of us, and magnifies the ceremonial strength of your workspace. You should decorate your altar until it is utterly and completely pleasing to your eye. After you’ve been working spells for a bit, an energy field will radiate from your altar.

Fireplace altars today hearken back to this earliest custom. Home and hearth have primal appeal to the comfort of both body and soul. If you have a fireplace, it can become the very heart of your home. The fireplace is also one of the safest places for the ritual work of fire keeping. Sanctify your fireplace with a sprinkling of salt, and then set it up as an altar to the four seasons. Like the Vestal Virgins of old, you can keep a fire burning in a votive glass holder in the back of your fireplace and have an eternal flame. The fireplace can be your simplest altar and a reflection of the work of nature. If you don’t have a real fire in your fireplace, you can place in it beautiful sacred objects—pretty rocks, feathers, seashells, glistening crystals, beautiful leaves, and anything representing the holiest aspects of the world around you. Let nature be your guide.

Rituals for the Road: Making Your Own Talismans, Amulets, Charms

Before you travel for work, study, and pleasure, it’s good to create charms and talismans of power. You can also craft your own ritual tools from what you gather in your travels. Nature will often provide you with tools: shells, bark, and stones. In addition, you may also meet new spiritual teachers as you make your way on the pilgrimage that is life. Pay attention and you will learn much and receive many gifts.

A Medicine Wheel shamanic group run by Brooke Tarrant taught a group of drumming novices, myself included, how to make rattles and drums from recycled leather and sheepskin. In fact, all the materials we used to decorate our rattles and drums were found objects: crystals, sand, tiny shells, and sticks from the forest floor. Last, we used “feather medicine” and decorated the rattles with rawhide and found feathers, each with personal totemic meaning. With a final drumming circle and fire ceremony, we blessed the drums and rattles and each other. During the ceremony, we used both the new and old rattles and drums in some immensely powerful energy cleaning and healing. Even physical aches and pains were alleviated with these new tools. Rituals for the road should also be recorded in your Book of Shadows: what you find, who you meet, and what you create. When the spirit moves you, you should be creative. You can construct a sand mandala or take photographs on the beach to preserve your inspiration. One lovely custom from long ago: Upon your return home, create shadowboxes, which are really like little shrines of the sacred objects from the road.