About Your Altar

Slowing down and taking time for meditation can be a life-changing experience, but getting from here to there may seem too difficult unless you use the right tool. That tool is simply an altar. While it is standard practice to use an altar for focus, Your Altar presents a new way to utilize it as an integral meditation technique.

Your Altar is a guide for using a meditation altar as a tool for self-exploration and growth. Like a labyrinth, an altar can serve as a map that leads the mind through a pre-determined flow for a unique form of meditative practice. Dividing the altar top into multiple sections and using them to focus a flow of thoughts allows the altar to function as a powerful and symbolic tool not unlike a Buddhist mandala (sacred circles), classical Christian icons and Hindu yantras.

Creating an altar using the power of numbers allows you to achieve spiritual stillness in a personally meaningful way. The numbers one through nine carry profound symbolic history and significance. By dividiing your altar into a certain number of parts, you can harness a powerful energy and apply it to your life.

The purpose of this book is to introduce different altar setups/matrices that call on the power of numerical patterns to help the reader explore inner and outer (beyond one’s self) space. However, it’s not so much about what and how you place things on an altar, but how you use the energy.

Because of the energies that converge, an altar is not a passive space—there is constant interaction that leads from the psyche to the soul. This meeting point of spiritual and mundane energies can provide an orientation or anchor in the world—a place to hold onto and come back to for personal strength and exploration.

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Reviews

Publisher's Weekly
October 15, 2007

Readers interested in this volume from Kynes (Year of Ritual, etc.) would do well to pay attention to the subtitle, as the title is somewhat misleading. The book is not a comprehensive overview of home altars, but a guide to using an altar space for meditation. The thrust of the book is that an altar is like "a game board"—through different arrangements of objects, practitioners can prepare themselves for varying states of reflection. For example, Kynes describes how an altar space can be divided into three parts, with each part representing one of the divine triplets from an ancient spiritual tradition (e.g. Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva from Hinduism or Fotla, Erin, and Banba from the Irish Celtic tradition). She then suggests what to place on the altar for different effects. A three-part arrangement can be used to rebalance energies or as an aid for decision-making. In all, Kynes outlines nine basic altar compositions and gives hints for alternatives in each main category. While some may be annoyed by Kynes's use of the second person throughout the book, this should be welcome reading for neo-pagans seeking to spice up their spirituality with something a little off-beat.

~

FacingNorth.net

I sometimes imagine an alternate world where there are huge libraries dedicated to magical tomes of all sorts. Not only will you find general texts, but you'll find thorough books on very specific topics.

It's sort of like walking into Hogwarts or a similar fantasy-based setting, and finding books on the care of magical creatures, entire expositions on the best use of the wand, and histories of incredibly obscure sects.

While I am firmly planted in this reality, I have been delighted to see a rising number of books that go into detail about specific practical pagan topics, rather than "a chapter on this, a chapter on that" generalities. "Your Altar" is a superb, innovative guide to a rather deceptively simple idea: how to set up your altar.

Kynes has quite obviously put a lot of work, time, and love into this book. It is an excellent guide to the layout of your altar--not necessarily the specific tools and their uses, but the actual altar itself. She explains the theory and practice behind altar setups involving anywhere from one to nine sections. It's a wonderfully cosmopolitan book as well, drawing from neopagan, Buddhist, Christian and other religious traditions to give examples of how the individual practitioner may set up hir sacred working space. Rather than simply giving us a bunch of correspondences, Kynes explains why each layout is important, and what its appeal is. It's truly thorough, yet streamlined.

Kynes' writing style is excellent, inviting and easy to read, yet informative. And I was incredibly pleased to see a nice selection of footnote citations showing exactly where she got certain pieces of information from her research, rather than just leaving us with a bibliography and a pile of questions. She's done her work, and it shows.

Overall, I found this to be an excellent read--and I admit, I'm a tough one to impress! Whether you're a newbie just getting started, or a seasoned witch or mage looking for new ideas for your altar space, give this book a try.

~review by Lupa

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