ALTAR FLORAL ARRANGEMENTS

Altars: Bringing Sacred Shrines into Your Everyday Life

"The creation of an altar is a sacred act, an act of power and grace. For a few timeless minutes you enter a dimension beyond ordinary reality, where light, sound, and energy merge into an exquisite state of being."

The human urge to create physical sacred centers for our lives is so deep that we often create them unconsciously. Photos on the dresser, personal objects on our desk or around the computer are tangible tokens of our longing for balance and wholeness--and of our attempts to strengthen connections between our loved ones, nature and community, and other great sources of spiritual power.

The internationally acclaimed author of Sacred Space, Denise Linn, speaks directly to this primal need for hallowed and holy places. In Altars, she demonstrates in photos and text how you can further enrich the areas around us at home or in the office by creating unique shrines for personal devotions, intimate centers for healing and contemplation. Beautifully illustrated and thoroughly practical, Altars shows how to

- Create personal altars for prayer and devotion, stillness and listening, loss and mourning, relationships and love, and connecting with the life energy
- Find the right place to install a home shrine, according to the points of the compass and the ancient and honored principles of feng shui
- Select altar objects that are particularly suited to your special needs
- Purify yourself and your altars with incense, prayers, drumming, and chanting
- And much more!

Everyone who yearns to draw near the mysterious and wondrous, to infuse ordinary moments with sacred meaning, will find a great wealth of beauty, inspiration, and wisdom in this unique book.

This beautifully written book offers instruction and inspiration to those who want to integrate altars into their daily lives. Author Denise Linn (Sacred Space, Quest, Sacred Legacies) helps readers become more conscious of what they are already unconsciously doing: creating altars in the kitchen corners, on shelves, and in other everyday spaces in their homes. "The urge to create sacred spaces is so deep in the human psyche that, even when there is no formalized intent to make an altar, we often create them subconsciously by the way we gather our photos on a piano, or by the way we carefully arrange objects on a desk or around a computer," Linn writes.
Linn suggests how to create altars with specific events or agendas in mind (i.e., holiday, vacation, or birthday altars filled with symbols of hope for the coming year). She also offers ideas for creating altars that honor new relationships, births, deaths, and other rites of passage. Exquisite color photographs make this a stunning resource for your home and spirit. --Gail Hudson

Unlabeled print in Susie's albums. I think this is the altar of the First Methodist Church in Wasco, and I assume the reason for the picture was the lovely flower arrangement, though it may have been for some other special occasion. Date unknown.

Floral arrangement under the principal altar at Hereford cathedral.

This building also houses the famous chained library and Mappa Mundi.

Great for those without the space for a permanent altar or for those who otherwise wish to make their sacred space more portable, this 12" wide by 12" long and only 7 1/2" tall, this table easily fills both of those needs. Hand carved of wood and stained to a rich, black color, this table is a marvelous display of craftsmanship. Its four solid legs are beautifully crafted to lend a flow and curve to the whole design and stability upon most surfaces. The table top extends out from this base to create a wide expanse for your altar tools and ritual crafts that is also richly imbued with carvings that form an intricately woven pentagram, embossed in the table`s top and surrounded by a pattern of small spirals. This ornate, sturdy design makes it the perfect tool for space-saving practitioners that needs to tuck their ritual tools away in the closet when they`re not in use, witches who wish to set up an altar in the woods behind their home or in the meadow where their covens gather, or anyone who might wish to simply add this beautiful piece to their sacred space.