Looking After Your Altar

Altars are wonderful as they create a permanent sacred area in the home to work your ritual or hold space for an intention. You might have an altar to a Matron or Patron Goddess or God, you may have a all purpose altar where you do all your ritual and anything magickally related, or maybe you have separate altars for different intentions such as fertility and healing.

Either way once set up its easy for an altar to be forgotten or unused for long periods of time. I even get asked at times how should i be using my altar?

 

Altars need to be 'fed'! Setting up an altar be it for an intention like prosperity where all your abundance work will be focused or to a specific deity you are creating a sacred living space of energy and vibration. What do you think will happen to that energy if it sits unused, unattended and dusty. If you have gone to the trouble to invite a deity in by awakening a statue and altar space or working your prosperity spell and setting up a grid that energy needs upkeep or at the least it will wither and leave, at worst gather negative or stagnant energy.

So how do you feed an altar?

This can vary greatly and depend on what your altar is for but here are some ways to keep your altars fed and looked after even if they are long term (one of my altars in my home has been up for 4 years now and is still very much a working space).....

1. Anointing Deity statues

2. Lighting incense that resonated with that deity or intention

3. Regularly burning candles

4. Chanting, mantra and song

5. If you have a singing bowl, bell or rattle use sound to raise the energy at your altar

6. Take your gemstones from your altar and place them under the full moon each month

7. Reactivate your grids regularly

8. Clear your altar space with sacred sage or aura sprays

9. Regularly change your offerings out for fresh, this could be food, flowers, herbs, money, shells or other sacred items to that altar

10. Meditation with your deity in their temple

11. For set in place altars carefully remove any dust every so often and clean down statues if you have been anointing them

12. Anoint gemstones and tools

13. Regularly reaffirm the intention of your altar with ritual, song or whatever is part of your own practice. Use the lunar cycle.

14. Give thanks and gratitude