Now of course, altars only apply if you worship deities. If you're secular you probably don't have one, and don't have a need for one.
But this is something I feel the need to talk about, because as we were discussing last Friday at Witch Counsel there seem to be two distinct kinds of witchcraft. The first kind is the kind you see on tumblr and Instagram and other similar places where it's very pretty and perfect all the time and very much fits the witchcraft 'aesthetic' sort of thing. The second kind is what 'real' witchcraft looks like, it's messy and disorganized and nothing is that perfect witchcraft aesthetic that you see in the pictures people want to share.
Now the first kind is fine; if you can make it super pretty and you want to take a picture and share it more power to you. But we need to break this illusion, especially for new witches, that those pictures are how things have to be 100% of the time. There was a campaign called 'no filter witchcraft' going around tumblr with this same idea, but I haven't seen much of it recently so I'm assuming it fell through.
But take my altar, for example;
Is it super pretty and decked out? No. I worship 8 deities, and each one has a place at what is essentially a card table covered in some fabric I got from a craft store. The two in the front corners, the one on the right and the one in the back that's hard to see have their own bowl/plate things, but the rest are just cheap plastic plates as place holders. Except for the front right corner that has its own cup the rest are cheap cups I decorated myself to represent the deities. Until I find bits that are fitting for them it's as good as it'll get, and to be honest the one that's hard to see in the back is a silver heart-shaped bowl I got for Christmas from my uncle.
I've got a jar of war water on the left to charge, a black hole jar behind it to charge/recharge, and the flowers as an offering/decoration on the right are just in an old glass sauce jar I cleaned out. My finances are limited, so this is what I can do for now. And for some of the deities it's hard to find things that represent them because they're somewhat abstract ideas that I don't know if I could find a bowl or cup for without getting something custom made.
So yeah, my altar is what it is. And I'm not ashamed of it, I'm not afraid to show it off. It's not even in a great spot in the house right now - it's in our office, sure, but it's kind of settled in the little strip between the closet and the door to the bathroom. We don't have the space for it to be displayed anywhere else, and with cats especially there's worry about them jumping up and knocking things over if it's in a place they can get to 24/7 instead of the office that we close off while we're not using it.
What I'm saying is that if your altar isn't perfect or pretty don't worry about it. If you feel the need to set one up for your deities, do it however you want and however you can. Some people have altars in their car, there's one tumblr post circulating where the person has an altar to Hermes that's just a bag with some relevant stuff in it hanging from their rear view mirror. Altars in your purse or backpack are perfectly valid too if you're hiding your craft too. As long as that's your intention, that altar is perfectly valid no matter if it's a portable one or a stationary one, no matter if it's perfect and pretty or just whatever you can do with whatever you've got.
Banner was made by me in Photoshop. All other pictures here were taken by me specifically for this post.
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