Altar ARTS: AUTUMN
As many of you know, I am a dedicated altar builder. Altars grace my home (sometimes more than one per room), my gardens, and my life. I am drawn to their ability to focus my awareness and intentions, their beauty or rawness, the creativite expression I am invited to engage in, the flexibility and timelessness of the practice. Today, I will focus upon a seasonal altar practice for Autumn. If you’ve worked with my Ancestor Altar guide before you’ll see some reminders of basic altar practices in addition to discussion of season-specific altar arts. I hope you’ll join me in exploring this practice.
ALTAR BASICS
Here are some basics to get you started. I encourage you read through what I’ve included below to determine which elements you want to incorporate, what order works best for you, and how you might explore your own cultural traditions, then create something that feels right to you.
Preparation
LOCATION: Your altar can be inside or out, occupy the corner of a shelf or an entire room. It can be inside a cupboard or out in the open for all to see. Size and scale are immaterial, it is how you feel about and relate to the space that matters.
PREPARE YOURSELF: I invite you to take a few minutes to prepare yourself for what you are about to do. Preparation can mean prayers, meditation, a few centering breaths. It can also mean putting on your favorite music, a piece of jewelry or a crazy hat. It can mean fasting, ceremonially cleansing yourself, or busting out the extra dark chocolate. Do what makes you feel most in touch with yourself and your intentions for the altar.
PREPARE THE SPACE: Most altar building traditions involve some sort of ritualized physical and energetic cleaning or space preparation. What does your chosen space call for? Sweep, wash, clear clutter, ring a bell, beat a drum, rake, dust, burn cleansing herbs, gently move the spiders, speak a blessing, make the space ready as you see fit.
Intention: Seasonal Symbolism & Magic
What is Autumn and why would you wish to build an altar to it? Autumn is a time of transition and change. Beyond the visible change in the weather and season, in many parts of the world this is a time of harvest before the long winter. It is a time when we offer gratitude for what the earth and our individual and communal labors have provided us and how they may sustain us in the months to come. In much of the Northern hemishphere, it is the last period of growth or life before the dark months as the sun wanes. It is balance, and the moment when we shift from outward energies towards inward focus. Historically, it was a time of abundance and preparation for the long dark to follow, a recognition of impermanence and process of letting go. It is also a time when various cultures and traditions mark the permeability between the physical world and the otherworld, honor their beloved dead, communicate with or protect themselves from spirit realms. What are your intentions for your altar?
Do you wish to focus on honoring your departed loved ones?
Are you drawn to acknowledging the life-sustaining harvests you’ve made?
Do you want to bring your attention to the threshold of life and death upon which this season rests?
Is this time of year one that means bustling community or busy solitude and how will that be made manifest?
Building:
CONSTRUCTION: Some altars are housed in purpose-built boxes or shrines complete with lids or doors to close and protect the space when not actively in use. Others are laid out on old tree stumps in yards, or directly upon shelves or other cleared off surfaces like a tabletops, mantles, bookshelves, or desk corners. You may choose to place your altar on a beautiful plate from your’s grandmother’s favorite china set, or slab of stone, or in a steamer trunk you’ve thrifted. Anything goes as long as it suits you.
COLLECT MEANINGFUL ITEMS: Shrine and altar items can be anything that has meaning for you. They may evolve over time (mine do) and generally fall into three categories. Their purposes may overlap. Today, our focus is on the season of Autumn and what that means to us. While writing this, I am located in the Northern hemisphere in a temperate climate. What speaks to the season for me will be very different from what speaks to the season for someone in the far northern tundra or equatorial jungles.
Representations of the season: This category includes anything that embodies fall for you. This will look different for everyone and geography and memory will likely play a part. Fall in the Sonoran Desert, my birthplace and home until my mid 20s, does not include the red and yellow maple leaves my adult child sends me photos of from British Columbia, Canada. Don’t use something just because it is what others say represents Fall. I will never put a pumpkin spice latte on my altar… but I might put a leaf sent to me from Canada, a stick of Mexican canola (cinnamon) and tiny pumpkin, a bowl or water with a sprig of creosote (my favorite Sonoran Desert plant and the “scent of rain” to desert dwellers there), or something else that evokes the fall season for me.
Autumnal Symbols to get you started. These will vary depending on your location and personal prefrences:Cornucopias: harvest, plenty, abundance, sustanance
Gourds and hard shelled squash: prosperity, longevity, warding off evil
Root vegetables like turnips and rutabegas: grounding
Colorful, fallen leaves: letting go, transition
Colors: reds, oranges, and yellows, purples, browns
Chrysanthemum, marigold
Acorns and Oaks: Perseverance, cycles, strength and vitality
Wheat sheaves, apples, wine, dried corn, pomegranate, hawthorn berry: harvests of the season, each with their own and varied symbolism
Rosemay: protection, purification, remembrance
Sage: Cleansing, protection, healing
Protective charms, amulets, talismans
Animal representations: crow, raven, cat, etc.
Spirals
Scythe and other tools used for harvest
Anything that speaks to you. Examine why and how it means Autumn for you. Find what is fruiting, ripening, flowering, changing in your natural environment and use that. Paint or photograph the sunset at this time of year, collect a fallen feather from a migrating bird, form a shape from rain-soaked clay soil, attune to your surroundings and let them guide you.
Elements: My altars always include natural elements. This is common among altar builders and absolutely appropriate for seasonal altars. I almost always place water; salt, soil or stones; fire/candles, incense/smoke producing items or some other representation of air (like feathers) upon the altar. The altar itself and the meditations and prayers I offer at it are my ”spirit” element. Incorporating the elements helps attune our awareness to balance, the interplay of each of these elements in life, and how they are present in the particular moment or season we are recognizing with our altar practice.
Offerings: These are gifts for the spirits of the earth, the loved ones you’re honoring, a deity, plants or animas, elementals, etc. Your offerings can be gifts of service (song, poetry, prayers, etc.), cooked or raw/foraged foods or drink (mulled cider, wine, water, etc. in a vessel on the altar or poured onto the soil), an object or physical artistic item you make or find (painting, basket woven from pine needles, mandala of seed pods, etc.).
Decoration: Embellishments to beautify your altar space are completely optional. Oft times the symbolic and special items placed on the altar are already beautiful. Perhaps yours is a bare wooden shelf decorated with a single smooth stone, meditative and gorgeous in its simplicity. Perhaps you create it and realize you want a vibrant altar cloth and abundant armloads of garden flowers and strings of garlands… What goes on your altar is deeply personal and entirely up to you.
Tending Your Altar:
TENDING: For some, tending means freshening the water in a vase of flowers or an occasional dusting. For others it means daily interaction with the altar (burning incense, offering prayers and perishable items, speaking to the dead, meditation, adding new items as inspired, etc.). I like to play-it-by-ear. Sometimes I find myself at an altar multiple times a day, feeling the pull to pause and commune with it and what it symbolizes for me. Some days are busy and I have little time to pause. I find, however, that intentionally setting aside a daily practice with my altar is nourishing for me. Easy ways to do that include lighting a daily candle at it, refreshing the bowl of water when I have my morning glass, or simply taking a moment to say hello to it. These acts help me remain centered, in alignment with my values (presence, awareness, attunement), and more resilient because I’ve taken time to tend my altar and therefore my heart-space.
Disassembly:
Eventually, our seasons shift and our seasonal altars and shrines will be disassembled, whether forever, in preparation for the next season, until next year, or simply for a move to another location. Disassembly, like building, can be complicated or simple. Typically there is some form of each of the following:
COMMUNION: Some sort of moment of communion with the altar, what it represents, and the items upon it, before it is removed. You may begin by focusing upon or handling each object and item and reflect on its special meaning and relationship to the season of autumn and how you have seen the energies of autumn show up in your life. You might offer a blessing, communicate through prayer or intention, offer gratitude, love, a statement of what is about to occur (disassembly of the altar), an invitation to the energies to remain present after the altar is removed, or a boundary set to come again only if or when you build another shrine.
DECONSECRATION: This is the act or intention of returning a sacred space and objects to the mundane world. Dissolving and dismissing the sacred container you’ve created can be as elaborate or simple as feels right for you, it is the intention that matters. Deconsecration is simply a change of intentions for the space and objects. Some ways of deconsecrating an altar space can include spoken our silent statements of intention, prayers or blessings, songs, ringing a bell or striking a drum, removal (with intention) of a specific item that anchors the altar-space for you, gestures, or simply clapping your hands.
REMOVAL & STORAGE: Items are reverently removed. My seasonal altars always incorporate ephemeral objects from nature. Some of these last a few turns of the wheel of the year while others last only days. I have several places I stash long term items that come out when I need them, and others live lives away from the altar, set on a shelf or fireplace mantle for year round enjoyment. You get to decide what is right for you.
DISPOSAL: In my personal practice, anything that isn’t kept long term but is compostable or fire safe is returned to the earth via burial, fire ceremony, or simply laid upon the soil. I like to use them as offerings to the soil and microbes that sustain life, with the intention that they bring renewal through their death processes. You can bury, recycle or give away anything you wish, so long as it is appropriate to do so (biodegradable items only for the earth, etc.). Any items that can only be disposed of in the garbage are done so with the intention that they cause as little harm as possible and that their return to the living earth be as swift and as beneficial as possible. It is amazing how our awareness of consumption and the seasonality of life shifts when each thing we dispose of is done so with intentionality, reverence, and care.
PURIFICATION: The space is physically (and/or energetically) cleaned in much the same way as it was when you prepared it, and the intention is set that it is now ready for a new purpose.
OWN YOUR PRACTICE
Ultimately, your seasonal altar is your own. Build it, tend it, use it as you are called to. Disassemble it how and when you are ready. If it speaks to you, you are doing it right. Truly, there is no wrong way of creating a personal altar practice, only the way that is right for you in that moment. I encourage you to explore traditions (particularly those from your own cultural and ancestral lineages), make something up, and give yourself permission to try something new.